Over lunch I learned the Australians were both in their mid-60s, and had come to Perugia from Melbourne to take one month of Beginning Italian. Despite the fact they were speaking English, their heavy accents made it challenging to understand everything they said. She introduced herself as Grace and he gave his name as something that sounded like Attha. I thought it was African or Abo, and all through lunch I kept calling him variations on it like Attar or Atho and at one point I called him Aphid, like the bug. But it was not until Grace wrote down their names and phone number that I realized his name was Arthur, not Aphid.
Grace and Arthur told me the apartment they rented near the school had a kitchen full of pots and pans and other cooking utensils, but no dishes, cups, or eating implements of any kind. I joked that they should just borrow some items from the cafeteria to which Grace replied, “Capital idea!” and Aphid immediately began stuffing cutlery and plates into his backpack. After the heist, we decided to meet up later that evening and go to the movies. Grace and Arthur thought it would be a good way to immerse themselves in the language and culture without actually having to speak to anyone.
Much to our surprise the movie was not in Italian but in Korean with Italian subtitles. The film, from South Korea, was called La Moglie Dell’Avvocato, The Lawyers Wife…not the avocado’s wife that Grace thought it meant. Anyway, talk about weird; it turned out the film was basically porn disguised as a highbrow South Korean soap opera.
From what I could piece together the story was as follows: Hojung is the frustrated wife of Mihjang, a successful lawyer who disses Hojung and takes up with his secretary. Seeking revenge, Hojung gets involved with a very young guy—Wohung—who lives in her building. But things get complicated when Mihjang and his lover are killed in a car accident and Wohung’s father discovers that his son is seeing Hojung and all hell breaks loose. I think it was a comedy. Aussie Grace thought the name of Hojung’s lover was “well hung,” which it did sound like and makes you wonder about the South Korean sense of humor. Arthur, a.k.a Aphid, slept through most of the show and spent the rest of the time pondering the possibility of swiping a stack of cold drink cups from the concession stand to augment their ill-equipped kitchen. I suggested he might as well take the popcorn maker, too, while he was at it, but he didn’t think he could fit it in his backpack.
We continued to meet each day at the cantina between classes and fell into the kind of accelerated intimate friendship that is often forged among strangers when traveling far from home.The next week we saw another film, this time in German with Italian subtitles. Once again the story line seemed to be just the sheerest of veneers to host an all-out porn fest. It was rather surprising that all the films were distinctly adult in nature. I asked my host family about all the peculiar foreign films I had seen. They exchanged worried looks and explained delicately that the particular theater I’d been to was not exactly mainstream, but the “art house” for experimental films. I told Grace and Aphid I got the impression from my host family that we had been frequenting the local porn theater. Grace and Aphid were unfazed. Nothing rattled them. Aphid said it was all part of being Australian, that as a rule they tend to stay calm and not stress on the little things. I called their philosophy and attitude towards life—avoiding a frightening behavior—coined from a poorly translated fire emergency poster I saw in the cafeteria that read:
IN EVENT OF FIRE—GENTLY YOU HAVE TO AVOID TO ASSUME A FRIGHTENING BEHAVIOR.
I believe it meant “Relax, Stay Calm, and Don’t Panic.” Grace and Aphid always exuded an easy, relaxed air that I admired. But heck, they were on an extended vacation, with nothing really to worry about. Or so I thought.
Two days later things changed. At 3 A.M. I got a frantic call on my cell phone from Aussie Grace.
“Please come right away, it’s an emergency,” she said. “I’ll explain when you get here.”
Grace opened the door looking quite distressed and weary. Aphid was sitting hunched in the corner with a dish-towel in his lap.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s Arthur it’s…oh, how to say this…it’s the prasta,” said Grace.
“The what?”
“The prasta.”
“The pasta? He ate something bad?
“No, not the pasta, the prostata.”
“Are you speaking English?”
“Yes, yes!” said Grace.
“Oh good God Grace,” said Aphid. “Just tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
“It’s me little Joe…it’s stuck,”Aphid said.
“Your what? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Grace, give her the box,” said Aphid.
Grace sheepishly handed me a carton.
“It’s viagra,” Aphid said. “I took it several hours ago and…well…it went up but now it won’t go down.”
I burst out laughing and Grace started laughing, too. Aphid just moaned.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry,” I said. “But what the hell do you want me to do? You Aussies are a kinky bunch. I’m not that kind of girl you know!”
“Oh please, be serious!” said Aphid. “We need you to read the box for us or help us call a doctor. We can’t possibly explain this in Italian.”
“O.K., O.K., let me see the package. Where did you get this stuff anyway and what were you thinking?”
“It’s not that I need it,” said Aphid. “We thought it would be fun to try—you can get it in the pharmacies here.”
“Yeah right, I guess those foreign films put some ideas into your head.”
Grace started laughing again.
“Marcy pleaseeee…” begged Aphid.
“You know I have to say that I’m really disappointed with you, this is so irresponsible, experimenting with drugs…and on a school night!”
“Please Marcy, read the package…”
“O.K….uh huh…uh huh…hmmmm interesting. All right then, lets try this—Aphid, stand up and put your hands over your head and stretch your fingers out as wide as you can.”
