Caricature of a Terrorist

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We ate at a long, linen covered table in a restaurant, each of us from different parts of the globe, communicating with gestures, facial expressions and bits of broken Italian.

A Dutch girl on my left asked, “You draw?”

“Si,” I said. “Caricatura.”

I pulled out a ball point pen, and used a blank page in my Italian vocabulary notebook to draw a quick profile of the Norwegian man across the table.

An Austrian girl on my right pointed at the drawing and laughed. “Du macht spass,” she said, reverting to her native German language by mistake. We were celebrating our graduation from an Italian immersion class for beginners, and we were supposed to speak Italian only.

Each student had enrolled in this crash course for different reasons. One German girl needed Italian for her opera career. A Swiss lady hoped her knowledge of Italian would propel her to a better job. An English academic thought Italian would aid her study of medieval literature. I needed Italian to enroll in an art restoration school.

Chianti wine loosened our stumbling tongues and our reserve. As the celebration wound to a close, we called for a song from Monika, the German opera student. She treated us with a short, sweet aria. Her mother and uncle, who had traveled to Italy for her graduation, beamed as she sang and applauded wildly when she finished.

Monika pointed to her uncle. “This person, Uncle Juergen,” she said in her best elementary Italian, “paid for my school.” We applauded him, too. Our private language school in the medieval heart of Florence, Italy, was not cheap.

Uncle Juergen bowed his head in acknowledgement of our applause. With his dark hair, chiseled face and athletic build, he looked young, mid thirties perhaps, too young to be Monika’s uncle.

“He is very good looking,” a Danish girl whispered to a Spanish girl.

“He is a pilot too,” the Spanish girl whispered back, and rubbed her thumb against the tips of her fingers.

I drew Monika’s uncle from afar, scratched it out, and tried again. After three failed drawings I gave up. He was either too far away or too good looking. Maybe I drank too much wine.

Next week many of us returned for the intermediate course. For several hours every morning we submerged ourselves again in the Italian language.

After class I worked afternoons as an apprentice restorer in a small shop hidden in an alley. The owners of the shop were professional restorers from one of the city’s many state-run museums. I restored antiques under their guidance, and hoped they would recommend me to a restoration school.

In the evenings I drew caricatures at an open-air art market on a historic bridge called Ponte Vecchio. Jewelry shops lined each side of this pedestrian thoroughfare across the river Arno. When the stores closed for dinner, portraitists, landscape artists, and print makers displayed their works before shuttered shops, while beaders, leather toolers, and souvenir hawkers spread their wares on blankets in the middle of the bridge. I would arrive at sunset, stake out a good spot with good light, unfold my display, hang it on a tripod, open my camping stools, and signal to strolling tourists and Italians that they possessed interesting faces.

ISCA members who accept invitations to work abroad return home with broadened minds. The best way to experience another culture, another way of thinking, is to live inside it. Even small things, like drawing horns and a tail on a badly behaved kid, which usually makes American parents howl with laughter, means something different to different cultures.

A couple sat for a caricature one evening at the Ponte Vecchio artisan market. She, in her thirties, slim, much younger than him, his trophy wife. She winked at me. He frowned. I drew her in a bikini, enticing, inviting. I drew him frowning, pointed nose, long chin. I added horns to his bald head.

“What’s this?” He pointed at the horns and blushed. His trophy wife blushed, too.

“You look devilish,” I answered.

Later an Italian friend explained that a man grows horns when his wife is unfaithful.

Ponte Vecchio’s nightly art market is more accurately described as a black market. None of the artisans had licenses, none collected or paid taxes, and most, like me, were foreigners who were not allowed to work or earn money. If the police caught you, as they did sometimes, they immediately deported you. I always kept my “Permesso di Soggiorno,” my official residence permit, in my back pocket. This document insured the police would scold me, but not arrest me, for working in the black market.

At that time, the police did little against this underground economy because it was everywhere. Even reputable government employees, like my teachers at the restoration shop, participated in the underground economy. The government cut its employees’ hours in order to reduce its budget. Therefore state employees like museum art restorers received smaller paychecks. The government forbade its employees from working second jobs in an effort to reduce unemployment. State employees who worked outside their government jobs did so in secret without licenses and collected no taxes. The restorers who took me as their apprentice worked mornings in the state museum legally and afternoons in their clandestine shop illegally.

