They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  I blurted, “Che bella vulcano! Il . . . il . . . nubes suben la caldera!” in a muddy blend of Italian and Spanish that probably meant nothing, but got everyone’s attention.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Blond Sailing Brochure. She tapped her blond brochure husband on the arm, pointed, and said, “I think she’s saying those are clouds from the volcano!”

  The captain nodded and said something in Italian that prompted everyone to point at the mountain and chatter. Unable to understand them, I smiled blankly. A young black-haired goddess with skin tanned the deep bronze of endless summer put a sympathetic hand on my arm and explained, “The captain said the same thing you said, more or less.”

  At the island, the captain turned us over to a hiking guide: a short, barefooted man covered in wild curls from the top of his head to his muscular calves. He spoke no English, so I’d be learning little about the volcano. Before we started up Stromboli, we walked to the guide’s house in the village, where he put on hiking boots and kissed his wife and children goodbye.

  I was surprised there was a village on the narrow grass skirt of the volcano. Hadn’t these people learned anything from Pompeii, where the villas and bathhouses and temples of a once-thriving civilization still wait for masters who will never return, where hundreds of suffocated victims left their imprints in pumice, where plaster casts of the dead still huddle in agony around the bones within?

  So, if I was so smart, what was I doing here?

  We started the hike just before sunset so we’d arrive at the top after dark, when it’s easier to see the fireworks. For the first hour, we walked single-file through the grasses of the lower slope. The sun began to bleed, then drowned in an indigo sea. During the second hour, the group fell quiet as the terrain changed to a steep rise strewn with sharp rocks. Soon, deep volcanic ash sucked at our shoes. During the third hour, the sky turned black and the group pulled out flashlights. I donned my headlamp.

  We were resting among a clump of rocks when I saw it: a shower of flaming red pyrotechnics sprayed from one of the mountain’s three craters and flew high into the dark sky. The volcano’s thunder was distant and faint. I had no clue how to say “look!” in Italian, but grunted loudly, “Ag-g-g-b-b-b . . . !” and flapped my hand in the direction of the explosion. The exclamations and sighs of the group were equally inarticulate, as they turned just in time to see the glowing rocks fall earthward and float ever so slowly down a collapsed segment of the cone, called the Sciara del Fuoco, the “Stream of Fire.” I wished Sean were here to see it.

  “Okay, I’m satisfied. I have seen it and I can turn back now,” the Bronze Goddess of Endless Summer muttered. She leaned against a rock and rubbed her calves. “Not that I’m afraid. Just exhausted. Walking through this ash is like walking across the sands of the Sahara!”

  When we continued upward, I chuckled. Mr. Blond Brochure turned and asked, “What’s up?” This American euphemism sounded new and charming in his Italian accent. I answered, “I was just thinking, we’re going the wrong direction. I’m sure if you told most people, ‘You see that mountain there? It’s ex-plo-ding,’ they’d run the other way.” The Blond Brochures and the Bronze Goddess laughed and passed a translation down the line to the non-bilingual Italians. Delayed laughter floated back to me in a slow wave.

  The guide took us to the ridge and then up into the sulfur-stinking cloud of steam that rose from the craters. Then we came down out of the cloud to sit in the ash and eat. As I ate my panini, I stared unblinking at the craters below, waiting for the next thunderous expletive.

  Twice more the volcano bellowed and sent up salacious spouts of lava, fragmented into fiery red blobs. We were closer this time and the loud booms gave several people a start, followed by nervous laughter. The third time, the fireworks disappeared momentarily into the cloud overhead before returning to sear the mountaintop. The radiant red cinders crept down the black void, and we could hear them crepitating like dozens of distant campfires as they flared and dimmed into a sizzling after-glow of gold embers. We stared in awe, pre-hominid children from the primordial sea witnessing the violent dawn of creation.

  Creation: an act of violence. I remember Sean standing on the sand of Cook Inlet, among the rock cairns, telling me that the only way to create something is to destroy something else. Maybe that’s why I’m not ready to answer his near-proposal: I’m not yet sure that we’ve destroyed what was to create what will be.