“Will this help? Does it say to do that? What will this do?”
“Nothing, but you’re always complaining that this flat needs a proper hat and coat rack—well, now you’ve got one.”
Grace exploded with laughter.
“Oh please!” said Aphid. “This is not a joke, what does it really say?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure but I think it says something about drug interactions and remaining calm. Gently you have to avoid to assume a frightening behavior.”
“What?” said Aphid looking puzzled.
“Never mind, it’s a translation thing…”
Grace continued to laugh.
“Look Aphid,” I said, “you need to relax. Grace, can you heat up some milk?”
“Warm milk? For what, a compress of sorts?” asked Grace.
“Oh jeeze no, I just thought it might be relaxing for him to drink.”
“Oh right—brilliant—good idea,” said Grace. “And then maybe we can give him some soothing thoughts—you know power of suggestion and all that—it could be beneficial for him to think of things that are not sexy.”
“Things that are not sexy? That sounds like a Jeopardy category—I’ll take things that are not sexy for $500!”
Aphid groaned and held his head in his hands.
“Well let’s give it a try,” said Grace. “Arthur dear, try to relax and concentrate on our words. I’ll go first…how about…ducks?”
“Ducks?”
“Yes, ducks”
“O.K. how about…porridge?” I said.
“Oh yes, that’s quite good, that’s not sexy at all. My go. I’ll say…flannel.”
“Lentils.”
“Hair-nets.”
“Mustard.”
“Tongue depressors.”
“Salami.”
“Salami?”
“Oh sorry,” I said. “But I’m getting kind of hungry.”
“Knee socks
,” said Grace.
We fired off words as if we were in the speed round of some demented game show.
But before I could give my next soothing thought, Aphid stood up and screamed—“For God’s sake, this is ridiculous! Besides, actually I quite fancy knee socks. But nonetheless, I would like to go to hospital now.”
At the hospital Grace and Aphid stood silently behind me as I tried to explain the exact nature of Aphid’s problem. Although I was supposedly a Level II Italian student, my vocabulary was not equipped to convey all the details accurately. I couldn’t recall the word for penis or even a slang term, so I made up words as I best I could to describe the situation:
“Il poinger non va via. È va su e sopra ma no va giu”
“Che cosa?” What? asked the admission clerk.
“Lui ha un grande problema con sua pee pee. Lui bisogna aiuto.” He needs help.
I wondered if there was an international signal for “erectile distress” and what it possibly could be. In desperation, I resorted to hand gestures and began an elaborate pantomime. My impromptu floor show caused a sensation and everyone in the admissions area started laughing at what can best be described as a sort of Martha Grahamesque piece on fertility rites gone horribly awry. Eventually a doctor who spoke English was called down to see Aphid. Il Dottore took Aphid away and gave him some kind of shot and il grande poinger retreated.
Grace and Arthur returned to Melbourne with the majority of their dignity intact. But I was left to negotiate the streets of Perugia on my own, still too embarrassed to walk past the hospital for fear of running into anyone who might recognize me from my performance. I was trying very hard to avoid a frightening behavior, but it was going to take some time.
Marcy Gordon operates a marketing and publicity consulting firm, Bocca della Verita, which provides marketing services to travel guidebook publishers. She is a contributing editor to the new Authentic Tuscany series published by the Touring Club of Italy, which she also co-designed and developed in less-than-pefect Italian. Ms. Gordon spends unequal parts of the year in California and Italy. She is a graduate of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communication with a degree in Advertising and Marketing.
AYUN HALLIDAY
Paris, Third Time Around
But was it a charm?
THIS WOULD BE MY THIRD TRIP TO PARIS. THE FIRST time, my father escorted me on a trip organized by my eighth-grade French teacher. We stayed in a two-star hotel near the Gare du Nord. Every night, we ate omelettes, frites, and mousse au chocolat in noisy bistros, where the regulars discredited the myth of Parisian hauteur by engaging us in as much friendly conversation as our Midwestern-accented, academic French—mine current, Daddy’s creaking with decades of rust—permitted. I had been given some early birthday presents to use on the trip: a straw purse, a high-collared trench coat that I considered far more feminine than the classic Burberry model, and some wood-soled sandals that attached via cream-colored, canvas ankle straps the width of fettuccine. I was, in a word, gorgeous: an eighth-grade woman of mystery in thick bangs cut to emulate Mork and Mindy’s Pam Dawber. The shop windows were bright with jonquils and chocolate molded into lambs, rabbits, and chickens. Unfortunately, the weather did not share the merchants’ sunny Easter vision, treating me to my first taste of travelers’ bane, the cold rain that pisses down from a pewter-colored sky for days on end. Freezing in my insubstantial off-brand trench coat, I clip-clopped from Notre Dame to Sacré Cœur, nearly breaking my tightly strapped ankles whenever my wooden soles hydroplaned on the wet cobblestones. I had a wonderful time, despite bunking with two ninth-graders who awarded themselves the choicest bathroom mirror time and both twin beds. I wheeled my rollaway cot next to our French (!) windows, dreaming of a not-too-distant future when I would return to this most romantic of cities with a handsome, artistically inclined man, temporarily played by whatever unsuspecting eighth-grade boy I felt like tapping for the fantasy. On my fourteenth birthday, the ninth-graders and I dressed up like French hookers and photographed each other posed seductively on my cot with Monsieur J. J., a worldly ten-year-old whose wealthy parents had sent him on the school-sponsored trip sans chaperone.