I rented a bed in a cheap hotel. My room contained three beds and the hotel owner rented the other two beds to foreign tourists who stayed a few days before traveling to their next destination. If they spoke English, I gave them a rundown of Florentine museums, churches, palaces and restaurants. One night two frowning Austrians dropped their rucksacks on the extra beds. They spoke English much better than I spoke Italian or German.

“What you work?” the big Austrian asked. His thick, dark beard hid half his face and his long, uncombed hair covered most of the rest.

“I do caricatures,” I said, “on the street, not really legal – sort of underground. But not tonight. Looks like rain. Weather’s changing.”

“Underground,” said the smaller Austrian. His thick, blond mustache obscured his mouth. He parted his dirty blond hair down the middle of his high forehead and hooked the strands behind his ears. “You like weathermen?” he asked.

Thunder rolled outside. I glanced out the window at dark clouds. When I was a child, my parents gave me a toy weather station. I measured rainfall, wind speed and learned about air currents around high and low pressure systems. “Yes, I like weathermen,” I answered.

The Austrians spoke a few hushed German words to each other. The blond one turned and said to me, “We come to make partners. Come eat with us.”

“I know lots of places to eat,” I offered.

“No,” said the blond Austrian. “I know a good place, safe place.”

Streetlights reflected in the wet city streets. The shower had been brief. They led me into the night, turning right, left, right, right again, wildly zigzagging around city blocks until we arrived at a restaurant behind the cathedral, a tourist restaurant where no Italian dined.

“I know better restaurants,” I said.

“No,” the dark Austrian said. “This is a good place.”

We sat at a table distant from other tourists in the half empty restaurant. The waiter, the only Italian present, groaned “non mi piace” when my new friends ordered a pasta dish for their first course and another pasta dish for their second course. I tried to explain to them the ethics of Italian dining, that ordering successive pasta dishes instead of a first course, pasta, and then a second course, meat and vegetable, was considered crude.

My dark friend cut me off. “We care not.”

My blond friend leaned over and whispered, “We like weathermen, too. We care not about food traditions.”

I didn’t understand the connection between ordering food and weather forecasting.

“We will free the people from old ideas with a new order,” the blond one explained. “We come to find partners. We meet tomorrow at the university. We make plans like your weathermen.”

The grumpy waiter, the other tourists, everything else in the restaurant faded as my focus narrowed on the two Austrians across the table. They were not talking about the cheerful people on television that predict the weather. They meant an American terrorist group called “The Weathermen” that had bombed army recruitment centers, police stations and the Pentagon.

Radical leftist talk was common at that time in Italy, especially among young people. Occasionally I overheard older men, who met regularly at twilight in the town squares, discussing the merits of a proletariat government - perhaps making up for their fascist past. The Italian Communist Party had a sizable representation in parliament and was negotiating a power sharing agreement with the Christian Democrat Party.

“Well,” I said to the Austrians, “Things need to change.” I complained about the old order, how my restoration teachers were not allowed to work second jobs.

The waiter placed out pasta dishes before us. I was hungry.

“They must not work the second job,” said the dark Austrian. “Everyone must share the suffering.”

“But how can they pay their rent when they earn half the money?” I asked.

“There will be no money,” the blond one said. “Every one will share. You will make drawings for coffee or candy.”

I laughed and said, “I already do that.” Between bites of tortellini, I explained how a shortage of Italian coins forced merchants, including me, to give and receive pieces of hard candy as change. Rumor blamed the disappearance of coins on foreign terrorists, who hoarded the coins in an attempt to ruin Italy’s economy.

The image of terrorists sitting atop a mountain of Italian lira seemed ridiculous, but neither Austrian smiled. “We have friends in all parts of the world,” the dark one said.

The blond one nodded his agreement.

“So,” I said, “there will be no money in all parts of the world.”

“Yes.”

“And everyone will share?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we are a long way from that kind of a world.”

“No,” said the blond one. “The change will come overnight with one act of violence.”

“Violence?” I shook my head. “A society born of violence will breed more violence. You have to change people’s hearts first. Then society will change.”

The dark Austrian’s perpetual frown deepened. “That is laughable.”

Laughable? Despite my friendly banter, the Austrians had not smiled once that evening.

The blond one put down his fork and fixed his eyes on me. “The people will awake with one act of violence.”

