Pedro, Bruce, Ken, and Alvaro – Four lambs about to be clipped

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, pleasure was blooming in our cabaret. Pedro, Bruce, Alvaro, and I, with our front row table right on the edge of the dance floor, were beaming. Background music was perking up, thumping with ever louder beat. We had knocked off our round of libations recommended by Alvaro and were working on the bottle of bubbly that magically appeared shortly after our friendly B-girls moved in. These cheery beverages, you’ll remember, were on top of the five glasses of wine we downed before arrival. We were feeling it! If all of that wasn’t enough, the evening’s entertainment was about to begin. What a place!

The B-girls, much like bees buzzing from blossom to blossom, continually shifted among us, hopping from lap to lap, squirming with delight, and making it hard for me to keep track of which one was where. My thoughts were distracted by a fanfare and a dimming of the house lights. A spotlight flashed on the dance floor as a man talked excitedly in the dark until the spotlight found him and reflected off the microphone in his hand.

Flamenco begins

Alvaro whispered to me that the guy was introducing a famous flamenco dancer. After more fanfare and another moment of darkness, the spotlight came back to target a tall woman in a billowy red dress, her hands on her hips. The spotlight widened to include a seated man, guitar in hand. He plunked a few chords, the woman threw her hands in the air, stiffened, and began a slow movement that evolved into some serious and rapid foot stamping and guitar playing. The excitement was contagious, making the B-girl seated on my lap bounce with pleasure.

My attention to the entertainment gradually dimmed and what little remained focused on our table with its energetic B-girls. Amazingly, a second chilled  bottle of bubbly appeared, and the empty first was whisked away. Wow! Nights in Madrid were amazing, and the people so friendly. Our smiles broadened, we whispered back and forth, the squirming girls more intense.  The second bottle had an equally short life, mainly because the B-girls continued their little tricks, filling their glasses to the brim and then jamming their fingers into their drinks and swirling them about, spilling much and wasting their luscious bubbles.

Sign of trouble

The evening flipped abruptly when our tuxedo-clad waiter appeared with a slip on a tray. Pedro picked up the slip, frowned, and turned to Bruce and me. “Did you order the wine?” he asked. We shook our heads.  He asked Alvaro in Portuguese, who quickly replied, “Não!” Those two rattled back and forth, and Pedro passed the bill to me as the B-girls slipped away. For cheap Madrid, the check had quite a pop. I mentally converted pesetas to dollars and came up with roughly $60, something like $15 apiece for us, an amount we all thought exorbitant ($150 in 2021 dollars). We came to agreement in a moment. We hadn’t ordered the wine and damned if we would pay for it.

Alvaro uses a pen to scratch out the two bottles of bubbly on our bill and announced how much each of us owed. He motioned for our waiter, who came over solemnly. Alvaro stated our case. The guy was ready for that and gave what sounded like a dignified and demanding speech of which Bruce and I understood not a word. Alvaro replied, his voice rising. The dialogue turned to shouts and ended when the waiter wheeled abruptly and stomped off.

“We okay?” I asked. “He’s getting the manager,” Alvaro said. The manager, accompanied by our waiter, soon appeared. Again the discussion started calmly but soon escalated, Pedro adding his perspective at times. But agreement was not in sight, and our two antagonists stormed away.

Serious trouble

I turned to Alvaro. “What’s up?”  “He’s going to call the police.” Hmm! This was getting serious, but I was tipsy enough to find it more exciting than worrisome. We four would stand together! In short order, two uniformed policemen came in and were met by the manager. After a short discussion, the three approached. The higher ranking of the cops spoke with Alvaro quietly but with obvious authority. Alvaro replied with careful respect, neither side giving in. Pedro remained silent. Finally Alvaro nodded and turned to Bruce and me. “We’re arrested and will go to jail.”

This was becoming a night to remember! We delinquents were quickly escorted by the pair to a nearby city jail in the basement of an imposing building. In the dimly lit lower floor were something like six cells, all empty, and we four were marched into one of them. The iron gate was closed, the key turned, and the cops left, leaving us locked in a cage the size of a small bedroom, a sturdy wall on one side and vertical steel bars on the other three.

