Rudy's Rules for Travel Read online

  I catch him in a big hug, and after a time, look up at him and ask, “Did you ever try to meet Helge and her mother again, when you were older?”

  “Papa and I tried to contact them after the war, to see if they needed our care packages. We wanted to say thank you, but they had disappeared. They were Jewish.”

  Looking out over the city, I understand that we will often come to this country, but that ours will never be a tourist holiday.

  CHAPTER SIX

  YES. IT IS TRUE. I MARRIED HIM. NOW, EXACTLY ONE YEAR after a honeymoon night on the Edinburgh roof, our union is being tested again, this time on the Italian autostrade leading from Rome. Italian drivers, when they choose a rental car, do not test car brakes—they test car horns. The speed of the autostrade explains all that. I will admit that I have, in the last hour, done a bit of screaming. Covering my eyes has not helped, as I can feel the traffic flying around our little car. I cannot help myself; I share driving tips with Rudy.

  Rudy, meanwhile, has his own thoughts. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot today.”

  I brace myself.

  “I worry that we’re wasting good time, Mare. We have the same old arguments day after day. They have already gotten boring and repetitious, and we’ve only been married a year. We don’t want to end up like some old couple bickering all day, wasting time.”

  He has a plan: “Let’s take our most frequent complaints and number them, like your comments about my driving. From now on, you can just call out the number. It’ll save time.”

  “Hmmm . . . number one would have to be, ‘You’re speeding like a madman.’ Number two could be, ‘You’re going the wrong way down a one-way street.’”

  I interrupt myself to scream, “One!” This is not a practice session. The numbers save time, it’s true, but I already miss full-blooded arguments. We are, after all, in Italy. I lean back in my seat, settling in for a long discussion of the proposed strategy, just as Rudy takes an exit for a hill town not seen on our tourist maps. I don’t have time to number my complaint. I think it would have been a “two” except that we are heading down what is not a road at all. There is not even one way, but rather a narrow path from an earlier era, probably meant now for tractors or pedestrians or cattle, clearly not for Ford Fiestas. There is an unfortunate curve behind our car, so backing up is not an option.

  The town’s laundry hangs above us, strung on clotheslines extending from home to home. The town’s women also hang above us, leaning out their windows, most shaking their fists and yelling something that must translate to ‘stupid Americans again,’ but others wave and laughingly call out to us. I am mortified.

  “What are you going to do now?” I ask Rudy. Even I can hear my panic.

  “Find my camera. I have to get a picture of this. What a beautiful passageway. You know it could be from medieval times.”

  “I mean what will you do now to get us out of here?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. They’ll have a way to help us. We can’t be the first dumb tourists here.”

  He squeezes halfway out the car door, then adjusts his large camera lens and immortalizes the path, the wet laundry, the waving housewives. Everyone now wants to be in the American’s film.

  His rule about relying on kind strangers holds true again: a farmer atop a tractor appears ahead of us. The man has clearly done this before. He adjusts our mirrors, employs two villagers to guard the sides of the car, and then at about two miles an hour leads us down the curving passageway. Freed at last, Rudy surprises me.

  “That was very upsetting,” my usually unflappable spouse says.

  “No kidding—I thought we were going to spend the rest of our lives in that alley.”

  “No, I mean it was very upsetting to have the sun in the wrong position for good pictures. They’ll look all washed out.”

  I am not known as the violent type, but that night I write something in my journal about murder.

  We recover to explore the hill towns, a beautifully quiet collection of artistic, historic villages. In three days our only unsettling experience is in Assisi, home of Saint Francis, patron of animals. In full view of the famous statue with birds perched upon saintly shoulders, a restaurant chalkboard announces the day’s special, pigeon pie.

