St. Anthony's Mistaken Identity

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert, he was beset by accidie [mental and spiritual sloth] and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?”…Abba Anthony also said, “He who wishes to live in solitude in the desert is delivered from three conflicts: hearing, speech, and sight; there is only one conflict for him and that is with fornication.”…A hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man [Anthony] said to him, “Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.”

-The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, about Anthony the Great, the father of Egyptian monasticism and asceticism

Often during our midday rest stops in the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts, some of the camels- only males were allowed for export- would engage in horseplay with each other, trying to pin the other’s neck to the ground and otherwise exhibit sexual urges. The drovers would say, ayyiz yaneek kitir, he wants to fuck a lot, using the verb naak, yaneek defined in Wehr’s dictionary as “he engaged in sexual intercourse, he engages in sexual intercourse”.

But you must be careful in your pronunciation, because the word for she-camel is naaqa, with its final consonant the different but near homophone letter Q, or qaf. And Wehr gives an odd Xth form of the verb from the tri-literal root n-w-q, as istanwaqa, meaning “he mistook a he-camel for a she-camel (proverbially as a mistake)”, so one can only surmise that Abba Anthony- the patron saint of butchers- had committed istanwaaqa (n.)- mistaking a male for a female- when he was among the brethren- or maybe not.

Save Leptis for Last

I would recommend any student of the past to save up Leptis Magna to the last. As a sight, as an experience, there is nothing to equal it…It has splendor; it is as complete as any reasonable man could wish for; the restorers have been happily hampered by political convulsions and lack of funds; above all, you can walk in its ruins for days on end, as I have done, and see nobody…Still, I do not think the Libyans will make any serious attempt to develop it, as the word goes, for a long time to come. They are too absorbed in their newly discovered oil.

-Cities in the Sand, Aubrey Menen

Walking alone in the desert is wonderful. It’s like walking on the face of a clock that’s stopped.

-from the 1957 film Legend of the Lost, shot on location at Leptis Magna, starring John Wayne as a Latin sight-reading Saharan adventurer and Sophia Loren as a prostitute and pick pocket

Aubrey Menen approached Leptis from Tripoli in the west and John Wayne and Sophia Loren came up from Timbuktu in the south. All three had to wade through the sand to get there. I arrived by hired car and only had to wade through a few trinket sellers at the main gate. My time was just after one “political convulsion” and just before the next, the one that killed Qaddafi. Like them, I saw nobody while there- as if the Libyan clock had stopped long before me.

A few travel agencies had sqeezed their Leptis tours successfully between political convulsions, but not many. Only a happy few have recently passed under Roman Emperor Septimius Severus’ triumphal quadrifons arch at the intersection of the cardo and the decumanus maximus to walk the via colonnata to the palaestra, the baths, and the nymphaeum. War and mayhem have a way of impeding tourism, even of erasing history. And Menen was right about this and still is- for a long time to come Libyans will be absorbed by other things, even if Leptis’ native son Septimius, his hands bloodied from murdering family and friends, might teach today’s warlords why they should leave a few stones standing for those who come after.

Sophia embraces the Gorgon, from Legend of the Lost

The Conference of the Birds in the Ubari Sand Sea

A huge bowl of rice, beans and mutton was set in the middle of each group of six guests. A spoon was used for the rice and beans but the mutton was picked up with the fingers. When each of us had eaten enough, he laid down his spoon and the wash bowl was passed around again. This was followed by Pepsi Cola, amid loud and justified praise of the excellent, highly seasoned food. The closing ritual of the three cups of tea was accompanied by lively conversation, touching on- among other topics- the surface of the moon, the floods near Ghat, a camel that had disappeared near Awainat Wanin, the joy of visiting Mecca…I think often of that meal under the stars…We were nearing the essential brotherhood that a man’s heart seeks all his life long. Suddenly, while talking of other things, without seeking it at all, we had found it almost involuntarily, as did the birds of Attar.

-Touring Libya, The Southern Provinces, Philip Ward

I was in the town of Germa at the edge of the Ubari Sand Sea to write about the Garamantians, a Berber tribe in Roman times settled hundreds of miles from the Mediterranean coast who harried Tripolitania for over two hundred years. Ward was there in the 1960s, I was there in the early 2000s, and for both of us we felt to be the only outsiders. In Ward’s time they were not yet recklessly draining the Fezzan’s deep aquifer through the Great Man-Made River, and by just a few days I had missed meeting the British archaeological team led by David Mattingly. They had packed up and left for the season.

