The Full Monte

Why in the name of God’s green earth would anybody want to read a book about Montenegro? Much less one written by a pedantic professor. Most Americans have never heard of the country and those who have, cannot locate it on a atlas. Even if you have a map and know where to look, it still takes a magnifying glass to find it. To people in the United States, the word Montenegro sounds Spanish. When I would mention to people where we were traveling, they would all get a glazed look in their eye while they tried to remember where in the Carmen Sandiego it was. Most of our friends thought we were going to the capital of Uruguay. Others asked if it was one of those banana republics near Belize. A few were certain it was a Portuguese island off the coast of Africa. It is not anywhere near those places. Montenegro is situated north of Albania and south of Bosnia-Herzegovina and is the smallest of the republics that made up the former country of Yugoslavia. It sits on the coast of the azure Adriatic sea across from its better-known neighbor, Italy. The two countries share a laconic love for leisure, passion, wine, sun, food, and family. When the Venetians came conquering down the sea’s eastern coast, they sailed into the Bay of Kotor and were impressed with the dark pine trees that covered the mountains. They called the place monte negro or black mountain. In Serbian, it is Crna Gora. Montenegro is simply magnificent. Their Ministry of Tourism markets the country as having “Wild Beauty” and they have not exaggerated. It has Alp-like mountains, valleys of grape-filled vineyards, roaring river rapids, pristine (and primordial) forests, fjords with almost vertical massifs that stretch up to the sky, and beach after beach that face into the setting sun. All of this in a country only fifty-five by eighty miles across—magnificence in miniature. It is difficult to know which is more beautiful, the landscape or the people. Montenegrins are tall (they average over six feet), dark (from all the Mediterranean sun), and exceedingly handsome. And, that’s just the females. The women have long black hair that accentuates their very long legs. They have baby-like complexions and killer smiles—Slavic sirens all. Because of their embracing nature and unbridled love of strangers, Montenegrin people have been described as “aggressively friendly.” The country sits at the crossroads of Western Civilization. Divided one way, it is the difference between Latin Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Cut the other way, it defines the historical border of occidental Europe and the oriental Middle East. It is a mix of Slavic, Byzantine, Moslem, and Albanian people, all living on top of Illyrian, Roman, and Ottoman ruins. I have always wanted to go to this little country. It is the land of my people. My mother’s father was born in a large stone house above one of those stony beaches. Hardship forced him to leave his family and immigrate to America. He married my grandmother, begat my mother, and never said a single word about his family or what he had left behind. I never knew him as he died before I was born. Thus, I never got to ask him the questions that he would not answer for my mother. If grandfather didn’t leave me many clues about his early life, he did bequeath me his face. My mother still looks at me wistfully, shakes her head, and says how much I look like him. He must have been a very handsome man. At least as handsome as you can be when you are a short, balding man with bushy eyebrows over a large schnozz—all part of my Montenegrin inheritance. Mother kept our little known heritage alive as best she could. When I was in elementary school and we were assigned to make a country map out of flour paste, she told me not to raise my hand until the very end of the list so I would get Yugoslavia. (This was before there was a Zaire or Zimbabwe.) When we wrote reports about world leaders, she told me to pick Josef Tito, the man who ruled the country with a velvet fist from 1945 until his death in 1980. (This had to have raised some eyebrows in the north Dallas, staunch anti-communist, John Birch neighborhood in which we lived.) Therefore, I wanted to make sure that my trip was really going to happen before I called and told her. “Mom, I’ve been named a Fulbright Scholar.” “What? Oh, son, that is so exciting!” “And you’ll never guess where I am going—to Montenegro!” “Oh, my heavens! I can’t believe you’re going there. I have wanted to go my whole life! You know my father was from there. Where will you be living? When are you leaving?” “We will be living the capital, Podgorica. We’re not leaving until January.” “How long will you be gone?” “It’s just for six months, Mom. We will be back in June.” “This is so wonderful! I am so excited for you! Where did you say you were going?” Mother had contracted Alzheimer’s disease six years earlier and her memory degradation was fairly slow but constant. We would have the same conversation over and over. It was like being stuck in Bill Murray's Groundhog Day but in shorter, five-minute loops. She has a great attitude about her disability. She constantly tells us she loves us and laughs over things she cannot remember. With her disease, what used to be so important is not anymore but little things can become significant. The brunt of care taking has fallen upon my sister as she lives two miles away from mother and I live five hundred times that. My sister is at my mother’s home constantly, much more often than my mother remembers she is. She takes care of mother’s finances, hires and supervises caretakers, gets the strange calls at all hours, puts up with the angry outbursts of frustration, deals with the crisis of the day (like misplaced eyeglasses or hearing aids), and goes home exhausted. My sister’s husband is a kind and soft-spoken physician who carefully watches over his mother-in-law with just as much love as though she didn’t have those last two hyphenated words. My sister and brother-in-law deal with the paranoia, personality changes, and depression that can be a daily occurrence. My father died when he and my mother were only fifty-five. Twenty years later, my mother married Sam, a wonderful but quiet man. At eighty-five and ninety, they live in their own house and sleep together in their own bed. Caretakers spend the day with them cooking meals, doing laundry, and making sure pills are taken. Mother and Sam resent the intrusion; but in the back of their minds, they know what the alternative is. Traveling to Montenegro was a trip Mother and I always wanted to take together. After Dad died, she took what little money was left and spent it on trips to Europe, Japan, and the Holy Lands. She finally was able to see some of the world she always told me to go see. She constantly talked about the two of us going to Montenegro, but the timing never was right. I didn’t have either the money or time as I was working and going to graduate school while raising a family. When Mother finally saved up enough money so she could go by herself, the Yugoslav wars had begun. After hearing about the atrocities that were being committed on both sides, she was never very enthusiastic after that.