We threw dinner leftovers from the terrace at night. The cats ate the food but didn’t touch the mice. It was the kind of place where animals agreed not to recognize each other’s differences. They came in different shapes but faced the same challenges. The deal was no eating each other.
The animals I loved most lived on a makeshift farm that belonged to Santino, the island handyman. He had two donkeys, Angelina and Maradona (because he was a hard kicker, just like Napoli’s football idol), two ostriches, a cow, a watchdog, cats, and chickens. They were badly matched yet they fit together like a dysfunctional family. I liked them because they made me think of home. Santino could move fridges and furniture up the mountain—alone or with the help of the donkeys. He loaded mules with groceries and water for tourists and hauled them up the hill in exchange for cash. He lived with his wife, Rosalia, and two daughters next to a metal trash container by the sea—a miniature Sicilian trashopolis like Dharavi in Mumbai. The animals rummaged close to the trash piles, inhaling the stench of garbage and melting plastic. It yielded a thick, sickly-sweet smell under the sun.
—
Everyone on the island recognized my brother and me from the Spam commercial we’d shot in Italy the previous year. When we disembarked from the hydrofoil it was a walk of shame. Kids chased us with cameras and papers so we could sign autographs.
“The Americans are here!” they screamed.
We stopped for refreshments at the bar and were welcomed like movie stars with free mulberry granita and iced tea.
“Who’s hungry for thinly sliced vegetables on a bed of chopped meat?” the barman winked at us, quoting our mother’s line in the commercial.
The islanders cackled.
“Canned meat anyone?” another intervened.
“Can we come out to your beautiful house?” a little girl asked, prompted by her aunt.
“Macché! They live in America. That wasn’t their real house,” one of the local boys interjected.
“They’re rich! They have a house in Rome and one in Los Angeles. Don’t you know?” the little girl’s aunt answered in dialect.
They spoke their ideas out loud, talking about us as if we weren’t there. The teenage girls hissed when they looked at me. I wanted to tell them they had nothing to be envious of. Nearly a year had passed since we moved to the United States and little had changed. Part of the canned-meat company’s payment to us was a long-lasting supply of Spam. My parents had shipped the cans over to the island so Alma could feed the stray cats. Not a glamorous story so far. When they asked me if I’d seen any celebrities in LA, I told them about the day on the freeway when I passed the actor who played Eric Forrester, the powerful father figure in The Bold and the Beautiful. His custom license plate read PATRIARCH. I had also seen David Hasselhoff at a mall in Encino. I lied and told them he’d pulled in to the parking lot in a black sports car with tinted windows and a roving red sensor on the hood.
—
The boat my uncle bought from a fisherman a few years earlier had a name painted in blue on the bow: Samantha Fox IV. It was flimsy and filled with stagnant seawater, but dignity was bestowed upon her by the Roman numerals that followed her name. We took off from the small port, trudging slowly across the calm sea. Alma bailed out the yellowing seawater inside with a sawed-off two-liter water bottle. She wore crooked, imitation Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and liked repeating that the last time she bought something for herself was 1979. She clipped her toenails on board, then threw them in the sea—the usual open-air toiletry method. Her feet were permanently dirty from walking barefoot on the island rocks. My uncle didn’t speak with us much. He didn’t approve of Ettore’s move. He and Alma lived off sun and water and the vegetables they grew on the plains on top of the mountain.
“Why would anyone need more than that? Why move somewhere far away when all you’ll ever need in life is right here?” he asked my brother and me, tapping his heart demonstratively with one hand and clasping the tiller with the other, a cigarette dangling from his lips.
We shrugged our shoulders.
“To make movies?” I ventured.
Alma shook her head disapprovingly.
“America!” she groaned. “Full of shit films!”
“Ettore and Serena should bring culture where it’s appreciated. Not stupid Hollywood!”
“It’s not exactly Hollywood where we live, so don’t worry,” I said.
I curled onto a wet cushion and closed my eyes in the sun, lulled by the hum of the slow motor. It seemed to repeat the same monotonous words over and over, Lay low, even out. Lay low, even out. I followed its orders and compressed my body against the spongy cushion. Lay low and make yourself small, a voice inside me said. Lay low and even out.
We anchored the Samantha Fox by the Scoglio Galera, the prison rock, a conglomeration of isolated rust-colored cliffs in the middle of the sea. My uncle opened the canopy for shade.
“You don’t need to watch movies when you can live inside them. Welcome to Jurassic Park,” he announced, smiling and looking up at the uncontaminated sky.
I hadn’t been to that side of the island in years. I’d forgotten how wild it was—a prehistoric enclave with no humans, just wild goats and large birds flying over the black lava shores. Alma removed her bathing suit top and dove into the green-and-purple algae that floated beneath the surface of the water. Timoteo, smeared in fluorescent white sunblock from America—our mother’s only recommendation was that he protect his pale skin—jumped off and paddled away with a blunted trident in search of octopus dens. Birds circled the lava accumulations that spilled from the tip of the mountain, squeaking fiercely at each other like pterodactyls, ancient wails that belonged to no other birds on earth. They picked on the wild goats hinging off the slippery rocks, and the wild goats bleated back defensively. Their interactions were like emergency calls, the bird cries strident requests to be rewound to the era they actually belonged to.
—
I swam to shore and dried on the black rocks. My uncle appeared, water dripping from his chest, holding a swim mask filled with sea urchins. He opened them against a stone and removed eggs from inside with his finger, offering me part of the beheaded creature. I let the urchin spikes prickle my palm and nudged the eggs with my fingertips. Antonio looked back up at the wild goats battling the birds, and pointed to a row of chewed-off prickly pear cacti that looked like apocalyptic wishbones.
“Everyone’s either hungry or dying here. No more fish. The fishermen from the other islands use underwater explosives in the winter. By summer there’s nothing left.”
He threw out the empty urchin shells and pointed to a small recess in the mountain.
“Alma and I lived there for six months. We filtered our water and ate fish and prickly pear fruit. I think I didn’t go to the bathroom for months.” He laughed.