“Ignorance is bliss,” said Mom. But she had the absentminded look she gets when something intrigues her.
We’re American, my mother and I, though I was born in Rome and get teased because I speak Italian with a Roman accent. Mom is from Kenwood, California, which is where I spend summer vacations with my grandparents. She’s tall, with long hair the color of brown leaves, and every Italian who sees her says the same thing: “la classica Americana.” She says that means being beautiful and not very bright. When she was in college she did some modeling, and I have a scrapbook of yellowing magazine pictures showing her in plaid skirts and woolly sweaters, peering out of covered bridges or pretending to chat with bearded old lobstermen. Now she and her friend Elsa run an English-language bookshop in Trastevere, where I work sometimes on Saturdays. My dad is American too: he’s with Reuters. When I was a baby, before my parents got divorced, they lived together in Rome; now Dad’s in Manila, and I only see him a couple times a year. I’ve lived with my mom and with Federico for five years, since I was six. Fede is a law professor at the University of Rome, and was born in Palermo, and is a lot older than Mom. He’s short, with a funny rubbery face, and he can speak perfect American English, and if I beg him, he’ll do a hilarious Mafioso imitation in Sicilian dialect. He can be terribly bossy, but we get along. We’re both addicted to peanut M&M’s, Harry Potter, and video games; he’s the only person I know who has made it to a higher level of Tetris than me. And he loves my mom a lot, although they have huge fights at times, and she says she can’t bear this short-legged Latin male. But all in all we’re pretty happy. In Rome, we live on the Cassia, which is where a lot of foreign families live. We’re not really a foreign family—we’re a mixed family.
Anyway, after siesta time on Favignana, everyone rode bikes to the beach. I was stuck riding with Ginevra, who lives near me in Rome and who was showing off her temporary tattoos and boasting about what a great gymnast she is. I could see Mom up ahead, pedaling quickly past Federico, who was riding with Ginevra’s father, Uncle Massimo. The beach had pumice stones instead of sand, and the water was like dark green glass, and though the sun was boiling, the sea was like ice. Ginevra and I swam anyway, while the grown-ups spread out straw mats and lay down. There were millions of hermit crabs on the rocks, and we got the idea of collecting them and putting them into two big plastic mineral water bottles. Mom said they’d never survive, but Ginevra and I thought that if we just kept filling the bottles with seawater they’d be fine, and we could even take some home and keep them in an aquarium. Federico went snorkeling along the rocks and came back shivering, with about fifty sea urchins in a bucket. Somebody took out a knife and a lemon, and pretty soon all the stepcousins and aunts and uncles were opening them up and eating them raw. Yech—you couldn’t get me to touch them: spiny on the outside and red and slimy on the inside. Mom ate one, but you could tell it was just out of politeness. She’s not a beach person. She sat in the sun with her hat and long-sleeved shirt, chatting with Aunt Saveria and Aunt Gabriella and the other ladies who had taken off their bikini tops and lay there covered with gold jewelry and oil, cooking themselves, as she calls it. Beside them she looked so pale and different that I felt a little embarrassed for her. She says that most of what Italians call beauty is simple vulgarity, but I always like the way Italian ladies look at the beach: brown and glittering in the sun like Egyptian queens.
Before sunset we walked along the rocks to see a cave that was famous for having amethyst light inside; when we got there, Federico and the other men fooled around, shouting to make echoes, and jumping in the water. And on the way back, Fede told Ginevra and me a story about a young man in Sicily who’d spent a summer on a wild seacoast like this, and had met a mermaid and fallen in love with her. The story was by Tomasi di Lampedusa, a famous Sicilian writer, and had an ending that Fede couldn’t remember exactly—a sad ending, he thought, or perhaps it was that the story was never finished. The writer probably got stuck, Ginevra whispered to me, because how do you describe sex with a mermaid?
That night we all ate dinner at a long table in a room full of oil paintings of fat naked women, fruit, and jumping tuna fish. The primo was spaghetti Sicilian style, with fresh sardines. I didn’t think it tasted like anything but fish, but everybody else seemed to think it was fantastic. “The real taste of Sicily,” Federico kept saying. “The taste of all my summers at the seaside when I was a dirty-minded little boy dreaming of
