by Phil Doran
It was, in fact, this collection of long-legged blond women in bikinis that distracted Cousin Spartaco, who had been sent out to find us. As a result, Nancy and I had to wander up and down a crowded beach looking for Dino and his brood. This was not easily negotiated, since Nancy’s arm was in a cast and I was limping across the scalding hot sand as I struggled to carry a cooler full of victuals. In contrast to all the robust sun-worshipers, we looked like a pair of refugees from an orthopedic ward who had been taken to the seaside to air out.
“Hey, hey, over here!” somebody yelled.
I heard English over the babble of a United Nations worth of voices, and I turned to see Rudolfo waving his arms at us.
We slogged off in their direction as Dino, Flavia, and an assortment of cousins and dogs came out from under their shade to hug us, kiss us, and lick our hands. Our cooler was taken and combined with an already belly-bursting collection of edibles, and space was somehow found for us under the tent, which was now as hot and crowded as any back alley in Calcutta.
And like any back alley in Calcutta, it was also teeming with intrigue. Cousin Aldo was fretting with his mamma over his bathing attire. Though I’m all for self-expression, I could well understand her aggravation over a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound man with a huge gut wearing a skimpy red Speedo that barely covered his butt and showed his penis sticking out like one of those little pencils they give you when you play miniature golf.
At the same time Nina, Nona, and Nana were berating Cousin Fausto for leaving the family for long stretches of time to sit in the snack bar listening to a motorcycle race on the radio; Cousin Turrido was hollering at Leonardo and Rafael for kicking sand on his insalata con funghi while they played Marco Polo; and Flavia was accusing Monica of being a negligent mother because she was too involved in her trashy novel to notice that la bimba Artemisia had crawled over to Torpedo, stuck the dog’s tail in her mouth, and was sucking on it like a pacifier.
But the main event was what was going on between Rudolfo and Pia. More accurately, what was not going on between them. They sat on the blanket with their backs to each other, hardly like boyfriend-girlfriend. Dino cast me a sharply pointed look urging me to intervene. When I blankly stared back at him, he resorted to a hand gesture, putting his flattened hand, palm down, in his mouth and biting down on it, to let me know how much he hated what was going on.
“Yo, dude, let’s go check out the water,” I said to Rudolfo, more to get away from Leonardo and Rafael, who had managed to step on my swollen ankle three times already.
Rudolfo needed no more coaxing than that to spring to his feet.
“L’acqua fa male,” Flavia scolded, reminding him that he had just eaten and any contact with the water would bring about his instant death.
Rudolfo kissed his mamma and assured her that we were just going to look at the sea and maybe stick in a toe.
But Flavia wasn’t convinced. She urged Pia to go along and make sure we two boys didn’t do anything foolish. I was happy to note that no one had referred to me as a boy for twenty years, but Pia looked peeved. She flashed an angry look at Rudolfo and commented that he was old enough to take care of himself . . . or at least, he should be.
Rudolfo’s eyes went hard and he stormed off. I caught up with him, and as we threaded our way through the throng, I tried to engage him in conversation, even though it was difficult to hear over the clamor of a beachful of Italians laughing and talking with their usual exuberance.
“Everything okay with you guys?” I said.
He shrugged.
“Seems like Pia’s on your case.”
He flicked three fingers under his chin, which means “I could care less.”
“Yeah, women,” I clucked, allowing my focus to settle on a magnificent Italian girl who was sunbathing topless.
“Why is she never happy with the way I am?” he finally said. “If she loves me, why is she always trying to change me into something else?”
“Beats me.”
“They’re so complicated. They say one thing and do another.”
As if to underscore the mixed messages we get from them, the girl I had been watching raised her arm to reveal an un-shaved armpit that looked like it belonged to Charles Bronson.
“Why is it I can be with a man and he’s okay with me just how I am, but every time I’m with her we get into a fight?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes it feels like we’re from two different tribes.”
“And yet, we’re expected to pick one and live with them for the rest of our lives.”
“Crazy, isn’t it?”
“I can’t do it,” he said, stopping an errant soccer ball with his foot and kicking it back to the players. “I can’t marry her.”
“Okay . . .”
“I mean, I love her. But more like a friend and—and, look, I met somebody.”
“Oh, man, you got to tell her.”
“Telling her is not the problem,” he said. “My father’s going to freak. And Mamma . . .”
“You know what? They’re going to scream and holler and it may get ugly for a while, but eventually they’ll get used to it.”
He started to say something, but whatever he was about to tell me got swept away by the sudden uproar of electrified cheering, hooting, and laughing. And as loud as that was, it was all but drowned out by the commanding sound of a thunderous drumbeat. The source of this raucous euphoria was a vast army of young men, maybe two or three hundred, marching down the beach in lockstep, each holding a red plastic bucket upside down under one arm as they pounded out a beat on it with the flat of their hands. The actual moving mass of humanity was almost double that size when you included the giggling young girls and excited little kids cheering them on.
I was witnessing the spectacle the Italians call gavettone, and for reasons no one’s quite sure of, it’s only played out on this day, on beaches and piazzas, maggiore and minore, all over the country.
