Only in Naples (2 page)

When Raffaella moved, whiffs of Chanel perfume cut through the aroma of baked dough and basil. The
salone
of the apartment may have been opulent but the kitchen was minuscule. On the right side, a rectangular Formica table was built into the checkered tile wall and sat four people at most. The stove, oven, sink, and some (very limited) counter space were on the left. If more than two people were eating at the table, nobody could pass to get to the refrigerator at the back of the kitchen. Why would any family who clearly had money not build a bigger kitchen? I wondered.

As it turned out, extra space was reserved for the living room with its dining niche, where the Avallones ate when they had guests. The kitchen was for cooking and eating
in famiglia.
You can scooch around and bump into family, after all. Lean over them, step on them, feed and be fed by them. A lot of space isn't really necessary when you're with people you love.

There was no place at the table for Raffaella, but fortunately she wasn't planning on sitting. She was planning on doing at least eight other things, including making the American girl feel at home. At some point Salvatore's older sister, Benedetta, arrived, squeezed in, and introduced herself. She was twenty-six, three years older than Salvatore, and had intimidating turquoise eyes framed by thin Armani glasses. Her light brown hair was long and silky straight, and swished like that of the coolest girls in high school. Strangely (it was only 8:00 in the evening), she was wearing pajamas, decorated with pink and white teddy bears holding balloons, with a ruffle at the neck.
Mi piace stare comoda,
she would tell me later. When I'm at home I like to be comfy. Her brother was wearing his comfy T-shirt and jeans and she was in her comfy PJs. Only their mother had spent time getting done up.

“Benedetta
lavora, capito?
Ha iniziato a lavorare in banca,”
Nino was telling me. His eyebrows were raised and he was grinning. He was clearly very proud of his daughter, and repeated several times that she was already working at the age of twenty-six. She works in a bank, already! This was very early for Naples, I inferred. She had finished university with top grades and in record time, and had been hired by the Banca di Roma in Naples to consult with clients about their investments. She had a
contratto a tempo indeterminato—
a no-end-in-sight contract, meaning that she could not be laid off
ever
and could retire at fifty-five. Life was good: she had hit the jackpot with her job and was planning on getting married the next summer.

“
Matrimonio! Matrimonio!
Wedding, do you know?” Nino was positively jolly. I interjected
“Veramente?”
(Really?) every once in a while and
“Mamma mia!”
to demonstrate my awe. So this slick, superconfident Salvatore was the brown-eyed little brother of the whiz kid with the turquoise eyes. That had to suck.

Raffaella, meanwhile, was saying something about a
multa
as she drizzled olive oil over the steaming pizza. Who had gotten this 50,000-lira parking ticket and who was going to schlep to the post office tomorrow to pay it? If I had known then that
multa
meant a parking ticket and that Salvatore was saying that he was nowhere
near
Via Toledo on that Tuesday at the end of June, and Benedetta was saying that her brother was the only one in the family who regularly
quadruple
-parked, I probably would have stopped saying
veramente
and
mamma mia
at regular intervals.

“Me? Absolutely impossible.” Raffaella was now being accused by Benedetta, and she froze to make her case, the scalding pizza in an oven mitt suspended above Nino's head. Everyone seemed to have forgotten about me. Salva was going at it with his sister, Nino was looking around wondering when his pizza was going to appear, Raffaella was still talking about her whereabouts on that Tuesday at the end of June. I realized that this was just family business as usual.

Finally Raffaella placed the first slice of pizza on a plate and passed it over her husband's head to me. Salvatore's eyes, for the first time since we had arrived at his apartment, had settled on me.

What kind of a girl is she? How will she eat this pizza?

I understood immediately that it was important to everyone at the table that evening what I thought of the pizza. The pizza was hot, gooey, and thick—impossible to eat with my hands. So I picked up my knife and fork and tasted it. Objectively speaking, it was the best pizza I'd ever had. But my language skills were not yet sufficient to communicate that. So I said something like, “Pizza great yes thank you very much Salvatore family tomato pizza.”

And then there was that laugh again.

I laughed too; it was a laughingly delicious pizza.

This was the first of many times that year that my eating would be a performance. The cacophony of voices would stop, silence would reign, and all eyes would focus on me as I dug in. I would feel enormous pressure as I twisted the spaghetti or cut into a pizza. (Will I flick a piece? Will I miss my mouth? Do I need to finish chewing before I begin the praise?) The question on everyone's mind would be, “What does the chick from the world's superpower think of
this
?” And I would satisfy them.
Mamma mia!
Phenomenal!
Buonissimo!
Never tasted anything like it!