“But there has already been violence – here in Italy - terrorist attacks on judges and factory managers. People don’t like it.”

The blond Austrian’s blue eyes turned to steel. “With the right act of terrorism, will the people awake. Those who like it not, we awake with force.”

“And what would my restoration teachers do in this new society? What if people don’t share enough? What if they had to work a second job?”

“That will not be permitted.”

“But that’s no different from what they have now.”

The blond one’s eyes cut into me. “It will be different because we will not ignore their crime.”

“We are serious,” said the dark one.

The waiter brought the Austrians their second course, another pasta. I received my second course; veal and spinach. But my appetite had vanished.

I wanted to change the subject. “Let me draw you a caricature,” I said, and whipped out a pen and my vocabulary notebook. I scribbled the dark Austrian’s hair on paper, an easy head to draw, I thought, because his head looked like a lint ball under my bed. His frown changed to a sneer. I glanced at the blond Austrian just long enough to feel his steel eyes slice through my nerves.

“Stop,” said the dark one.

“No pictures,” the blond one said.

I stopped scratching ink onto paper and studied what I had drawn. Ink lines twisted around the dark Austrian’s frown, a shaggy dog head if a dog could sneer, but I had not filled in two spaces on his forehead. Those two spaces looked like …

“Horns,” I gasped.

My pen went back to work, scribbling over the horns. “Stop drawing,” hissed the dark Austrian.

I tore the paper out of its notebook and crumpled it. The dark Austrian held out his hand and I gave him the drawing. He stuffed the paper wad into a pocket without looking at it. Only then did I realize these Austrians, unlike most tourists, carried no cameras, took no pictures.

We left the restaurant in a misting rain. I knew a straight route back to the hotel but the Austrians insisted on zigzagging. They said nothing more to me. The next day they were gone before I awoke and I never saw them again.

These Austrians were not like the superficial leftists I encountered nearly every day in Florence. Were they sympathizers with The Red Army Faction, a German terrorist group who robbed, kidnapped and killed with weapons said to be supplied by communist Czechoslovakia? Were they meeting sympathizers of the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist group who committed similar crimes with weapons said to be supplied by the Palestinian Liberation Organization?

What would the police do to me, an illegal alien, if I told them I might have had dinner with terrorists, I might have drawn a caricature of a terrorist? If the police believed me after investigating my activities, they would jail me. If they did not believe me, they would deport me despite my precious Permesso di Soggiorno.

My frenetic schedule–Italian school in the mornings, the restoration shop in afternoons and the artisan market at nights–pushed any questions about that dinner to the back of my mind.

A short time later, a terrorist attack occurred that rivaled the attack at the Munich Olympic Games a few years earlier. One bright, sunny morning, in a quiet, upscale neighborhood in the middle of West Germany, the president of the German Employers Association was kidnapped in an ambush that killed all his bodyguards. The kidnappers demanded a ransom and the release of jailed German terrorists. Shortly thereafter, hijackers took over a German airliner full of tourists and repeated the same demands. The plane landed first in Italy and then hopped around different Middle Eastern airports. Radio and television reported the airplane’s odyssey every hour for days. No ransom was paid and no jailed terrorist was freed. Finally at the end of the fourth day, a German commando unit stormed the plane at Mogadishu’s airport. Three of the four hijackers were killed and all the hostages were saved except one - the German pilot. Two days earlier in Yemen, the terrorists executed the pilot as a way of saying, “We are serious.” The President of the German Employers Association was also murdered. Police found his body in a German forest. Nearly all jailed German terrorists died in prison the night after the hijacking ended. The official explanation for the death of the inmates, each in solitary confinement inside Germany’s most secure prison, was “mass suicide.”

A short time after these events, one of my fellow language students stopped me in the street. “You remember Monika?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “She was the opera student.”

“And her uncle?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” I said. “All the girls loved him. He paid for Monika’s school.”

He looked down and said, “Her uncle was on that hijacked plane.”

“Is he ok?” I asked.

“He was the pilot.”

Deano Minton completed a Masters in Art History, studying Michelangelo, Leonardo, and other Ninja Turtles. While working in Europe with art restoration, he fell into caricatures. Deano currently draws sunburned tourists in Florida, and writes in his spare time. His novel, “The Universal Essence,” was published in 2010.
www.cartoonsbydeano.com
www.theuniversalessence.com

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