The Island Beyond the Moon: an Aeolian Tale

By Roland Zoss

An award-winning story about one of the remote Aeolian islands off Sicily/Italy, a volcanic
archipelago which is a UNESCO World Heritage Area. First published in German in Switzerland.

What happens when a 23-year old student takes his books and leaves Switzerland for the
south of Italy? He finds an island of 9.5 square kilometers, which others have left in
search of work in Australia, Argentina and the USA.
The villages on this island are like ruined ghost towns covered in ferns. Geckoes and
snakes live in the houses. The student works alongside the last inhabitants through winter
storms and earthquakes. He makes wine and bakes bread. He lives with very little money
on the borderline of civilization in a cavern in the mountain. Roaming a wild, untouched nature.
One morning he is standing on a mountain in front of a ruin and has the strange feeling of
having come home. On the very same day, a contract is signed. The poet of the island
sells the ruin to the poet from Northern Europe. Together they plant a palm-tree.
That is the end of the dream of a house on the island. And the beginning of reality. A true
story.
In 1993 Roland Zoss received a literary award from the City of Berne for this little book,
which was first published in German. "The author transforms language into perfumes and
sounds, into impressions and landscapes, with intense and stunning pictures."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781618420855

Book preview

saying.

THE PEOPLE IN THE SEA.

Far away. Farther than the swallows fly. Farther than the clouds travel: a green and slender hope. A land of humming-birds. A lunar garden. A mountain in the middle of the sea.

Odysseus rests in the shade of the palm-trees. Through the bushes Aeolus murmurs something about love. Summer is a blue tent-canopy. The snake lives without venom, and man without money. No slick of oil breaks the azure of hidden bays. No-one has to seek firewood for the winter. No-one is hungry. The trees are heavy with fruit all year round. Flowers wear perfume over the cliff-faces. The light takes on butterfly-wings. Banished the harsh word that makes the mouth bitter and the lips thin. Far from war. Far from time. Watched over by the sun. Island of dreams.

*

There are hardly any waves. Yet the few passengers on deck have pulled their heads into their wind-cheaters. The hydrofoil is steady, yet someone swears:

"Porca miseria, quiste tempu?" What miserable bloody weather! The wind sweeps the words into the sea, which hasn’t lost its magic, playfully catches your gaze in the net of waves – and sends you far on your way . . .

Suddenly you smell land. A scent of wormwood and broom. A light feeling in your belly: Arrivato!{1}

There they stand on the pier. The people of the sea.

A crowd of friendly faces to receive you, with whom something connects you, a stretch of road shared, a glass of wine, some slight bella storia.{2}

Jokes fly back and forth until the massive oarsman shoves the gangplank aboard the hydrofoil. Ashore in a couple of steps…

There!...and yet there’s something missing! The old romantic procedure of changing from the big ship to the rowing-boat. The oarsman’s steadying grip under your arm when you disembark.

The harbour has been done up, the pier widened and provided with an iron landing platform for the ferry. But who else notices that?

And the air? So clean and salty-fresh! And the incredibly blue sky! And what about the incredibly noisy people, hugging and shouting at one another by way of greeting?

The mongoloid boy, surrounded by suitcases and overflowing boxes of vegetables, carried along by the excited hullabaloo of the reunions?!

And as for me? A stray dog tripping my legs, and behind me something deep, something ancient and heavy. A soil full of woes, full of kisses and tears, saturated by the sweat of centuries.

Small continent of my dreams. A ten-square-kilometer land full of rocks, full of cacti with Mickey Mouse ears. And behind all that, a real mountain, tall and bathed in the melancholy of the sea.

"Tutto occupato!"{3} All the cars are taken. So I walk up on my own – as Topolo used to in the old days with his laden mail-donkey. And finally I feel the weariness of 24 hours’ train travel. The sun burning on my neck like a spotlight. And just as every other time I am terribly excited. And just as every other time I ask myself what is it that I have lost here in this savage beauty. These decaying paths, these grey and sombre ruins, these precipitous mountain-sides. An incandescent Garden of Eden.

*

In 1973 all I wanted was the sun and the south to prepare my school leaving exam by correspondence.

I remember it well: it was cool in the harbour of Messina just before midnight, but still very mild for a night in November. I had thrown myself into a worn-out leather armchair in the ship’s lounge-room and was nervously twisting my long forelocks as I looked out the porthole into the darkness of the mafia. Shady characters were hanging around the harbour. There was an oily, fishy smell. A smell of adventure.

