Only in Naples (12 page)

Despite their professional appearance, Gianmarco and his friends had never given up the snowplow either. They pizza-pied straight down the mountain at perilous speeds, snapping photos of each other with their cameras as they went.

It was terrifying. People were coming at me from all directions. It seemed that no one slalomed—they were all on straight daredevil trajectories, from young kids to elegant white-suited
signore.
And their speed didn't stop them from having loud conversations from opposite sides of the slope. They argued about which
rifugio,
or restaurant on the mountain, had the best grilled meats, or the best
scamorza
cheese. Let's meet at the Aremogna at two! No, the Pizzalto restaurant has better
bruschette
!

As if this weren't stressful enough for a nonexpert skier, the “lines” for the chairlifts were great masses of pushing people who had trouble keeping their balance on skis.

“Can you please get your skis off mine?”

“But he's pushing me!”

“She butted. I was after that lady in the white hat.”

“I did not! I was here first!”

Katherine, you're going to have to use your poles to push ahead,
Gianmarco told me gently when he saw that I'd been standing in the same spot for ten minutes. I could
not
push my skis onto someone else's, butting in line and risking a colossal fall at the same time. “Don't worry, I'll meet you at the
rifugio,
” I told him.

The cuisine in this part of Abruzzo is meat- and cheese-based. You won't find quite as much butter and cream as in the Alps, and virtually nothing is fried. It is, however, fatty: sausages and lamb chops, grilled
scamorza
cheese, and salami that is to die for. The pasta specialties are
cazzarielli e fagioli,
a gnocchi-like pasta with beans (and sausage, in case you haven't gotten your caloric intake for the day), pasta with truffles, and in the summer, pastas with every kind of mushroom you can imagine. You don't see brightly colored vegetables in this mountain village, and fruit is expensive and hard to come by.

We sat at a long wooden table in the sun. I soon realized that this was not about refueling: we wouldn't be grabbing a burger or bowl of chili before we hit the slopes again. This was a
destination
. The skiing had been a fun mode of transportation to get us here, and now we could unbuckle our boots and dig into a heavenly
antipasto, primo,
and
secondo,
accompanied by deep red Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wine. We started with a platter of fresh ham,
salame,
and cheeses, followed by steaming
cazzarielli e fagioli
on plastic plates. When the grilled lamb chops and sausages came out, I worried that I'd have to roll down the mountain (or at least slide like my mother had in Aspen).

“It's normal to feel large in Roccaraso
,
” one of the girls in our group reassured me.
“Qui,
si lievita.”
You get bigger here. The word comes from
lievito,
or yeast. You expand like pizza dough. Maybe that's because of all the sausage and cheese and infrequent trips to the bathroom, I offered. No, the young woman told me with authority. “It's all the oxygen. You will find that in Roccaraso you are hungry and sleepy.” (I declined to note that most places in the world have this effect on me.) I would later hear people in Naples talking about going to Roccaraso to
pigliarme nu poco 'e ossiggeno
or “get myself some oxygen.”

The
ragazza
finished off the last bone of the little Abruzzese lamb and pulled a foldable aluminum tanning mirror out of her backpack. She held it up to her face to augment the sun's rays as she digested. “This place is so good for your health,” she told me. “The best Italian wet nurses were from Abruzzo. Rich
signore
from Rome or Naples or Milan would handpick women from these mountains to nurse their babies. Their milk was rich, fatty, and yellow: the best. Abruzzese food is good for you, Ketrin.”

After that lunch on the ski slope in Roccaraso, I felt confident that I could land a job as an Abruzzese wet nurse, no questions asked.

I got back to Naples oxygenated. Gianmarco hadn't tried anything with me, which had been an increasing concern with all the couples smooching around us. I couldn't wait to see Salva and tell him about the skiing and the fabulous meals in Roccaraso.

But he didn't want to see me. He gave monosyllabic answers on the phone, and didn't invite me over. Alone in my little apartment, I wondered what I'd done that was so awful.

“You
what?
” Maria Rosa asked me when I went to get her advice. “You spent a weekend in Roccaraso with another guy?”

