View source for Caricature of a Terrorist

==Article Transcript==
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.''<br>
www.cartoonsbydeano.com<br>
www.theuniversalessence.com

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