Sicily — When Balconies Drop Buckets
5 p.m. on Via Chiavettieri is when balconies drop buckets, euros clattering in metal pails over rusted railings. My Sicilian neighbor, on the third floor perch directly opposite mine, flings his bucket down with one hand on a worn rope pulley, calling out to our Palermo street: “Angelo!”
He is the baron, I think, as the afternoon sun wanes just enough to become bearable, sending an electric glow above our balconies. The Italian novelist Italo Calvino writes about 12-year-old Cosimo — his titular baron in the trees — who climbs an oak one day and decides to never touch the ground again, swinging between branches for the duration of his life. From his makeshift reality, Cosimo rejects linearity for life in a new plane, and at this time of transition, as the afternoon turns evening, my neighbors and I do the same.
We are all the baron.
Prosecco glass in hand, I watch from my folding chair as the street of my two-week trip rotates 90 degrees: my neighbors each come outside, some with cigarettes whose smoke makes me cough from one level down; others with chilled Moretti bottles whose caps plummet into the crooks of the dusty cobblestones below. One particularly noisy neighbor argues on the phone while her dachshund sticks his head through the balcony’s narrow grate and for one panicked moment, the dog looks like he could squeeze through the gap, hurtling toward the horizontal.
As my bucket-wielding neighbor awaits Angelo’s response, his daughter perches at his feet and waves a lookalike doll at a friend two balconies to the right and one floor down. A Spider-Man towel hangs to dry between them, but they chatter from different dimensions: a vertical conversation where home stretches onto the street, where nightly rituals of princesses and Barbies are no less fantastical than the idea of the baron’s boundless branches.
Two years ago I lived on this street, in a different apartment with a different balcony, and now that I’m back, however fleetingly, I remember Via Chiavettieri’s habitual magic. During this unspoken, serendipitous happy hour, each of us claims a silver of the street — and here that is the same as taking a slice of the sky.
When Angelo finally responds, he materializes from a bakery on the actual street: the Via Chiavettieri that forms perpendicular to our fleeting community. Not bothering to count the coins, Angelo pockets the payment and exchanges it for a loaf of bread, along with a pastry my neighbor hasn’t ordered. He is the baron’s brother, the heroic source of sustenance when in-house resources wear thin.
As the bucket sways back toward our arboreal neighborhood, the scent of freshly baked bread converges with lingering cigarette smoke, the two like maple syrup sap tapped from our balconies’ bark.