He was scarcely even a puppy, a tiny black bit of fur the size of my own small hand, just able to walk across the beach. I scooped him up and turned around, looking for his owner. There was no one behind me, just the beach restaurant where my lunch had been cooked. It had been simple grilled fish with rice and a few tomato slices. The restaurant offered salt but no pepper or hot sauce -- expensive luxuries here. Twenty feet in front of me, close to the turquoise sea, a group of Italian men with Cuban girls laughed and bantered.
The men were ish but fending off gravity better than most American males, and they didn't look bad in their bathing trunks. The women were spectacular in their tangas, not an ounce of fat on their year-old bodies. They were ebony. There was an adage around that you heard once you'd been in Cuba a few times, that the Italian men always went for the really black Cubanas.
What interested me about this was that in Italy, bourgeois Northern Italians will sneer at Sicily or even Naples as "Africa.
The puppy was completely black and would have been beautiful, but for the way every inch of his skin was covered with fleas or flea bites. Using the big bottle of water I'd brought to the beach, I began to clean him and scrape away the fleas. He squeaked in discomfort as I cleaned him, but he was so little that his resistance was no impediment.
By this time other beachgoers were coming round to watch the drama. The Cuban girls ignored the puppy, but the foreign men were concerned. An Italian man thought he'd seen a black bitch with milk-full teats nearby. But when he found her -- X-ray thin, mangy, unhappy -- and led her over, she turned her back on the puppy. The puppy followed her. He grabbed helplessly for her teats as she backed away.