So, out there, on the other side of the blinking blue neon-sign, out there in the inky-black night, lay the islands that Homer sings of in the tenth book of the Odyssey. Where the Greek gods of the winds brew up their storms. And Scylla and Charybdis? Does the earth shake? Do subterranean giants breathe there?

I had fallen asleep and hadn’t noticed the heavy engines of the ship starting up. In my Greek dream Sibylla seemed even riper and more mysterious, with her long hair shot through with strands of silver. How long could she already have lived in the wild south? All woman, and all alone?

When I saw her, in the pergola of her casa, weaving silver threads into jewellery of filigree, I loved her: those hands at the rickety table. A raspberry-red candle; on the grey wall lots of lilac and batik. The earthenware bowl full of golden oranges. There was something big in the air, something like Goethe.

The bougainvillea-blossoms in her hair completely transformed Sybilla of the endless mild December into a hippie-lady, a goddess of love who had found her own California far from the hustle and bustle.

In the tower-room of her house I chewed my way through a very thick pile of literature, as single-mindedly as the woodworms gnawing in the roof-beams. Outside the balcony door hung the guitar, right next to the never-ending steely sky. Late at night, when the locals gathered in the cool around wine, women and card-games, one could still see a gas-light burning in Sibylla’s house: "the Svizzero and Sibylla are making amore!"{4}

How wrong they were! There was the guy with his icy-cold feet, brooding over the hermaphroditic procreation of the Helix pomatia. Or who had wearily laid aside his zoology syllabus and dragged his guitar out of its damp case, and was singing, with Bob Dylan: My love is like some raven on my window with a broken wing!.

*

On calm days during that winter I gathered all sorts of bits and pieces for a collage: there was art to be found at every step. A length of red fisherman’s rope, the rusty heart of a clock, small icons of saints from the deserted ruins, cactus-fibres and a red rock that gave off sparks when struck.

That’s how I met the other tourist of Filicudi. He lived in a rock-cave and had been to sea. This German seaman painted wonderful island scenes, and read Nietzsche and Hölderlin. He encouraged me to drop my studies and get to know life here where there was no civilization. How’d you learn that from books anyway? Isn’t it a thousand times more exciting to look for Greek inscriptions, catch cuttle-fish, live on the wild asparagus and spinach that grows by the wayside, and to take each day just as it comes?

And so I made my way up to Monte Giuglia. The daughter of the Roman Emperor Agrippa is said to have been banished to this mountain for being a nymphomaniac. There was talk of a fabulous treasure.

Hour after hour I dug with my Swiss army knife, pulled up wormwood-bushes, and descended into cracked cisterns. Eventually I gave up – leaning dully against the last column still standing of the Roman Empire.

My trove: nothing but empty snail-shells, pottery shards and a rusted toy clothes-iron dating to the turn of the century.

Still, there was something else: the sea, criss-crossed by the fine tracks of the wind. And small neighbouring islands floating on the horizon.

Deep in the distance the grey stone-blocks of the houses, the snake-tracks of the mule paths, all of it so strangely familiar. And suddenly this premonition, already a near-certainty – of having lived here before.

Less than two hours later the COMPROMESSO was typed up on an old type-writer – the contract of sale. As an entrance fee to Filicudi I had to sacrifice my entire savings, small as they were. Two million Lire, which was to cross the Swiss-Italian border baked into a piece of Butterzopf twist-bread.

But before all that I stood there, simply overwhelmed by happiness three hundred meters above the sea in the middle of this wide-screen, Hollywood-movie panorama. Later again, I attempted to read the piece of paper in my hand and didn’t understand half of its difficult legalistic Italian. However I had faith in the spindly signature of PEPPINO POETA and his touching offer as of one poet to another to assist with the ricostruzione.

*

The duffle-bag slung over my back, but with a heart lightened by memories I climb higher, past the closed post office, past the closed pensione, past the telefono. Into the narrow alley of the houses of Rocca di Ciauli. There behind the grate of the pink chapel: the Virgin Mary. Ciao, are you hot too? Where is everybody? Does nobody recognise me then?

Wide fields of barley open up beyond the village. Strung together in the green of Indonesian rice terraces they cut the mountain like soft sickles. Terrace by terrace, a landscape silent in the heat. Here and there an almond-tree, a cow in its shade. Houses like sleepy people enjoying the sun with their head back. The closer I get to my house, the steeper the path, and the more my feet hurry. My legs follow the path as if sleep-walking, my head avoids low-hanging olive-branches. I fly across the