Only in Naples (13 page)

That gimpy shepherd partially hidden by the tree now lives in what my family would call the Land of Katherine's Disastrous Haircuts. He's not perfect, but like the pizza man or a dweeby fourth-grader, he's part of the Christmas scene.

O
ne figure was not positioned in the manger scene the day the
presepe
was set up: baby Jesus. Traditionally, the father puts baby Jesus in the crib after midnight on Christmas Eve. Nino's moment with the minuscule porcelain baby was to be after dinner, after mass, but before that big Nordic guy swooped in (the kids all up, the kids waiting, the kids liking this import as much as that fabulous trick-or-treat idea!). The
Befana
witch would have her moment on January 6, the day of Epiphany—no reason you couldn't have both her and Santa bring gifts, the Avallones felt. The more the merrier.

Raffaella hosted sixteen people for Christmas Eve dinner. She included all of her future son-in-law Mauro's family, and Benedetta wanted to be sure that everything was perfect—a 
bella figura
—the fancy set of plates and crystal, place cards in silver holders, even little favor bags for the kids. She wore something shimmery and red, and made up her turquoise eyes so that they shot out at you even more than usual.

She left the preparation of the fish to her mother.

The fishmongers in Naples are open all night long the three days before Christmas.
Le mamme,
wanting to make sure that the fish they get for Christmas Eve dinner is the freshest, set their alarms for 3:00 and 4:00
A.M.
They want to get to the fish as the fishermen bring it in, before anyone else has a chance to claim it. The clams must be squirting. The eels must be fat and splashing. The sea bass must have eyes that “sparkle.”

“Nessuno mi fa scema.”
Nobody can make a fool out of me, Raffaella said as she stuffed a wad of cash in her sexy lace push-up bra. It was 5:00
A.M.
on December 24, and Raffaella was going down to the Piazza Mercato fish market. “They put eyedrops in the fish's eyes to make them look bright. They put food coloring on the gills to make them look rosy. But I don't fall for that.” Nonna Clara was the expert at looking a fish in the eye to see whether it'd been “made up,” and she taught her daughter well. The message for Neapolitan women is clear: Go ahead, make yourselves up. Make your eyes look glamorous. But be damn sure that your bass is as natural as the girl next door.

When Raffaella returned from the market hours later, she looked and smelled as if she'd been on a fishing vessel on the open sea for days. She held three plastic bags, one of which was moving in a very disturbing sci-fi way. In it was the
capitone.

If you look up “eel” in an English-Italian dictionary, you will find
anguilla.
But an
anguilla
is smaller and skinnier than a
capitone,
and is eaten on Christmas only if a family is too poor to buy the thick, powerful, splashing
capitone.
“At my place, we eat
capitone
at Christmas” is a Neapolitan expression meaning, Don't be thinking we're low-class.

When the fishmonger cuts off the head of the eel, it continues to writhe, and the man with his tough rubber gloves has to use serious muscles to keep the bugger on the chopping block. It is really entertaining when the
capitone
escapes and a chase ensues. (When I was having trouble years later keeping my toddlers in check, Raffaella invoked this image, telling me it's normal. Toddlers are like eels, you grab 'em from one end and they slip away from the other.) Raffaella's eel was chopped into four chunks, and still continued to thrash in the plastic bag.

The second bag held the clams. The first course of Christmas Eve dinner is
spaghetti a vongole.
Usually, the name of a pasta with fish includes the preposition
con
meaning “with.” Linguine with shrimp.
Paccheri
with swordfish. But there is no spaghetti
with
clams because the two become one. A translation might be “clammed spaghetti.” Neapolitans would say
“si sposano,”
they get married. The spaghetti bride and her clammy husband are an organic, inevitable match.

The third plastic bag held our fresh, bright-eyed beauty, the sea bass. She was to be baked whole, flanked by potatoes, for the main course. In addition, there would be the
insalata di rinforzo,
the strength salad. It is made to pump up anyone who might be gaunt and feeble, and features boiled cauliflower, olives, and carrots. There would also be fried codfish, sautéed escarole, and desserts, desserts, and more desserts.

