There are plenty of sex perverts in Sicily; all of them are men. The whole island, as I see it, is a man's primordial porno playground. The place pulsates with the vibes of undulating male loins.
Of course it's all very hush-hush... all very covert and Catholic. I don't think Sicilian wives are very much aware of this, but who really knows the truth except the priests in the confessional booths?
Wherever we went, we were plagued wth randy dandies and horny honchos. Guys were always walking along beside us whispering in dialect about their balls and other organs. Along paths in mountains, where we thought we might find respite from all these biological urges, we would see lust areas in the underbrush where sex parties took place at night. We'd always catch a few guys jerking off in the magenta crush of bougainvillea blossoms.
They followed us everywhere; the fact that we were both blondes had something to do with it. The fact that we were lesbians on a honeymoon didn't make much difference to them. Four year old Max was with us too, and that didn't deter them either. Maybe they thought he was a very short pubescent girl. Everyone is short in Sicily anyway.
"I'm tired of walking everywhere in this country," Shaggy said.
"I want to go back to the beach," Max whined.
"I thought you two might want to walk in the mountains for a change," I said. We were walking up a quiet road into the hills. A boy, barely nine years old, pulled up to us on his Piaggio. His motor was hot. He smiled and said something to us.
"Another pervert," Shaggy said. She knew a little bit of the Sicilian dialect from her mother.
"Whadhesay?" Max asked.
"He was just telling us about his personal history," I told Max. "Just ignore him."
We decided to rent a car to get around. After being haunted by guys on Vespas and wild groups of cruisers in Fiats everyday, we thought it might be a better idea. We went to a fly-by-night rental place where there were rows of navy blue Fiats waiting in the sun. To rent us the car the man didn't want money or a credit card; we didn't own one anyway and he didn't knw what a credit card was.
"One of you will have to leave a passport," he said in his English. Since Shaggy and I had both given our passports to the pension people, Max's passport was the only one we could give him. That was fine with him. "Mario, the man who runs this place, isn't here now, but he'll take care of the money when you bring the car back, okay?" he said. That sounded fine.
I jumped into the driver's seat and we barreled off. I loved the car. It was the size of an ordinary kitchen table. It handeled like a small bathtub on wheels. Now the horny grape growers and olive farmers wouldn't bug us. We would leave them in the dust. We were mobile.
We still ran into problems when we stopped at intersections. There'd always be a man on the corner who would notice us quickly and he would immediately expose himself by dopping his scrubbed drawers around his ankles. In Sicily, all the men's underpants are very clean. Their wives or mothers don't have much else to do during the day except wash clothes.
"I'm begining to think there's sexual repression in Sicily," I said as I turned the corner away from the butt-naked man.
"They seem healthy to me," Shaggy said, looking back at him as he was pulling up his pants.
"Maybe it's us," I said. "Maybe our clothes are too tight or something."
"I think it's because we're Americans and we're blond," Shaggy said.
"Maybe it's your eye makeup," Max said from the back seat. He was pretty astute for a four year old.
We were staying in a pension in a little town called Rocalamare. It consisted of that pension, an empty beach, a restaurant, a cigarette store, a grocery store, and a variety store. The population was about eighty children, forty-five men and three fat women. We spent most of our days on the sun-baked beach next to the placid water of the Ionian Sea, burning the retinas of our eyeballs reading books to fill the vacant hours. Rocalamare was very close to Taormina, where we had wanted to stay because of the annual Taormina Film Festival. We had plans to meet with some German independant filmmakers there but because of the festival there weren't any vacancies in any of the pensions we could find in Taormina.
The first night of the festival, we drove into Taormina. The festival films were all shown in an ancient Greek ampitheater which sat on the edge of a mountain overlooking the sea and the active volcano Mount Etna. We found our German director frends there.
"Ve von't hf time fa dinna," Werner said as he ran along with his japanese wrist watch. "But I haf dis bottle of red vine. Ve'll haf dis, no? Ve'll vatch the films, den maybe ve eat somesing afta, no?"
None of the films made any sense to us. We'd forgotten that they were all in Italian. Even the German and American films were dubbed in Italian. I hated dubbed films, even when they're dubbed in my own language; it just ruins everything. By the time the films were over, all the restarants everywhere were closed and the opening night festival party was a flop, so Shaggy and I returned to the Rocalamare pension, drunk and hungry.
I'd left Max there with a ten year old daughter of the pension owner and there he was sitting in the big family kitchen under a faulty florescent light at a high marble table with skinny white cats scattered around eating cold pasta on newspapers. Max was drawing on butcher paper with waxy crayons.
The ten year old babysitter looked like she was about forty years old. It occured to me maybe she wasn't a child at all, just a short adult. She had been waiting on tables in the family restaurant for five years, all the kids waited on tables in Sicily. Waitress jobs made girls look old before their time.
"I don't like it here," Max said the next day, sitting on the bed crying.
"I don't either," said Shaggy. We started to pack. I didn't really like it either.
We paid our bill and said goodbye to the family, then we packed up the Fiat and left to return the car to the rental place. On the way, we came to some railroad tracks where red lights were flashing and the bells were bonging. A train was coming. I stopped the car and waited for it to pass.
I had stopped the car in the wrong place. The red striped two ton metal pole that lowers automatically to warn cars on road crossings was slowly smashing the roof of our Fiat. We were wedged under it.
I felt like a complete asshole while the people in other cars laughed at us. I tried to back up, but we were pinned. As the pole squeeched metal on metal, I looked at Max in the back seat to see if he was okay. He was laughing. Shaggy was laughing. The roof was smashing in.
"Get out of the car," I screamed. "We're going to get crushed." They weren't taking this very seriously, but they jumped out. The car was shaking and its steel body was whining under the weight. Then the pole stopped descending. We waited. After the train passed, the pole lifted and the little blue Fiat bounced up into position on its rubber tires. The roof was all smashed in, sway-backed, like a birthday cake someone had fallen into.
"We're going to jail now," I said. "We don't have the money to pay for these damages."
"Get back in the car," Shaggy said. "We'll take our chances at the rental joint."
"Don't mention the roof until they do," I told both of them.
"Maybe we could just leave the car there with some money and keys in an envelope," Shaggy said.
"Let's just leave it by the side of the road," Max said.
"You're forgetting about your passport," I told him.
We drove the car back to the rental lot. I turned off the ignition and sat there for a few minutes. I knew we would all go to jail or something and this was our last day of freedom.
I walked into the office and met Mario, who was sitting behind the desk. I handed him the keys.
"Okay, let's take a look to see how many kilometers are on the car," he said and slid off his seat. He stood no taller than my waist! I couldn't believe it! Mario was a midget! This was divine providence! He looked the car over, checked the kilometers, kicked the tires... but he couldn't see the top of the car. He was too short.
He gave us back Max's passport and we paid the small sum for the rental and left.
There's an old superstition in Sicily about seeing a midget. It brings luck.