I remember eating spaghetti and tinned tuna cooked up by the driver and guide who had been assigned to me in Tripoli. Ward dined far better than that and apparently had more enlightened post-prandial conversation, about the moon, a flood, a lost camel, and Mecca, which brought to his mind Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th Century poem The Conference of the Birds. To me, those topics seemed almost Biblical, or Quranic as the case may be. In our case, my mates and I talked about girls- Ukrainian girls, Libyan girls, and American girls. More Playboy reader’s advice than Persian sufi poetry.

And unlike the birds of Attar, we had not had to cross the Valley of Annihilation or the Valley of Detachment in order to find enlightenment. Just get past the Mizda Hospital’s Ukrainian nursing station- They were so, so, so hot, my companions assured me. Worth the detour, in Michelin’s words. Yalla Binaa- “God be with us”- in theirs.

Nomadism as an unstable, wandering, spreading ulcer

nomade lat. nomas, -adis, mot grec. 1. Qui n’a pas d’etablissement fixe, parlant d’un groupe humain. Voir Ambulant, errant, instable, mobile. 2. Par ext. Vie Nomade Voir Errant, vagabond “Cet instinct nomade.., toujours en quete d’aventure” (Gide) 3. N. Peuple de nomades. Voir Forain. Antonym. Fixe, sedentaire

-Petit Robert, Alphabetique et Analogique de la Langue Française

nem-…B. Greek nomē, pasturage, grazing, hence a spreading, a spreading ulcer: NOMA C. Greek nomas, wandering in search of pasture: NOMAD

-Indo-European Roots, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

rahhaal, pl. rahal, roving, roaming, peregrinating , wandering, migratory, nomadic— (pl. rahhaala) great traveler, explorer, nomad. Al-tuyyuur al-rahhaala migratory birds

-A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Hans Wehr

vago, ga, adj. y s. Vacio, desocupado. Holgazan, vagabundo. Indeciso, Decimo nervio craneal

-Diccionario de La Lengua Española, Isidoro Diaz

I remember Miguel Diaz Vargas in Arequipa, rejected from compulsory military service because he was too short. Vago was written on his identity card, a misspelling of bajo. So his family laughed at him, saying he was a vagabond, a nomad, indecisive and a slacker. At least he got out of the draft.

KhairAllah, the greatest rahhaal I ever met, was never embarrassed to be a nomas, in the Ancient Greek sense, wandering in search of pasturage. “Gush” he called it (from the classical word qashsh, for straw), and whenever we came upon it, we stopped so the herd could graze and we all became a sedentary people, fixed, no longer errant, ambulatory, and unstable- but still forain, as in the Petit Robert’s first meaning for that word, although it is labeled as vx, for vieux, or out of date- Qui est dehors . We were always outdoors on the trail- KhairAllah, Rabih, Ahmad, Bilal, Mas’ood abu Dood, and the others- even when standing still and staying put.

Eminent Kababish

One catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last- so it almost seems- like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe.

-The End of General Gordon, by Lytton Strachey, from Eminent Victorians

No, the preceding is not a synopsis of Voice of the Whip, although it could be, except for the sentence’s last word, which you should replace with “success”. For KhairAllah got us to Binban without losing any camels, without catastrophe, without drama, all arriving sound and relatively fat and ready for market. We had taken it easy, easier than Yousef who pushed his dabouka to the breaking point just so he could arrive a few days before us.

But I did in fact have a brush with General Gordon in Khartoum before heading out to Kordofan when I visited the National Palace and its famous outside staircase, on which it is said that he lost his life- and as repeated in the various painted and cinematic versions- and which post-independence has been opened for any Sudanese citizen to walk past and gawk at from the riverside. When I passed by, I was not thinking about spear wounds of the past but rather saddle sores to be. Forty days of friction sliding to and fro. No stirrups, so no posting up and down.

Along the trail, yes there had been plenty of “queer complication”- short on water, short on dhoora (millet flour, for making the Sudanese staple meal of aseeda cake), short on sugar, short on tea. You can hear the tension in the dialogue. “Why don’t you hurry up and saddle?” “Why don’t you fall in a hole?” Those subtitles were made by a BBC Arabic Unit translator, so I have no idea with what salty words the insubordinate drover Idris had in fact answered his impatient trail boss Yousef.

All I know is that General Gordon’s very last journal entry- December 14, 1884, “Arabs fired two shells at the Palace this morning; 546 ardebs [a Sudanese dry measure] dhoora ! in store…Now mark this, if the Expeditionary Force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good bye.”- speaks to the same complication that we often faced on the trail. No dhoora, no dinner.

