Tourist of the living dead

My face has finally cleared up, which is information that I’m sure just absolutely makes your day. If you could have seen me just 24 hours ago, though, you’d understand how I feel. You might have stepped slowly back, certain that the black plague had finally come calling. Either that or you might have thought that you’d suddenly stepped into a George Romero movie.

Actually, the movie that most comes to mind is “The Singing Detective” (1986), Dennis Potter’s acerbic story about a misanthrope named Philip E. Marlow. As played by the great Michael Gambon, Marlow is a failed detective writer whose main achievement was a novel called “The Singing Detective.”

Playing out over multiple episodes on BBC, the Jon Amiel-directed miniseries (available in both DVD and VHS) bounces back and forth between Marlow’s real and imaginary life. The former sees him in the hospital suffering from an extremely painful case of psoraisis; the latter sees him working on a case that is only a veiled reflection of his real predicament.

The point of both Amiel’s version and the feature-length remake that Keith Gordon premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival (starring Robert Downey Jr. as the title character) involves what Marlow, fighting all the way, learns about himself. Which, mainly, is that his outward illness is a reflection of the bile that he carries around inside.

So, OK, I can be an angry guy. But, hey, I’m in Italy. Sure, trips past have seen me respond to anxiety by developing a back problem and a painful case of sciatica. Just last year my jaw started hurting so bad that I could barely eat. The diagnosis: anxiety-produced TMJ . But the problems, especially the TMJ, usually lasted no longer than it took for me to wash down my first plate of pasta with a good chianti (forget the fava beans and, just for fun, name the movie).

This time, however, the redness began just days after I arrived (on the 20th). It got worse even though I applied pretty much every lotion a gaggle of Italian pharmacists could recommend. And then the peeling began, a process that climaxed yesterday with my looking like, well, Philip Marlow. No wonder the workers in the local supermarket were so happy to help me out while I was picking up supplies in the early evening; getting rid of me quickly was merely good business.

But now I’m all better. A good scrubbing removed all the dead skin, a dose of aloe vera-based lotion stopped most of the itching and No. 60 sun block is protecting me from further damage. I was even able to enjoy a day of walking through the Italian coast town of Vernazza (one of the Cinque Terre), watching both the topless sunbathers (well, THE topless sunbather) and the wind-whipped waves crashing on the rocks strewn along this part of the rugged Mediterannean coast.

And no one looked at me twice. I was so relieved that I very nearly started singing, though I thought better of it. This is Italy, after all, home of the world’s greatest opera tenors. Hearing me sing is likely to make any true Italian begin talking in tongue. Or walking like a zombie .