  It is a good thing we rested in the small towns, because our entry into Florence is exhausting. We are barely surviving humid Italian days and Rudy has compromised his rules about traveling on the cheap. He has booked a modern hotel with air conditioning. But where is it? We circle and circle the city, dodging mad Italian drivers and jaywalkers, unable to find any road that might lead to our hotel, reputed to be northeast of town. We stop policemen and they shake their heads; only tourists go in that area. One, two, three hours go by and still we are lost. We begin to recognize the same buildings over and over in our loops around the city. One of the now familiar landmarks is a small bar along a side street near the old bridge. Rudy pulls into the last space in its parking lot, takes a city map, and goes inside, leaving me to do what I do best in crisis—nap.

  He returns with a beautiful young woman with vibrant dark eyes and long curling black hair. Before I can ask who she is, he clears a place for her to sit in our backseat.

  “Maria, this is Mary. Mary, Maria,” he says. “Her boyfriend Marcus is the bartender in there and he loaned her to us.”

  “He loaned her to us?”

  “Right. He loaned her to us. It works out perfectly. Maria lives out by our hotel and wants to go home. Her boyfriend has to work late tonight. Maria can show us the way. She speaks a little bit of English and, combined with the Italian I learned this week, we’ll be fine.”

  It could have worked out perfectly except that Maria always takes the bus. She has no idea what roads lead home, let alone where our hotel is. To compensate for the knowledge gap, she points out tourist attractions, most of which we have seen five times today. She is helpful, though, in keeping Rudy’s driving speed down—she screams and prays loudly as he approaches every intersection. Her English is spotty at best, but we understand her advice, “Bus.”

  At last there is a miracle. It is good we did not eat the pigeon pie, because the saint is on our side. As we enter a more recent housing development, Maria points to the left and Rudy instinctively turns right. Now, directly in front of us, is our hotel. We look at each other. We can’t take Maria home because with or without her we will never find our way back here.

  “Come, Maria,” Rudy says as he opens her door. “Grazie, grazie. We get you good taxi.”

  It does not take long for us to view Maria’s advice as life changing. We park our rental car for the week and find the bus.

  A few days later, Maria runs to catch us as we leave the hotel, her long dark curls flying in the morning breeze. She brings tickets to the final match of the Calcio, a lively annual competition between neighborhoods of the city. From her combination of hand gestures and English fragments, we understand that Marcus’s cousin plays in the historic football game, and that we may sit with their neighborhood if we wear green and cheer only for his team. No, we cannot pay for the tickets; they are to thank us for seeing her home. Rudy and I look at each other guiltily.

  Rudy has read about the importance of the game to the city.

  “This is serious business, Mare. In the sixteenth century, Florence was once under siege and had to finish the Calcio before fighting back.”

  Entering the arena, we understand just how serious this is. The audience, divided into neighborhood groups by colors, packs bleacher seats and practices deafening cheers.

  “Bella, bella, bella.”

  On the sand field, a procession begins. The two teams of athletes, brandishing muscles and making menacing sounds, are escorted by city fathers clad in brilliantly colored sixteenth-century guild robes. Behind them comes a well-nourished heifer. Again the cheers, this time for the cow.

  “Bella, bella, bella.”

  It is easy to see why the Calcio is said to be a combination
of every sport except baseball. This historic football game has touches of soccer, kickball, wrestling, and street fighting. In the interest of getting the ball to goal, many maneuvers are approved, including head-butting, punching, and choking. Gurneys line the outfield, ready for business after each brawl. At the end, our winning team—or at least the survivors of our winning team—converge on the field to claim the cow for their/our neighborhood.

  On our last day in Florence, after multiple visits to David and our favorite gelato café, Rudy and I take a longer bus ride, up the hills above Florence to the small town of Fiesole. Rudy gathers intelligence from the driver about lunch stops. Criteria: cheap prices, hearty food. Our bill for the air-conditioned hotel is mounting, and we have been dining on sandwiches in our room all week.

  The bus driver’s choice is a large truck stop dating from another century. It is not like the truck stops we know at home, where few if any truck drivers would ever eat. Here the parking lot is filled with pickups to 14-wheelers, the picnic benches inside crowded with customers. White bean soup, spaghetti with meat sauce, and green salad sit in big bowls on each table. Red wine in carafes completes the meal. The fixed price is one fifth of what we pay in town.