A cultural anthropologist's best informant is under ten

I sat by myself in the street until a boy of about eight years old passed by. I called him and said, “Who is your father?” “Abdallah al-Haj Ali.” “What’s your name?” “So and so.” “And your brothers and sisters?” “So and so, and so and so, and so and so.” And so we went on until the number in his household amounted to twenty three people, whereas his father had admitted only to eight.

-The Memoirs of Babikir Bedri, An Autobiography

It is hard to get names and relationships straight in some Arab extended families. Brothers can be full or from a different mother or unrelated but off the same wet nurse. Forget about daughters, aunts, and mothers. I was once introduced to the older sister of a man I’ve known for many years and she said, I met you and we talked a long time ago. I said, I don’t remember and she said, you came to my father’s house and sat in the men’s quarters and we talked through a crack in the door.

That’s why I liked to befriend the family’s youngsters. They didn’t look at you like you’d dropped in from the planet Mars and they talked to you like the simple-mind whose broken spoken Arabic you sounded like. But you could get a free vocabulary lesson from them, like playing a game of you point-and-they speak pictionary. As long as you could see it, they could say it. Donkey. Ear. Donkey ear. And most children had all their teeth, so that solved the problem caused by using the old and toothless as your word informants.

Babikir Bedri, an original companion of the Sudanese Mahdi and later an educator who founded what was to become Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, had similar troubles in getting all the names in the household straight. His grandson Gasim is now Ahfad’s president and presides over his campus- quite a household it is- like a benevolent father figure.

And he is proud of his girls and knows most of their names. When I wanted some student interviews for an article I was writing, he waded into a crowd of them during their class change-over and pulled two aside. Tell me if you want others, he said to me. I’ll make them talk all you want. And he smiled.

Hanan, Visit Me Sometime

My name is Hanan Abdalla Abdel-Karim, aka Hanan Bulu-Bulu. My beginning was in 1983…[when I] recorded my first album Alamy wu Shagaya (My Pain and Misery)…During those years in the eighties, the Sharia law was in effect and because of it I ran into many problems with the authorities and had to answer for summons in different parts of the country and was subject to several arrests. I was fed up and had to leave the country.

-from the liner notes interview with Vik Sohonie in Two Niles: The Violins and Synths of Sudan, Ostinato Records

It was February 1984, the next to last year of Ja’afar al-Nimery’s dictatorship and his last gasp attempt to survive by imposing Sharia law on the whole country. The western provinces did not take kindly to this, being a place where merissa (millet beer) and aragi (date wine) drinking are commonplace. David and I were on the trail with KhairAllah at the head of the herd, and the other trail boss accompanying our camels once got so drunk that he fell off his mount. A long way down, but unhurt.

I had a small cassette player and some tapes that I played mostly for myself. I remember playing Ella Fitzgerald for a Southern Sudanese man named John- unlike another Southerner I once met, Bau from Wau, John was from Kadugli- who was Bashir abu Jaib’s buying agent Abd al-Wahab’s driver, sitting on the hood of the jeep, me trying to explain about the blues and scat. And once I played the Talking Heads’ Take Me to the River (“Take me to the river, drop me in the water, Push me in the river, dip me in the water”) over and over through the night after we jumped into a passing lorry upon reaching the Nile at Khilewa and tried to get to Dongola asap. It didn’t work, because we broke down long before reaching town.

But mostly I remember playing Hanan Bulu-Bulu’s Zurni Marra, Visit Me Sometime, much to the delight of the drovers while sitting at the night fire, running down my batteries, and now, only much later, do I learn that Hanan faced the same Sharia troubles as did we when drinking our merissa and playing- in a reworking of the Christian gospel-infused Reverend Al Green version- the heathen Talking Heads. If we had known, no doubt the drovers Mas’ood and Muhammad would have convinced KhairAllah to take her with us up the trail to safety in Cairo, where she ended up on her own anyway.

Delight Turbaned around my Head

There I was, cutting through a strange market crowd- not just people shopping for their salad greens, but beggars and butchers and thieves, prancers and Prophet-praisers and soft-sided soldiers, the newly-arrived and the just-retired, the flabby and the flimsy, sellers roaming and street kids groaning, god-damners, bus-waiters and white robed traders, elegant and fumbling…The day was fresher than a normal summer day, and I could feel delight turbaned around my head, like a Bedouin on his second visit to the city.

