There’s no good excuse for failing to purchase a license to fish wherever you wet a line — except in Italy. Those of us who have used lousy excuses in the past know who we are: our shame is almost as enormous as our gratitude that we were not caught, unless we were, and that the statute of limitations has passed for our crimes, except, perhaps, in Italy.
We are deeply ashamed of that gratitude, too, if not much about what happened in a lovely, picturesque nation others describe as “a society almost crippled by a cancer-like bureaucracy” that will “test your will to survive against the unscalable granite rock face that is an Italian public office” and in a culture of warm and friendly people whose motto is “Tutti fanno così. Perché non io?” (Everyone does it. Why shouldn’t I?), where “furbizia” (cunning) is valued more highly than anything else, including the Pope, espresso and La Mamma.
While that’s a fair example of a lousy excuse, I hope soon to provide another much better and far worse.
“Dad?”
It was hot, way hot, and it had taken me too long to rig rods for Max and me while the two of us, father and son together, melted toward desiccation in a puddle of shade beside a small stream that has watered the resorts of Italian elites since before caesars. It still feeds vast Lake Cuomo, trickling to a confluence barely 50 yards below us, and while I might have preferred to fish upstream through the shade, perhaps to some Sacred Trout Oracle and Wet Bar, our destination was below, Bellagio’s “best” beach, where you may today find patches of sand between pitted rocks, bits of broken tile, and pods of adolescent boys who throw rocks at each other while waiting to become human beings.
Not much to look at, really, even with a little restaurant perched on a seawall looking over the gravel bar of the delta. But I had it on good authority that a run of fish would pass through in an hour or two — this from the only Italian fisherman I’d met in two weeks of searching, who, while not actually fishing at that time, was a fishing writer who graciously gifted me copies of his book and DVD. We’d talked for more than half an hour — about local waters, hatcheries, and the introduction and invasion of nonnative species, such as the largemouth bass in a lake nearby, and the giant Wels catfish now invading Cuomo. Along the way, we several times noticed that he spoke no English and I no Italian, but we didn’t let this bother us. (Fishers can do that.)
“Dad?” said Max again, who at thirteen teeters on human status himself — a prodigy, really. Almost. Sometimes. “Dad?” “I know,” I replied, then grunted to disguise an accidental snap of my jaws, because it’s not quite quality time when you’re adding tippet with sweaty hands while peering through sweaty eyes and swearing through parched lips. Also, I’d already snorted “Silence!” twice. So by way of diversion, “And what kind of fish are we about to catch?”
“Shard.”
“Shad, I said. “Agone, which I can tell from the pictures is some kind of shad.”
“Oh yeah. Shard are the pot pieces? So shad, though I don’t really know what they are.”
“Fish,” I said helpfully, then paused to suck a bicuspid for spittle sufficient to slick a blood knot. “And the reason we’ll catch them for sure?”
Max’s turn to sigh. “Because the guy you met today said we could, right off the beach, which is lucky for us because they’re only here two months a year. But not really that lucky, since we’re leaving tomorrow.”
It was possible we’d been over this a few times too many. “You got it.”
The next “Dad?” arrived with “Look!” attached. I followed his point. Bingo. Three young men were now wading the stream’s outlet to the lake, spinning rods in hand. And even as I watched, two began to perform the most right of rites, besides a tight-loop cast — which I had been hoping to see for nine days so far and had searched for in vain, on foot from bridges and trails, also from buses, trams, ferries, and trains. Not one, anywhere, except as images, immortalized for the moment in paintings, etchings, and the top righthand corner of a tapestry in the Vatican.
I knew it, I thought, and their timing is perfect.
“Very cool, Max,” I said, and with my stare still fixed on these fishers, I held out his rig until he took it.
It was lucky that gaze was fixed. We’d hardly taken a step toward them when I saw an olive-green jeep barrel around the seawall. Three men in the open cab, all dressed in fatigues and berets that so exactly matched the color of the jeep I remembered my old army man set, soldiers and machines cast from the same plastic. But I forgot about that when the tires sprayed gravel in a stop so violent it seemed to hurl out one of the passengers — cop? ranger? — who hit the ground running toward the closest angler. He halted at less than arm’s length to thrust forward a face resembling, even from our distance, a mongrel bred from a mastiff and something with a very long snout.
