7 Beds · 6 Baths · 282 m²
Country House in Piazza Armerina, Italia
After Gatsby died, after the Long Island pools emptied of champagne and fake laughter, after the curtain fell on the most expensive comedy money had ever staged, someone disappeared. Not Nick. He went back to the Midwest, wrote the book, convinced himself he had closed his accounts with the East. No, I’m talking about someone else. About the one no one ever mentioned in the society pages. Jordan Baker, maybe? No, she had her chance and wasted it. I’m talking about a nameless man in the history books, one of those silent guests who wandered through Gatsby’s parties with a constantly full glass and an always empty gaze. His name was Tom, but not that one. He was Tom Carraway, a distant cousin of Nick. For years he had been a background presence in those millionaire salons, present and absent at the same time, like human furniture. He listened to stories that weren’t his, laughed when others laughed, toasted successes that weren’t his. Until one morning, he looked into the mirror in his hotel room and didn’t recognize his own eyes. They were dull. Empty. Like two windows of an abandoned house. In that moment he understood he had to leave, very, very far away. He took the first ship to Italy. He didn’t know why. Maybe because in the travel guides of the time Naples and Sicily seemed far enough to forget. He got off in Palermo, then took a train. Not toward the sea, never again toward the sea. Inland. Upward. He arrived in Piazza Armerina on an afternoon of light rain, the kind they call here “May water.” He got out of the rental car and found himself in front of an avenue of olive trees. There was no one. Only the wind making the silvery leaves sing, a music more honest than any jazz orchestra. He walked down the avenue on foot, the leather suitcase bumping against his calf. At the end, the farmhouse. Just stone that smelled of centuries, not speculation. Three apartments, each with its own mezzanine, that had never seen a white-jacketed waiter. Behind the building, a garage as long as a pier. But it didn’t face the water. It faced the garden. Tom Carraway walked down the stone path. His Italian shoes sank slightly into the damp earth. And then he saw it. The pool. It wasn’t like Gatsby’s. No marble, no fountain, no champagne tower. It was a real pool, the kind that needs to be cleaned by hand, surrounded by olive trees and the scent of wild herbs. The water was still, green like the eyes of a woman he had never known. And yet, for the first time in ten years, Tom felt he could stay. He sat on the edge. He took off his shoes. He dipped his feet into the cool water. He laughed because there were no guests. No maids. No one wanting anything from him. Only the stone, the olive trees, the sky turning orange, and a huge house to fill with his own life, not the lives of others. He took the large apartment, turning the rooms into a library. He left the bathroom as it was. He rented out the other spaces to wanderers passing through the area: an archaeologist digging at the Villa Romana del Casale, a German poet fleeing her husband, a cook from Catania who wanted to open a farmhouse. He filled the pool every summer. He still swims there today, at sunset, when the sun reflects on the water and light filters through the olive trees. It is a different light from Gatsby’s. Calmer. More real. It promises nothing. It simply gives. If you pass through Contrada Elsa, in Piazza Armerina, you might see him. An old man with light eyes, sitting on the edge of the pool, his legs in the water. He doesn’t speak much. But if you stop him and ask why he came all this way, so far from everything, he might smile and show you a worn notebook. Inside it is written, in slightly trembling handwriting: “At the end, you don’t run away from something. You run toward something. You just don’t know it until you get there.” Below, a pencil drawing. An avenue of olive trees. A stone house. And a pool. Today that house is for sale and it is time for it to find another soul. Someone to keep filling the pool every summer. Someone to keep the green light of the sunset alive. Come to Contrada Elsa. The water is still the same. And the light, in the evening, still has the shape of a dream waiting for someone who has the courage to live it.