Incarceration is a sobering process. One’s world suddenly is restricted to a tiny space, in our case a few square yards of concrete floor with nothing else, not even a bench, water, or toilet. Fortunately, the red wine and bubbly had darkened my sensibility a few shades, and I was among friends, so I was able to accept my confinement in a manly manner.

 Pedro explained we were in a holding area for people about to go to court. Unbelievable to Bruce and me, court cases like ours were adjudicated at all hours of the day and night. It was early morning by then, somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m. According to Pedro we were due for trial in city court within hours. So justice was swift, and even nocturnal, in Madrid. The idea of going to court worried me a bit, but in my numbness I retained confidence. I had seen enough Hollywood movies to know what to say when apprehended in a foreign country, and I planned to blurt it out as soon as I faced the judge. “I demand to speak with the American consulate!”

A complication arises, and the trial

In the meantime, Alvaro and Pedro were engaged in an urgent conversation. When it ended, they revealed a complication. Alvaro was a Spaniard living in Lisbon on a Spanish passport, and he worried that this transgression might put his passport in jeopardy, so perhaps it would be better if we weren’t demanding at trial, if we agreed to pay the cabaret bill.

This consideration occupied our talk until a guard appeared and escorted us upstairs into an imposing courtroom. We were led to a wooden rail, chest high. Above the rail, and farther back, was a recessed dais, rising a good ten feet above us. On that dais stood an imposing black bench. To our right along the railing, already waiting, was the cabaret manager.

A man in a black robe came in from an upper door and seated himself behind the bench. He made some sort of brief opening statement and then spoke to the manager, who in turn read from some notes while waving the check we had rejected. Then it was our turn, Alvaro speaking for us with obvious cautionary respect. Then the manager again. Pedro whispered that the manager had just said, in the spirit of compromise, that he would reduce the amount we owed to something like two-thirds of the original amount. “See,” I whispered back, “that proves he’s a crook.” Pedro kept my remark confidential.

The resolution, and freedom!

The proceeding was surprisingly cordial. In the end we defendants, sensitive to Alvaro’s delicate position, agreed to pay the reduced amount. We pulled out cash, signed some sort of form, and even shook hands with the manager. Minutes later, we happily skipped out of the building into the oncoming daylight, liberated and not wanting our adventure to end.

We strutted along the wide avenue until Alvaro spotted a coffee shop across the street. Just what we needed! We skipped over, dodging the light early morning traffic. Pedro tried the door. It was locked, but we could see a man and a woman scurrying around inside. We pounded on the window, but they shook their heads and gave a palm-down wiggle of their hands to indicate they hadn’t yet opened.

Coffee with the judge

At that moment who should come into view but the judge from our trial. Pedro and Alvaro hailed him and he came over smiling to chat with them. At one point they pointed to the coffee shop. The judge peered in and tapped on the shop’s window. The woman scurried to open the door and greet the judge, the man following. Apparently they knew him well, and we were invited inside. The woman gestured for us to have a seat along the bar.

Coffee was brewed, we were served, and Bruce and I enjoyed the strong, sobering caffeine while the others shot the breeze in Spanish. We did find an opening, however, to tell the judge, who was competent in English, that we much appreciated his deft and kind handling of our trial.

Everyone seemed to sense it was not a time to linger, so we drained our cups rather hurriedly. Try as I might, I cannot recall who paid for the coffee, if anyone did, but I do remember us four back on the street, waving goodbye to the judge and returning to our boarding house for a bit of rest. For the record, that was my only arrest, ever.

A Look Ahead

Do you pay much attention to your internal clock? At one point in my early life I discovered how astonishingly accurate mine was. Compelling evidence revealed that I possessed eerily accurate timing, an aptitude that I made use of almost daily. But my need for precise timing was temporary, lasting only a few months, and later, after I bought my first watch, I had no need for internal timekeeping, and I ignored what no longer was essential. Years later, the issue resurfaced, with a surprising result. I’ll tell that story next time.

During one of the amazing lunches at our Madrid boarding house, Pedro and Alvaro struck up a conversation with a pair of Spaniards seated across the table. The friendly pair had been working in Madrid for some months and knew the city well. As I mentioned in my last post, Pedro had the better English, but it was Alvaro who starred in Spanish. Portuguese and Spanish share a huge number of cognates so speakers of one country can converse reasonably well with those from the other, but pronunciation and rhythm vary considerably between the languages. Alvaro’s vowels, his inflections, his fluidity, perfectly mimicked the Spanish speakers, but Pedro’s words at times seemed off kilter, and his hesitations were obvious.