-The Story of the Girl Whose Birds Flew Away, by Bushra al-Fadil, from the collection The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction

Strange market crowds, how many I have pushed and dodged and cut my way through in countries where men wear turbans and when a woman appears in public the scene becomes even stranger than before. Big city markets are much stranger than village souks. I’m not talking about Khan al-Khalili, Cairo’s tourist trap, but rather like the old Bab al-Louk not far from AUC where I could walk past the live poultry stalls and learn twenty new and essential vocabulary words in five minutes. Gizzard, wing, neck, feather.

Or Souk Libya in Umdurman, where you could buy a camel, board the high clearance desert bus for El Obeid, or change a $100 bill into hundreds of thousands of Sudanese pounds.

My first walk-through of such a market was in Arequipa, following a step behind Emma Nunez whom I trailed as if I were her prized pet on an invisible leash, she explaining to her usual Andean Homburg-hatted Saturday lady vegetable vendors that I was her house guest, living in her son’s room for the summer to learn Spanish. She bought huge slices of orange squash and big-kernel corn, choclo, and various greens- I knew the cilantro from arroz con pato, which we ate at the Hotel Bolivar in December 1981 when we missed our flight to Arequipa and had to overnight in Lima- whose names I never learned, all for the simple condensed milk-based chowders- chupes, or sucks, she called them- she would make for supper after we had returned still full from our Sunday dinner in a picantería in Sachaca or Tiabaya where we’d have eaten the real deal, chupe de camarrones, a crawdaddy suck for which you had to really suck on those tiny Río Chili crayfish legs to get the meat out.

But those Sudanese markets were the best. I remember walking through the Dongola souk with KhairAllah after twenty days on the trail. I was wearing a rugby shirt and bluejeans and he a short riding tunic and loose pants, the araagi and sirwal which marked him to the townsmen as a real camel man, and the stall merchants all wore ankle-length gallabiyas which dragged in the street crud.

I wanted to buy fresh mint, sold in bunches and piled on huge green stacks of it. He said, better buy dried mint, crumbly and scooped from a gunny sack. Fooey, I said. I want it fresh. Everything green in the desert rots and goes bad, he said. Baayis, miserable. Everything dry, lives. Lazeez, delightful. He proved right the next day when my mint in the plastic bag went bad that fast and his mint lasted as many more days as I could stop myself from using it all in one pot of tea.

The secret police nabbed us and wanted to know by whose permission I was in Dongola. I showed him my journalist permit and passport stamps and he said they meant nothing to him. I told him I knew the prime minister’s family and he asked, so what? I showed him a letter of introduction from my host Bashir abu Jaib and he said, why didn’t you tell me that in the first place, and he let me go. So we went back to the trail and left Dongola and its market whose fresh green mint I thought about for many days after.

Dongola

Verily I say to you, No Prophet is accepted in his own country

The Pontic region to which Darius was leading his army is inhabited by the most ignorant peoples of all. For we cannot cite the wisdom of any nation there…nor do we know of any man noted for wisdom in the Pontic region other than Anacharsis.

Anacharsis went abroad and saw a great deal of the world, demonstrating great wisdom along the way, and on his return home to Scythia…he retreated to a place called Hylaia and here he celebrated…with a drum…But one of the Scythians saw him doing this and told the king…and when he saw Anacharsis performing these rites, he shot him with an arrow and killed him. And because Anacharsis had gone abroad and practiced foreign customs, if anyone even now asks the Scythians about him, they deny knowing about him at all.

-Herodotus, The Histories

When you go abroad and see a great deal of the world and return home and practice foreign customs there, beware if returning to a backward, ignorant, know-nothing place. Speaking a language spoken elsewhere, or seasoning your food with za’atar or pico de gallo or duck sauce, or climbing minarets and burning copal and ringing temple bells and flying prayer flags used to get you into a heap of trouble back home. Not anymore. In any small town America even more than in any big city USA you might hear Q’eqchi’ or Hmong or Somali spoken, buy goat necks or chicken feet or smoked eels at the butcher, or worship Krishna in a converted church or Allah in a basement room. If you are from Panajachel or the Plain of Jars or Puntland, that’s okay. If you are Norwegian-American from Duluth or Russian-Jewish from Teaneck or native Angelino from Long Beach, that’s okay too. And if you are Hmong-Norwegian-American or Somali-Russian-Jewish or Guatemalan-Maya-Californian, that’s even better. Yes, be a prophet in your own country. Any country. And don’t forget the hyphenated Gold’s, even its Rib Sauce certified Kosher for Passover.

sahel sounds

I ran across a music publisher called Sahel Sounds which remasters and re-releases music from West Africa like Mauritanian wedding songs and Polisario freedom anthems and helped to define now super popular Tuareg guitar music for western audiences. Their website’s sales page offers a one-off collection of field recordings on a pay what you wish basis.

