Off to where?

She was a university student going off to Italy with her boyfriend, Pasquale. He was a postdoc Physicist at the university, younger than her by ten years, but very comic. He looked like Einstein with his fuzzy hair, and his English was unique. 

There was a physicist conference in Erice Italy and she was asked if she wanted to come along. Paying her own way was not a problem. She had never been across the ocean before. Yes! Of course she wanted to go. Her kids would be with Tamara, another single parent mother from Student housing; Tarmara needed the distraction and a place to live as she was no longer a student. Her son had been kidnapped by his father. The child was somewhere in Russia, she supposed.

Pasquale i Lola were about 4 hours into the flight, when Pasquale began to describe what the next six weeks would be like.  

‘You can’t come with me to the conference, you know. There’ll be a lot of lectures and work to be done. But don’t worry. You’ll be staying with my aunt, in Cune, just outside of Rome.

‘Whaaat?’

She lives in a huge house up the Rocks from the caves where the famous Sybil gave answers to any questions she was asked. My aunt could take you there, but she rarely leaves the house. She’s afraid of the locals, and keeps to herself. The curtains closed, the food delivered. You’ll be good company for her. 

‘I can’t believe this. I won’t be with you? ‘

´Oh maybe the last week. Mom and Dad, and another aunt have two adjoining flats in Napoles. When the conference finishes, I’ll pick you up and take you there. 

‘Does she speak English?’

‘Not much, but you can learn Italian.’

‘But my one language course was in French, that’s not going to work!’

‘Not to worry, you’ll be fine. I’m going to get some sleep now,’

While she stewed in her imagination about what could happen to her and what she could do, she began to panic. Six weeks! she certainly didn’t have the money or the knowledge to strike out on her own. Her lust for adventure didn’t reach that far. She wasn’t up for that!

As she paced up and down the aisle of mostly sleeping passengers, there was another professor she had met briefly the week before.at the house of her sister’s friend. There was no use asking him for advice, as all that she remembered from their conversation was that he had called her a fool. She must be. Despite being married, divorced, and then gaining entrance into the provincial university, maybe she wasn’t a very good judge of social character or intercourse.

By the time Pasquale woke up, she was a nervous wreck. ‘What did you mean about not travelling with you once we are in Europe?

‘Oh that, that was just a joke, funny eh? That aunt died, but I’ll take you up to Cune if we have time.’

So, they go into Naples.The first morning in her single bed, she awoke to a series of booms. A war? No, just fireworks, she was told at the breakfast table. At daybreak? She was in a crazy country. 

His mama, a modern, French speaking woman, said, ‘David phoned, I told him you were coming, going to Erice with a Canadian. He’s upset you didn’t tell him you were coming. He asked why you were going camping without him’. Lola found out later that ‘a Canadian,’ to him meant a kind of camping tent.

His father, a judge, cornered her in his office a home, to talk and question. Ah, Lola, that’s a very Italian name, a sexy woman name.’ he sighed. ‘You speak Italian.’ 

‘No, not at all.’

‘It’s your real name? ’

‘ Yes, ‘ What ever Lola wants, Lola gets,’ the song goes, a popular song of her father’s time. 

 He sighed again. ‘You’re older than Pasquale,’ at times, an older woman can be the right thing for a young man. He didn’t know how much older than Pasquale she was. But it seemed he would have no scruples taking his son’s girlfriend to bed while his wife was away on her Paris holiday.

‘I’d like to take you, and Pasquale, to Capri, by boat. It’s close.

 He wanted to know about her parents, but fortunately his English, and Lola’s Frenchified attempts to communicate, inhibited the responses.She had hardly spoken to her parents for years. 

The food, there was so much of it. Spaghetti as a starter, then a plate of veggies and meat, and one more plate of fish!, Apparently, as the three women, wife, mother and aunt cooked, there was a continual competition to please the judge. 

 Pasquale, after the first lunch trying to translate some of the conversation, said translating gave him a headache. He thus wiped all his English out of his mind, and left her to guess what was being said. 

As for herself, the eating hours set her off-kilter. By the late lunchtime, her stomach had given up on getting something in it, and when they arrived back to the double apartment after a bit of tourism, the 23:00 leftovers went untouched. She would lose 16 pounds before they headed back to Canada. 