 These differences were particularly noticeable when a hot topic suddenly widened their eyes and revved voices to a higher pitch, Alvaro nodding enthusiastically and Pedro, after a slight pause, following. When the laughter ended and things finally calmed down, Pedro relayed the gist of the conversation to Bruce and me. The Spaniards had described a Madrid tradition, one in which visitors in the city are invited by local residents for an evening tour of the local wine shops.

 The basics were simple. Tours would begin at the nearest wine shop, where all would enjoy a small glass of wine before moving on to the next shop for another glass; participants would continue this routine until every wine shop in Madrid had been patronized. The laughter apparently had erupted when Pedro voiced what was obvious. Wine shops are ubiquitous in Madrid, so no tour could ever be completed. Participants would be blotted out after their first a half dozen shops. After this gaiety the duo had invited Alvaro and Pedro for a tour that very evening, and us too, if we wanted to join in. Bruce and I threw our thumbs up.

The Tour Begins

Late that evening, well after darkness fell, the six of us set out on what would become a most formidable evening. We walked no more than a long city block before coming to our first wine shop. It was small, no larger than an average hotel room, with a bar along one end, bottles layered behind it, dozen of patrons imbibing, and peanut shells covering the floor.

 My few days in Madrid had made clear how inexpensive everything was for Bruce and me, but I still felt a pleasant thrill of incredulity when Pedro explained that a small glass of house wine, red or white, was being sold for the equivalent of two cents per glass. We all chose red and talked and sipped as we cracked peanuts and scattered the shells across the floor. After a suitable time we paid up and moved on to our second wine shop.

 We caught our rhythm, idling for about twenty minutes in each shop, allowing time enough to eye the customers, compare our two-cent reds to those of the last shop, add to the floor’s collection of peanut shells, and softly mumble the small talk one slips into with new acquaintances. By shop number three Bruce and I had begun to wonder how long we would last. The clock above a huge black wine bottle indicated it was 10:35, still a good hour before Madrid’s real night life would begin.

As midnight neared, our group stood quite jolly in our fifth wine shop. Our zeal for progress had been slowed by foresight, not to mention the necessity to maintain our senses. At that stage we were only mildly buzzed. Each of the small glasses we had downed over a couple of hours contained roughly two ounces of wine, or perhaps a bit more, so our total consumption was only about 10-12 ounces of wine, its absorption being modestly delayed by handfuls of macerated peanut particles.

At this juncture our local hosts unexpectedly begged off, explaining they were due for work early in the morning, but urging us to continue our celebration by visiting a cabaret. They recommending a popular one and provided directions to it.

We sent them off with our thanks and enthusiastically made our way to the swanky place they had recommended. We easily caught a table, for we were among the earliest arrivals. The lighting was dim, the waiters in tuxedos, the music with steady beat. After we were seated, Alvaro suggested we try a favorite libation of his. We placed the order. As we checked out our surroundings, Pedro asked our waiter to take a photo.

 

Left to right we are: Pedro, Bruce, Ken, and Alvaro, newly arrived at the cabaret

 

Our drinks arrived, we clinked glasses in honor of our friendship. One instant later, smiling girls appeared at our table, happy Spanish in their voices. I said, “Good evening,” and one of the girls said “Goood eev-neeng,” and plunked herself on my lap, squirming a bit as she settled in. I took her little quivers as a sign she was quite excited about practicing her English. Within moments a fat bottle of cold bubbly appeared. How nice of them! I thought. I took the bottle to be Champagne, but it likely was a local cava. Glasses were filled. Toasts followed.

I can’t swear how many B-girls were actually at our table, they kept flitting from lap to lap, squirming enthusiastically, but the number three shimmers in memory. They had this funny habit of stirring their drinks with their fingers, swirling vigorously so that bubbles erupted and most of the precious liquid gushed out onto the table. I thought it a horrible waste but was having too much fun to object. And I knew the floor show was about to begin.