“It wasn't a guy! It was a group!”

“Even worse! So American women
are
loose like the ones on
The Young and the Restless.
”

“But I did nothing wrong! I touched no one, I kissed no one….”

She thought for a moment, and then said, “Go immediately and apologize to Salvatore if you want to continue the relationship. Tell him that you did not
touch
any other man. That you had a major lapse of judgment, but you've come to your senses.”

I did. I repeated the script that she had written for me (with the same intonation of the Catholic prayer of confession
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa:
through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault). After hearing my apology, Salva said, “I just have one question.
Stiamo insieme
?” Are we together? He held eye contact with me. This was something he cared a lot about.

“Certo,”
I said. Of course.

“Because maybe in your country you can have lots of guys at the same time and it's okay with all of them. But Ketrin? It's not okay with me.
Siamo una sola cosa, adesso.
” We are one thing now, you and I.

That sounded good to me.

A
s I walked the Via San Gregorio Armeno with Raffaella on December 10, 1996, my mind worked up a list of things that were surely not sold on the street in first-century Bethlehem:

“There was no pizza in Palestine!” I exclaimed to Raffaella when my mental list was complete. “There was no spaghetti. People didn't sell fish near the manger on a cold December night!”

Raffaella had brought me to this famous street in the center of Naples because it's been the home of the Neapolitan Christmas tradition of the
presepe,
or Nativity scene, since the seventeenth century. Artisans display their handiwork on both sides of the tiny alley from the beginning of November until January 6, but traditionally Neapolitans go between the Immacolata, December 8, and Christmas Eve. On December 10, San Gregorio was one great pushing pack of humanity.

“Ketrin, look at that one! It has a moving water mill.” She pulled me through the crowd to look at the crèche close up. It had not only running water, but twinkling lights and a pizza oven that lit up from the inside. A three-centimeter-tall baker with realistic stubble used a long wooden baking paddle to slide a pizza in and out of the oven. It was extraordinary.

But I was not to be stopped. History was history. Jesus's birth was Jesus's birth. “How could washerwomen be washing petticoats in a river? Petticoats near the manger? Raffaella?” My future mother-in-law was fingering tiny terra-cotta shepherds. She had put her glasses on to examine the quality of the workmanship. “There was no river near the manger. There were no petticoats. There were no washerwomen!”

“Which of these shepherds do you like better?”

We were here today because one of the Avallones' shepherds had emerged this year from its tissue paper packaging with one leg missing. The two shepherds that she now held up for me to see were different only in that one had blue seventeenth-century breeches, the other green.

“Blu! Quello blu.”
I wanted to get back to the Truth.

I was intent on convincing Raffaella that even though I wasn't Neapolitan, I knew about Jesus's birth and the manger and the no-crib-for-His-bed. It was important to me because I had heard a lot of negative press about the way my culture exports its commercial, capitalist Christmas traditions. Christmas trees and Santa Claus (along with Halloween) are recent imports in Naples. In Italy, the
presepe
is the symbol of Christmas, the
Befana
witch is the one who brings gifts, Carnevale is when kids dress up. Why, many Italians feel, must we be subjected to other cultures'
usanze,
or traditions? A tree gets needles all over the floor, and ghosts and goblins scare little kids. Not to mention a big fat man who drives a sleigh and eats your food.

When I was in elementary school, I had an arts-and-crafts project every year at Christmas. With red and green felt, white school glue, and beads that never stuck where you wanted them to (how I hated arts and crafts!), I would make a frame for that year's school picture. With much sticky difficulty, I would slide in the passport-size photo of myself as, for example, a toothless second-grader and present it to my parents as a Christmas tree ornament.

Thanks to these ornaments, the Wilson family Christmas tree documents every stage of my youth, and that of my sister, Anna. Believe it or not, these artifacts have defied every law of Christmas ornament degeneration and are in a perfect felty state, right up to senior year of high school. (At a certain point, we must have stopped doing the crafts, so I'm sure Santa Claus took over.)