Its track list includes sounds of Wolof grief, Niafunke clapping games, pinasse stevedores’ shouts from Mopti, murmurs while getting off a night bus at a rest stop in Douentza, karate practice and shortwave radio emissions from Gao, women’s mortar and pestle beats from Timbouctou, well singing from Chinguetti, and the chatter of phone card sellers in Nouakchott’s Cinquieme slum district. You can stream them all for free.

One buyer recommends it…”Alright, this is epic. If you want to drift over the edges of space and time, to hear voices from the liminal zone, to feel connected with the elemental, then this bizarre piece of work is the place to be. It's hypnotic and transcendent, and it's the perfect antidote to modern life. Dig deep. Enjoy.” I bet this guy never stepped foot in West Africa, for him to call street vendors’ cries and video game chimes “liminal”, “elemental”, “bizarre”, and “hypnotic”.

But even so, I know what he means. I came back from a camel drive from Sudan to Egypt with cassette recordings of the drovers’ tea time banter, the sounds (recorded with much difficulty and patience) of two different kinds of dromedary flatulence- “afeet”, a sharp report, and “fuswaa”, a slow hiss- and snatches of conversation and complaint around the camp fire. I thought they were gold and I played the well working songs for Alan Lomax. He said they sounded like Inuit throat singing. Boy was he wrong.

what is rare is not what everyone likes but rather what everyone ignores- Nicolas Landau, art collector

Naples’ Capodimonte Museum has 126 galleries with a few masterworks- by Masaccio, Bellini, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes- and 10 rooms on the way out dedicated temporarily to the exhibition “Deposito”- salon-hung paintings and vitrine-piled objects from its storerooms- a peek, a “cone of shadow” as the brochure puts it, at some of the 6,000 leftover pieces that are never on view, what everyone usually ignores.

Caravaggio’s Flagellation is the museum’s biggest draw and it hangs at the end of a long hall of connected dimly lit galleries with a spotlight on it so that when you turn the corner you see it from several rooms away telescoped into view. If a person wearing red walks in front of it, Jesus’ white flesh appears from a distance to bleed.

The Deposito exhibit’s brochure- calling the storerooms “closed universes, dusty undergrounds, impenetrable guardians…the cave of Ali Baba, the tomb of Tutankhamun”, in other words, the fine art equivalent of the city’s many many catacombs- goes on to challenge the visitor to make sense of these 1,200 pieces that have made it upstairs from the basement vaults.

The last panel reads “Some of you, already along the exhibition route, will have tried to weave a story, to draw a conclusion; others will have hypothesized new attributions for the works; still others, discouraged, indifferent or lazy, will have decided to abandon the thread of the story in disorder and without plot. Will it not be that history does not exist if not written, organized by historians, philosophers, professors, or museums?”

After walking my dogs off in the museum’s 15,000 square meters, more than the Uffizi which has many more masterpieces than here, I did not need the Capodimonte’s self-important curators to call me lazy if I chose to abandon the thread of their story. I could always refer later, when home, to the the Museum’s joint collection digitization project with Federico II University of Napoli, a school that had been on my mind whenever I drank acqua minerale naturale frizzante in that country.

Every bottle’s label must contain an independent laboratory’s chemical analysis of its contents and Federico II University seems to have that business cornered. Carbs, Protein, Fat, Sodium, Calories…that was the thread of the story I most wanted to follow. I would have loved to knock on the Chemistry Department’s door and ask for a tour of the many bottles- San Benedetto, Sveva, Potenza, Ferrarelle, Benedicta Prestige, etc- that had been sampled, shaken, titrated and tested there.

I had taken to using Tomas Nunez’s way of asking for the bathroom- i servizi idraulici, per favore- when in Italy. That would have been embarrassing, visiting Federico II and waiting to explode like a bottle of frizzante, asking for the toilet and being shown to the laboratorio. A deposito for leftovers, to be sure.

Andy Warhol’s Vesuvius, in the Capodimonte Museum, the same view as from its Belvedere

Screening Boccaccio '70 in Palazzo Margherita, Just Me

Francis Ford Coppola bought the run down Palazzo Margherita in Bernalda, one of Basilicata’s neglected hill towns, where his grandfather was born and turned it into a swank boutique hotel, the kind of place he wanted his children to return to again and again long after he was gone.