Suddenly, the fisher looked less young man than boy. He quailed before an aria of barks — frankly, I find even shouted Italian sonorous — then began frantically patting his T-shirt and shorts. Neither had pockets.
Meanwhile, the other two olivemen had dismounted to stride forward with exaggerated gaits, each one headed for one of the other anglers.
Deer in headlights.
“Dad?” said Max softly, and this time it was a question.
“Yuh.”
“Are we . . . I mean, we are allowed to fish here, right?”
“Um-hmm,” I murmured, weakly affirming what I firmly believed to be true.
But because this was not, perhaps, the whole story, a recent thought repeated itself almost verbatim — And their goddamn timing is perfect.
Max read my face or mind. “Dad. You did, didn’t you, finally find a place to buy — ”
“Silencio, Max. I’m thinking.”
I had tried. I’d tried a lot, if not hard enough, and I might have succeeded if I had arrived in-country with research that sifted wheat from chaff and omitted thirdhand guesses, or maybe if I’d chosen to book an outfitter, which is likely the only reasonable way to go. But along the way, I’d learned a lot and remembered more, as in “except in Italy.”
Let me be the first to admit this, since I know Italy won’t: The Boot and I got off on the wrong foot and have stumbled downhill ever since. Mrs. Hillfinger started it all by briefly deviating from the Three Cs of her third-grade curriculum — Carping, Criticizing, and Crying out “Lord God Please Punish You Animals.” Instead, she tried to provide a brief, ad hoc, and almost incoherent summary of what We Animals needed to learn about Rome. While I cannot say how she chose the two points she pounded home or why, I can tell you that I personally found both of keen interest, mostly because I combined and confused the two:
Rome, Italy’s famous city, was found (sic) by twin boys who suckled from a wolf, and when in Rome you must do as they do.
Now . . . nine-year-old boys don’t forget things like that. Certainly not any who know this is actually possible because they have personally observed a dachshund nurse 21 puppies and two kittens, then offer herself to several rabbits (unsuccessfully) and a chicken that Mrs. Hillfinger insisted I take home (just a tragic disaster). And when that error compounds because it almost explains another misunderstood message, the damage is pretty much done. Because what else but such an exotic diet could explain this: Italy went to war against America at the orders of Mussolini, a dictator they loved because — get this — “He made the trains run on time.”
I mean . . . good grief. My school bus was late half the time. So most likely, wolf suckling ruined Italians’ brains, a thought a little too dark to be crazy funny, as in ha ha ha.
Of course, I’d dismissed that childish nonsense by the time I first visited Rome in the 1970s, though it might have occurred to me, ha, when all the passengers on my flight were forcibly deplaned and herded into a circle by members of an excited Italian SWAT team, not one of whom had completed a basic submachine gun safety course. (You know the saw about “talking with their hands”? Well it’s different when those hands are well armed.)
But never mind. Who couldn’t forgive the small sins of such a warm, friendly, and fashionable people and a nation that had invented pizza, gelato, and the Lamborgini?
That’s a rhetorical question. Or so it became during the ten days I spent trying to purchase a nonresident Italian fishing license, in Rome, Bologna, Bergio, and all points between. By then I was struggling — I mean failing to struggle — with terrible thoughts. Among the few to which I will admit was a comparison of trains running on time with, say, the process of acquiring a freshwater stamp, or the possibility that a small, bloodless civil war might be in order to restore the order missing in a morass of laws. By that time, I’d even begun to globalize a little, with a theory asserting that the only reason you can find ruins like the Coliseum is because descendants of some “new” Visagoth owner are waiting approval on a remodel permit submitted in 587 A.D.
Rather than haul readers across the Alps of that effort, I’d ask they simply recall and adapt a great scene from the movies: Jack Nicholson’s attempt to order just toast in a diner guarded by the Waitress from Hell, now played out in any number of tiny Italian tourist information offices where a nice, nicely dressed girl answers “Triente cinco,” because no matter where you are, or when, the only place to get a license will be thirty-five kilometers, thirty-five miles, or thirty-five minutes from where you stand. Worse yet, either “You cannot get there from here,” or that office is closed and unlikely to open for roughly 35 hours, at which time the staff will speak only Italian.