  While our group waited for another blast, Mr. Blond Brochure told us he’d just had a discussion with the guide about how safe we were. The guide had told him only two hikers had ever been burned while standing in this spot. “He said they got hit with the sciora, the hot rocks, and one of them got hit in the head. But they didn’t die,” Mr. Blond Brochure reported. “A man was killed once, but only because he walked too close to the crater.”

  Mrs. Blond Brochure elbowed him. “You could not wait to tell us until later?”

  The Bronze Goddess lifted an eyebrow at me and said, “So, we did come the wrong direction.”

  train from milan, italy to port bou, france

  The volcano didn’t burn me. It took people to do that. I’ll never know who they were. I never saw their faces. I’ll never know exactly what happened. The most disturbing thing of all is the absence of memory, the dreamless three hours or so between “before” and “after” that are forever lost to me.

  On my way out of Italy, I stopped in Milano to see Leonardo de Vinci’s Last Supper. I could think of no other inducements to stay in such a homogenous, city-like city. So after the Last Supper, I caught an all-night train to Port Bou, France. From there, it would be a quick hop to Barcelona. That meant breaking a vow I’d made to myself for my own protection: “Never take an overnight train.”

  Rather, I wasn’t breaking my vow, only amending it, to: “Never take an overnight train alone.” I walked through the passenger cars until I found a compartment with three female travelers who spoke English. I asked if I could join them, and explained that I was nervous about traveling alone. They were very obliging. I never thought to ask, and they never thought to tell me, whether they were taking the train all the way to Port Bou.

  The first two women got off the train somewhere on the coast of France. The other woman left a couple of stops later. With that, I was alone.

  The hour was late. I looked up at my heavy pack on the overhead shelf; I would have to don it again if I wanted to search for new companions. And, I knew by the murmurs and snores sneaking through the walls from neighboring compartments that many people had already gone to sleep. I decided to stay put.

  If one must take an all-night train alone, the travelers’ grapevine offers the following advice: don’t fall asleep; don’t put your bag near the door where someone can quickly reach in and grab it; don’t lie with your head near the door, because some robbers chloroform travelers to knock them out before fleecing them of their belongings.

  It wasn’t possible to lock the couchette. So I slid my pack away from the door, then I lay on the bench with my feet propped against the door so I’d feel it move if someone tried to open it. I was determined not to fall asleep. I read Moby Dick. Not the best reading material to keep me alert after 2:00 a.m., but it was all I had. At about 3:15, I glanced at the tiny travel-clock I carry in my pocket. Then I lay on my side to continue reading. A few minutes later someone opened the door. That’s the last thing I remember.

  The next thing I knew, I woke up from a strange blankness and again checked my little clock. It was 6:30, more than three hours later. Odd, never on a train had I slept for more than an hour. But then, I didn’t feel as if I’d been asleep. I felt as if it had been 3:15 a moment ago and now it was 6:30 and the time between had vanished. I felt disoriented, my thoughts gummy and knotted. There was a funny taste at the back of my throat and a strange chemical smell in my nose, which I felt a strong urge to blow.

  I walked dow
n the hall to the toilet, where I grabbed copious streamers of toilet paper and repeatedly blew my nose. But the odd smell didn’t go away. It dawned on me that the train had stopped. Concerned that maybe we’d reached my stop, I wandered into the next car.

  When a young woman stepped out of her couchette, I asked, “Y’know where we arrrrr?”

  Her eyes studied mine for a moment before she asked, “Have you been robbed?”

  “No. Juz’ worried thiz may be my . . . ztop.” To my own ears I sounded quite normal.

  She gave me an odd look. “Do you know where your stop is?”

  “Yeah, wrote on a ‘lil peez of paperrrrr . . . ” I was about to take out the slip of paper, which was in my pocketbook, when I realized I didn’t have my pocketbook. “Thaz ztrange, I muz’ve lef’ it in the couzhette.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and over-enunciated her next words, as if she were talking to someone deaf and wanted to make sure I could read her lips: “Are you sure you weren’t robbed?”

