Christmas at Capri

December, Naples 1976. I was alone, staying in a pensione out by Mergellina. I was sharing a room with an Australian who asked if I wanted to go up Vesuvius with him. I looked at Vesuvius across the bay and said no because there were dark clouds swirling around the mountain and I didn’t want to get wet. He went on his own and the clouds became a storm and he was struck by lightening and didn’t come back.

Instead of climbing the volcano I agreed to buy a ticket for the boat out to Capri from a girl who was also staying in the pensione. She was called Helga and she turned up at everywhere I went. I met her first in Genoa then in Rome and now she was in Naples. After that she turned up in Igoumenitsa, Athens and finally Belgrade. I don’t know what happened to her after that.

Anyway I bought the ticket she said she couldn’t use and during the thunder storm that finished off the Australian I set out for Capri. It was a small boat carrying mostly stuff rather than people although there were a few old ladies in black there too with bundles of ….. stuff. There was a small truck with a pig tied up in the back of it, and it sat on one side of the deck with nothing to balance it on the other side.

As soon as we hit the open water with the boat sitting low and lop-sided in the water I started to panic. I concluded that this was the end of me but the old ladies looked unperturbed. The wind picked up as did the waves and we pitched and the pig squealed a bit but the ladies just moved their tongues around their toothless mouths a bit, gumming rather than on plugs of tobacco, and spitting it over the side.

The rain blew straight into my face as did spray from the sea each time we plunged down into it. Clouds came down to obscure the island we were headed for till eventually it disappeared in the grey, dismal mist. Thunder rumbled and I got uselessly angry with Helga and wished I’d gone up Vesuvius instead although I didn’t know that one of those thunder claps was a follow-on from lightening that had struck the Australian.