Italian Toilets - a Short Story

Italian Toilets

Diane had come to the conclusion that Italians do not pee.

There could be no other explanation. Diane and her husband had trekked every inch of Rome in the past nine days. While they had discovered every landmark in the tour book and then some, there were hardly any bathrooms to be found. Every night, she thanked God – literally, on her knees with her hands folded over her chest – that her period hadn't started on the trip.

They became aware of the bathroom situation while waiting for their first train. The two of them sat next to their week-and-a-half's worth of luggage, frazzled from their nine-hour flight and keen to get to their bed and breakfast. The station had a door with a bathroom sign, but inside was nothing but a mountain of used toilet paper and a hole. On each side there were painted footprints to show users where to place their feet in case they didn't understand how to squat over a hole.

Emmett was convinced they had discovered their first bidet. He was fascinated by bidets, and every time he saw a European drain or faucet he didn't understand, he declared that he had found one. In the train station, he was nervous that at any second, a stream of water would shoot out of the ground.

That was the last public toilet they would see for three days.

Where the gypsies peed was no mystery. The scent of urine was in every alley corner and on every subway wall. Once Diane and Emmett saw a little gypsy kid run out of a train, drop his drawers, and pee with gusto all over a bench. But where the Italians urinated, Diane had no clue.

Eventually, they learned the Toilet Secret that was known by every American tourist: McDonalds. The fast-food chain was speckled all over Rome, with misspelled signs like "laught with friends" and soda more expensive than wine, and they had free bathrooms.

The bathrooms at McDonalds weren't much better than the one at the train station. In the worst one, a trash can as high as her knee was piled with garbage up to her chest. Either someone had skinned a cat in there, or other female tourists were not as fortunate in the timing of their menstruations.

Still, McDonald's bathrooms were better than an alley. Or a bench.

Diane and Emmett finished a fantastic meal. He'd had margarita pizza, just as he'd had every night for the past nine days, while she tried the chicken carbonara pasta. He took a picture of her suspending a forkful of noodles over her mouth with the night lights of the coliseum glittering in the background.

"Perfect," he said.

Diane was puzzling over the race of their waiter. He had the same dark skin as the hawkers, beggars, and panhandlers, and she couldn't imagine where they all came from.

The city was infested with panhandlers who looked just like the waiter. Other tourists told her horrible stories (that were also slightly amusing) of being tricked and robbed by ingenious methods. They wove bracelets around people's wrists without their permission and then acted furious when the tourists refused to pay for them. They sliced purse straps with knives and ran off with them, too. It was a well-known fact that they threw babies. A beggar would walk right up to a tourist, toss a baby in the air, and steal his wallet while the tourist scrambled to catch the child before its skull broke open on the cobblestones.

While none of that had happened to Diane and Emmett, she was sick of waving away swarms of beggars who coerced her for change and hawkers who coerced her to buy junk. She harbored no ill will toward their race – how could she, when she didn't even know what it was? – but when she and her husband saw someone with that tell-tale coloring, they turned the other way.

At the restaurant, Diane asked her waiter if she could please use their bathroom.

The waiter gave her an incredulous look. Customers did not use restaurant bathrooms in Rome, apparently. He hemmed and hawed about it, but she couldn't exactly be shamed into no longer needing to pee, so she insisted. Finally, the waiter gestured for her to follow him.