This particular army proceeded up the beach until it encountered another army heading in the opposite direction. Then, the two opposing legions broke into a furious water fight, hurling buckets of seawater at each other in a pitched battle that lasted over an hour. After everyone was sopping wet and laughing, the armies disengaged, reassembled, and continued their drumbeat march in opposite directions.
As this was going on, people all over the beach were also deploying their buckets, either individually or in small groups. There is particular pleasure in sneaking up on someone reading a book, or taking a nap, and dousing him. Some more aggressive males have perfected the art of dashing their bucket of water with sufficient force and at the proper angle to take down the bottom of a girl’s two-piece bathing suit.
But that’s about as aggressive as it gets. As I witnessed this, and got hit by more than one bucket of cold water, I couldn’t help marveling at what a joyous, fun-loving way this was to channel natural male aggression in a ritualized mockery of how, for centuries, rival city-states and religious factions had slaughtered each other with pike and musket.
Rudolfo and I borrowed some buckets, and while we were joining in on the madness, Nancy was getting Pia’s thoughts on their relationship. When their conversation became the interest of too many ears, they left the tenda and took a walk to the snack bar. Pia confided that she loved Rudolfo but she wasn’t sure about marrying him. He could be sweet, but he was such a mammaiolo, a mamma’s boy. In a society of forty-year-old men who routinely live with their mothers, it’s a sad indictment of anybody who can earn such a distinction as being singled out as a mammaiolo.
But Nancy’s advice was to try and be more understanding. Men are immature by nature, she counseled, citing numerous examples of my behavior for the record. But the good news was, with the right woman, a guy can sometimes learn to get it right. They talked like this for a long while, and as they headed back to the tenda, Pia was beginning to feel that with enough patience and love, Rudolfo could possibly become a stable, responsi
ble adult.
Needless to say, Rudolfo chose that exact moment to sneak up from behind and dump a bucket of water on her head.
28
Ritorno Subito
If you’re ever going to spend any amount of time in Italy, there is an expression you should know that comes up with greater frequency than grazie and arrivederci. The phrase ritorno subito is not usually spoken but is more commonly rendered on a homemade sign hanging on the door of a store or an office. It means “be back soon,” and the chances of that sign appearing will be in direct proportion to how urgently you need to get inside the establishment. It is also relevant to consider how the Italians define the concept of soon. Long before Einstein, the Italians proved not only that time was curved, but in the right hands it could be bent into more shapes than elbow macaroni.
And so it was that we found ourselves staring at yet another Ritorno Subito sign, this one hanging on the door of the office of Avvocatto Bonetti. We hadn’t started the day by planning to be tapping our feet in front of our lawyer’s office, but this is how events unfolded.
Earlier that morning we had driven over to Tito Tughi’s Auto Mundo Repair Shop to see what was going on with our VW. There wasn’t much to see, since it was in the exact same state as it had been on the night that gentleman from Massa T-boned our car and turned it into so much scrap iron. Signor Tughi was not around, and the Tughi brothers didn’t seem to know anything about it, so I demanded to see Pia, getting so aggravated that my swollen ankle began to throb.
Pia came trotting over from the sales office and greeted us with double-cheeked kisses. Before we could get to the reason we were here, she had to tell Nancy about yet another example of Rudolfo’s mammaioloism. Every night this week, he had dragged her over to Mamma’s house for dinner. She finally convinced him to take her out to a restaurant so they could be alone. But instead of paying attention to her, he acted as if he really wanted to be at Mamma’s. He sighed all through his antipasti, and when the waiter came over to ask him about his main course, Rudolfo ordered the tortellini bolognese because that’s what Mamma was making that night.
We expressed our sympathy for her being in love with a man who was attached to his mother in a preternatural way, but we really needed to deal with the issue of our car. After all, we were confused. We thought Auto Mundo had received a check from the insurance company and we couldn’t understand why, after three weeks, nothing had been repaired.
Pia explained that they had only received a check for a very small amount, hardly enough to cover the towing and the storage fees. How could the amount be so small? Any idiot could see that it would take thousands of euros to fix it. But any idiot didn’t see that, because not one single idiot from the insurance company had even shown up to look at it.
Once again we learned that, surprise, surprise, they do things differently here. In America, you hit somebody and the two insurance companies sit down, haggle over the damages, and the hitter’s company cuts the hittee a check. The Italian way is for the hitter’s insurance company, without any admission of guilt whatsoever, to send the other party a check for a rather paltry amount. The aggrieved party is then free to cash that check, without any admission that they have agreed to settle. They can either keep the cash and go away . . . or they can use the cash to hire a lawyer and sue the other party’s ass off.
Guess which one we chose.
I called Avvocato Bonetti, and even before I could explain the situation, he was way ahead of me, predicting that in the next few days we’d be receiving another small check for our medical expenses and the rental car. He suggested that we come down to his office immediately, plan our strategy, and prepare to file the court papers as soon as possible.
Of course, as I explained earlier, the word soon can encompass any length of time from right now to the twelfth of never. Which is why we found ourselves standing in front of his darkened office, wondering why we were being greeted by a Ritorno Subito sign instead of Avvocato Bonetti himself. When I tried to reach him on any one of his many cell phones, all I got was a recorded message saying it was not in service.
