LONDON CALLING!
FLISS USSHER
LONDON CALLING!
FLISS USSHER's G21 EUROPE column LONDON CALLING! changes venue to kick off our With Passion Issue: This week, from San Quirico, Italy...
G21 ASIA new contributor RAOUL TESLA reports from Manila, Philippine Islands.
BARE KNUCKLES: JEFF WINBUSH won't be seeing "Titanic." Read why here.
TRIO: San Francisco's RON MORGAN on "Kurt & Courtney."
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STONEWALL VIEWS. Premiere! PHIL MARTIN on the Challenge of "Growing Up Gay" in our new feature.
CULTURE CAST on people who call Cults their HOME.
More meta-criticism of pomo American life.
ANOTHER Great Joke of the Day in THE HOUSE OF CARDS!
JENNIFER BLUE's PLANETARY MADNESS looks at YOUR influences!
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San Quirico is a medieval hill-top village where old men sit on low walls, pulling faces at the babies, while their old wives gamble noisily in the parks. Little did I know that for young women there was no such freedom, but just as much segregation. The girls are still defined against the medieval standards of Madonna and Whore, where the madonna is used as an icon of innocence and motherhood, and the whore is used for sex.I was excited that night, summer 1990, because after two weeks in Italy, I had plucked up courage to ask one of the girls in the piazza if she would be in the bar later, and she had said that she would. I would go and present myself, the English au pair girl, to my first Italian friends.
I walked into the bar, a young 17-year old all dressed up, too nervous to notice anything except a small room, packed with people drinking noisily at tables. Only they all went quiet as I turned round with my pint of beer and saw that they were men, 200 or so, and all looking at me. "Whore!" screamed the Italian cultural norms. Where oh where was Ilaria, the girl from the piazza? I could have put down my drink and run but, acting on some stubborn and perverse instinct, I chose the danger zone. I picked a table at random, and went and stood by the benches until one of the guys moved up. I sat down and started making conversation.
Soon our table was the liveliest one of all as they all flirted with me, asking which was the most handsome and whether I had a boyfriend. "Oh yes,' I said, and "no, I don't want to sleep with any of you."
We went out driving, much too fast, to the next village where the bars played music, and Bastiano held my hand. He had too much stubble, but I let him kiss me in the car while we were waiting for the others.
At home, a kiss was just a kiss so I was surprised when he arranged with his friends that we should get in a separate car and leave his friend sleeping in this one until we got back. "Where are we going?" I asked, but he just muttered romantic pleasantries, trying to work the gear stick.
A deserted field was where we were going. And after just one kiss he released a lever on my seat and sent me sprawling on my back, his hands everywhere. A boy had never even touched my breasts before. My first kiss had been just six months earlier. "NO!"
I insisted that he reinstate my seat and proceeded to shout at him for his forwardness. "I could always force you," said Bastiano sulkily, at which point I got out of the car, walked round and insisted he got out to let me drive back. He did, for amusement, but took over hastily when he saw that I could actually operate a car. He took me back to his sleeping friend, who drove me home telling me what a nice guy Bastiano was.
The evening had certainly been some sort of success. Maybe this was my holiday romance? I had agreed with my boyfriend back home that I could have one, just a snog or two, nothing more. But Bastiano, in his wounded pride, never spoke to me again.
After that I used to head down to the bar every few nights, always pretending I had bumped into them accidentally, then letting myself be persuaded to join them. We ate out sometimes, but mostly we just drank beer.
"Do you know Ilaria and the other girls? Where are they?" I would ask. "Oh, they have gone swimming today." But there never were any other girls. It turned out that the crowd I had fallen into were sheep farmers' sons from Sardinia, who had come to Tuscany to work in the harvest. I had picked a bad table, that unfortunate night in the bar.
The boys found it funny that I couldn't understand Sarda, the language they spoke amongst themselves. It made me as vulnerable as any other foreign girl, because I couldn't tell that all their talk was lewd and crude. I didn't know that Italians joke about Sardinians, saying they cannot speak Italian because they spend all their time sucking sheep's cocks.