  “I don’ thing-zo,” I said. Why did she keep asking me that?

  “Why don’t you show me that little piece of paper?”

  She followed me to my couchette. I was puzzled to see that I’d left my pack behind, too. Anyone could’ve taken it. What was I thinking? My pocketbook with the neck strap was lying on the bench. Picking it up, I said, “I pud the peez of paperrr righd here. Thaz funny . . . ” All the pocketbook’s compartments were unzipped, the money I’d carried in it gone. “Oh my God . . . ” I said, instantly alert. “I was robbed.” I reached down to feel the many zippered pockets of my travel pants. “Jesus! He must’ve had his hands all over me. All my pockets are unzipped.” How could I have slept through that? I looked at the girl, puzzled. “How’d you know?”

  “You weren’t the only one.” Her accent was American. “Another woman came to our compartment a few minutes ago looking confused, like you. But she knew what had happened to her. She said she was scared because she’d just been gassed and robbed, and she asked if she could stay with us.”

  “Gassed?!”

  “Yeah. She said someone sprayed something in her face and when she woke up later her money was gone. My friends and I heard about this kind of thing. We promised to keep each other awake all night because we were scared it might happen to us. So did they get a lot?”

  “No, it was just thirty-five bucks. I carry the rest of my money somewhere else . . . Oh my God!” I reached into the waist of my pants for my money belt, yanked it out, and tore it open.

  “Is everything still there?”

  “Yeah, it’s all here.”

  “That makes sense. I hear these thieves move fast, hop on at one stop, get off at the next. You know, I think we saw the guys who did it, too. A few hours ago the door to our compartment opened and these two guys were standing there. They looked surprised to see the three of us sitting up, wide awake, just staring at them. They muttered some excuse and took off. And that girl who came to our car? She met another girl in the hall who it happened to. They must’ve hit a bunch of people.”

  I kept looking through my pocketbook in the compulsive way a hungry person will keep staring into an empty refrigerator. I thought back to when I’d first woken from my drugged sleep. The sarong I’d pulled over myself had still been draped over me. Rather, it had been neatly put back over me after someone had removed it, taken my pocketbook from around my neck, and rummaged through my pants. I pictured some man looming over me while I lay there helpless. With a train full of loot to plunder, the thieves wouldn’t have taken time to molest me, but the thought that they could have without me being any the wiser . . . A chill shook my body.

  The girl put a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “You can come sit with us if you want.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind of you. But I think I’m going to go sit in the coach.”

  Still a little out of it, but no longer the clueless zombie I’d been when I’d first woken up, I put on my pack and walked through the train in search of the conductor. I told him simply that I’d been robbed, that I knew he probably couldn’t do anything, but that I thought he should know. He shrugged with such elaborate unconcern it bordered on malice. He acted as if he was enjoying my misfortune, and I wondered why. After that, I walked to a nearly empty coach and sat down with my pack by my side, draping my arm across the seat behind it like a lover.

  Now I’m on a different train, to Barcelona. But as this train fills with morning light and sleepless travelers, I keep trying to piece together what happened to me on that other train in the dark. I can still see the door opening . . . then nothing. It’s what I do when things go wrong: I go back and back and back, trying to figure out how I could have changed what cannot be changed.

  Looking back, it occurs to me I’ve been dazed and confused for a long time, long before I was drugged and robbed last night. I’ve spent too much of my life unconscious while men have taken what they wanted from me, leaving me with little but my next destination. Luckily, this time they didn’t get much. Anyway, that’s all behind me now. It’s a new morning in a new country and another chance to start again.

  Shit! I just realized. I left Moby Dick on the train to Port Bou.

  Across the Abyss

  thirty-six years old—cuenca, spain

  It was after ten tonight when my train arrived in the small Spanish town of Cuenca, and I’d just missed the last bus up the hill. I shouldered my pack with a sigh and started walking.