Now consider the effect of an impossible bureaucracy on surprisingly pleasant people living maze within maze, often without any exit except the one your brother-in-law can arrange, or his friend, who would of course expect you to cover expenses.
Which leads us back to Max, almost, at the beach.
Enough readers will guess the answer to the query I almost let Max ask above — “Dad. You did, didn’t you, finally find a place to buy — ” that I decline to write a confession. Many will assume that while watching saliva spray from the mouth of an infantryman/olive mastiff/schnauzer cross, I did not feel the satisfaction a father earns by setting a fine example for his son. The same folks won’t be surprised when I admit that I failed to find Dad’s Proud Pink Glow in a bottle of Italian wine I drank that night, a rosé so modest it should have also been ashamed. But one great thing about being a father and husband is that there are so many chances to improve yourself.
The luckiest among us have a spouse and teenage spawn eager to inform us of every single one of these opportunities — and that, friends, is a lot of opportunities. But quantity isn’t everything. Don’t forget volume, pitch, and vigor, all of which increase if you lock yourself in an attic, basement, or bathroom with an excellent supply of liquids, solids salted and smoked, a pedestal vise, fibers and dubbing, and the last saddle hackles you’ll ever buy, since the hairstyle of an American Idol judge has driven their price higher than that of any religious relic, save, so far, the Shroud of Turin. (Word of advice: at the outset of this self-help retreat, you may wish to shout “I’m improving!” but just that, just once, because anything more is encouraging. And take a cell phone only if it has caller ID.)
One bad thing about this terrific idea is that some day you will have to come out to resume your career and duties, which in my case meant fleeing to Italy with the hope of fly fishing a little, preferably with my son. That proved an insanely optimistic aspiration that looked to turn out far worse than I could have imagined.
Then again, you never know. Because for two frightening years, I’ve regretted my failure to provide Max a lesson so important and so unpleasant that I feel ill when I think about it. But now, luckily — through error, by accident and ignoble response — he would have at least an introduction.
In Italy, appropriately enough, where the popular saw is “Everyone does it. Why shouldn’t I?” and cunning is valued more highly than anything else.
Cute. Clever. And by the way, our motto in America would be. . . different?
I don’t wish to put too fine a point on this or elevate a tawdry rationalization to grandeur, but if our own government machinery is not yet so onerous and inefficient as the bureaucracy that cripples Italy — and I don’t think it is, quite — we are, I think, left at least as helpless against the machinations of the Bigs: Oil, Tobacco, Pharm, Hospital, Finance and Banking, Unions and Special Interest Groups, and the Halliburtons of the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower dreaded. Together, these are “corporations enthroned,” and that caused President Lincoln to tremble because “the money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity . . . more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy . . . working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
And what has this to do with Max and his miscreant father? Do Bigs beyond his understanding present threats he must confront today?
Of course they do. Of course I won’t allow him to suspect that yet. But there are codes by which they operate that my son will need to understand, and — let’s just carve this down to the bone — adopt to survive. Because the fact is that the “Bigs” get away with that very “it” that “everybody does,” or tries to, including the littles, in Italy and ever more often here. And the skill that it involves, the critical skill, is the cunning required to achieve the ultimate goal: Getting away with it.
Lord God save him, Max, so far doesn’t try. Or not often, not hard, or often and hard enough. Instead he does what I did for so long —
— the right thing that would make his father proud, and so in time lend him pride of his own . . . that he will pour into his children, and see reflected in their eyes.
Only . . . I don’t want that. A powerful, powerfully frightened part of me doesn’t. It’s all noble, but his life isn’t a Hallmark card. It’s clearly absurd for Max, built right now like a rapier with bumps and good hair, to take the righteous stands he does, the way he does, and far worse to take responsibility for his acts. To trip a kid stealing cell phones on the playground is brave, but foolish when the boy’s twice your size, and straight-up stupid when there’s a zero tolerance rule. And then not to slip away, or even excuse yourself if you can’t? Max? Ditto and ditto when you plant a 20-ounce cup of Coke on the face of a twit making Jew jokes, then stick around for dessert. And if you’re going to question a teacher required by a public school district to insist that one religion’s prophet — the only one she’s allowed to discuss — “Brought all the religions of the world together in Peace and Love,” must you ask this aloud, in class, then politely demand evidence “because I don’t think that’s all he did”?
