Head First
“Como si dice ‘sí’ in spagnolo?”
“Sí.”
“No, peró como si dice ‘sí’.”
“Sí.”
This goes on a few rounds before before it finally sticks that the Italians and the Spaniards share the word for ‘yes’. Then the kids ask me to count to 10 in Spanish, forward and backward, and they are delighted to find the linguistic similarities extend to numbers as well.
All of this would be fine if we weren’t 30 feet up on a jagged rock with the Ionian Sea churning an opal froth below us. We first spotted the outcrop over lunch at Jónico, a cliff-side restaurant 10 minutes outside Syracuse’s old city. We ate calamari and pasta with anchovies and watched Sicily’s leanest bodies sun themselves into impossibly dark shades on the private terrace below us. Eventually, when the white wine took hold, the talk turned to that large object rising out from the sea beyond. Challenges were accepted.
By the time I finally swim over, I’m not exactly eager to take the plunge, so my strategy is to get on and off as quickly as possible. But Sicilian kids are a curious bunch, so before I can jump, we discuss Balotelli and FC Barca, the pasta scene in New York, a few of the curvy Italian women sunning themselves in the distance, and, finally, how I plan to leap off this rock. “Di testa! Di testa!” I don’t know, I say, it’s a long way to dive head first and I’ve got this feeling that these kids are icing me in the hopes that I flub it.
The questions and encouragements are still flying when I finally step up to the highest point on the rock, wave ciao and open my arms to the sea. Volo dell’angelo they call it in Italian—angel dive—and I feel like I might have stuck it.
But when I surface, there is no cheering or high-fiving or screaming si! si! in Italiañol. No, the kids are pointing to another cliff, twice as high as the one I just threw myself from. “No, we want you to dive off that rock.”
From Syracuse and Beyond, on Roads & Kingdoms