Intermission

Whew! I meant to finish this story here, but this is getting long and the gurus of blogging warn against wearing out your readers. Most suggest that something like 750 words work best for a single post. I’m now nearly at 1,000, and I still have more crucial events to cover, so I’ll stop here and let us catch our breath. Admittedly, I’m putting off telling of my time in jail, but I don’t want any of you to sleep through that episode. I’ll reveal all in a post within the next few days. Cross my heart!

In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, please sign up to receive an email notification each time I post something new. That way you’ll be among the first to see me behind bars. I’ve checked out the process by entering my own email address, and it works great. Having said that, I know that a good number of you have tried to sign up but somehow didn’t receive the confirmatory email necessary to click on to activate the process. Then, when you tried again, you got a message telling you to return the non-existent email sent the first time (but I think a plan B was suggested). Bummer!!! I’m looking into that.

By the time our train stopped at the border between Portugal and Spain to be checked by customs officers (a hassle no longer required when traveling between countries of the European Union), Bruce and I had learned a bit about Pedro and Alvaro, the two young men we had met at the Lisbon train station. Pedro was soon to enter medical school, and Alvaro was studying another field, I think business, or perhaps international relations. As our train began moving again and picking up speed, we four continued our enthusiastic blabber, speculating on what we might do in Madrid, swapping ideas, telling jokes, having no notion that trouble lay ahead.

Our new friends were better prepared for their stay than we were. They had made reservations in a boarding house, whereas Bruce and I were traveling wild, hoping to find a centrally located hotel with a room available. When we mentioned this, Pedro suggested there might be a room available for us in their boarding house, which he said was located close to the train station, and quite inexpensive. That sounded good to us.

We four were behaving like old friends by the time we reached Madrid. Pedro, who had better English than Alvaro, translated signs for us as we walked out of the train station and onto a broad street toward the boarding house, which was only minutes away. Luckily, the proprietor told us, he did have a double room available for, as he called us, Pedro and Alvaro’s friends. The price he quoted was so low that I did an fast estimate and quickly rechecked my math, thinking the rate could not be so unbelievably cheap. But it was. For our room and two meals daily, Bruce and I would pay the equivalent of $1.25. (Taking into account that the 2021 dollar is worth only about 10% of its 1953 value, our cost in today’s dollars would be $12.50 per day; still quite a bargain, wouldn’t you say?)

Our room was clean, the beds comfortable, and the food just what we needed. Good and plentiful! For breakfast we were provided mainly baked goods such as baguettes spread with olive oil and other toppings, or croissants, along with coffee and juices. Lunch was the big meal of the day. It started late by our standards, about mid-afternoon. We boarders, more than a dozen of us, gathered at a long table and ate family style through a number of courses, the second being either fish, chicken, pork, or beef. The entire meal was an experience. Never before nor after have I consumed midday meals in such a leisurely and convivial manner, each being a languid episode marked by savoring, listening, swallowing, smiling, observing, and occasionally talking, and spanning two or more hours every day.

It was during these meals that I learned to eat a banana Spanish style. Bananas were among the selections available for dessert, and on the first day I was about to pick mine up and peel it when I saw others lay their fruit across their plates and pick up their knives and forks in typical European style, fork in left hand, knife in right. Stabilizing their banana with their fork, they slit its peel lengthwise and pushed its edges back to expose the full length of the fruit. Then they stuck their forks into the left tip of their bananas and neatly sliced off bite-sized morsels before left-handing them into their mouths. This sequence was repeated for the life of each banana, diners snipping off their delicate bites until only peels remained.

This trick was a cinch for me to pick up because I had eaten that way since childhood. When I was very young I constantly transferred my fork while eating, moving it from my left hand to right and back again, eating ambidextrously. One day my father, somehow exasperated by all this switching, told me with some emphasis, “Stop moving your fork from hand to hand.” Being suitably obedient at that tender age, I complied, my fork at that moment located in my left hand. From that time forward I have consistently curled my left fingers around forks, freeing my right hand for knife work. Only when I arrived in Europe at age 20 did I discover that an entire continent had copied my manner of eating.

