I once read in a tour guide that if you sip cappuccinos past eleven in the morning in Italy, you deserve the belittling look you get. It is a silent rebuke that says: “You are a tourist. You are a boor.” And in Rome, if you choose to sit down to drink your coffee, you pay three times the price than if you don’t. So you learn the ropes, you stop ordering at the wrong hour, and you stand. Then, as you slurp quickly, you look around for the foolhardy missteps of others.
In the late Roman afternoon, in the most demanding of post-cappuccino hours, we order our frozen gelatos at a corner stand and wish for caffeine. We have barely time enough to get a half-hour of the Colosseum in before it shuts down for the day.
Three Italian males dressed in pleated leather gladiator skirts, and sexy gladiator sandals through which toe hair protrudes, stand in front of us and block our direct route to the entrance. They’re not only not moving out of our way, they are advancing, ready to assail us. Claris shifts a little over to her left but the ringleader moves with her, like a dance partner.
“We take-a your fotos in-front-a Colosseo, signora,” he insists in rhythmic Italo-English, like he’s faking his own accent. He reaches for her camera even before she’s had time to consider. She’s been readying herself to get the classic shots: one of me looking dreamy, muscular, contemplative, and the other with her looking hot, cosmopolitan.
Claris glances over. “I think it would be a good picture of the two of us in front, eh honey? We’ll let him . . . ?”
“It’s got to be a tourist board initiative. Sure, what the hell.” Still, in the craw of me, in my inner core, I think, what if they grab the camera and run off with it?
Claris nods and two of the brutes — one with a large, wide sword, the other a husky, aging Roman with dyed black bangs, fake as all get-out — come up on either side of us. A third, who seems to be in charge, moves back so there’s a view of the Colosseum in behind. He’s got Claris’s camera, he corrals us together with one hand, and he snaps the first one. He’s familiar with other people’s digital cameras.
My new best friend starts swinging his sword in circles like a windmill, which is moderately funny. And then, much less hilarious, he slides his sword between my legs from behind so it’s up real tight and cozy. I can feel it just glancing my raisins, and the guy obviously knows it because he’s grinning like a maniac. He’s feeling some spongy resistance, I hope, as this is a mite prickly for me. He has, I take note, all the power.
“Jesus, Claris,” I hiss without moving my lips, “this is a little much!”
She looks down to where she can see a good length of sword tip pointing stiffly out, and upwards, and so the metal glints a bloody orange in the angled sunlight.
“Eww!” she says, half laughing.
You’d never get away with this kind of jocularity back home. Here, I guess, it’s Euro humour. Here, men kiss cheeks of men, they hold each other’s hands, they wear tight black 1950s jeans. They place their palms around the curvaceous backsides of females in public places and get away with it. It’s foreign to us. It’s not our Anglo-Saxon way.
Kissing men is one thing. What you definitely don’t do the first time you meet a stranger is stick a sword between his legs and expect pleasantries.
Even if Claris doesn’t get it and sees amusement in this, I do get it, and the gladiators get it. They know they are humiliating me because they understand exactly how it works. If I overreact, it puts me in my foreigner place. But, if this were Boston or even downtown Toronto, a strange sword pressed against the tender spots, especially in front of the wife, would get you dead.
There’s got to be something more to it. I don’t see how the Roman tourist board expects to endear itself to our dollars if I’m churning in rage. I’m starting to think these guys are freelancing.
“Okay, fellas, very funny — enough pictures, we gotta go.” I decide to take charge.
The one with the camera snaps a few more. The Spartacus slowly withdraws the sword, smoothly grazing my loins and exiting at the coccyx. They all come over to shake hands. Ha ha ha. Jolly funny. The camera is held up towards Claris, and the one with the sword says: “That’s five euros each. Fifteen euros,” in a painfully perfect facsimile of entrepreneurial American English.
Now it’s Claris’s turn to droop her smile. She’s hoping against the evidence that this is a joke. She reaches out for her camera but it retreats.
“Oh, come on, you guys,” is what she says, sweetly. She sounds more pathetic than playful. “You’re not serious, right?”
They say nothing, but the chief looks severe and holds the camera tight. His face says he’s playing by the rules, and we are not.
There are hundreds of people strolling about the Piazza del Colosseo. A few are gawking at us, they seem not to understand that we are in a predicament. It’s not as if we have been shanghaied in a dark alley at two in the morning. We are on public display alongside one of the busiest intersections in the world. I’ve just had a sword inserted, in peacetime, in a challenging way. Eerily I realize our disadvantage — if I make a scene, we become impudent americani tipici.
Claris is counting on me to make a decision for both of us. Being pursued by these solid-looking thugs down the side streets of Rome, the spectacle of my being emasculated with a broadsword, to say nothing of what these miscreants might do to a hot woman — none of these options is overly compelling.
I’d have to at least lunge for our property if we are to break even. The camera’s worth a couple hundred dollars, far more than fifteen euros of extortion — I’m doing the math and a rough currency conversion in my head as the goon drills into me with his glare. They’re counting on the generosity of tourists. Christ! So are all these people circling around, it seems. The whole putrid system is set up to extract the ransom.
Claris’s face says “We’ve just been had, honey”; we’re idiots, and she reaches for bills from her purse. “Just get the camera back and toss it up as something we won’t ever repeat.”
“We’ll laugh about it when we get home,” she chokes out encouragingly.
“No fucking way,” I seethe, my manhood revived. “Give them five euros, total, no more.”
Septimus Andronicus here gives me a glassy look but assumes the posture of wounded warrior.
“Mister Americano,” he now beseeches me, hangdoggedly: “This is how we make our living. This isn’t for free. What are you thinking!”
It is the special pleading of an Italian footballer. Suddenly I feel like I’m on top. My pity bubbles over.
“Poor things, let’s throw them another bone,” I mumble to Claris, and I reach into her purse and pull out a second fiver, in sympathy with their starving offspring. Buy some new rags for your urchins, for Pete’s sake. In this sudden conciliatory mood, I feel my chest puffing up, my testicles reinflating. The gladiator glares, but snatches at the cash. And that’s it, it’s over, we hasten our steps, we’re free of them.
The ticket vendor at the Colosseum reminds us that we have only a quarter-hour, no more, and doesn’t charge us the full rate for admission. We see this as partial compensation for our ordeal. We scoot around the inside of the place and try to put the recent altercation out of mind so we can enjoy the arena and transport ourselves back the two thousand years when gladiators spilled real blood, when lions gorged themselves on the entrails of fallen slaves, and winning and losing was life or death.
The next day, after early-morning cappuccinos and sugary pastries, we pass by the Colosseum again on our way to bus to the catacombs at San Sebastiano. A family of French tourists has just been caught in the net of Les Gladiateurs, the mother looking to be in a state of shock but reaching for her purse, a confused grimace pinching her face.
“French tourists,” say I, with ample disdain.
“Rookies,” says Claris.
We watch the performance and then see the wads of euros exchanged for the familiar expensive pocket camera.
“Bravo!” say I, and in my heart I applaud the technique.
“Magnifico!” says Claris, offering her best ever Italian accent.
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