  “I can tell it’s delicious,” Rudy says.

  Walking back to the bus stop after our meal, we see a frail older man, cane in hand, seated on the bench. Rudy is tired after the large lunch and sits beside him. I begin to walk further up the hill, wondering how one burns off a thousand calories. When I circle back to the bench a few minutes later, Rudy asks if we can wait out the next bus, stay here awhile longer. He and the gentleman, he says, have some things to talk about. A half hour or so later, our bus comes and the two men shake hands, embrace, wave good-bye. On the ride home, Rudy tells me the man is German, his bad leg a war injury.

  “It’s something I always wondered about, whether this could happen,” Rudy says. “We think he was in at least one of the missions I flew. We were probably shooting at each other, Mare, trying to bring the other’s plane down. Now we sit together and talk at an Italian bus stop.”

  “What did you share?”

  “What you would guess . . . we shared that we were too young for war, that we just wanted to finish our flights, finish our duty, and go home. We talked a lot about how it was up there. He made promises to himself, too, when it was over. And, I don’t know if I should have, but I told him I was born in Hamburg.”

  “I would think he’d have a hard time understanding how someone born in Hamburg could attack Germany.”

  Rudy has his head down. “Of course he did.”

  IT is not easy to leave Italy, either emotionally or physically. We depart from Bari, a seaside port, taking an overnight ferry to Dubrovnik. The next morning, Rudy with his early-rising rule saves us. He wakes me.

  “Mare, quick. We’ve landed in Dubrovnik. But we haven’t just landed. We’re getting ready to pull out to sea again.”

  “Hey, what about that wakeup call we signed up for?”

  “Forget it . . . throw your coat over your pajamas and run up to the deck. Run. I’ll take our cases and try to get our car out of the hold.”

  “Just don’t let them keep me on this boat.”

  The crew’s expressions when I reach the deck say there is no chance they will keep me, the crazed uncombed American woman in pajamas shouting “prob-lem, prob-lem” and clinging to her coat, purse, and shoes. They move the boat back to the pier.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I HAVE SAT ON RUDY’S SUITCASE THREE TIMES NOW AND STILL cannot conquer the bulges.

  My voice is shrill, which is how it gets when, the night before an international flight, the luggage will not close.

  “There is no way this book can come with us, Rude. It’s three inches thick and the size of a tabletop. And do you know how much it weighs?”

  Rudy considers. “It probably weighs a lot. Tito had a full life. You know he was eighty-seven when he died last year.”

  He launches into a summary of the man’s life from Resistance leader to president, but I need to get to the point. “Rudy, tourists do not bring Yugoslavian history books with them into the country. They buy them there to read. Probably because they weigh so much.”

  “But that’s a chance we can’t take. What if I don’t find this in English? And where am I going to get a price lower than the used bookstore here? I bet there’s a run on this book over there.”

  THE customs agent begins to riffle through our papers and luggage, looking at us with suspicion. “You here business? pleasure?”

  “Neither,” I want to say, but Rudy is ready with his answer.

  “Pleasure, sir, pleasure to see your country.”

  When the official comes across the Tito biography, he pulls it from the bottom of the case, holds it high, and smiles at me. Then he pats Rudy on the back and helps us repack our case, sending us through the Green Light lane.

  We find Yugoslavia a mix of beautiful sights and consumer frustrations, a blend not unusual in socialist countries. Dubrovnik is perhaps the most dramatically sited city I have ever seen. Our room is small and simple, but it has the view we came for: red-tiled structures and walls jutting out to sea. We walk the ramparts each day, see the tiles from above, watch as fishermen pull small wooden boats laden with catch onto the shore. Each afternoon when we come back from our walk, we are pleased to see the hotel still standing. Building maintenance does not seem high on the government priority list: paint peels, elevators stop between floors, door frames lean.

