Alma stood on a rock in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, shampooing. She had long curly black hair on her legs.
“Come and take your showers,” she invited my brother and me.
She poured expired body wash on our heads, massaging our skulls. We dove from the rock into the clear water. Soapy foam rolled down our spines, caressing the back of our necks and slipping off our naked shoulders.
“That’s it. Clean now!” she screamed, and dove after us into the dirty wake. It was our daily ritual, Neptune’s private bubble bath. There was no running water at home.
A tourist boat passed. There were several of them each day from neighboring islands. They circled ours without stopping to let passengers off. On the loudspeakers the captain entertained passengers with folkloristic tales of our island’s main attractions: the tiny population, the predominance of donkeys, the absence of cars, roads, and food—total wilderness. The captain honked at us as we finished our sea showers. Alma climbed out of the water and flipped him off. She hated tourists. A British woman on the boat deck screamed at her that we were polluting the sea.
Alma yelled back, “Verpiss dich!” “Fuck you” in German. “We have no running water here! How would you wash your hair?”
From the sea our island looked like a truncated cone rising vertically from the water. Like all the Aeolian Islands of Sicily it used to be a volcano, but it had been inactive for thousands of years. It was hard to believe the green pastures on the top of the crater were once fumaroles emitting vaporous liquids and lava. Everything on the island was built upward on blocks of coarse basaltic stones. The winding mulattiera, a donkey path climbing from the sea to the top of the mountain, was the only road. At the port an Alfa Romeo convertible had been parked between rusting barrels for twenty years. A fisherman won it in a lottery. It came on a boat and hadn’t moved from that spot since. There were no roads to drive it on.
It was June 1993 and we were on the most isolated island of the Aeolian archipelago. Our parents had decided we would spend our summer there while recovering from our difficult first year in Los Angeles. Timoteo and I knew the place. We’d spent childhood summers there in the care of our uncle.
“Don’t send them to those horrible beaches filled with deck chairs and umbrellas. Kids need to learn about wilderness or they’ll never survive in the world, let alone LA,” my uncle Antonio told my parents. It had not taken much to convince them. In Los Angeles Max was on the brink of getting money for a new film he wanted my father to direct and co-produce. They all stayed behind, supposedly to work, but I often wondered if it was just that they couldn’t afford the airfare.
At the southern end of the island was the meager port with the alimentari, bar, and newspaper stand. Hydrofoils docked at the tiny pier. The port was flanked by lavic boulders that functioned as beaches. We stayed with my uncle and his German wife, Alma, on a central plateau halfway up the mountain, about two thousand steps. It was a small village area stippled with limestone houses supported by dazzlingly white masonry columns and decorated with built-in bisuoli—benches. At the tip of the volcano was the ghost village, inhabited by a small colony of German hippies who squatted in the abandoned houses of fishermen who had immigrated to Australia at the turn of the nineteenth century. They lived off potatoes and solar energy. Alma had been one of them before meeting my uncle and marrying into “civilization,” as she said. Her face was rough from years in the sun.
They lived year-round in a sophisticated ruin perched on a cliff overlooking the archipelago. No electricity, no running water, but plenty of organized harmony. Cisterns collected rainwater. When they traveled off the island, the islanders built pipelines to steal water from their cisterns, leaving just enough for a few summer showers and occasional dishwashing. My uncle didn’t complain about it. It was the price they had to pay to live on the island, he said.
“We’re in Sicily. Do you know anybody who doesn’t pay protection money here?”
I liked the feeling of being cloistered on the island. Windless heat, cicadas, no air conditioning. After overabundance came restriction. After supermarket aisles stashed with nineteen varieties of milk, came the relaxing Sicilian communist regime: milk, cheese, bread, eggs. You had to take things at face value or starve. The “all or nothing” approach was easier than anything in between. Timoteo and I had passed through Rome for a few days on our way to the island. We stayed with our grandmother and slept on her couch. I read stories from the American literature anthology all night long because the jet lag wouldn’t let me fall asleep. The city was empty and quiet. None of my old friends were around and it was impossible for me to get my bearings. I did bump into Alessandro, the school’s Rastafarian political leader. He’d cut off his dreadlocks and was working the door at a summer disco-bar on the Tiber. He had graduated from high school, refused to go to university, and didn’t have any plans. “Rome is depressing, man. There’s nothing to look forward to here.” I tried to console him. I told him about the evil imperialist America. He’d been right. It was a place from hell. Every other store was part of a big chain. But he shrugged his shoulders and said I was lucky I didn’t have to wear ugly, itchy wool sweaters from Peru in the winters like all the other lefties from school. “Get a tan and stay away from here. You won’t regret it.” Then he stamped my wrist and let me in for free.
With almost no people on the island I focused on the animals instead. Mice were everywhere. Timoteo feared their insidious tails. He imagined them creeping into his bathing suit. From the cots in the kitchen where we slept, we heard them crawl in search of crumbs and leftovers. As a solution my uncle adopted, for the time of our stay, ten of the hundreds of wild cats that lived on the central plateau. Most lacked bits of paws, eyes, or tails.
“They are perfect. They eat everything, even ants!” Alma proclaimed.
“Better than your California sinkerator,” Antonio chimed in.