Capo Zafferano - part II, 2025

For most of my life, I slept with an animal between my legs. In a cubbyhole behind my left knee.

First there was Krabbe, a huge white tomcat that wanted in from his nightly prowl. Then Mazout, a kitten brought in to catch the mice in our Antwerp flat. She was efficient. I found them in the cubbyhole behind my left knee. Dead.

Carlo, our first Jack Russell, needed eighteen months to work his way up from the basement to our bed. James did it in six. Mr. Watson in three.

Sleeping between my legs, gazing up occasionally, changes your worldview. A life-altering trauma, really. The least I can do is hear them out.

UP FRONT. WHERE ELSE?

Mr Watson's Sidewalk Diaries N°5 - Palermo; Ashtrays and Swordfish.

I made it. It took me just over six years to make it to the front row. To first class. The sharp end.

Six years of my best behavior before my humans—forget the hooman doggolingo nonsense; I converse in correct multisyllabic words and the occasional alliteration, words as sharp as the needle of the rabies vaccination that the vet subcutaneously planted smack in between my shoulder blades, barely out of reach of my gleaming choppers that would have loved trimming his pinkie into a bloody stump—deemed me worthy of an upgrade.

As if they hadn’t tallied the countless miles I’ve clocked at their side, paw in hand.

But in Paris, I felt like I made it. Little did I know it was just a stopover in R & H's grand travel scheme. Riding front seat in a cargo bike on a summer's day. H pedaling like crazy because the bike rental people didn't fit the bike with its required battery control panel. (He should have known; they were Dutch—no hills there, no frills either). R going full electric, and me soaking up the ride, ears flapping in the wind like the luffing sails of a tack gone wrong, and the thousand smells of Paris' sidewalks—stained to exquisite perfection by papillons, bassets, griffons, and poodles incarnating the existentialist promiscuity of Simone de Beauvoir—all up my nose.

My British ancestors would have loved me for it: replicating the entente cordiale, doggy style. Not sure H & R would have approved, though.

So why did they drag my shapely hindquarters to Palermo? A city where the sidewalks smell less like existentialist poodles and more like an ashtray laced with the scraps of yesterday’s swordfish lunch. That's when you're lucky to find a sidewalk at all. With slobbering cane corsos strutting their bulk as if they own the place. Their skin so loose and wrinkled, it looks as if they're wearing a grandmother's fur coat, two sizes too large. Imagine H trying to wedge one of those brutes into a Parisian cargo bike. He’d collapse before his first cannolo.

Palermo. Honestly.

And the traffic. I was so scared that I buried my head into R's lap, so deep I nearly suffocated. The entire Fiat catalogue of the last thirty years, every model dented, came rushing at us from angles you didn't know even existed, over cratered roads big enough to swallow them whole. Drivers who treat the brake pedal as an urban legend. Because braking is for sissies. Conigli; good only for a Sunday stew in autumn. And in between these tiny beaters, accelerating for all they're worth with the suicidal determination of engines past their prime, the traffic miraculously opens to shiny, unscratched SUVs like the Red Sea parting for Moses. Laws unseen, but absolute.

Not ours.

If it weren't for the villa we were staying at, I would have gone on a hunger strike. No, scrap that. Food is holy, my red line. I'd have stood in front of R & H, whimpering. Giving them the sad puppy-dog eye, honed to perfection. Straight up in their face. Scratched their legs with my front paws. I would have rounded my back and tucked my tail—my magic wand, my compelling baton of affection, desire, and despair—between my legs. I'd have broken their hearts. Again. They would have given in. They always do.

But I didn't. I let them stay. I guess they deserve a holiday from time to time. So do I.

I worked on my tan. Salt and sun make my coat whiter than sheets on the bleaching green. Practiced my fetching: tennis balls on the terraces and sticks in the garden. Those are my rules. Spent time with H when he was writing and with R when she was designing. I'm their muse, flourishing their creativity by my mere presence. Their Apple Watch too: 11:50 and 17:40 are when they should get up and play with me. It's their health I'm protecting. And my return home. I run the show. They just log the data.

But no more Palermo, please. Once is plenty.

Give me Forte dei Marmi instead. Three days on our way home. With hotel staff crouching on the marble floors to say hello and caress me behind the ears. With the soft white sand on the beach to dig myself a cool little cubbyhole, spreading my pheromones along the shoreline behind me. With the cerulean wall-to-wall carpet at Miu Miu that always triggers an irresistible burst of zoomy energy to circle a display of the shortest skirts in history—not tacky, but elegant—and wishing R were 25 years younger to show off her still-sexy legs, and me at her side. With the rickety Chinese bikes to ride Forte's leafy streets, me in a wicker basket on the handlebars.

Up front, of course.

Where else?

Interior Styling: Reinhilde Gielen

For more architectural visuals of Capo Zafferano, see our previous Story - Part I

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