  There is a do-it-yourself quality to this hotel, as guests appear to be on their own. The first night the dining room is dark, empty at six o’clock. Rudy finds the desk clerk and asks, “Restaurant no open? Dark, all dark.” While I blush, he illustrates by flicking the switch for the desk area up and down. “Dark, see dark.”

  “Yes, restaurant open.” The clerk points to his watch. “Seven? Eight? Nine?” He is asking us a question, not making a statement. Tonight and every night of our week here, we skip the darkened hotel restaurant and find a fisherman’s family seated around a portable barbecue and an eight-by-eleven-inch hand-lettered sign that reads “Café Fish.” We eat grilled fish we will long dream of.

  We don’t have time to sit and look at Dubrovnik’s red-tiled roofs for days, or we would. On the road to Split, we drive in circles, lost and tired, finally stopping at an advertised government resort for the night. The luxurious façade is just that. Inside we locate and fill out our own tourist cards, persuade a bellman to find us an empty room, and pour our own drinks at the bar. We bribe a young woman, perhaps a guest, to be our waitress.

  We eventually make our way to a ferry that takes us over the bluest of Adriatic waters, then drive on to the town of Bled, high in the Julian Alps. Any traveler we meet along the way insists we spend time at Lake Bled. It is, they say, extraordinarily beautiful and romantic. We are not disappointed by the emerald lake and its church that sits with its steeple atop a rocky island. We are in fact so taken with the sight that we throw Rudy’s budget rule to the wind and check into a beautiful old hotel, netting a room facing it all.

  “What say we never leave here?” Rudy calls from the terrace. “I’m less than a third of the way through the Tito book.” Leaving it on the outdoor table, we go down to breakfast. After our meal and a walk along the easy lakeside path, we return to our room to find a handmade lace cloth covering our table. I finger the lace, the careful stitches. On our budget we are not used to the fineries of travel.

  On day two, we walk again, longer this time, and on the path meet a dozen men and women, brown-skinned from laboring under a bright sun, headed now we guess for a wedding in the church. On this hot, humid day, each woman wears a black or navy pleated wool skirt, a heavy sweater, and a kerchief. Men wear the wool in pants and jackets. They all have sturdy black shoes, carry small gift packages, and show us broad smiles and missing front teeth. Their gestures toward the lake say, “Isn’t it all beautiful?”

  W
e return for lunch at the hotel. While we are gone we have become celebrities. “Are you the people on the second story with that decorated terrace?” fellow tourists ask, scarcely hiding their envy.

  They take us to the lawn behind the hotel where we can view all the terraces. All except ours have an unadorned plastic table and two plastic chairs. Indeed, our lacy tablecloth has been joined by a large ceramic bowl of fruit and a garland of brightly colored fresh flowers. Walking into our room, we find the Tito book in the center of our coffee table, opened to a full-page photo of him as president. He has merited a garland of flowers too.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WE HAVE BEEN ON THE ROAD FOR MORE THAN A MONTH in Spain. So much tourist literature highlights central Europe that we are unprepared for the elegance and beauty of this country. To see its vast terrain, we have to do what we are not so good at—tour all day and stay one, at most two, nights in simple inns, packing and unpacking, sensing that in our hurry to move on we are leaving more than the stray toothbrush behind. Life, though, has a way of slowing you down.

  Our subcompact rental car chugs up mountain passes and skirts through cities with never a problem. Until there is a big one. We are in a long, long tunnel, driving in the far right lane with traffic racing around us in three lanes to our left, speeding toward what must be light at the end, when our Ford shudders and stops. Just stops. Rudy tries again and again to coax it to life, but not a whimper comes from under the hood.

  Spaniards have good reflexes: they dart around us, rolling down windows to shout what is either helpful advice or a Spanish version of road rage. After approximately three years and two months, a car pulls in front of us and its brave passenger jumps out briefly, long enough to gesture to our hood and point to a bright red telephone on the opposite tunnel wall. We raise the hood and dodge three lanes of cars and trucks to reach the red phone and a relatively safe, narrow, concrete platform. I am prepared—I clutch my purse with our passports and our California automobile club card.