He is not yet gone but he was right. Sofia got married there and even better for a family of cinephiles he created a great movie room in the piano nobile’s reception hall, with black-out curtains, retractable chandeliers, and drop down screen. Coppola personally selected 200 films for screening, mostly classic Italian neorealist and post-neorealist, some on their way to being forgotten, some never released in the USA in their Italian versions. To see any one of them, all you have to do is ask. So I did.

I like Rossellini and De Sica, Visconti and Pasolini, and wanted to see Monicelli for the first time. So I saw two old favorites first, Francesco giullare di Dio and Il Decameron, I wanted to see La ciociara, from 1961, which we call Two Women and was Sophia Loren’s Oscar break through- she was the first to win Best Actress in a foreign language film- but Coppola only had an un-subtitled version.

So I saw it when I got home and was shocked by the last scenes of expressionist violence and sadness- so unexpected and raw in a work of gentle neorealism- and I read about the marocchinate, “the deeds of the Moroccans”, the mass rape and killing of civilian women and men in the Ciociaria countryside following the fall of Monte Cassino. The Italian government estimated 2,000-3,000 female victims aged 11 to 86 years old had been raped in a few days of mayhem by Goumiers (from the Arabic word “qawm”, meaning “people or tribe”), irregular troops from North Africa under loose and out-of-control French command.

Instead I saw the 1962 anthology film Boccaccio ‘70 with the short La riffa, like La ciociara, starring Loren, directed by De Sica, produced by Carlo Ponti, and with a milquetoast supporting actor playing against Loren’s busty broad- Jean-Paul Belmondo (a year after Breathless !) in Two Women and Alfio Vita in La riffa.

The Italian release had the Monicelli short- Renzo e Luciana, co-written by Italo Calvino- that the US version did not which I liked too, with modern office-as-rat’s maze scenes like what Jacques Tati played for laughs in Parade ten years later but that Monicelli played for poignancy- with the Italian gioia di vivere completely snuffed out of a young secretary newly married to a janitor in the same company, which they must keep secret because for a woman to marry in that company is a firing offense.

But to compare Two Women to La riffa is to compare cantaloupe to honeydew- Sophia Loren fills out her shirt so well that it seems impossible she can find any extra room to stuff and unstuff fat wads of lire in there, which she does in both films with gusto. Her weak counterfoils are not quite equals- Belmondo is an intellectual with his head in the clouds, Vita is a Mama’s Boy- but neither can stand up to her high-heeled sashaying self.

I must have spent ten hours in that screening room over two days, not a minute of them wasted, and the lights came up with a renewed taste for neorealism, for untrained actors and extras picked off the mean streets like Pasolini did, or picked out of the monasteries like Rossellini did, or picked up from random town carnivals where De Sica found his.

I like the story that Rossellini once shot a scene with Ingrid Bergman talking to a group of fishermen in Stromboli, using real fishermen, but he couldn’t get them to mouth nonsense words at the right times where the dialogue would later be dubbed in, so he tied strings to their toes and told them to say something whenever they felt a tug, and his assistant director pulled on the strings one by one, and it worked, sometimes with the fishermen swearing, but Rossellini got his shot.

Stromboli wasn’t on Coppola’s list but Viaggio in Italia was, which I also saw. Its scenes from Naples and Pompeii are great, made just ten years before I was there the first time when I saw the famous plaster dog. Was he awkwardly scratching fleas or writhing in pain from Vesuvio’s suffocating gas? And the car George Sanders and Miss Bergman drove? In the Colette story it was a Jag, in the film it was a Rolls. This time ours was a Fiat Panda. Theirs was a comfortable convertible. Ours, under-powered but good on curves.

The St. Martyrs of Otranto, or un'altra Campari Soda per favore

The fortified town of Otranto sits low on the back of the Italian heel like a blister you get from wearing new Florentine leather boots, as close as you can get across the Adriatic to Albania and the start of the Via Egnatia to Istanbul. English speakers may know it best from Horace Walpole’s gothic novel in which a father wants to marry his son’s fiancee, but its fame stems more from the year 1480 when 800 of its townsmen were beheaded by an invading Ottoman army. Their bones are still encased under glass in the cathedral and their still uncorrupted flesh is held in locked wood-fronted cabinets, so their degree of uncorruption must be believed unseen.

The martyrs were canonized en mass(e) by Pope Francis in 2013, a decision not without controversy, besides the fact that their individual names are mostly unknown so one must pray to the Martyrs- called “the victims of Islam” in one Italian newspaper- collectively. The move was forced upon Francis by the last minute decision of Benedict XVI, aka Benedict the Islamophobe, made the same day he dethroned himself from St. Peter’s chair.