Because we need dark recesses to hide our awkward phases and long, exposed branches for the photos where we look pretty, the Wilsons always look for a tree that is scraggly and asymmetrical. No fluffy, well-proportioned firs for us. One shadowy crevice in the back of our tree is the assigned slot for Katherine with Permanent Teeth Before Braces. Another low, hidden area in the rear is home to Anna's I'll Only Wear Fluorescent Pink phase. In the front, one can find the Anna with Ringlets zone, next to the Katherine After Her No-Brownie-or-Anything-Else-Brown Diet section. On protruding, well-lit branches in the foreground, Anna and Katherine are quite serious and beautiful (mouths closed); in the backstage holes, we are giggling kids letting our teeth and pounds show.

One summer on the boardwalk of Nice, I won a stuffed monkey in one of those twenty-five-cent carnival games. He had red shorts and big boxing gloves, and a wide-eyed expression that said, “Bring it
on
!” When we got home, we all agreed that the angel that crowned our Christmas tree had had her day in the sun: it was time for a new cast. The monkey now sits in the place of honor, daring anyone to mess with us or our ugly-ass tree.

That December, instead of decorating our family fir, I helped Salvatore, Raffaella, and Nino set up the Avallones'
presepe.
(Benedetta was with her future husband's family now almost all the time.) Raffaella told me that Neapolitan tradition dictates that the father, the paterfamilias, is responsible for the crèche.
La mamma
is responsible for baking cinnamon
rococò
cookies and making sure everyone is warm and well-fed as they position the figures. There was a look of disgust on Raffaella's face when I asked about eggnog (Milk? Eggs? Alcohol? Together?
La prego no!
), about tea (who ever heard of tea in Naples?), or about cider (big mugs of hot liquid? Why don't you just make chicken broth if you're cold and hungry?). Fine! I gave up. There would be no warm liquids consumed.

“Nino!” she belted to her husband, even though he was sitting right next to her. When there was tradition to uphold, her voice got deeper and louder. Proclamatory. “It's time for you to set up the
presepe
!” He didn't move, just nodded. Raffaella proceeded to unwrap the base, a great slab of wood supporting mountains and caves made of cork. As the three of us watched, munching
rococò
cookies, she used a little eyedropper to make sure the water flowed down the mountain properly. “Nino!” she bellowed when she had finished fixing the
presepe
plumbing. “Now it's time for the
personaggi
!”

Salvatore and Nino and I started unwrapping the figures. We gently peeled open the tissue paper and held up each character for Raffaella to see.
“Il macellaio!”
The butcher! Raffaella called his name like he was an old friend who had unexpectedly turned up after a long absence. She told Nino that the butcher goes on the left side of the highest mountain.
“Il pizzaiolo!”
Salva was cradling the pizza man, awakened after a year of hibernation. To the right, on the second tier, said Raffaella.

Each had his own specific place on the stage. All of them, that is, except the solitary little men in breeches that I kept unwrapping. “Who's this?” I asked, and Raffaella explained that it was a shepherd. The shepherds were to be scattered randomly alongside their tiny sheep across the mountains. “So I can put it anywhere?” I asked. “Yes! Anywhere except in the Nativity cave.” I positioned my shepherd next to a little hill of dried branches, at which point Raffaella picked him up and placed him somewhere else.

Then, when Nino unwrapped the shepherd missing a leg, something beautiful happened.
“Poverino!”
Poor little guy! “He lost his leg!” They were all really, honestly upset. Could Salva truly have that much empathy for a tiny terra-cotta figure? We were in Naples: of course he could.

The shepherd was passed around. This is the funeral, I thought, this is the ritual, and then they're going to throw him away. My family said goodbye to our angel, too, before she and her wings got recycled. But no! Raffaella had the solution. “We'll just have to pretend he's sleeping.” She positioned the one-legged man behind a tree, laying him down on the moss so that his missing leg wasn't visible. When Raffaella and I went to San Gregorio Armeno two days later, it was not to replace the shepherd but to add one more standing witness to the crowd.