On our second full day in Madrid, we four invaded the Prado museum, a fabulous attraction with a huge collection of Spanish paintings, these combined with a good inventory of works of other famed artists. As we wandered through the rooms, I was wowed by works by Rubens, Raphael, Durer, Titian, and Rembrandt, among others. But the painting that struck me with the greatest force was none of these. Nor was it notable for elegant brush strokes, or other forms of artistic prettiness; it just froze my blood. It was Goya’s The Third of May 1808 that held my attention like no other in that museum. In that huge canvas (it is something like nine feet tall and eleven wide) Goya depicts Napoleon’s soldiers executing Spanish patriots who had rebelled against the French occupation just one day earlier, a huge lamp lighting the bloody scene. Its impact on me was enormous, a picture of killing in cold blood.

I downloaded an image of the painting from www.museodelprado.es to show it here. Even now it grabs my attention.

Goya painted a companion canvas, The Second of May 1808, which illustrates the reason for the executions shown above; this image depicting Spaniards rioting in Madrid and being attacked by Mamelukes of the French Imperial Guard. It is a painting of equal size to the one above, with perhaps even more carnage, but for me it wields less power, maybe because its savagery is more balanced, both Spaniards and Guardsmen are slaughtering and being slaughtered, their deaths not as one-sided as in the execution scene where the firing squad massacres unarmed men. Should you be interested, you can find this second work at the above website.

This post is getting a bit long, so rather than wear you out, I’ll stop here and continue our Madrid adventures next time, finally confessing my arrest, and subsequent incarceration, in that fine city.

The Iberian Peninsula is a vague corner of Europe for me. I’ve traveled there only twice, my trips decades apart. On the last one I jetted to Madrid and caught a high-speed train to Seville where I had been invited to participate in a conference on hypertension. The organizers had booked me in a room going for the equivalent of nearly $500 per night, and I was eager to inspect the luxury they were providing for me. When my taxi pulled up in front of a nondescript building with a faded hotel sign on one corner, I told him it must be the wrong place, but he insisted it was the address I’d given him. How correct he was!

The world fair, Expo 92, was in full swing at that time, and lodging costs in Seville had soared through the clouds. My room and bath turned out to be large and serviceable, but I could detect not one smidgen of opulence. After the conference ended, as a good tourist I spent a day on the Expo grounds and had my pocket picked (the police later found my wallet, cash absent but all else intact). On the following day, still troubled with a twinge of traveler’s remorse, I high-speeded back to Madrid and boarded a plane for Munich where I was living at the time.

 That brief trip was completely different from my first look at the region, which had unfolded nearly forty years earlier. That one also began from Germany and was planned not long after my weather unit had transferred from Landsberg to Ramstein, an American Air Force base near Kaiserslautern. It was early fall, the air was cooling, and friend Bruce and I, yearning for warmer climes, were on alert for any military aircraft soon to head south. We found one scheduled to head for Portugal in about five weeks, thus giving us plenty to time to have our furlough orders cut. Here’s what part of my orders said, in typical Air Force speak:

 A/1C Kenneth L Goetz . . .31^st Wea Sq, is granted twenty (20) days ord lv of absence eff o/a 6 Nov 53 for the purpose of visiting US and French Zones of Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, and Austria. Reservations and visas where nec w/b obtained by the indiv. Travel via US mil acft on a space aval non-revenue basis auth.

Two points of explanation: 1) The last sentence authorized the travel perk I mentioned in earlier posts, namely that I could fly free to my destination, which in this case was Lisbon. 2) Although Bruce and I planned to travel by train from Lisbon to Madrid, and then on to Barcelona, we weren’t yet sure what rail path we would take from there back to our base, so Switzerland and Austria were added just in case our train travels wandered a bit eastward from our more direct path back to Germany through France.

On the appointed day, Bruce and I each lugged a suitcase aboard a C-47, the workhorse of Air Force transportation then, and settled in for our flight to Lisbon. The C-47 was the military version of the Douglas DC-3 commercial version, but don’t envision the C-47 as having soft reclining seats. What it did have, on each side of the cargo bay, was a row of metal seats, about14 per side. As I remember, each “seat” was essentially a concavity shaped for you to plunk your rear into. And you couldn’t lean back because the wall of the fuselage was right behind you, and it curled inward as it rose, so you tended to lean forward as you flew. Were there any windows to look out of? Some C-47s had a few portholes, some didn’t. Did I ever complain about these little details? Not once! Being young and flying free was a beautiful thing.

