Alghero, Sardinia
My suspicion that the four stars beside the name of the Hotel Carlos V were decorations turned out to be correct. Our room is large, with tile floors, clinical overhead lights, a plastic shower stall, and a little TV bolted to the wall. It’s air-conditioned, though, and there’s a nice terrace overlooking the good-sized pool and the sea. We went down for breakfast this morning and tried our luck with the hot drinks machine. The milk seems to be an optical illusion. It comes out of the spout but disappears as soon as it makes contact with the coffee. On leaving, we saw the Italians bringing their cups up to the bar—which is apparently what you need to do if you want a real latte.
When Dario drove us into the city of Alghero, Hugh said, “Oh, it looks just like Mogadishu.” I haven’t been to Mogadishu, so to me it resembles Utah but with a beach. Manuela and Dario are in the next town over, staying at his parents’ place. It’s a boxy, one-story house set in a grove of olive trees. There’s greenery, but it’s all sage-colored. I’m used to the walls and hedges in France, and the landscape here strikes me as mean. It’s dry and dusty and full of things that can hurt you. Packs of wild German shepherds run around at night. There are lizards and snakes. Even the birds seem to have a chip on their shoulders.
We went to the beach yesterday afternoon with Manuela, and it was packed, wall to wall. The crowd didn’t bother me. Rather, I enjoyed being pressed against so many people. The women behind us, all in their fifties with dark, leathery skin, rattled on and I guessed they were trashing somebody. When people speak Italian, I always imagine that they’re either gossiping or relating the details of a close race. There were many women in bikinis, but no one was topless. A lot of the men wore tiny swimsuits. The water was warm (L’acqua era calda) and you could see to the bottom. I went out beyond the boats with Hugh but got dizzy and nauseated after the first two hundred feet. It’s the bobbing up and down that gets me.
We went to the beach at around four thirty and stayed for three hours or so. At the snack bar I practiced my Italian. “Two bottles of water,” I said, learning as the man got them that it comes in a box. We’d worked fairly hard on our language lessons before arriving, but now it seems futile. I got to say la domicilia and la firma this morning while renting my bicycle. It’s a ten-speed with normal handlebars and I like it a lot. After paying, Hugh, Dario, and I went to buy a few things at the market. It was noticed that my bike light didn’t work and Hugh told me no less than fifteen times that I had to take it back and have the guy fix it.
When he started in for the sixteenth time I said, “OK, you can stop talking now.” This doesn’t mean “shut up,” exactly—well, yes, I guess it does. I went back to the bike shop and used the word torcia. The kid was very nice and fixed it so that now the light cannot be turned off. I wanted to say something while he was working, ask a question, make a comment, but I don’t know the words for that kind of thing. It made me remember when I first came to France and learned to point out the objects in the room. Still, though, I guess the little bit I know is better than none at all.
August 20, 2000
Alghero
I sat in a lounge chair yesterday afternoon and got a tan on my forehead. Today I’ll try to get one on my back and chest. I’m the color of a French chicken and really stand out here. The people surrounding the pool are impossibly brown. They arrive in the morning and roast until six at night, pausing every now and then to bob around in the water. I haven’t seen anyone use sunscreen. Neither have I seen anyone with a burn. I guess it’s their skin. What little tan I get will start to peel within a few days, so the only souvenir of my vacation will be the scrapes and bruises I sustained during last night’s bike accident.
According to the Herald Tribune, millions of Italians returned from their vacations yesterday. Alghero seemed a little less full this afternoon, but it was by no means empty. It was my job to find a place for lunch, so after riding around for a while I settled on a restaurant called Mazzini. It wasn’t fancy. In the corner a TV played dubbed American soap operas. People always complain that the French are rude, but I’ve found the Italians to be much colder than Parisians. The hotel desk clerks are nice, but in the stores and cafés, they’ve all been blustery.
Our waitress acted as though we’d singled her out for some terrible punishment, but then we noticed that she treated everyone the same way. She was maybe twenty years old, pretty. At the next table a group of three workingmen attacked huge plates of spaghetti and mussels, followed by big cuts of grilled meat. I ordered a seafood antipasto followed by what I thought was spaghetti and octopus. Pulpa sounds to me like it ought to be an octopus. I think the waitress made a mistake, as what I received was a plate of red-sauced spaghetti heaped with crabs. They were small—the size of a fifty-cent piece—and each one had been hacked in two. One normally doesn’t eat the entire crab, and besides that, these were hard, with shells. I guessed they’d just been used to flavor the sauce.
Hugh tried picking apart some of the tiny claws, but it was too much effort for the stingy reward. Still, though, it was good. A table full of sailors came in during The Bold and the Beautiful and were followed by a young couple whose hand-holding suggested they might be on vacation. We were the only Americans except for the people on TV.
August 24, 2000
Paris
Yesterday morning Hugh and I watched an Italian man go for a swim with his dog, a yellow Lab with bruised-looking teats. He’d just come out of the water and was standing on the rocks when a second man confronted him and said, I imagine, that animals were forbidden on the beach. The two men argued back and forth, and then the second guy stomped off and returned ten minutes later with a scroll. I’m guessing it was the town charter. He unrolled it, but the first man was unimpressed and the subsequent argument lasted for half an hour. What amazed me was the second guy’s tenacity. I’m not sure what reaction he was hoping for, but he seemed determined to get it.
August 29, 2000