One of the stated miracles required for their being named saints, in this case the return to health of a cancerous nun whose fellow sisters had prayed to the Martyrs, was challenged by her oncologist claiming she was cured the old fashion way with chemotherapy and radiation. Another basis for saintliness is that they be defenders of the faith, but documents from the time indicate they were war hostages killed because their overlord the cash-strapped King of Naples would not pay their ransom.

On a clear day they say you can see the Albanian mountains from Otranto’s harbor. It was cloudy during my visit, but very hot My legs were sore from walking. In the cathedral I was most impressed by the mosaic floor showing the Tree of Life growing from the backs of two African elephants, less by the four carved marble columns standing outside the Martyrs’ Chapel that recount their story, and least of all by the bones in the glass cabinets. I am facing hip replacement surgery next month and came to Italy to get away from all that.

I was happy to leave the chapel and head to a cafe table on the harbor side under an Aperol umbrella- Cinzano seems out of favor this summer- where I ordered a Campari soda. This one came mixed by the barman with a slice of orange in a tall glass. I prefer the ones I had in Naples that came pre-mixed in a volcano-shaped bottle for two euros, albeit a half size but still a nice visual companion to seeing Vesuvio across the Bay. I couldn’t see Albania from my table in Otranto but I did see the last of the tourist season’s bathers and sun seekers stripped for action on the town beach. Their flesh looked uncorrupted. My legs still hurt. But mirabile dictu, the Campari hit the spot.

Can you count all 800 skeletons?

can you see the beheaded martyrs?

Mamma Roma eats at Da Meo Patacca, the Earthman Boy at Tre Scalini

I remember Rome in 1965, five years after the two bit ham actor from California Remington Olmsted who had washed up in Cinecittà with sword and sandal roles in Ben-Hur and Barabbas opened a restaurant in Trastevere appealing to American tourists who wanted their waiters to sing and crack dirty jokes in Roman dialect. I ate there with my mother and brother and aunt and cousin. I remember we ate outside on straw woven chairs and had big helium balloons tied to their ladder backs. They looked good in the black and white pictures the restaurant photographer took.

A few years ago I told a Roman about my memory of the place and he laughed and said it was a tourist trap even back then. Owner “Sor Remy” as he was called when not getting credited billing as a Roman soldier on the big screen single-handedly invented the concept of the singing Italian waiter, in Rome! A bit like Mamma Leone’s in the Theater District and Adolph’s Asti in Greenwich Village, now both closed.

Mamma Leone’s brings to mind Pasolini’s film Mamma Roma, made about the same time as our dinner at Da Meo Patacca, about a former prostitute with a difficult son. We had rented a Checker cab in Paris and driven all the way to Rome, “two ladies and three children” as the night clerk at the Berkeley Hotel kept repeating to himself at 4 am in the funniest accent I had until then ever heard (“But the reservation says three ladies and two children, and you are two ladies and three children”) when we got to London on a late BOAC flight from New York.

My mother and aunt did not want to navigate Roman streets on their own in a Checker, so they picked up a hitch hiker on the city’s outskirts and asked him to drive us to our hotel. In broken Italian the two ladies and three children were taken to meet the hitch hiker’s wife in their apartment in a Fascist era building with a later conversation between hen-pecked husband and hell-to-pay wife no doubt like something out of the Mamma Roma script.

And something even stranger…My mother and aunt bumped into a lady they seemed to know from Texas travelling with her son who was a bit younger then me, maybe 6 years old, and when we all sat in the Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona he threw a fit because they didn’t have a hamburger- “hambuuguh” he pronounced it and we all laughed at him. The boy’s name was Earthman and he ran around the fountain of the Quattro Fiumi which contrary to what our mothers told us did not represent the Missouri River where we lived, just the Nile, the Ganges, the Danube, and the Rio de la Plata. I later saw them all.

Pasolini would have been amused by the Earthman boy’s Ugly American act. He could have cast him in one of his Trilogy of Life tales- say in the Decameron, as Masetto of Lamporecchio the pretend deaf mute who is forced to have sex with every nun in the convent because they know he will not tell anyone and finally when exhausted cries out, Enough!, is proclaimed God’s miracle- or even better in Salò, the 120 Days of Sodom. But then he would have had to stuff his face with that hambuuguh as carpaccio, raw and by the kilo, and laugh like an idiot, while the rest of us ate the Tre Scalini’s famous tartufo- “una storica golosità”- as if we were all civilized American gluttons.