  Two men stood on the corner talking and I asked them, in Spanish, for directions to my pensión. One of them—a portly man of about sixty-five with thinning white hair, straightforward eyes, and a brow creased with years of patience—explained that my pensión was at the top of the hill, too far to walk with such a large pack. He offered me a ride. I said I didn’t want to trouble him. No trouble, only five minutes by car. When I still demurred, the other man, sensing my unspoken concern, told me not to worry: Eduardo was a respectable gentleman and only wished to help. My pack was heavy and I was ready to be convinced, so I followed Eduardo to his car.

  He drove a tiny beige vehicle that looked like a Volvo, although I can’t readily identify the various motorized toys Europeans drive in lieu of the super-sized beasts so popular in the States. I explained this as we motored uphill, and he chuckled. His smile was kind, although the corners of his mouth moved only slightly, as if the muscles were stiff. I remarked that the cliffs of Cuenca looked pretty, lit up at night. Then, embarrassed by my rusty Spanish, I fell silent. Eduardo didn’t speak English.

  Even wedged in a clown car, Eduardo maintained the proud, erect bearing of an old caballero as he pointed out the landmarks we passed: the Plaza Mayor and its gothic cathedral, the medieval convent, the old prison that once housed prisoners of the Spanish Inquisition. We passed through an arched entry in the old castle wall into the Barrio del Castillo (Castle Neighborhood). There, atop the hill where a castle once stood, my humble pensión now sits among a handful of bars, restaurants, and lovely but faded dowager homes.

  Eduardo insisted on carrying my pack to the door, where he waited until the owner answered the bell, a woman about his age named Maria. They greeted each other by name. I thanked Eduardo and offered to buy him a coffee if I saw him in town. My offer was genuine, but I was surprised when he replied, with courtly dignity, that he would come this way tomorrow evening at six to pick me up. Recalling the old man in Crete who’d slobbered on me and shoved me out of his kitchen, I tried to think of a way to amend my offer, but Eduardo left before I could reply.

  When he was gone, I asked Maria if she thought it was a good idea to let Eduardo pick me up in his car. She replied that he was a good man from a good family and said it was fortunate I’d found a friend who knew the town. With that, I relaxed. Now, sitting alone in my room, I’m beginning to feel excited at the prospect of making a Spanish friend.

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sp; ***

  Cuenca climbs up a narrow hill poised between two gorges. It’s a plank tilted between two great rifts in the parched summer earth. This morning I walked downhill on a path that follows Cuenca’s eastern cliffs. Those cliffs line the Río Huécar Gorge, a slender drink of water poured down a long rippling throat.

  In the Ciudad Antigua, or Old Town, three fourteenth-century homes cling to bulging, uneven rocks on the edge of the cliffs, their balconies hanging over a gut-wrenching drop. It’s believed the Casas Colgadas, or Hanging Houses, were once summer homes for Arab royalty. Two of the Casas Colgadas are linked together to house the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español. I wasn’t as interested in abstract art as I was in the renovated medieval homes and the blood-percolating sensation of standing balanced over a precipice. The homes were a capricious gambol of multi-level spaces, conforming to the uneven rock below. A series of windows each picked up a different aspect of the gorge, creating stop-motion frames of art.

  After exploring the museum, I walked back uphill to take a nap before Eduardo arrived. On the way, I passed a group of children on a dirt playground, hanging upside down on monkey bars and chasing each other in the games-without-rules of the very young.

  One girl of about eight played by herself, and I imagined her an outcast. She wore thick glasses and her hair was cut in a bookish pageboy. When she stepped up to an old stone fountain to drink, I snapped a photo. She strode up to me and commanded me to take her photo again. Anticipating a request for money, I declined.

  To soften the blow, I told her she could take a photo with my camera if she liked. She nodded vigorously, and her whole body vibrated with excitement as I showed her how to snap a shot. She asked me what to shoot and I told her she could decide. She turned in a slow circle, reconsidering her familiar world through the viewfinder. “El Corazon de Jesús!” she squealed, as she pointed the camera across the gorge to a towering white statue of Jesus that looked down at us from the opposite hill. Then she took a few more photos of sights invisible to my adult eyes before I rescued my camera from her random exposé.