The Pillars of Hercules

“In America we would call that a small dick.” Out of delicacy I said this in Italian, using the word cazzo, enunciating it—not grunting catz, the way I heard Italians doing in Boston when I was growing up.

“That word is a little vulgar,” Riccardo said in Italian.

“What word would you use?”

“‘Dick,” he said. Cazzo. “But I don’t raise my voice, eh?”

James Joyce believed that Italians were obsessed with their private parts. “When I walk into the bank in the morning,” he wrote, “I wait for someone to announce something about his cazzo, culo, or coglioni. This usually happens before quarter to nine.”

The Pompeii brothel—a so-called Lupenare, a house of the she-wolf—was filled with shuffling Japanese, young and old, men and women, giggling at the lurid frescoes depicting coitus, marveling at the pallets of stone—the shelves on which the act of love was performed; snapping pictures of the cubicles.

“Now I will show you the house of the bachelor brothers,” Riccardo said. “They lived a bisexual life. We know this from frescoes and statues.”

One of the statues of Priapus, a small figure clasping a torpedo between his thighs, was in a side room. Thirty Japanese filed past it. I waited at the exit listening to the flashbulbs and the shrieks and giggles of the women, who emerged with their hands over their mouths, because an open mouth is considered rude in Japan. The Japanese men were silent, and they looked rueful as they shuffled out of the room. Not very long ago, women tourists were forbidden to enter that room.

In an unvisited corner of the same house there was a fresco showing the infant Hercules strangling snakes, and I thought again of the Pillars of Hercules, and how this god, the patron of human toil, was a suitable model for me in my journey.

“What do you think?” Riccardo asked me as we strolled along.

“Very interesting.”

But I was being polite. I disliked it all for being a theme park devoted to Roman dissipation—just chat and speculation, a rather unsatisfying amusement, like Epcot’s preposterous Italy-by-the-Lagoon in Orlando, Florida. In the end, all that people will remember will be the statue and fresco of Priapus showing his torpedo.

We were soon on more fertile conversational ground when I saw a priest—an American, or at least non-Italian, priest was walking past us with another group.

“Riccardo, when you see that priest,” I said, “do you think he’s a jettatore who might give you the evil eye?”

“That is a superstition you find in Sicily and south of Naples,” Riccardo said, laughing insincerely. “Not here very much.”

“Don’t some people do something when they see a priest?”

“You scratch your—somethings—and you make a cornuto if you see someone with the evil eye. A priest, maybe.”

“What do you do?”

“I don’t worry much, except—”

He was hesitating. I said, “Yes?”

“Nuns,” he said with disgust. “I hate to look at them. Their faces can be frightening, especially the ones with a black cloth over their heads.”

“What do you do when you see them?”

“I have a special thing that I do,” he said. He winked at me, but he would not say what his precaution was against the evil eye of a black-shawled nun.

Whatever Riccardo devised in the way of counter-magic was something in the folklore of Italian superstition that had been proven effective against the evil eye. The belief was ancient and so were the remedies. Touching iron was recommended—keys, nails, a horseshoe, the hinge of a door—because iron was associated with magnetism, to absorb the malevolent power. If no iron was immediately available, a man secretively grasped his goolies. Garlic worked—some people carried a few cloves in their pocket. Some people wore garlic on a string, or a piece of onion, or a saint’s picture, or a necklace of pigs’ teeth. They might carry a goat’s horn, or a plastic imitation. Some colors repelled the evil eye: blue in the north of Italy, red in the south. Was there a jettatore standing on the road making a malocchio on your house? Sprinkling water sometimes helped. Even better, pissing on the spot where the evildoer stood, because urine also acts as counter-magic.

Thin people, priests, nuns, Gypsies were all potentially dangerous jettatori, suspected of possessing the evil eye. The jettatore was not to be confused with the Sicilian strega, a witch but a useful—probably indispensable—woman, who (observed by both Norman Lewis and the Sicilian reformer Danilo Dolci) “arranges marriages, concocts potions, dabbles a little in black magic, clears up skin conditions, and casts out devils.”

The evil eye is probably rooted in envy; such fears predominated in places where people were more or less equal in their misery, where resources were scarce and there was heavy competition for them. It was also related to the struggle in such places of getting ahead without looking superior or stronger, the paradoxes of power and difference, and the fear of the unknown.