 Their Tourism did include the trip to Cune, a look at the cave where the local Sybil had given answers that could be understood in a plethora of ways and thus always be true. Pompei, where many of the tragic scenes were under tarps, was being renovated. Better to please the tourists. 

Finally, on to Erice. What so impressed Lola on the road to Erice were the bridges. Instead of going up and down the continuous green valleys, a long steel-looking bridge swept through the air, leaving the valley far below, onvalley after another. As if Sicily could demonstrate riches far greater than the rest of Italy, or even Canada.

The reception, welcoming the physicists and their wives or companions, was at the top of a long winding road, looking down at the rest of the small island and the sea beyond. The Monks sure knew how to locate their monastery with the most beautiful view. The food was great, the wine divine, and it seemed Pasquali and Lola were popular. She danced, while Pasquale seemed to be talking with everyone! A great evening. The next morning, Pasquale was deflated. Apparently he’d been popular with the cooks and restaurant staff, not other scientists.

 ‘What a shame’, she joked.  

‘No joking matter.’ 

The rest of the stay there was a paradisiacal holiday for her. One lunch on a yet smaller island with a host who looked like Nero, or Caligula with rounded babies in his great pond of fresh emerald colored water. Caligula in green soup. But, again, delicious food was set out along the long narrow terrace, above the sea. Another day, however, she suffered the scandalized looks of the local woman, because of the short shorts she was wearing. Only with the tourists and on the beach, not in the local town was this acceptable. 

She drove the little Fiat Seicento up and down the winding road, and even stopped to pick up a hitchhiker who was walking up the steep road.  

‘Don’t touch!’ she said as he reached over to grab her leg, or something higher up. ‘Dire a tu Mama!, tu Mama! Not sure exactly what she said, but he took his hand back.

The next Sunday, Pasquali and Lola were sitting on a terrace in the shade of the church walls, when who should walk up with his mama and girlfriend, yes, Romeo himself. Romeo’s dark brown face turned white. They didn’t stop, even though the church patio was surely the best place to sit, eat, drink and chat.

The Conference was over, and they started their way back to Naples. Mount Etna, was glowing with lava not far away. They had started out late and were still on the island when they pulled off the road to find a hotel and have a late night dinner. Hunger came first, and they parked on the small dark street before walking up the stairs to the beautifully lit restaurant. 

 Pasquali doubted leaving the car, but who would bother stealing an old Fiat Seicento, tired car. 

They sat down looking at the lights of the town below, and Mt. Etna in the distance,

Pasquali looked at the carta, raised his hand, two fingers joined to the thumb, the way Italians do, and shouted at the waiter. ‘You think I tourist? Ella es turista, I sono Napolitano!’ No prendermi per il culo.’ his hand shook in the face of the waiter, ‘ Sono de Napoli, Dammi l’altro menu! 

The waiter, turned back to the bar, came with with the menu for locals and Pasquali ordered for the two of them.

‘‘I knew it!’ he said when we returned to where the car was supposed to be.

‘Maybe the police, towed it away’

‘Idiota’

They walked to the hotel.  

‘I’m going out,’

To report the theft to the police?

‘We’re in Sicilia, not in Canada. I’m going out to find the car,’

He left. Came back much later, and left again before she got out of bed. 

She had her own problems. All her things were gone and her period, turned up. Has anyone else ever tried to look for Tampax in a foreign island? The Sanitary Pads were huge, in huge boxes. And she didn’t want to explain by gestures what she needed. No one was obliged to help. Eventually she found what she needed along with a comb, and other toiletries. By midday, the whole town knew that the Canadian wandering through the town and was menstruating. How they laughed.  

‘

‘Where have you been,’ she asked when Pasquale showed up late in the afternoon,

‘To see the Mafia,’

What!

‘The big Mafia, not the little people.’

No self-respecting Mafia, would touch a Fiat Seicento, the little mafia neither, but they saw my beautiful suitcases. They’re gone now, but I got the car.

‘Really? 

I had to phone Papa, and buy the car back. A thousand of your pinche Canadian dollars. Papa says, no problem, It’ll come out of my inheritance. Everything comes out of my inheritance, even mama’s trips to Paris.

Delirious. Weird.

‘And my clothes, my things?’

‘Your stuff was scattered on the lava all the way up the mountain. No value there. ’ 

‘Why up the mountain?