There’s just no place for this. Nor is there a platform for a parent blindly determined to provide and model irrelevant moral instruction without caveat. Not the way I’ve tried to do, anyway, looking better, I’m sure, than I am. And because I know that so certainly . . . I should find myself satisfied, however embarrassed, by what happened at last in Italy.
“Dad? Are you thinking?”
“I am,” I said calmly, even while watching the second and third officers close on the other two fishers.
“And?”
“Well,” I said, using the voice I reserve for questions about sex or algebra or how to spice meat, “what we will do now is slowly, slowly turn around — not yet — and start walking back up the stream.”
“Toward the road?” “Good idea.”
“But Dad . . . should we — ” “Yes, so start turning now.” “But won’t they see the rods?”
“Could happen, so turn and walk and stick your rod out straight in front of you like this, but don’t jam the tip on the ground.”
“Like this?”
“You bet and walk . . . slowly . . . and walk . . . tip higher, please, because that’s a nice 5-weight. And walk . . . and — good, very good. Now breathe.”
He did, half a dozen times. Then, “Are they going to arrest us, Dad?”
“Hard to say,” I said, as if suggesting
Let’s add lime and salt. “But I don’t think so.”
“Will we go to jail if they do?”
“Probably not,” I answered, chuckling, sort of, as I looped a fatherly arm around his shoulder. “But that’s a ‘probably,’ so don’t turn around yet, just walk and walk and relax a little, but don’t drop your rod tip.”
We might make it, I thought in the ten seconds of silence that followed.
“Dad?”
“Umm.”
“I really, really, really can’t believe you didn’t buy a license.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know you can’t.”
“And please don’t tell me you tried. Because no matter how hard, you didn’t get one, right?”
“Right,” I said, instead of It can’t be done. “So we did break the law.”
“Close,” I said, “and we would have.” I watched him mull this over, frowning, clearly confused by my lack of remorse or obvious guilt. And I gave another, smaller a hug.
“Dad,” he said, and slipped his own arm across my back, the way he still likes to do. “Do you think we’re safe now?
“Almost.”
“You sure?”
“No. But we will be, if we can we reach the store up there.”
“Really?”
“Umm. We’ll step around back, take the rods down, put the pieces in my pack. Get a Coke, maybe, but only if they have diet.” “We’ll split one. But Dad? Does this — ” he looked around, head up “ — does this mean we’re getting away?”
I smiled. Big hug this time, powerful enough to squeeze out at that instant the idea seed of this Meander. “Maybe. But . . . Max? If we do? It would be a good idea to talk about it later.”
Max glanced up and gave me a thirteen-year-old’s look that I would call “dubious.” “I seriously doubt that,” he said.
I laughed, loudly this time. I shook his shoulder and laughed again. “Yeah, yeah. But we could if we wanted to, right? The two of us, anytime?”
“As in don’t tell Mom?”
“Whoa. Man. You are probably so right about that.”
We made the store a few minutes later. We strolled around back, broke down the rods . . . came out to split a Coke and stroll some more, uphill toward our Italian home of the moment, unblamed, if not blameless.
Postscript:
While writing this a month later — during a break between drafts — Max and I shared Gatorade at the local market deli. So how did he feel now, I wanted to know, about our “Italian adventure”?
Max grinned. “Boy, that was close!”
“Yeah, it was,” I said, smiling back. “But I mean how did you feel knowing that, well, I hadn’t bought a license. Pretty surprised, I bet?”
“No.”
“What? Did you say ‘No’?”
“At first maybe a little surprised, I guess. But then not really.”
“Why not?” I snapped indignantly. “Have you ever seen me do anything illegal before?”
He actually had to think about this. “No. Well … no.”
“Then why weren’t you surprised?”
Max grinned again. “It was fishing, Dad. And for fishing, I think you’d do just about anything.”
