Only in Naples (10 page)

And then the night before leaving I went upstairs to brush my teeth and set my alarm for the next day. My mother came to my room with an excuse, did you pack your toothbrush or something, and I gave her the opening of a very quiet, very contained, “Mommy, I don't want to go.”

“Sweetheaaaart,”
she bawled, “it's just the worrrst thang thit ever happened to me! My baaayybyyy girl!”

In Naples they say,
'E figlie so' ppiezze 'e core.
Your children are little pieces of your heart. But to feel what that expression means, you need to imagine Dolly Parton saying it. No, actually, you need to imagine Dolly singing it. Because this dialect, like that of the American South, lays bare so much suffering and so much love that it does to the body what good country music does—it goes straight from the ears to the gut.

T
he Avallones' apartment smelled like a geriatric ward. Ben-Gay stung my nostrils as I walked into Salvatore's room to find Nunzia Gatti massaging his bare shoulders and neck. Salva was sitting at his desk; Nunzia was behind him. I was appalled.

The desk where Salva “repeated” his studies faced two French doors through which he could see the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius.
“Dunque,”
he was repeating,
“la legge canonica del Settecento prevedeva…”
Eighteenth-century canonical law foresaw the enforcement…I could not believe my eyes, or my ears, or my nostrils. Had Salva really asked the Avallones' housekeeper of twenty years to massage him with Ben-Gay? Was he really studying his law texts while she did it?

I said nothing. No one noticed me standing there.

“Grazie, Nunzia,”
Salva thanked her when the massage was finished, and she went to wash the Ben-Gay off her hands and to return to chopping eggplants in little cubes to fry. She was making
melanzane a funghetto,
following strict instructions from Raffaella. (Nunzia, born and raised in central Naples, surely knew how to prepare
melanzane a funghetto
when she came to work for the Avallones. But Raffaella had to make sure that the recipe was exactly the same as hers, and so one morning twenty years ago Nunzia followed Raffaella around like a little duckling as she prepared the
melanzane,
learning from scratch.)

“Oh, ciao,
Ketrin!”
she said cheerfully as she passed me on her way out.

Nunzia came in the mornings to do simple cooking and heavy cleaning in the apartment. What are
le pulizie grosse
? I asked Salva when he described Nunzia's responsibilities, translating the expression in my mind as the Big Cleanings. I saw that Raffaella did a lot of cleaning herself: she swept, dusted, even got up on a ladder to wipe the windows down with old
Mattino
newspapers. So why did they need a housekeeper? “The big cleaning,” it turns out, meant keeping things clean in the Neapolitan sense of the word. For this she needed Nunzia Gatti.

In Italy, one's apartment must be spotless. Outside, many Italians think nothing of throwing their cigarettes on the ground or otherwise littering in full view of other people. It is shocking to witness the contrast between the filthy streets of Naples and the shiny, disinfected, pine-smelling cleanliness of Neapolitan apartments. A home should not be superficially clean, or
pulita per la suocera.
(This expression, meaning
mother-in-law clean,
is used in a highly pejorative way and refers to something that is clean for show. An apartment that would pass the test of a five-minute visit from a mother-in-law. Dusted, clothes hung up, no dishes in the sink.) No, one's apartment must be
Italian
clean. Toothpicks getting the crud out of the molding. No dust in the rungs and rivets of the radiator. Outside,
Chi se ne frega!
Who cares! is the mentality, it's not my house.

Many Americans, on the other hand, would not be caught dead throwing a dirty Kleenex on the ground at the park but think nothing of leaving their houses in a state that would have an Italian mother dialing up social services. An Italian grandmother told me of an American mother she knew in Rome in the 1960s who was so much fun! So positive! So kind!
But that apartment.
No one could understand how the woman could live, let alone raise a family, in such a pigsty.
Mio Dio.
Beds unmade and clothes on chairs. Those poor children!