C-47s were driven by two husky propellers that enabled the planes to cruise along at about 160 mph, so our flight to Lisbon stretching over 1,100 miles, probably took about seven hours, dismally long when compared with today’s jet schedules, but for Bruce and me, the only passengers on that flight, our air time tingled with anticipation, not boredom, and the hours flew by.

The Hollywood movie, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, had come out a year before our visit to Lisbon, and Bruce, being a good Catholic, was hot to visit the site. We had learned Fatima lies north of Lisbon, a drive of about 80 miles, so on our second day in Portugal, we found a car and driver and negotiated a fine cheap fare. This was before credit cards were in vogue, so before leaving our base we had purchased plenty of American Express travelers cheques in dollar denominations, these being easily exchangeable for the appropriate foreign currencies as we moved from one country to another. Unlike today, the U.S. dollar was a mighty beast at the time, and we were able to exchange each dollar for about 170 Portuguese escudos, a rate making our expenses in that country amazingly inexpensive. We didn’t throw our money away, but we happily splurged. Free flights and the powerful dollar allowed us to travel in style!

To nourish us on our excursion to Fatima, we loaded up on fruit and sandwich ingredients from a small grocery and had all packed into a large paper sack. Our driver was a serious fellow who spoke no English, and we of course no Portuguese, so sign language carried the day. As we made our way steadily northward, Bruce and I put together sandwiches in the back, downed non-alcoholic bottled drinks, and marveled at the unfamiliar terrain. The passing groves of olives caught our attention early, but soon became commonplace. We urged our driver to sample our tasty snacks, wanting him to enjoy what we had carefully selected, but he shook his head vigorously and indicated it would be illegal for him to eat or drink while driving.

Fatima had its charm. Some places were familiar and brought back to me scenes from the film, but the story of the miracle told by local guides was more complicated than the movie’s version, at times being noticeably inconsistent with it, a conflict that confused the entire matter for me. Despite all this, the visitors we spoke with, coming from several countries, were clearly in awe of the surroundings. Most importantly, the entire day formed itself into a perfect motor trip.  Bruce and I filled it with endless energy as we bounced through the hours, our attitudes lofty and quite worldly, and all lasting through our return journey. Our careful driver steered us safely back to Lisbon, dropped us off at our hotel by late afternoon, and drove off smiling with his parting tip.

Nearly everyone can recall certain incidents that abruptly jerked their lives onto totally unexpected paths. Bruce and I had one of those moments as we were leaving Lisbon. We had taxied to the train station, bought our rail tickets to Madrid, exchanged our remaining escudos for Spanish pesetas, found the appropriate track for our departure, and were idly watching as clusters of fellow passengers gathered around us. Suddenly an abrupt chorus of loudspeakers blasted our ears with what sounded like an urgent message. The crowd around us muttered, picked up their luggage, and drifted away, leaving Bruce and me gaping at each other.

As we watched the exodus, two young men of about our age noticed our hesitancy and came back to ask, in English, if we understood that the train to Madrid had been moved to a different track, a useful bit of news and a happenstance that reshaped our immediate future. For at that instant Pedro and Alvaro became our travel companions. We four found adjacent coach seats and became acquainted as we sped into Spain, Bruce and I having no inkling of the marvelous exploits that lay ahead with our new friends. Without them, we surely could never have found such an insanely inexpensive boarding house for our stay. Nor would we have explored Madrid, day and night, with the uninhibited gusto we managed with our new companions. And, had we not been with them, we certainly would never have been locked into a Spanish hoosegow. I’ll tell of our sudden arrest, and other Madrid adventures, soon.

As I mentioned here earlier, my Air Force assignment in Germany provided plenty of time for me to breeze around Europe. And, like all airmen of any rank, I had a precious perk, a sweet plum that allowed me to fly free on military aircraft throughout Europe. At the time, C-47 cargo planes crisscrossed the continent, transporting equipment between major cities, or at times merely flying from here to there for training purposes. To nab a free ride, I would get permission to travel from my appropriate officer, get orders printed, board the plane, and zip off to wherever.