My loneliness was increasing. None of the girls would speak to me, the local boys jeered at me suggestively, and I couldn't even sing in the house without bursting into tears and having to call my mother. I told her the 5-year old I was looking after was spoilt and the 13-year old fat boy with a downy moustache persisted in standing in doorways so I had to brush against him as I walked past. Their parents screamed at one another and gradually stopped speaking to me. I didn't tell her anything else.
In England, a girl who has fun without having sex gains a mysteriousness that makes her more attractive. But by playing the madonna inside whore's clothing, I had lost my novelty value in the Italian bar and become boring. Only Serafino, the angel, still spoke to me, asking me every time we met if I would go for a walk with him, away from all the noise.
So we went to the public gardens one evening, around the ruins of the old castle. It was so good to talk to someone one-to-one. He kissed me in the moonlight and explained that it was normal for a girl to make love once she had gone on an evening walk with a guy.
"It's not like that in London," I said. Not that we have the weather for it.
He said he had lost his virginity aged twelve to a woman in her forties, and it had been the most incredible experience of his life. "Making love is the best way of getting to know someone," he said, "and anyway, I could always force you." Just like Bastiano.
"I want to lose mine to someone I already love," I said. "Let's go back to the bar."
I thought our interesting conversation about contrasting social norms had made us friends, and I started sitting next to him. But he too stopped talking to me, except to ask me every now and again, with a teasing smile, if I would go for a walk with him.
So, one evening I said I would, and he was so surprised. I thought it would be a repeat of the other time, but once we got there he turned nasty and accused me of being a tease, embarrassing him in front of his friends.
"Why should coming here with you mean that I want to make love?" I asked.
"You know it does. We came here before and I told you what it meant. You are so full of your talk about England but it is you, not me, who is wrong. This is how we do it here." The cross-cultural arguments seemed infallible and I had had enough of feeling out of place. "Anyway, you are not a virgin, you liar, you do not behave like a virgin."
So I let him penetrate me under a bush, if only to prove that he was wrong. Me lying on scratchy twigs and him not looking at me, trying to get further inside but to no avail. "Now do you believe I'm a virgin?" I asked.
He said "yes," pulling on his clothes. Looking back, I am grateful that he did not rape me there in the park.
That was as low as I ever got. We left in silence, me in some bizarre way triumphant. It was only when I got home and saw the blood on my underwear and found myself washing for hours in the shower that my anger built up. I made sure I never saw him again, but even now, eight years later, if ever we met I would say, with a punch that sent him reeling, "you broke my hymen, YOU BASTARD!"
So I had become the whore that everyone thought I was. A young 17-year old, out of her depth, without the perspective or the guidance to imagine alternative scenarios. I was due to leave San Quirico that weekend for Florence and I was glad for a change of scene. I would fill my mind so full of Michelangelo's David and the other treasures that I would not get lonely or sad.
But the hands of Fate had not yet finished with me. Sunday buses don't stop in San Quirico but I had to get home by seven, after a great weekend, to cook dinner for the family. "Come to Montepulciano, the end of the line," said the bus driver, "and I will drive you home." I had little choice.
"He's a family man," said the women on the bus, not saying that, aged 50, he still lived with his mother. "You'll be fine with him."
The driver gave me a tour of Montepulciano's vineyards, wheat fields and olive trees. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asked, out of the blue. So poor was my concept of maturity that I replied, "Oh, I have four," thinking with internal irony of the men I was accumulating.
"Well why not make it five?" asked the elderly gentleman. "We can always pull over in that field." I laughed far too loud, cursing myself for my stupidity, and he dropped me off uneventfully with his mother's phone number, should I ever want to go dancing with him.
I never did. It dawned on me a week or so later, lying awake at night, that just three weeks had swept aside all the values I had grown up with. And that's not to mention Rossano Mangiavacchi, the young decorator in Florence, whose talk of a place under the stars where we could make beautiful love had turned out to be a disused train in Florence train station.
It made me weep for my lost innocence and, worse, the prospect of facing interrogations in London. I cut all ties with Rossano, got in touch with my female pen-pal from Naples, and started reading Winnie-Puh l'Orso in the early evening again.
But actually I had not lost my sexual innocence. Loving relationships have shown me since what sex is all about. What I lost in Italy that summer was the belief that all people shared the same values and the same definitions of good and evil. What I had started to learn, albeit with a bundle of heart-ache that was not strictly necessary, was how to find my own way.