There wasn’t even a decent café to duck inside and get away from the heat, so we passed time squinting into a windowful of clocks in the shop next door. When we got bored with that, we switched over to the shoemaker’s, where we were entertained by his skill at putting a tiny bunch of nails in his mouth, plucking out one at a time using a small hammer with a magnetic end, and driving it into a heel in one smooth motion without ever knocking out his front teeth. We were content to watch this for a while, but when the shoemaker heard the clocks from the clock store chime, he put on his hat, turned off the lights, and left, hanging out his own Ritorno Subito sign.
By now the midday heat was approaching the level of a blast furnace, so we decided to pack it in, go home, and soak our battered bodies in the pool. We had just gotten into our car when we heard a horn blasting and a frantic screeching of tires. We flinched, fearing that lightning was about to strike us twice, but were relieved when an orange Alfa pulled up behind us and Avvocato Bonetti popped out.
He never bothered apologizing for being late, but predictably, he launched into a monologue designed to elicit our sympathy for his misfortunes. Today’s episode of the Bonetti family soap opera featured a frantic search for his teenage daughter, who had run away from her eating-disorder clinic, and a harrowing experience with his mother. They had finally convinced her that her Siamese cat was dead, only to have the elderly woman show up at their church and accuse the priest of poisoning it. Not to mention all the ritardi at Telecom Italia who had so screwed up his phone bill, he could no longer call anyone on any of his many cell phones.
So masterfully did he weave his storia that we wound up feeling bad for him, even though we were the ones who had been waiting for forty-five minutes in the blistering heat. But that didn’t matter now. He was here. We wanted to get down to business.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to meet with us, because he was late for a luncheon date at a restaurant up the street. He would cancel it, of course, but the man he meeting was someone who could help his chronically unemployed brother-in-law get a job. And it was a government job, so secure that even a cretino like his brother-in-law couldn’t get fired.
But he invited us to walk with him to the restaurant, and perhaps we could settle some of our business on the way. He said walk, but we were really doing a brisk trot as I cursed my bum ankle and tried to keep up with the one guy in Italy who was actually in a hurry to get somewhere.
“It is important we go on the offense,” he said to us over his shoulder as we struggled to keep up with him. “Attack them with a barrage of medical bills, X rays, and sworn statements from doctors.”
“Well, I was examined by the staff surgeon at the hospital,” Nancy said.
“And the paramedics checked me out in the ambulance,” I added, limping at a pace that put a sheen of sweat on my brow.
“That’s not enough,” he announced. “We need specialists. People who are the best in their fields. In fact, there’s an excellent clinic in Geneva where I . . .”
“Geneva?” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll bill them for the trip,” he said in a voice as precise as a trial lawyer’s. “And you will go first class.”
“We don’t want to rip anybody off,” I said.
“Who is ripping anybody off?” he said. “We just want to be compensated for our suffering.”
“Well, I can’t work.” Nancy cradled her broken arm. “I guess there’s loss of wages involved.”
“And they’ve got to cover the repair of our car, and pay for the one we’re renting,” I said.
“Of course they will,” he said as we reached the restaurant. “But it’s the medical bills that will make this case. The higher the better.”
“Nancy was injured and they should pay for whatever surgery or therapy she’s going to need,” I said. “But I’m really okay and I don
’t need—”
“How can you say you’re okay?” he said. “Look how you are limping. You should be on crutches or in a wheelchair.”
I chuckled at myself as Avvocato Bonetti opened the door of the restaurant and peered inside.
“Look, signore,” I said. “I’m limping because—”
“Uh-oh, he’s angry I’m late. Okay, I’ll fax you a list of doctors and clinics and we’ll talk. Ciao,” he said, with a nod in our direction, before he disappeared into the darkness of the restaurant.
We never went to Geneva, but for the next few months we did go to Lucca twice a week, so a team of physical therapists, under the supervision of Dottoressa Mancini, could care for our injuries. Nancy was guided through a series of exercises designed to repair her torn rotator cuff without surgery, and my neck was treated with muscle stimulation and chiropractic adjustments.
Every few weeks we had a consultation with the dottoressa. She was an attractive woman in her late thirties with hair and eyes the exact same color brown. After she’d reviewed our X rays and charts, her tawny brown eyes would twinkle and she would declare the progress we were making to be squisito, exquisite, even though both she and Avvocato Bonetti were somewhat disappointed when I held firm that my ankle injury was self-inflicted.
The waiting room of the clinic was constantly filled with people from all walks of Italian life, sporting all kinds of broken and misaligned pieces. Since there was a great deal of waiting around involved, I took the opportunity to practice my language skills, which were now at the point where I spoke Italian about as well as Desi Arnaz spoke English. I was usually in the wrong verb tense and I comically mispronounced a lot of words, but I was pretty much able to make myself understood.
I was also able to understand so much more that I could tell Nancy, when she came out of her therapy, how the housewife next to me had said to her mutinous three-year-old, “Stai ammazzando il tuo papà” . . . that his unruly behavior was killing his father, even though daddy was back at his office.