As I had predicted, the next time I saw Paris, I was in the company of a handsome, artistically inclined man, but, as shoestring travelers with only public facilities at our disposal, Nate and I were rank as goats. No doubt Paris has suffered its share of stenchy lovers. Napoleon and Joséphine come to mind. Juliette Gréco and Miles Davis had access to modern plumbing, but I’ll bet they reeked of the bars in which they frisked. But with our constant stink further augmented by our poor diet, financial anxiety, and sleep deprivation, my libido didn’t stand a chance of measuring up to the eighth-grade ideal.
This trip to Paris was different. Our digs in an old hotel off the Rue de Rivoli were fairly plush, food was plentiful, and this time I was wildly in love, flush with an infatuation as delicious and short-lived as the lone bead of nectar squeezed from a honeysuckle blossom. Unfortunately for my mother, she, not my lover, was my traveling companion. As soon as the Star gave her the green light, Mom invited me along, envisioning a fun mother-daughter escapade. We would arrive a week before Fashion Week, rent a car, and tour Normandy and the Loire Valley. At Giverny, we would picnic within spitting distance of Monet’s infernal water lilies. Having glutted ourselves on the picturesque, we would roll into Paris, where we had a vague notion that I might tag along as a sort of barely fluent translator as Mom covered the collections.
Poor Mom. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and wake up in the cramped candlelit bedroom of the apartment my new boyfriend Wylie shared with two other architecture majors from the Illinois Institute of Technology. If Satan had materialized on the wrought-iron balcony, I would have swapped my mother and my soul for Wylie in a nanosecond. Mom knew it, but tried to keep a brave face. Just before we rendezvoused with our rental car, we were loading butter and marmalade onto uninspired croissants in our Paris hotel’s basement breakfast room. A young couple seated themselves at the next table. The woman was pretty and blond, and the man, a tall Asian guy with a long ponytail hanging down his back, looked just like Wylie. I thought I would swoon. If only I could squat beside his chair, lay my palm on his back, and feel him breathing through the thin cotton of his shirt.That was all I wanted, just a crumb, a little morsel to tide me over for the next twelve days, the hundreds of hours I would be spending with my mother instead of Wylie. We watched the couple intently over the rims of our giant coffee bowls. Their voices were pitched too low for us to hear, but they held hands and smiled at each other frequently from inside their happy love bubble. “I’ll bet you miss Wylie,” Mom ventured, giggling uncertainly. Only 288 hours to go, I thought, not counting the return flight. I tore my eyes away from our neighbors, grunting an affirmative to my mother’s question as I nonchalantly shook a Gauloise out of my pack. If I couldn’t be with my lover, at least I could pretend to be French.
Under the cover of jet lag, I caught up on the many hours of sleep I had foregone since taking up with Wylie six weeks earlier. The humming of the rental car’s wheels lulled me into unconsciousness, even as Mom freaked out from the pressure of confusing rotary exits and mileage signs posted in a language she didn’t understand. These afternoon naps also served to transport me temporarily from the frenzied itching of a sudden-onset yeast infection, which, if nothing else, was expertly timed, given my transcontinental divide. Yeah, I was a real dud in the company department. Instead of lavishing me with admission to museums and gardens, and treating me to three provincial squares a day, my mother should have invited one of her friends, like Diney, her standing date for the Indiana Repertory Theater, or Ellen, a free spirit who painted watercolors of cows and Labrador retrievers. Either of those ladies would have been a livelier choice than I was, pining for Wylie’s clove cigarettes and the red curtain he kept drawn across his bedroom window at all times.
Mealtimes were the hardest. In the car, I could sleep o
r twitch in my seat, trying to subdue the pernicious demons of my infection. Tourist attractions offered partial distraction from my Wylie-less state with their informational plaques, often helpfully translated into English. I learned quite a bit about the landing at Omaha Beach, the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet’s love of Japanese woodcuts, and the monk-designed formal vegetable garden at the Château de Villandry. Sometimes I got pissy, like when Mom whispered to watch my bag as we passed through a street market en route to the famous cathedral in Chartres. When one is suffering from the pangs of lovesickness, the pragmatic comments of a mother cannot go unpunished. Only lovers think that they are immune from harm, that the whole world, even the tiniest forest creatures and most hardened criminals, wishes them well.
If I couldn’t have Wylie, I longed for something to take my mind off him. As it was, I was afraid Mom and I were on the verge of turning into one of those long-married and almost universally feared elderly couples who dine silently in restaurants. After so long an acquaintance, what could we possibly say to each other over roast chicken and vin ordinaire? It didn’t occur to me to ask Mom the same questions I had posed to Wylie in the breathless recent past, or that she, too, had plenty of anecdotes relating to a time before our paths crossed.
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