Nunzia Gatti was around sixty and square-shaped. She spoke almost exclusively dialect, and used a
third
form of
you
—the most respectful, feudal form,
voi,
which exists only in Neapolitan—with every member of the family except me. When we first met, I was uncomfortable with the idea of using the familiar form with her while she “Madam'd” me, so I did what I often do: I used the formal
lei
with her, sprinkling it with a few
tu
s so I didn't seem too uptight. Pretty soon we were
tu
-ing without saying anything about it. Nobody, including me, would dare say, Let's use
tu
with each other from here on in, whatta you say?

Nunzia, coming from a different social stratum, was a sort of foreigner in this household just as I was. She took it upon herself to warn me in hushed tones about the dangers of getting too involved with a Neapolitan upper-class boy, a
signorino. “Vieni qua”
—she would beckon me with her index finger to follow her to the balcony where she was beating the rugs with a long wooden rug-beater—
“Sai come si dice a Napoli?”
You know what we say in Naples?
“Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi?”
Wives and cows from your hometown. She didn't mean, as I first thought, that I should be careful of buying a cow or a wife that wasn't from Washington. The idea was that Salva and I would never work as a couple: relationships only work if the husband and wife come from the same place and the same socioeconomic background. “Oh yes,” I would reply with a polite smile, “I understand.”

I was uncomfortable with Nunzia and with the culture of servitude that made it okay for Salva to ask her to rub Ben-Gay on his neck. It was so servile, so lewd! When I exploded at Salva, wanting an explanation for it, he was confused. “It's no big deal! She works here and my neck was hurting. Your family has a housekeeper too!”

Doris Belen Hernandez moved to Washington from Honduras in 1984. She was hired by my parents to clean our house several times a week and was responsible for vacuuming, ironing, and making the beds. She called my parents, Bonnie and Ed, “Mrs. Bony and Mr. Head.” My mother cleaned up frantically before Doris arrived, worried that she would “just have too much to do, poor Doris!” My mother, the
signora
of the house, would “give orders” that started with “Doris, do you think if it's not too much trouble that you could try to maybe…” and ended with “That is, if you have time!” When she needed to be sure Doris was coming on a certain day, she would say, “You're not thinking of coming by on Tuesday, are you?”

Raised poor, my mother was uncomfortable with the idea of hiring “help.” She liked to pretend that Doris came because she felt like it, or because she happened to be in the neighborhood.

Doris was not a workaholic. She watched soap operas in our family room. She chatted with her friends on the phone. Our house was large enough that when she cleaned, nobody saw or heard her. We would see the beds made, notice that we were out of potato chips and leftovers, and think, “Oh, Doris must have come.”

When we did cross paths, Doris was entertaining. Her English left much to be desired, but this didn't stop her from doing some fantastic imitations of all of us. My father huffing and puffing as he tried to tie his shoelaces for a tennis match, belching and saying “Goddammit!” (with a Spanish accent). “Kaaaaatherine, you're not gonna wayar that are ya?” with tragically scrunched up eyebrows was my mother: Bluefield, West Virginia, by way of Tegucigalpa.

Doris was irreverent and entertaining, and in the Wilson family, that was enough.

“A housekeeper, yes, but I certainly would never ask her to massage—”

“But it's okay to ask her to clean the toilets?” Salva was honestly clueless about the difference.

“Where I come from, you pay a masseuse to massage and a cleaner to clean!”

With a high-and-mighty slam of the door, I went to find Nunzia to hear more reasons why I shouldn't fall into the trap of marrying a
signorino
like Salva.

An Italian friend of mine told me about a recent trip she had taken to the States. “You Americans,” she sighed, “some of you have estates as big as Italian villages but no one to pour your coffee in the morning.”

“That's not true,” I countered. “If you're famous you do.”

Raffaella's relationship with Nunzia took me a while to get a handle on. Raffaella gave orders using the familiar
you,
and I got a grammar lesson in the imperative familiar.
“Metti le lenzuola sopra ad asciugare!”
Hang the sheets upstairs to dry!
“Non usare quella scopa in casa!”
Don't use that broom indoors! Raffaella's assertive tone missed that of Cinderella's stepsisters by only a smidgeon, and was quite frankly petrifying to me. When Nunzia made a mistake in her simple cooking tasks, Raffaella didn't call to her from the other room but looked her in the eyes and asked,
“Ma perchè?”
—But why?