At eight o'clock on Christmas Eve, I found my place card (
Ketrin
printed with a gold marker) and settled in for what would be a three-hour meal. The eel kept reappearing in various incarnations (the thing was five feet long, after all) including pickled
capitone,
fried
capitone,
and
capitone
in tomato sauce. It nauseated me. It was oily and black. It nauseated other people too, but that didn't stop them from eating it.

“I don't like eel. I've never liked it. But I'll have a piece for tradition's sake,” Nino told us, and a few cousins followed suit. Same thing with the cauliflower salad. “I'm stuffed! Plus it grosses me out. Could you pass me some?
Giusto pe' tradizione.
” The conversation centered on recipes: how someone's grandmother prepared her
insalata di rinforzo;
who liked fried codfish and who preferred it baked.

Benedetta's future in-laws spoke knowledgeably about traditional recipes, which surprised me. “His mother left grilled chicken breasts in the refrigerator for him. She never cooked,” Raffaella had confided to me about Mauro. Horror of horrors. “Benedetta and I are educating his palate.”

When it was time for mass, we had difficulty standing we were so stuffed. The children were bouncing off the walls with excitement—just two more hours until Santa comes!—when we packed into cars smelling of perfume and rarely worn wool coats. Men dozed through the service. The hymn “
Tu Scendi dalle Stelle,
” “You Come Down from the Stars,” was sung entirely by the soprano section of the congregation.

We returned home at 1:00
A.M.
for the ritual of Nino putting baby Jesus in his crib. “Nino!” Raffaella called her husband to attention, his coat and hat still on.
“Il presepe!”
She handed him the tiny baby in tissue paper and pointed to the
presepe,
just in case he'd forgotten what his job was. This was the responsibility of the paterfamilias. And the real head of the family could relax in the knowledge that there was no chance of a blunder: there was only one place that baby could go.

M
y internship at the Consulate ended at Christmas. On my last day there, we had to evacuate the building because a mysterious package that looked like a bomb was found on Cynthia's desk. Nobody knew who had brought it or what was inside. So we all hung out at a café across the street and I was able to say my goodbyes
con calma.
After a few hours, we were notified that it was safe to enter the Consulate. The kind soldiers with Uzis informed us that the package was an elaborate
presepe,
complete with running water, that had been given as a surprise gift to the political consul.

“You gotta love this place,” Cynthia said when we hugged goodbye.

My internship was over, but no part of me wanted to go home. There would be time later to figure out my future—for now, I was still interested in figuring out Naples, and seeing where this relationship with Salvatore was headed. Life was organized in semesters, I thought, so I told my parents that I wanted to make this “experience abroad” two semesters rather than one. I planned on going back to America at the beginning of June.

To earn extra money, I took on teaching jobs at other English schools. When I wasn't in class I rode buses and walked the streets. I missed theater, and what I found on the streets of Naples satisfied my craving.

The first dramatic performances of my life were the “lullabies” that my mother sang to my sister and me. They were lullabies that weren't soft or tender. She had no intention of putting us to sleep: we were her audience.

Vocally, Bonnie Wilson was not a soprano but a tenor. With her diaphragm working overtime, she sang Gershwin's “Summertime,” sounding something like Luciano Pavarotti singing “
Nessun Dorma.
” Her version invoked the insomnia and anxiety in
Turandot
rather than the sweaty, lazy days of summer on a southern plantation.

Vocal energy reminiscent of my mother's singing can be heard at any fruit and vegetable market in central Naples. Men wail, almost tragically,
“Pomodori due euro al chilo!”
Tomatoes, two euros a kilo!

“What are those guys going on about?” my sister asked me, years later, when she came to visit. “Are they mourning? Are they imploring? Are they passing kidney stones?”

“No,” I answered, “they are simply stating the price of their tomatoes. With the intention of being heard.”

My childhood had taught me that the best thing is to perform; the next best is to be in the audience. I didn't have to look far to witness theatrics in Naples. It became a kind of sport for me to go into a coffee shop, or bar, in the afternoon and order three things that are not, that should never be, consumed together. For example, a small pizza, a cappuccino, and an orange juice. A huge no-no for a multitude of reasons. First, cappuccinos are generally not ordered after eleven in the morning. Second, orange juice can never be consumed alongside anything with milk in it because of acidity. Third, pizzas should be ordered with a soda, beer, or water. Absolutely not coffee or anything warm, or for heaven's sake anything with milk.

