Friday, March 02, 2007

Sex and death in the Italian countryside

It’s a bloodbath on the roads around Regnano these days. Utter carnage. Like a bizarre canvas of splattered over-ripe fruit, the splayed figures of countless frogs are paying the ultimate price of their unflinching response to the call of nature.

They’re generally out and about after the rain – and it has been raining recently – but the recent numbers are unprecedented, certainly for us. On one trip home from Italian lessons in Tolentino on the curling, undulating backroads, there were probably 20-30 in one 10-15m stretch. Given our beastly sympathies, we stopped, and I got out to try and get them off the road and out of the “splatter and splay” zone. But they would have none of it, completely ignoring my nudging foot.

On closer inspection, however, I understood why. Several of them were indulging in an activity of a particularly sexual nature, while the remainder were simply waiting their turn. I can only assume that they had some sort of inside knowledge that their indulgences would produce a sort of "positive net procreative balance" when weighed against the death and destruction they risked.

Another curious observation was that the females – a safe assumption, I think – were inordinately larger, by several factors, than the males. Veritable Big Berthas they were, squatting passively and staring into the night with a look of utter boredom. I guess procreation can be a drag, particularly when you’re just being used, as female frogs clearly are. If there were such things as frog cigarettes, I would have expected to see one dangling precariously from her ample lips.

So this, in the end, was the answer – the road, and in particular certain obviously erogenous sections of it, is a “hussy highway”, a sort of “madam’s mile”, as it were. But why the road? Why not the slushy, squelchy mire of the sodden fields? This would be, I’d hazard a guess, a more appropriate environmental accompaniment, somewhat more akin to the reptilian form of the activity they’re engaging in. Perhaps they are out there in the damp darkness in far greater numbers than on the road, and I just can’t see them. But I’m not convinced. Must be some form of aphrodisiac in the aggregate used to lay the roads.

The bestial carnal frenzy seems to be over now. There are many who gave their lives for the cause, now anonymous stains on the road, soon to fade into reptilian obscurity. However, there are still a few of them out there. I saw one the other night, sitting – hopefully, it seemed – on the side of the road, looking for Big Bertha. Maybe he was a blooming teenager, hoping to learn from the pros, or try a few moves of his own.

“Where is everybody?” he asks.

I don’t know what to tell him.

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