Tom Kando
My sisters Juliette and Madeleine and I grew up poor, in Europe. We fled from Hungary after World War Two and moved from country to country, ending up in Holland when I was fourteen.
By then, my mother was divorced and struggling to feed us and raise us by herself. Despite our poverty, she was determined to provide us with vacations and to show us Europe’s beauty. She felt that we were just as entitled to travel as rich people were.
The solution? We hitchhiked wherever we went. And did we go! Every summer, we would hitchhike to places like Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy and elsewhere.
These trips placed a heavy burden of responsibility on me. I was the oldest child and the only ‘man’ of the family. I was barely fourteen and my sisters were twelve. How could I protect them? For instance, sometimes we would get picked up by truck drivers in Germany, Italy or some other place, and they would get fresh with my mother and my sisters. Then what?
In 1956, we hitchhiked from our home in Amsterdam to the South of Italy - two thousand kilometers away! A forty-two year old mother with her three children. We carried our tent, our sleeping bags and our backpacks.
One day, we were standing on the coastal roadside outside of Viareggio in Italy, only a few feet away from the beach. We had been stuck there for several hours. The sun was setting on the Mediterranean coast, appropriately named the azure coast for its deep blue, almost purplish color. It was a warm summer afternoon with a gentle breeze blowing from the South. My mother and the three of us were taking turns at standing on the roadside and sticking out our thumbs. While two of us would be doing that, the other two could sit, read, play or have a bite.
Finally a truck stopped. It was a big, messy semi carrying tons of tomatoes, and there were two drivers alternating at the wheel. The driver’s cabin was so large that it even had a place to sleep in the back. After the men picked us up, there were six people crammed together in the driver's cabin. With people sitting on each other’s laps, it worked, although barely.
The two men were friendly. They were not too shabby, just your typical somewhat rough, working-class truck drivers doing the long haul. They were friendly the way Mediterranean people tend to be friendly, enjoying closer body space and more touching than is customary in Nordic cultures. We didn’t mind very much - until the two men became too friendly. The one who wasn’t driving started to paw all over Madeleine’s body. When she rebuffed him, he tried Juliette.
What could I do, a fifteen-year old boy weighing barely fifty kilos? Lowering my voice as best as I could, I shouted, “No! Don’t do that! Leave my sisters alone!”
The men laughed, saying things like “la bella bambina!” and one of them continued to place his hands on the girls’ bodies. My mom grabbed the man’s arm and started pulling him away from my sisters. Meanwhile, all four of us began to shout at the men, like a pack of wild dogs. I was getting ready to bite the man’s arms. All this became too much for the driver, who began to swerve and nearly collided with an oncoming truck. He then brought the truck to a screeching halt and shouted, “Mama mia! Out! All get out! Pronto!”
As he said that, he picked up our bags and tossed them onto the pavement. Fine! We all jumped out, made sure none of our belongings remained in the truck and we walked away from the vehicle as fast as we could.
After the truck took off, we looked around. We were in the middle of nowhere, on the coastal road somewhere South of Pisa. The scenery was magnificent. We were only steps away from a golden beach, and beyond that were the gentle waves of the Mediterranean. It was a warm summer evening. The beach was practically deserted. The few vendor stalls on it were shut. Seagulls were picking up the few edibles left behind by people.
We were in good spirits. We hadn’t suffered any damages. Our feathers were a bit ruffled, that’s all. Men like that, my mom knew, can be a pest but they’ll rarely hurt you. All you have to do is tell them to fuck off and they’ll leave you alone. Which is what the four of us had done, and we felt good.
“Well, kids “ mother said, “that went pretty good, don’t you think? Those bastards realized we were going to be trouble. We did all right.”
And then, becoming more serious, she continued. “Well, there is not much point trying to hitchhike anymore tonight. We’ll have to sleep on the beach. Here is as good a place as any.”
So that’s what we did. The only trouble was, we couldn’t pitch the tent in the soft sand. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky anyway, so we decided to sleep under the stars, in our sleeping bags.
When we woke up early the next morning, Juliette took a look at my face and started laughing. She said, “Oh my God! You should see yourself!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked, but I knew right away, because I could see Juliette’s face as well as she could see mine. She was pockmarked from ear to ear, barely recognizable, grotesquely covered with dozens of mosquito bites everywhere. We all were.
While we had been sleeping, the mosquitoes had enjoyed a feast at our expense.
There were many other similar inconveniences on these summer trips. Soon the mosquito bites were no more than a funny story in our family’s rich biography, as were a variety of other adventures, including nights spent sleeping on park benches, dance parties with Italian kids, meals with local farmers and other experiences we would remember and cherish.
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