So the response of the barista will be, first, incredulity and shock, followed by something akin to missionary zeal.
“Insieme?”
Together?
“La prego no!”
Please, I beg you, no! His eyes pleading, his voice plaintive, with his performance he will try to persuade me to change my mind.

The best performances to be found in Naples are on the sidewalks, in buses, and in coffee bars. I have witnessed arguments, love scenes, even tragic dialogues that rival anything seen on the stages of the Teatro San Carlo or the Bellini. There was a standoff on the 140 bus that runs from Posillipo to Piazza Garibaldi in the spring of 1997, for example. The initial disagreement was over a fart that a middle-aged man presumably expelled in the packed bus. The gentleman didn't have a seat, and stood nonchalantly holding the rubber loops hanging from the roof. An elderly lady sitting near him, holding her nose with a handkerchief, started in. She told the Bangladeshi housekeeper sitting next to her, “It's just rude. We all have to breathe this air.” She glared at the man.

“
Signora
, I agree.” The lady behind her declared her allegiance, and now it was just a matter of time before the whole bus, or at least the native Italian speakers, chose sides and put their two cents in. Interestingly, the accused continued to feign nonchalance until the argument got heated. Then he shut everyone up with his bellowing voice and
“Ma come fate a sapere? A sapere tutto?”
But how do you know? How is it that you think you know everything?

This kind of scene makes you want to miss your bus stop and keep riding until the curtain comes down.

I found another very simple way to witness the performance art that is Neapolitan speech: to ask directions. The rhetoric, the art of saying so little in such a spellbinding way, reminds me of that great rhetorician Jesse Jackson reciting
Green Eggs and Ham
on
Saturday Night Live
twenty years ago. Such a sense of rhythm, such skill at creating dramatic tension. He will not let your mind wander; he will not let you miss one syllable. Nor will he let you
not
care about his green eggs and ham. It makes no difference whatsoever that the words he is reciting are Seussian nonsense.

And so it was with a gentleman, a well-dressed-in-his-Sunday-best Neapolitan gentleman, whom I asked for directions. He was out for a stroll, walking slowly (toes splayed out in that typical way of Neapolitan men) and obviously with no destination in mind. I was a young woman who was also on her own and obviously foreign. These two factors, combined with an innate southern Italian sense of hospitality and the desire to perform, made this man want more than anything else to be of help. But unfortunately, he did not know where Via Noce was. Instead of saying, I'm sorry I don't know, he began a monologue which could have had a score, it was so musical.

“Via Noce, Via Noce.” He paused. At this point, I knew that he had no clue where the street was, otherwise his hands would already be in motion. They would be outlining my trajectory,
a
destra
a sinistra,
right and left with his hand curling up and then a big smile and his arms straight ahead when he came to
diritto
!
Sempre diritto!
Straight on down!

But he did not know.

“I have grown up in this area,
signorina.
Not too far from here, and I can assure you that this Via Noce, this Via Noce of which you speak, it is not, and I repeat, not, a cross street of Via Toledo. That it is not.”

This was the introduction, and it was performed solemnly, with no hand movements and a somber facial expression. His voice was level. After a pause, it was time to move on to the central piece of the monologue. He became more animated, and took his hands out of his pockets.

“It could be farther up this direction”—his eyebrows were raised in the hypothetical, one arm straightened to the right. “Or indeed it could be in this direction”—his arm straightened to the left, maintaining eye contact with me always. He paused. Oh, there were so many possibilities of where this street could be, given the fact that he did not know! “Because I, to my dismay, do not possess this particular piece of knowledge, I must be truthful. Truthful to you, and truthful to myself.” Again, he paused for dramatic effect. He was a man of integrity, he wanted me to understand. The pauses were timed so that the drama was heightened, the tension not dissipated.

“The truth is this,” he said, and I understood we'd come to the conclusion. “If I knew, it would be my great pleasure to impart this knowledge to you, a person who does not know, and would like to know, the location of Via Noce. And with this, I wish you a good day,
signorina.
” He spun around and walked away. With a flourish.