We weather guys had an inside track to the flight schedules. Our squadron operated in a brick building next to the runways of the airbase, and pilots routinely checked prevailing weather conditions with us before taking off. During those weather briefings, we often learned of later scheduled flights, so we usually were the first to know where flights would be going, and when.

On my first free flight, I soared over the Alps to Rome. Two friends and I had arranged to spend a brief Christmas holiday in Italy. After landing, we found beds in a small pensione, dropped off our duffles, and made a beeline to our first attraction, the Colosseum. It was an adventure that indicated how much my life had changed. For my first nineteen years I had been corralled within the borders of the Dakotas, never getting within a hundred miles of the region’s most popular tourist attraction, Mount Rushmore. And then suddenly poof, here I was at twenty, living in Europe and approaching a Roman structure built not long after the birth of Christ.

The crumbled Colosseum, with less than half of the original amphitheater still standing, was impressive in its faded grandeur, even more so when we walked inside to where the action had been. I gawked around, trying to imagine the place when it had been whole, when it had been packed with Romans cheering lustily as they watched men being battered to death, their fate sealed on the ground where we stood. The area was big enough to absorb a flood of blood. It looked to be about two football fields long and not quite as wide, plenty of space for all the mayhem. I’d read that roughly a thousand humans were killed there each year. So, considering the Colosseum was used for nearly four centuries, it seemed likely that some 400,000 lives had been rubbed out on the ground where I stood. It gave me a creepy feeling.

We flew to the city on December 24th, and, being fully aware of the admonition, when in Rome . . ., we followed a throng late that evening to a midnight mass at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. It was the first Catholic mass I ever attended, and the opulent ritual had me scratching my head as it unfolded. Nevertheless, the mysterious goings on intrigued me, and I thought the performance provided a spectacular ending to my Christmas Eve.

My seasonal spirits were sorely tested as we Americans squeezed our way out and descended the crowded stairs. Nearing street level, we were approached by three signorinas who invited us to join them for more earthy celebrations. I’m not sure precisely what it was, perhaps the jarring change in tone, coming as it did so abruptly on the fringe of that holy cathedral, or maybe it was nothing more than a touch of cautious prudery. Whatever the reasons, we spurned their offer.

After a quiet night, we awoke to a warm Christmas morning and took our planned train ride to Naples, going on from there to Pompeii. We arrived shortly before noon and hired a guide to take us through parts of that excavated city. When the guide explained that Vesuvius had erupted and buried Pompeii in 79 A.D., that date meshed with information I’d learned on the previous day, namely that the Roman Colosseum had been completed at almost exactly the same time. Wow! In just two days I had explored a couple of ancient ruins, each illustrating how folks had lived nearly two thousand years earlier. What a great way to absorb history! That may have been when the first smidgen of worldliness seeped through my skin.

After leaving Pompeii, we stopped in Naples for a brief peek at the city before returning to Rome. While in Naples, I purchased a souvenir, my temptation being strong.  “Pssst, hey you wannna buy gun?” My friends weren’t interested, but I was curious and asked to see what the man had to offer. He pulled out a small box and opened it. Inside lay a pistol, a classy little Beretta. I took a close look. I liked its heft, its style. It was brand new, and likely stolen I thought, either from the factory or a gun shop. The price was surprisingly low, really cheap. So I pulled out some cash and gave him the money without dickering. I don’t remember what I paid for it, nor do I remember what currency I used, but it definitely was a bargain, and, I knew, a keeper.

I came across that little jewel recently. It had been hiding in a drawer, and I pulled it out for a closer look. The pistol has had little use. I’ve rarely shot it. No more than twenty bullets have ever been fired through its 3 ½ inch barrel, and it looks as sharp as the day I bought it. I looked closely at its markings. It’s a Beretta Model 950 B, chambered for .22 caliber shorts, serial number 648402.

As I held my little souvenir, it began to demonstrate its wizardry by reminding me of that distant day in Naples when I bought it. The little guy didn’t stop there. It dusted off other happenings from my first trip to Italy, and threw into view the incidents I’ve described here. By doing that, I think, my little Beretta demonstrated that it’s not only a fine pistol, but a fine souvenir as well. It easily accomplished what the best souvenirs do. It brought back memories of the time when it was acquired. I can’t ask for more than that.