3.1. MRS. PALOMAR'S JOURNEYS
3.1.1. The Volcano
Mr. Palomar never leaves lights on, Mrs. Palomar is constantly walking into dark rooms. She spends a great deal of time fumbling for light switches, running her hands over wallpaper, over cool still faucets. Who knows what lurks after doorframes, in the long silence of bored furniture? She often sits in darknesses, listening to the distant operas of her husband's thoughts, conjuring lovers.
Mr. and Mrs. Palomar go to the Aeolian Islands, first to Lipari, the largest and most touristed of the strange archipelago. Mrs. Palomar watches the strange northern coast of the island draw itself in crags as they pour by on the train, the tip of a cartographer's pen. Mr. Palomar is sleeping, sleeping, with the war sounds of the train, the crashing back and forth of the wheels along wooden track slats, sleeping. Later they take a ferry to reach the islands and Mr. Palomar is sick, half his body hanging over the side, trying to watch the horizon. Mrs. Palomar holds a 500 lire coin in her hand, closing her palm slightly so that the money is cushioned by small folds of skin.
She spends the next few days avoiding the sedentary influence of Mr. Palomar, who can't leave the small island of Lipari without making himself ill. She explores the other islands, some of which are hours away by boat and largely uninhabited. At the bakery down the block from their hotel, the man behind the counter has caper-colored skin and gives Mrs. Palomar a loaf of round bread that makes her fingers sweaty. He tells her to get on a boat and go to Vulcano, the nearest neighboring island, where a dormant volcano stumbles over its own rocky terraces into the sky.
Mrs. Palomar leaves the bakery with the smell of morning bread in her graying hair. It stays there on the ferry to Vulcano, which is crowded with young German couples looking to bathe in the sulfurous mud at the foot of the old volcano. Mrs. Palomar follows signs to the path that leads up the mountain, the bread smell mingling with acrid volcanic belches. She climbs through the white rooftops dwarfed by the mountain's shoulders, its old moguls of lava shaped like giant popcorn. Below it there are foothills of black sand and she walks through these too, the hot dirt seeping into her walking shoes. Mrs. Palomar watches the top of the volcano, sees groups of golden-skinned tourists gulped into the thick clouds that nest at its peak. Dirty yellow streams trickle from them, once furious coppery rivers of liquid fire, now gentle ribbons of sulfur gas leaking into the toxic valley. The plants that grow on the volcano's faces are bitter, dry tufts of leaf and twig that pull at Mrs. Palomar's socks and the skin on her calves. The landscape slowly reduces itself to smooth lanes of bare red rock, redder veins coursing through it, rusty dust brushing onto the hot rubber soles of her shoes. The red thins as the air does and becomes cooler, gives way to mounds of asphalt crumbs that sound like broken glass under Mrs. Palomar's steps.
Mrs. Palomar goes higher and everything is white, it becomes impossible to see anything but fog and the patches of rough black stone just under and around her feet, occasionally tiny yellow geysers of the acrid gas. It stings her eyes. It seems to Mrs. Palomar to be a resting place for rocks that nobody could want to look at or touch. Here, she could learn to die, to be dead. The golden-skinned tourists are nowhere, their bare elbows and voices lost in the altitude. What seems to be the ground but is actually steep packed mounds of small rocks, great dunes of dead fluid fire, begin to flatten and the fog to move a bit so that Mrs. Palomar can see beyond the toes of her shoes. She is on the ridge of an empty crater where at some point there have been gulping explosions, the wind blowing folds of clouds in the spaces between her fingers. Mrs. Palomar sits for a minute to watch the empty pit fill with fog, the clouds curling and snapping in the middle of it like the fire did once, pouring over its sides onto the waiting beaches. Somewhere Mr. Palomar is sitting, thinking. Mrs. Palomar feels the heavy air push her skin against her bones.
When she stands, the wind is still pressed against her like another body, carrying her hair behind her, carrying the clouds on damp comma feet up the steep hillside of the crater and over her. She leans into it, bending her knees, holding her face parallel to the volcano valley floor. Soon Mrs. Palomar is flying on the wind, landing on cloud after curling cloud, bouncing off them like in the dreams of children staring through airplane windows. Screaming, delight, surrender, she forgets her feet below her and feels only her body against the wind. It draws in ice around her ears and she is in the sky of the moon.