My ankle is all torn up. Not from the dogs, luckily, but from the thorn bush I jumped into to get away from them. The same dogs at the same intersection in the lower village, alerted by the other dog behind the fence.
At first, I thought they would stay back and just bark at me from their garage, but no, they’re trotting up the hill towards me, barking and barking. Where do I go? To the side of the road, and I look down into an olive grove, it’s a drop. Would they jump after me? How would I get out of there? So I jump up, onto the low retaining wall, and walk as quickly as I can without falling. A red car up ahead has stopped, and the driver is talking to the driver of a stopped car going in the opposite direction. As I pass, shaken up, she calls me to her window.
I think my days of walking to town are over. It’s so far, and there’s no way around those bastard dogs.
Am I the only person who ever goes on foot here? How can these dogs just terrorize this intersection? Is it because they can smell my fear?
The woman gives me a ride to my village. At the intersection, she says, Giro is your neighbor? Small world, she knows Giro, she honks her horn, I hear a whistle come from the forest. He appears, his wife comes out on the balcony, and the woman in the red car tells them the story. Oftentimes I hear a conversation here that sounds like a fight, and then the people will suddenly say Ciao and part ways, friendly. It was like that, the way she told the story.
What I can understand is that they’re talking about how it’s so far, the dogs, she says she likes walking!!, she always wants to go to the beach!!, how could my friends go to Germany for the summer and leave me here like this, I need a car, and so on. When she leaves I say to Giro, She seems really upset, and he says, She was just scared too. I’m embarrassed to put all these people out, who are so kind to me. That’s when he points at my ankle and I see that I’m bleeding quite a lot. I hadn’t noticed.
I had spent the day one town over. One of my former bus drivers saw me walking around, honked at me and waved. I waved back but I wanted to stop him and say, You abandoned me!
On my way back, hot and tired, dejected because my bermuda shorts made me invisible to men all day, I’m pacing the platform when a slick, silver fox type asks me a question about the train as an opener. His English is good, but halfway unintelligible. I’m from New York, he’s the captain of a super yacht on his way back to Palermo with his teenage son, and his parents are flower exporters. Do you want a smoke? he says, and I respond Oh, yes! as my last one was on this very platform, when I arrived here twenty-five days ago.
He gives me his number, tells me to call him next time I’m in Napoli, and as my train pulls up, grabs my face and kisses me on the cheek.
I had just answered an email from a recording studio in Brooklyn. The schedule’s filling up, do I want to book? I ask about September, while my guitar has been gathering dust up in the mountains.
But before the train station, I was eating apricots on a bench when a teenager passed me in a Colorado State t-shirt, the home state of my lost love. In my backpack was an unfinished letter to him.
I had just come out of a church where I anointed myself with holy water and sat for a long time, praying with my eyes glued to a mosaic of Jesus. Give me a sign, please, I love him but, I don’t know what I’ll do in September, please guide me, if it’s not him, send me whoever it’s supposed to be, please, God, and please, if I’m going to write music, just make me a conduit, I need your help, I don’t know what to do about anything.
Now it’s the middle of the night at rifugio, I’m drinking coffee, eating steak, cooking beans, and intending to stay up until I figure out how to get to the beach despite the dogs, without having to depend on the good will of Giro for the rest of the summer. Out of drinking water and desperately thirsty, it’s another four hours until sunrise.
There’s a path through the forest that Alina sent me a map for. I could get really good at hitchhiking. I could buy a moped.
With some disappointment, and a good degree of relief, it turns out that Uber struck a deal with the Italian taxi union a few years ago. I’ve never ordered an Uber, I always walk. How was I supposed to know? All of those nightmares about being chased by dogs had to come to life.
Anyway, I learned that when something’s a real mess, in Italian it’s a bordello.
There’s a problem in Southern Italy. I once read there were 2 million stray or non registered dogs in 2023 in Italy. I can’t recall the exact numbers but it was shockingly high. People often abandon dogs in the streets, and as a result, there are many stray and hungry dogs, some infected with rabies. Where my parents are from, you cannot walk to the forest, even for less than two kilometers, without potentially being attacked by a stray dog. You may want to consider asking your neighbors if they are stray dogs by saying, "Sono cani randagi?"