Singular life
I was wrong
Petronella Wyatt
0 nce I wrote a polemic about Italian men, prompted by a meeting with a young Roman aristocrat who told me that his compatriots were no longer interested in women but in books on housework. My musings annoyed my Mediterranean friends. They inferred — wrongly, alas — that I must have had several Italian suitors who at the moment of yenta went back to their mothers.
But I have to say, now, that I take it all back. I was wrong and I want to retract. To eat my cappello with salsa di pomodoro. The Marcella Mastroianni spirit — 'hello, I want you, where is your hotel?' — is not dead after all. Having returned from holiday in Porto Ercole I can now recount to you a visitation. I am convinced it was a visitation sent by some aggrieved Mediterranean demi-god as vengeance for my hubristic jottings. It came, like all really good visitations, in an unexpected shape.
It was about six in the afternoon and I was making myself a drink. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, two men appeared. The first man must have been in his late fifties. His companion looked like an imp: small, red-haired, wearing boxer shorts and apparently mute. Instead of introducing himself, he descended into a low curtsey, like Orpheus in the underpants. Then his companion spoke. 'I am friend,' he said. 'Oh right. Friend of whom?' This seemed pertinent somehow, 'Friend of friend,' he added unenlighteningly. 'I look for him.'
It suddenly dawned on me that he might be searching for a man who sometimes hangs around the house. `Ah, so-and-so. No, he's gone away.' The man regarded me. 'Yes, but you haven't.' I guessed his summer had been long and uneventful, for my skirt had a large coffee stain on it and my hair was uncombed. Perhaps his wife was away? 'We ring you,' he said. They did, the next morning. The first man had a large boat and wanted to take me out on it. became nervous. Perhaps he was a pirate or a white slaver, 'Thanks so much. But I would have to bring my house guests, an English historian and his girlfriend, and,' I added in what I thought would be the killer punch, 'my mother.'
I must say that the word 'mother' was nearly too much for him, but he rallied. 'Good, it's settled.' We agreed to meet at the marina the following morning at half past eleven. The red-haired man, who apparently did amusing things on the television, was with him. When they saw our party they must have thought twice at least. My historian friend is a fine example of the rampant Anglo-Saxon. My mother was wearing a large and peculiar hat, She was a fine example of the rampant Hungarian — of either sex.
Still, they had filled their tank with petrol and the sun was high over the emerald sea. I was surprised, however, when we did not seem to move far, considering how big the boat looked. We chugged round the corner and then stopped, seemingly for the whole day. My host claimed his boat went at only five miles an hour. I suspected he didn't think I was worth the cost of the petrol. But like all optimistic Latins he opted to try to make the best of it. I went for a swim.
When I climbed back onto the deck it was bereft of people, save my host. The expression on his face was half-hearted. He was holding aloft a large yellow towel. He ambled towards me and tried to smother me with it. My first thought was 'attempted murder'. Perhaps it was like one of those films in which the victim knows something but doesn't realise he or she knows it. But what could I know about him? We had met only the day before. I poked my head up from the top of the towel looking like a large bee emerging from a hive. Then he said, 'I want to dry you all over.' 'Why?' asked stupidly. He looked at me wearily, wondering if I was worth the effort. Then he said, 'I like you. But I think you know that.' I bolted up the stairs to the top deck. 'Are you trying to escape me?' he shouted.
I would have thought that question was redundant. Then things began with the hands, his hands. 'Oh, that's quite all right,' I said politely. 'I haven't any mosquito bites that need scratching.' The thought arose in his mind that I might be simple. Still, he sent his fingers on long rambles until lunchtime_ It became like a silent film, with protagonists rushing this way and that and bumping into things. All the while the redhaired man kept sticking his head through portholes and pulling faces.
Lunch was long. There was much wine. I noticed that the more wine our host drank the more his feet moved like David Beckham's. My mother eventually said she thought she would have a siesta in one of the cabins. I seized my chance. 'I'll come down with you. I must go to the loo.' I was on that loo for two hours. 'Where is that girl?' the host repeatedly asked the historian's girlfriend. 'Is she sick? What is the matter with her. Is she frightened of sex?'
By four there was no sign of us returning to the marina. The man was on the prowl everywhere. By this time my friend's girlfriend wasn't safe, He wanted some nookie and by God he was going to have it. I saw his point of view. After all, boats are expensive to maintain. But he had reckoned without my mother. She had a hairdressing appointment at six and she was not going to miss it. `Ven are ve going back?' she asked. Our host glared. Is there any hurry?' Yus.'
I had by this time decided that the safest place to be was in the sea and had dived overboard. The rest of what follows comes from my friends. Apparently he conceived the idea of putting my mother ashore on a raft. I could visualise her being made to walk the plank and then left to drift to Palermo without so much as a bottle of San Pellegrino.
But my mother didn't go overboard on this idea, as it were. In any case we had all drunk so much that, as for walking the plank, we could hardly walk at all. After an hour, the man knew he was beat. 'I put you all into the tender,' he said disgustedly. 'That will take you to the shore.' The tender?' my mother asked pathetically. 'Is that a blow-up rubber dinghy? Will it sink?' Well, what could we do? Into the tender we went. But by heaven, I had learnt my lesson. Never again will I take up my pen against the Italian male and accuse him of being a wimp.
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