At lunchtime I bought this huge orange - the size of it made us all laugh. I nestled the golden orb in one hand, plunging into it with the other. Leathery rind and moss-like pith yielded, offering up their jewelled fruits. The burst orange bled drops of sunrise, they wove and laced and wrapped around my arm like the first sweet peas of spring. The rising fragrance, fresh and sweet, flooded the gentle afternoon, dissolving our laughter into a calm of contemplation. There, we quietly savoured in its abundance.
Halt. Stem the spray of sugared elixir! Take it back, back to before the orange was prised open, when it was prized among the grocer’s display. It sat behind an endearing handwritten ticket, alongside others boasting of Tarrocci and Mori, their blood (orange) cousins. And oh, the flavour of these oranges soaked in sunsets: more layered than the lunchtime orange that bore such uncomplicated love. There is sweetness, yes, though here it is accompanied by a crush of berry, underscored by a shifting bitterness.
The sweetness, the bitterness, the bittersweetness - they are well woven into the history of the orange. Go back, way back, to somewhere between the fall of Constantinople and the first circumnavigation of the world and somewhere in there, Giorgione was painting ‘Double Portrait’. He perfected the forlorn, yearning expression of the young man that dominates the foreground, his eyes searching in the viewer for empathy, advice - anything to relieve the burdensome melancholy of love. Of love! Oh, love, of course of love. So struck is he by this love, his tormented mind rests upon his right hand while his left holds… an orange? The melangolo, a bitter orange from Seville. The melangolo, the perfect companion to lovesickness! For citrus is the well known fruit of Love, because it is both golden in appearance and delightful to the taste, and pleases not without a mixture of bitterness.
But stop. Cease this pining! Turn back further, further, skipping over the orange groves of Catania, over to where Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river, and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. Follow the river down to the port, but don’t get on the boat to China - we’re not going that far. Pause; contemplate the Portuguese sailors that brought these orange trees all the way round the Cape of Good Hope. Look out over Sicily. Think, predictably, of the mafia, perhaps of The Godfather, maybe even of the oranges in The Godfather which allude to impending tragedy. Absorb the ominosity, and see.
See the entire forests of orange trees, pregnant with swollen fruit, and see who they are tended by. See their Black faces illuminated by golden lamps in a green night, working the hours between the half-light, earning no more than a euro for each orange-filled crate. See the not-quite homes they return to (because homes shouldn’t look like those): a jumble of corrugated tin, tarpaulin, and tent. See how the authorities respond with threats of dismantling the migrant camps, how the locals respond with hatred to the migrants themselves. See, once the immigrants flee, how the orange drops from the tree, onto a cobble of fallen fruit. Flies swarm, sweetness sours.
Recommended (from my heart!) reading:
The Orange, Wendy Cope - perhaps the best words ever written!
Carlo Emilio Gadda in The Land Where Lemons Grow, Helena Attlee
Double Portrait, Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco
Giovanni Battista Ferrari in Golden Fruit, Cristina Mazzoni
Suzanne, Leonard Cohen - I think the jaunty groove of Nina Simone’s version is a better companion for orange eating but should you be down and out in love, opt for Cohen’s droning.
Bermudas, Andrew Marvell