Why I'm Not Going to See Under the Tuscan Sun

I have several excellent reasons, and here they are:

1) Frances Mayes' beautiful book is content to offer a woman's love affair with a house and a region without cheesing it up via standard schlocky girl-meets-boy romance. I knew Frances Mayes slightly when I was teaching at SFState and doubt she's pleased with the "improvements" Hollywood has made in her story. (I give her joy of the $$, though, with all my heart; she's a lovely person and a great writer and teacher.)

2) After seeing this bigscreen travesty, lots of young, single American women will mistake themselves for Diane Lane (and fiction for reality), clean out their savings accounts and head for the Mediterranean in search of rich new meaning in their lives. What they'll get instead will startle them in mainly unpleasant ways. They will be sitting ducks. They will have invisible targets painted on their springy little American derrieres, and they will get hit. They can't imagine how hard until it's over.

How do I know this? Absent the Diane Lane inspiration, entirely on my own, I already did it, and here's what happened:

One summer, in order to brush up my Spanish for one of the language requirements for my PhD, I rented a fabulous house for practically nothing in a tiny village in southern Spain. Once I'd gotten used to the smell of goat that permeated every narrowed, cobbled street, I quickly got used to flushing with a bucket and doing my laundry on a stone washboard at the village mina with all the bowlegged old ladies shrouded in black, who took me to their hearts and gave me great advice ("Stay away the priest's house! He is bad man!" "Drink at Communist bar with us, not Plaza bar, all tourists there") along with recipes for gazpacho and pear-stuffed roast chicken.

The Latin lover showed up right on schedule, not as handsome as I would have wished but still very Latin and very romantic, with all the flourishes I promised myself on the way over I would avoid at all costs but somehow didn't recognize in person. He weaseled his way into my house, established himself right away and started bossing me around. Then he got nasty.

One day, as we lay sunning ourselves on the beach (me nursing a fastgrowing case of the creeps), he told me about his ex-fiancee. Her parents objected to the match and spirited her away, whereupon he launched a campaign of revenge that started small and petty (superglue in doorlocks) then escalated to bizarre public humiliations involving disguises and . . . well, you get the drift. I knew right then I had to get out. Not just get out. Escape. Which I did, huddled under a blanket in the back seat of a Volvo driven by one of the locals, to the nearby beach town, where I caught a bus and then a train and then a plane, hyperventilating for two days, all the way back to Boston.

He wasn't through with his fiancee's family, though. He told me he had one last big scam in store for them. He outlined it for me, and said I would read about it in the papers, and that he would get away with it. A year and a half later, I did read about it in the papers. And he did get away with it. It all went down just the way he said it would. And he's still out there somewhere.

So that's why I'm not going to see Under the Tuscan Sun. If you see it, and you're a young American woman with itchy feet, remember: IT'S FICTION. IT'S A FANTASY. Travel, yes, but travel smart. And don't expect miracles. Expect trouble. That way, you can dodge it gracefully while having something actually resembling a meaningful adventure--on your OWN.

Comments

[Pica]

in the back of a VOLVO??

Wow. Somehow that doesn't quite fit with the bowlegged old ladies at the mina.

[travelertrish]

Okay, I would like to proceed delicately here. You obviously met a very bad man. I think you'll agree that there are bad men everywhere. And bad women, though as a woman, I confess to believing there are more bad men than there are bad women. I do not think there are more bad men on the Mediterranean than, say, Boston. The difficulty, and you do allude to it here, is that it's hard for us foreigners to tell the difference. The cure for that is not being careful. The cure for that is learning how a culture operates.

The ladies in black at the village mina could have told you the truth about Paulo. I spend much of my writing life trying to explain that evil does not, contrary to popular belief at this juncture in trepidacious American history, leap up totally unbidden, looking like the perfectly nice guy next door. Evil stinks, and astute people smell it. Awareness is not "being careful," though perhaps that's where we get confused. The way we get into deep trouble is not innocence, it's naivete, it's approaching the world with blinking acceptance without discrimination. Innocence may not recognize evil at the first encounter, but innocence listens to alarm bells, gathers information from those more informed, and follows advice. Naivete gets in the car with anybody who stops without the slightest backup plan if the stink starts to rise.

I don't dismiss or denigrate a truly frighteningt experience. Read Paul Bowles (start with the short stories and go to Let It All Come Down) for a deep understanding of American naivete in foreign countries. What we need, instead of fear, is a clue about how to approach another culture so as to begin to smell ITS particular roses...and sewers.