Chapter 30
I TELL YOU ALL THIS to explain why, on our way back into town, I barely noticed the crowd until we were upon it.
I was in my own head, wondering how we’d managed to make such a mess of the afternoon, when Paul, who was walking a few feet in front of me, slowed and held out a hand.
I thought the hand was a peace offering and took it, but then he stopped completely.
We’d reached Cala Gavetta, and ahead of us, on the other side of the harbor, were maybe twenty or thirty people chanting something about America and waving a bunch of signs I couldn’t read, much less begin to interpret.
There was one sign with a big American flag shaped like a submarine.
It was actually kind of stunning, like a Jasper Johns painting, if Johns had been into subs.
I could see it hanging in a fancy foyer or maybe over a couch in an expensive New York City apartment.
But as we drew closer, I realized that someone had painted a thick black line through the flag.
Paul was very obviously on high alert. I could feel it in the grip of his hand and the pulse of his thumb. “Let’s take it easy,” he said in a low voice.
“Is this the group Tom warned us about?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.”
“What do their signs say?”
He started translating them. “That banner there says Italian Communist Party. And you see that red-and-yellow sign with the hammer and sickle?”
I said that I did.
“That’s the Italian Socialist Party. The PSI.”
“What do the letters stand for?”
“Il Partito Socialista Italiano.”
“And they want us out, too?”
“I think we can assume so,” said Paul.
“Well, that’s not very nice,” I said, in an attempt to be funny.
The protesters were almost all young people. They wore collared shirts and bell-bottoms, and while they were obviously Italian, with their dark hair and Roman noses, they reminded me of American college students protesting the Vietnam War.
I would not have called the group intimidating.
For one thing, they were attractive, and it’s hard to think of attractive people as sinister, or even objectionable.
For another, they were casual with each other.
Sure, they were shouting strange slogans that I couldn’t understand, but they were also laughing and flirting and sharing cigarettes, and I spied one girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, eating a piece of focaccia with her cardboard sign tucked under her arm. That image has always stayed with me.
Because there was no great way to get back to our hotel without wading through the crowd, we stood for a while with a group of onlookers who had gathered in front of a restaurant.
The owner of the restaurant came out onto the street and watched the proceedings for a few minutes.
Then he batted his hands at the lot of them, turned to us, and said, in very nice English, “The Americans spend more at this place than they do.”
This piqued my interest, and I wanted to ask him more, but he’d already gone back inside, so I addressed Paul instead. “Tom said all these people were from off the island, but how does he know that?”
“We’ve probably got a whole dossier on each of them,” he said, and I assumed he was kidding, although in hindsight, I know better.
We waited until the group began to make their way down the Via Vittorio Emanuele, toward the Piazza Rossa. When they had gotten as far as the church, we skirted the harbor and headed back to the Excelsior.
“We’re in for the night,” Paul announced as we rode the elevator up to our hotel room.
The pronouncement felt a little paternalistic, but I didn’t even know the meaning of the word paternalistic at the time.
All I knew was that the whole day—both what had happened at the beach and what we’d witnessed at the harbor—had left me feeling queasy.
I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner, and Paul ate three, but when I went to eat mine, I found I wasn’t hungry.