Scheherazade was a grifter

But when the king took her to his bed and began toying with her, and was about to ———— her, she wept, and he asked, “What is the matter with you?” “Your Majesty,” Scheherazade replied, “I have a younger sister, and I would like very much to take leave of her tonight before dawn comes.” So he sent at once for Dunyazade and she came…Then the king arose and did away with his bride’s maidenhead, and the three fell asleep. But when midnight arrived, Scheherazade awoke and signaled to her sister who sat up and said “…please tell me some delightful story to while away the waking hours before dawn.”

-The Story of King Shahryar and His Brother

Much has been written about Scheherazade as the teller of these 1001 tales, about her masterful control over the Nights’ narratives and her command of embedding stories within stories, by either telescoping or cutting them short as if playing a strong fish on a weak line. But less is said about how she and her sister play with other things.

Dunyazade is both eye witness to her sister’s wedding night and ear witness to her plea bargaining for her life. Why is she intruding in the marriage chamber and why interrupting the king’s first night plan? Did he never feel there were three in his marriage, that he was an eavesdropper on his harem, not a husband to his wife?

Dunyazade asked her sister to change the subject from what the king intended to do, if not say, and their ruse lasted 1001 nights, long enough for her to bear two sons and save 1000 other maidens from their death beds. Fast talking, stalling for time, playing the long- 2 and 3/4 year!- con. In this Orientalist threesome, if Scheherazade was the grifter with a gun pointed at her head in her own bed, and her husband King Shahryar was the mark holding the gun, does that make Dunyazade the shill or the voyeur, or both?

Scheherazade puts Dunyazade to sleep, Edouard Richter

Don Quixote in Baku

We were a very mixed lot, we forty schoolboys who were having a geography lesson one hot afternoon in the Imperial Russian Humanistic High School of Baku, Transcaucasia…Professor Sanin was telling us in his flat and uninspired way…”Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia’s cultural evolution, part of Europe. It can there be said, my children, that it is partly your responsibility as to whether our town belong to progressive Europe or to reactionary Asia.” …Then Mehmed Haidar, who sat on the back bench, raised his hand and said, “Please sir, we should rather stay in Asia”.

-Ali and Nino, an East-West romantic novel by Kurban Said, aka Lev Nussimbaum. Its authorship is contested by other competing claims between a German, an Azeri, and a Georgian

When Lev was allowed to go out [of his house in Baku], his favorite walks took him to the Asian quarter of town, with its mosques, its minarets, its narrow streets, and low houses…His identification with Islam and the Orient began there, when he was not yet ten years old. “To this day I still do not know whence this feeling came…I do know that throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of the Arabic edifices every night. And I do know that it was the most powerful, most formative feeling of my life”. (quoting from his memoirs)

“The ship was like an insane asylum,” Lev wrote in his memoirs. “We sailed starving, freezing, and semiconscious over the waves.” He tried to distract himself by reading the only book they had with them, a Russian edition of Don Quixote. (on returning to Baku after having fled as a child because of political unrest)

-The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, Tom Reiss, a biography of Lev Nussimbaum

Baku in 1999 was a bit like La Mancha- with bowing oil derricks instead of spinning windmills, Persian lamb hats instead of barber basins worn on the head, and Soviet-era clunkers crowding new Mercedes sedans instead of rocines (nags) jockeying by Rocinante. I stayed in the Old City, the Icheriseher, in a rented room belonging to a vintage carpet restorer, not far from the Shirvanshah Palace and Maiden’s Tower. The other rooms were occupied by refugee families of the Karabagh war. The bathroom was down two flights, across the courtyard, and behind a half door. No light bulb. Remember to knock.

It was coming up on the Miss Azerbaijan contest’s final rounds, and because my landlord moonlighted as a fashion stylist of historical costumes, the courtyard was jammed with aspiring Dulcineas dressed in traditional brocaded gowns, their heads covered with conical and pillbox hats tied with primary-colored silk scarves. There was also a swimsuit and talent contest, if I recall. In 1999, Fatima Abbasguliyeva was the winner. That I didn’t remember, because I only stayed for the first walk-around, when the contestants twirled out front before the judges in evening gowns and high heels.

I never did hear a call to prayer all the week I stayed there. Maybe it was heard across the border in Iran, but not here in Azerbaijan. The Ceyhan pipeline was almost finished, running from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Georgia and Turkey. A million barrels a day. That’s plenty of Allah Akbars for any country, whether in Europe or Asia.