[silvietta]

When I was a kid, my parents had a house in the mountains where I spent holidays and weekends. In this little village there was a small hotel whose owner, to me, was the very embodiment of a seducer…

He was around 45 or 50, about five foot three, bald, with a crooked nose… and he slept with everyone. Mostly tourists, but also women from the village which, being tiny, meant they were wives or daughters of his friends.

I’m not joking… he had a magnetic charm. He knew exactly what to say. Everyone found him likable — even the husbands.

He had five or six children from two wives. I used to hang around him because I was friends with one of his sons and had a crush on one of his daughters. I watched him with admiration as he would strike up conversations with various ladies whenever their husbands were distracted…
Every now and then someone would beat him up, but he carried on undeterred.

Because it’s easy to seduce if you’re handsome and rich… but the real champion is the one who manages it while being ugly as sin and half in debt.

In the village people whispered that his ugliness was compensated by a “super” endowment, but maybe he was simply very good at talking to women.

Actually, this story has a much more personal angle, and I’m not even sure why I’m writing it. I’m in a reckless mood today… I swear it’s all true. In fact, I’m deliberately avoiding giving too many precise details
As I was saying, when I was young we went there often: we’d leave on Saturday and come back Sunday evening. In the summer we’d spend a few weeks there just with my mother, while my father would join us on weekends and during his vacation. The hotel run by this guy also served as a restaurant, bar, newsstand, and public phone, since there were no cell phones yet, so everyone went there often.

We had rooms in a building just outside the village, about a fifteen-minute walk away.

At the time my mother was just over forty. She still is — but especially thirty
years ago — a strikingly beautiful woman: about five foot nine, dark-haired, blue-eyed, slim but very well-endowed. I assure you, I had a hell of an adolescence because of the interest my friends showed in her.

As I said, during the summer weekdays it sometimes happened that we were alone and without a car (I didn’t drive yet and my parents never got me a scooter). So my mother would walk along the only paved road leading to the village, and sometimes the hotel owner — who was only at the hotel in the evenings and otherwise drove around all day in his little 4x4 Panda — would give her, and often me too, a lift.

I’ll briefly explain how everything came out, because until then I had never suspected anything.
One day at the end of July, I think, my father was still at home. Some friends and I had organized a small hike with a packed lunch. The hotel owner’s son was coming too. I had already argued with another guy over a girl, and just after we set off we started fighting again. Things were about to escalate, so I told everyone to get lost and decided to head back.

I had said I’d return in the afternoon, but by late morning I was already back home.

I had the keys. I was about to open the door when I noticed that nearby, parked there, was our friend’s Panda. Not in plain sight — slightly hidden behind some bushes, in a strange spot.

We had rooms in a renovated farmhouse used only as a holiday home, and in those days it was just my mother and me there.
So suspicion crept in. Of course, he could simply have been at our place chatting innocently… I still hoped he had gone somewhere else, but it seemed very unlikely. So I moved away and found a spot at a distance from which I could see the front door without being seen.

More than two hours must have passed… I had convinced myself I was being stupid, that there had to be another explanation — that maybe the car had broken down, that he had left it there to go for a walk or to get into someone else’s car…

Finally, the door opened.

My mother looked outside and, seeing no one around, the hotel owner slipped out furtively, ran to his Panda, and sped off.