The Pillars of Hercules

The shores of the Mediterranean, so divided in certain matters, are united in their fear of the evil eye. Compliment a Frenchman and he blows lightly, to ward off the curse. If someone says, “What a lovely baby!” to almost any Italian parent in the presence of their child, the parent will immediately (and covertly) prong their fingers at the speaker, as a way of fending off evil spirits. Or they might spit three times at the suspected jettatore as soon as the person’s back is turned. In any case, the parent kisses the baby when he or she suspects it of an evil eye being projected on the child. Riccardo said that anyone who compliments a baby without adding “God bless you” (Dio ti benedica, or in dialect Di’ bendet) is probably wishing evil upon the child.

Some chants worked in Italy, I was told. Fearing the eye, you muttered the words for the three blackest things in the world: “Ink! Black mask! And the buttocks of a female slave!” (Inga! Mascaro!? natiche di schiava!) or simply, “Away! Tuna eggs in France! Let bad luck go to sea!”

Maltese fishing boats have the horned hands painted on the bow to deflect evil. Small replicas of finger horns were worn, or kept on key chains. Crusaders—the Knights of St. John—had sculpted eyes in the watchtowers in Valletta as part of the harbor defenses. In Greece, not priests but people with blue eyes are dangerous as bringers of the evil eye, and it is perhaps significant that Greeks think of Turks as being blue-eyed people, a whole nation of evil eyeballs ablaze. The remedy is a glass blue eye that Greeks use as a pendant. In Turkey (where this remedy originates) the glass blue eye can attain the size of a dinner plate, and the glass eye, along with other necessities such as matches and cooking oil, is sold in every kiosk and shop. It is really a fish eye, and plucking out a fish’s eye and stepping on it is efficacious counter-magic in the eastern Mediterranean.

But I should not think of Italians as people who walked around worrying about the evil eye, Riccardo said. Did I know what a gobbo was? Yes, I said, a hunchback.

A gobbo got his hump by having been the victim of the evil eye, in infancy. But it also meant that he was the repository of counter-magic.

“So it is good luck to touch the hump of a hunchbacked man,” he said. “And if the hump is on a dwarf, that’s even better. Some people go about with a hunchback all the time. Gamblers, for example.”

The modern version of Pompeii is probably the nearby town of Positano, a small harbor shared unequally by the idle rich and the landladies and the fishermen. If Positano were to be buried in volcanic ash today, future generations would understand as much about our wealth and our pleasures and the prosaic businesses such as bread-making and ironmongery as Pompeii taught us. They might not find a brothel, but they would find luxury hotels, the San Pietro and Le Sirenuse. The Roman author and admiral Pliny the Elder died in the Pompeii disaster; a Positano disaster could gobble up the film director Franco Zeffirelli, who lives in a villa there. It was perhaps this coast’s reputation for wickedness that induced Tennessee Williams to make his decadent Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer begin to go to pieces in Amalfi, before he was finally eaten by cannibalistic boys in another Mediterranean resort, the mythical Cabeza del Lobo.

The Seabourn was not leaving until late, and so I paid a Sorrentino driver eighty dollars to take me to Positano. This was my expansive Seabourn mood: I would never have paid that money when I was jogging along on trains and ferries.

Along the Amalfi drive, winding around the cliffs and slopes of this steep coast—much too steep for there to be a beach anywhere near here—I told the driver my fantasy of Positano being buried in ash. The driver’s name was Nello, and he was animated by the idea.

“It could happen,” Nello said, and began to reminisce about the last eruption.

It was in 1944, he was twelve. “My madda say, ‘Hashes!’ ”

Nello insisted on speaking English. He claimed he wanted practice. But that was another thing about travel in a luxurious way: the more money you had, the more regal your progress, the greater the effort local people made to ingratiate themselves and speak English. I had not known that money helped you off the linguistic hook.

“Vesuvio wassa making noise and zmoke. The hashes wassa flying. Not leetle hashes but ayvie, like theese,” and he weighed his hands to show me how heavy they were. “We has hambrella. Bat. The weend blows hashes on de roof and—piff—it barns.

“‘Clean de roofs!’ my madda say.”

“It sounds terrible,” I said.

“It wassa dark for two day. No san. Hashes!”

And it was certain to erupt any minute, Nello said. The volcano was long overdue.