‘I got to the car just in time. It was in a cola where the other cars were being dismantled to sell in parts..They made me pay for the time and effort they’d wasted,

´We can’t stop at the east side of the Island. Some important tourist areas there, but it’s time to get back. We’ve spent enough.

Back in Napols, there was one more visit to another physicist, Patricia. From the appearance on the outside, the building looked like an abandoned unfinished cement skeleton. They walked through the dust and climbed two floors of naked cement stairs before coming to her door. 

Voila! A beautiful apartment overlooking the Bay of Napoles.  

Then an excursion to Amalfi, for Pasquali to meet his friends there. This was the University where he longed to teach in the future, his dream job, and another chance to disgrace herself. He and his friends had formed a circle on the beach, to give each other speeches and sing. As Lola was not particularly included in all this she went closer to the water to listen and move her body in a choreography of the sound of the waves and the singing behind her.

‘Idiota,’ Pasquali said, ‘ This is a serious song. Don’t you even know the Internationale?

She found out a bit more, when she was sitting on the university lawn the next day, absent-mindedly humming. Three or four black-shirted men came up behind her, and asked her ‘Do you like that song? What is it?

‘Oh,’ Finally smartening up. ‘I don’t know, something I must have heard somewhere. Does it mean something?

They gave a common shrug of disgust, left it at that and moved on.

Finally it was their last night in Naples. Pasquale said he had to see his friend David, who had been waiting to see him. She went to bed, but didn’t sleep. Awake, when he came back early in the morning, she met him at her door. Red faced, puffy, smelling of sex.

She felt sick. She should have guessed. She hadn’t. It felt worse than if he’d been with an ex-girlfriend. Patricia, for example. Beautiful, intelligent, a loving farewell that she could have understood. But this! She’d had no warning.

Years later it might not have been a surprise, and thus not a shock. She was a bit late in life to become a little world-wise, but for her and Pasquale, it was The End, or at least the first ending.  

The Aftermath: meeting sister at Heathrow

There was something terribly wrong with this write-up, she realized. Why had she written, they had driven the Fiat Seicento down to Sicily, when she clearly remembered the landing in Palermo. The wings of the plane falling to the right then the left as they kept aloft. The rain on the plane’s windows, coming so close to the mountain cliffs, that seemed to swirl around them. If they had driven both to Erice and back to Naples there would have been no plane ride. She’d only been there once.

The only other clear memory she had of the return to Canada was at Heathrow customs. 

They stopped her to search through everything she carried. Two boxes of oils for painting, yes, she painted but hadn’t on this trip. The small bottles were so glued tight it was obvious they had never been opened. The old guitar case with her guitar inside. How had she forgotten. If she had it at the airport, she must have been carrying it the whole time. Lost from all memory. She realized it made her conspicuous, incongruous, especially with her white knitted suit that now hung slightly loose around her body, and the sombrero that Pasquale’s mother had given her. Also, the awful terrible cold she had, sniffing all the while. When the customs officer realized her sister and Pasquale were travelling with her, they were pulled out of the line too. Also the Gideon bible, that she had used to write some of the notes she made, poetry she had written. They confiscated that as it was obviously stolen. ‘What do you have to declare?’, ‘Nothing,’

‘You have been in Italy for six weeks and didn’t buy anything? Not possible, Nothing new?.’ ‘Sorry, just this hat that was given to me.’ As they found no evidence of anything illegal they had to let us all go.

But still, how did we just happen to meet my sister? 0f course, she travelled all the time, so could it have just been a ‘happy’ coincidence.

Flying over the Atlantic, Sister and Pasquale were delightedly exchanging knowledge of all things at the back of the plane. Quantum Physics, Relativity, game theory, mathematics. Who knows what else, besides abstract predictions, and Nash dilemmas.  

Customs, the search, the incompatibility of her dress and luggage. How had she been travelling with that? She didn’t know herself. Why was she carrying a guitar and boxes of acrylics or oils for painting. Had she been so struck with culture shock, she had lost a few days somehow? For all that she thought about it, she had no answers. 

And a Bible with her trip to Italy notes, that yes, In the hotel with the view of Mt Etna lava, wondering if Pasquale would come back for her.

Sister and Pasquale, stopped also because they were with her, were now friends, chatting up about the quirks of herself, perhaps. If they remembered she was there, that is.  

She hoped their arrival back in Canada would be free of surprises.