A Close Call in Capri

You check the time. Perfect. As intended, you’ve arrived fashionably late. Hair straightened, lips glossed, clutch filled with crisp euros fresh from the bancomat, you show your passport to the hulking bouncer. Your two best friends, Lauren and Danielle—New Jersey loud mouths with long legs and huge hearts—flank you as you make your way to the outdoor bar where your fellow American EuroAdventure group is currently taking tequila shots. As you’re already sufficiently buzzed having polished off a bottle of wine each while getting ready in the bungalow where you and your two friends are staying for the long weekend excursion to Capri from your study abroad university in Florence, you all decide to skip the shots and order a round of Peroni for your threesome.

“Do you see Ian?” You ask your friends, eager to score some one-on-one time with the mysterious tour guide you haven’t been able to take your eyes off of since meeting at the Florence bus station. “Yeah, he’s over there,” Lauren pointed to a high table near the center of the outdoor bar where Ian was having an animated conversation with his co-guide, Mike. Ian happens to look over to your table and catches your eye. He smiles and tilts his head, then leans in to say something quietly to Mike. “I think they’re coming over here.” You say as the two get up and head toward your table. “Ahh, you made it. We weren’t sure you girls were going to show,” Ian says. “We thought maybe you were having your own private party we weren’t invited to,” added Mike, giving Lauren a very obvious wink.

After hours of flirtation, rounds of drinks, and phone number exchanges, you and the girls decide it’s time to call it a night—a last ditch attempt to keep from being too hungover for the next day’s Vespa ride to Positano. You say your goodbyes and head back to the bungalow, all three of you fairly tipsy but luckily able to remember the way back through the foreign streets. A little before you cross onto the resort property, about a quarter of a mile away from your little bungalow, you pass by a group of 7 or 8 Italian men walking in the opposite direction. Suddenly you are very aware of things you hadn’t noticed before. How dark the night is, how dim the street lamps are, how quiet the carless streets seem, how you and your friend’s heels echo in the air, a non-verbal announcement of your hindered mobility, giving away your inebriation with every little stumble and side step. Just as you pass the group, the men start to chatter quickly to one another in Italian and then you hear something odd, you hear a cat meowing. Then there are many cats meowing and that’s when you realize, it’s the men…they’re meowing at you and your friends…and they’re starting to follow you. Something clicked in you at that moment. You went into survival mode. Without giving any indication that you were nervous, you pull your friends to you and say quietly, “On the count of three, we are going to run as fast as we can. I have the key, you guys shine your phone on the lock for me when we get there.” Your friends say nothing, but you know they understand. “1…2…3” You all run for it. You get to the door somehow without stumbling or tripping over your drunken and heeled feet. Lauren and Danielle pull out their flip phones and shine their screen lights on the lock but you’re shaking so badly you drop the key. The stampede is coming closer behind you. Boots hitting dirt ground, loud Italian slang being hurdled toward you, those incessant meows—somehow you can hear all this even though your heart beat is thumping in your ears like a beating drum, a backdrop of steady rhythm that somehow steadies you. You finally get the key in the lock, shove your friends inside and slam the door shut seconds before the gang is upon you. As they start banging on the door your first instinct is to shove the mini refrigerator in front of it in case they try to break it down (because, somehow that will help?). Meanwhile, Danielle trips and rips her foot open as she reaches for the bedside lamp to use as a weapon and Lauren immediately calls Mike, who thankfully thought he was getting a booty call and picked up despite the hour and his drunkenness. “We’re being attacked!” Lauren screams into the phone. Then everything goes dead quiet.

“Maybe they’re giving up. Maybe they’re going away.” Danielle whispers in the dark.

Then all of a sudden, the walls start to shake. At first it sounds like a torrential hailstorm, and then the meowing starts up again, louder than ever. The men are spread out, banging on the outside of your bungalow so hard that the walls were actually shaking like you’re in the middle of an earthquake. “What’s that noise?” you hear a muffled voice coming out of Lauren’s phone as you jump onto the bed with her, “Please come back to the resort right now, some men followed us home and now they’re trying to break into our bungalow!” Lauren yells into the phone. The noises from outside get so loud you can’t hear Mike’s response but Lauren’s yell for him to “Hurry!” gives you the hope that help is on the way. The wall shaking, yelling and meowing continues for what feels like hours but could only have been a few minutes. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had started.

Mike and Ian show up, red-faced and out of breath, some 10 minutes later. Lauren and Danielle explained what happened as you try to clean Danielle’s cut. The guides offer drunken condolences and get you keys for a different bungalow, one less isolated than the current one, and even though you each have your own queen-sized bed, you all end up sleeping in your bed that night. You didn’t realize it then, but that experience would be something that you wouldn’t be able to shake even after a decade had gone by. You didn’t know that the taste of your favorite Italian beer would be forever tainted with the taste of fear. That from now on, every time you pass a group of men your heart will beat so hard if feels like it’s trying to jump out of your chest. You didn’t understand your true fragility until that night. Up until then you’d been the most confident, self-assured young woman ready to take the world by the balls. But that night taught you that you aren’t as strong as you think, that you’ve been taking your safety for granted, that the pure fact that you were born a female puts you at a high risk for harassment and violence. That you’ve lived such a privileged and sheltered life that you hadn’t felt real fear in your life until age 20. That the world isn’t as safe as you thought. But through all this introspection you also realize that if you hadn’t trusted your instincts that night and ran when you felt danger, that night—and consequently your entire life—could have turned out very, very differently.