A mask in the window. Like the mask Robin from Batman wears, or Romeo’s mask at the Ball, even Hilary Duff’s mask in A Cinderella Story at a high school dance with Chad Michael Murray in which the audience is actually supposed to believe that he doesn’t recognize her in what doesn’t even deserve to be called a disguise. That type of mask. It caught my attention from the street in a costume shop window.
Carnivale is next week. Actually it already started but by the end of the week,Venice will welcome visitors from around the globe for its most celebrated and crowded time of year — a 48 hour party, filled with Venetian gowns, formal bowing, confetti wafting into canals, and other hedonistic desires people wish to relinquish before Lent. Only twenty minutes from Venice, Padua harbors much of Carnivales residual hype. Intending to attend a traditional Masquerade ball, my selective attention seeks viable costumes. I saw the mask in the window. It was black laced and wrapped around the eyes of a voluptuous mannequin that stood in front of a black sheet that veiled the rest of the store. It seemed poor marketing to hide all other costumes from a passersby but conceivable when considering an Italian’s priority for the display’s aesthetic over its marketability.
From the sidewalk, with some ambivalence, I considered if the right mask lived somewhere behind that curtain — cheap and sleek, but modest. I entered the store from the back. I had to buzz in and wave to a camera that arched over the door frame. A loud, startling buzz granted me access.
It was the middle of the afternoon when I entered “Il Sogno,” which translates to The Dream — not a costume shop, but an empty BDSM sex shop. A sole employee, who looked like a lost member of the Aryan nation, stood behind the counter and stayed vigilant to my every step. He wore tight jean shorts and a red flannel shirt as if he were a stripper playing a lumberjack. And though we were in Italy, Italian from his mouth didn’t quite fit — like watching a familiar television program set to another language. The elegance of his words seemed misplaced coming from his bald head, which, oddly enough, stood in front of an assortment of mannequin heads, each with adjustable mouths, intended for different sized penises to be inserted.
We couldn’t communicate. I just wanted to look around, but could only say “I want to walk,” and then moved my index finger in a circular motion. He just groaned, unamused but seemingly frustrated. I was still in the market for a Venetian mask but not entirely incurious about the beware signs that hung at the top of the basement stairs.
Adolfino, as I imagined his name might be, eventually left his post and followed me around the store. After letting the second pulsating vibrator drop from my hands, I couldn’t blame his attentiveness. He wanted me out, and as I weaved through the sex cages, leather strapped sex swings, and steel spiked whips, he followed, grabbing muzzles and dildos along the way, holding them to my chest. Either he was desperate for a dildo sale or he was shooing me out of the store with them. It was hard to tell in such sexy lighting.
I didn’t find a mask. More accurately, I didn’t find a mask that didn’t invite people to hold me down and defile my mouth — they actually had an abundance of those sorts of masks .I didn’t find a proper mask or costume at the two other sex shops I subsequently visited; nor was I really looking for them. I just found the places fascinating. The emptiness. The forbidness. The secrecy. Entering amid the sound of the buzzer was like submerging yourself into the physical embodiment of the dark web. These weren’t just kinky stores with edgy toys to spice things up in the bedroom, these were places with mazes doubling as basements that had beds doubling as sex contraptions. They had installation plans for sex swings and cages- so many cages. And yet the banality of it. Empty but hiding in plain sight. I had no business being there, not because I’m above alternative forms of arousal, but simply because I couldn’t afford a single thing being sold.. A mere rope, a ten foot rope was over forty American dollars, and that was a checkout item, like gum at the register of a grocery store. But Il Sogno and similar shops crystalized the differences I had already observed between American and Italian culture.
It was the way Italians compartmentalize their lives. Eroticism and the duality of sex furniture appeared utterly contradictory to the Italian reluctance to multi-task. It is the same reluctance to go grocery shopping for a week’s worth of food but rather go briefly each day for the next meal. The same reluctance to hire employees remotely, and the same discomfort a new friend expressed when I told her that in America our pharmacies are inside other stores. Convenience stores alone stand antithetical to the compartmentalization of the Italian mindset. I wouldn’t dare try to explain Costco or the new trend of axe throwing at bars. In Italy, I imagine they prefer to keep their drinking separate from their axe throwing.
It is athleisure, buffet style restaurants, partying in line while waiting for beer all night, amusement parks, gyms with coffee shops inside, walking meditation classes. In America we multitask as way of life and t is spreading of course. Even Italy can sense it quickly coming. But when my host father tells me not to put anything on my pasta plate until every ounce of pasta is gone or that while in Florence seeing Italians marvel at the variety of an Eataly store, I can recognize the way I’ve muddied lines between shapes I never knew were there.
Aren’t sex shops like these an exercise of multitasking? Not just the physical gymnastics these contraptions require, but the combining of sex and fear, danger and intimacy. It speaks up against the Italian attitudes of moderation and the afternoons and evenings of pacified contentment. It is a signature difference between societys based on Individualism versus Collectivism. In the former you can openly acknowledge you want more, that you’re not content with what you have. But in latter, like in Italy, to openly acknowledge something like this undermines their whole system of living. This is why in America we always want more and new, and then some more of that. We have less to swallow before stepping into a place like Il Sogno. And Carnivale is for the release of these desires, these indulgences, but of course it is tradition your identity be masked for the event.
I don’t know what the equivalent of Carnival in America is. I think we have a mini Carnivale every day — each time we maximize efficiency just a little more. We don’t section off a month to go for it all, we’ve managed to implement that into daily life, each time your bank has a Starbucks inside. We Americans feel to be more shameless in demaning what we desire.
My afternoon ends at the perimeter of the school yard. The bell rings and parades of children run up to the gate. Before they can go, I must make eye contact with their teacher and wave, signaling she’s off the clock. They come running, their backpacks wheeling behind. To Allesandro and Ingrid, and any child really, I may as well have been standing at the school gate since I dropped them off that morning. When you’re in school, time is finite in the confines of the school yard fence, it ceases to exist past those boundaries.
As we slowly walked over the bridge homeward bound, I could suddenly remember how enchanted the outside world felt when I’d leave early from school for a doctors appointment. So this is what the world looks like while I’m at school. Was it always so sunny? Was it always this seductive?
It might be one of the more subtle and yet sobering parts of adulthood — coming to know the world in the day time light. Throughout an education, at least up until college, they want you there. You are even punished if you don’t show up. They make you stay later. But out here in the sobering light of day, without class or a job, they chase you back out into the world, sometimes waving a dildo.
The walk home.
JonnyPoppins 