And then I made a big faux pas, a
brutta figura,
as they say in Italian. I started eating the crust before the rest of my pizza was finished. Salvatore got up, came around to where I was wedged between Nino and Benedetta, leaned over me, and cut the rest for me in little pieces. He held my fork and knife in his beautiful manicured hands and I could smell his aftershave, his eyes keeping contact with me the whole time. He was so close!

“These pieces you must eat first,” he told me, “not the crust! Always the crust last!” More words were coming at me so fast that it was difficult to understand. What I did get was just how invested he was in how my pizza was going to be consumed. I had potential. He just had to show me the ropes.

I managed to finish the pizza without dropping anything or further embarrassing myself. But some crumbs had fallen on my lap (my paper napkin was crumpled up in my tense, sweaty hand). Raffaella had spun around from the sink and was standing over me. She was silent, and still…and eyeing my lap. Before I knew it, she had plunged her hands—emerald ring, manicured nails—into my crotch. What the fuck is happening? I thought.

“Briciole, briciole,”
she explained. I will never as long as I live forget the Italian word for crumbs,
bree-cho-lay.
There was no annoyance, just a job to be done before the crumbs got all over the apartment. Why would it constitute a problem that they were located in my private parts?

Raffaella started singing a song about a pizza with tomato. It had a “Funiculì, Funiculà” rhythm about it, and she twitched her hips as she sang it.
Conosci questa?
Do you know this one? she asked. Her voice was deep, rich, belting. Everyone else kept talking, mostly about practical matters. So many logistics tied the daily life of this family together, parents and kids in their midtwenties connected by the traffic ticket and when's the plumber coming to fix the leaking toilet? It seemed so strange to me that in the next room there were priceless artworks and vases. It felt like we were in an Italian American kitchen in Jersey City.

I didn't even know if I liked this guy Salvatore, I couldn't understand most of what was being said around me, but I felt that, without any ceremony, rites of passage, or coherent verbal communication, I fit in with this family. Without my fully understanding why, this felt like home.

T
he U.S. Consulate in Naples is a big white square building on the waterfront of Mergellina, the port where motorboats leave for Capri and Ischia. It is surrounded by palm trees, and guarded by several open tanks where smiling Italian soldiers with Uzis keep an eye out for terrorists. In 1996, an enormous American flag and a photo of a very pink President Clinton welcomed visitors to U.S. territory.

My job at the Consulate was low stress, to say the least. I was working in the political office, and fortunately there wasn't much political tension between the United States and southern Italy in the late 1990s. Plus, I was unpaid, and the only intern at the Consulate. My co-workers were a mix of Italian locals with those sweet no-end-in-sight contracts, and U.S. foreign service employees, who were thrilled to be posted in a place like Naples, where they could relax and breathe easy before they got sent to Darfur. I usually came in around 9:30; the first cappuccino break started at about 10:15.

“Are you planning on taking the foreign service exam?” the Americans in the Consulate asked me. In truth, I didn't have any idea what I wanted to do career-wise. Both my parents had degrees in international studies, so I thought I might be interested in becoming a diplomat (or, in my less ambitious moments, becoming the ambassador to some small tropical country where I could throw really fun dinner parties with staff). But neither economics nor politics was my thing. What I loved to do was perform. Growing up, I studied acting at Washington's most important theaters and took private voice lessons with esteemed classical musicians. I participated in every monologue, poetry, and singing competition in the D.C. area. In college, I performed the leading role in nearly thirty plays. I combed bulletin boards for play tryouts, packed snacks for rehearsal breaks, and did homework during tech runs.

Onstage was where I was most myself.

But, according to my family, acting wasn't really a job. It was a great hobby, but I had to have a backup. I'd majored in cultural anthropology at college, which got me no closer to figuring out what profession to pursue—it just reassured me that I was open-minded, and wasn't it fascinating how Inuit women's rituals surrounding childbirth reflected their complex role in society?

My internship in Naples wouldn't give me answers, but it would give me a break before I returned to the States to figure out what I was going to do with myself.

My boss at the Consulate, an imposing, full-figured African American woman from Chicago, took me under her wing. She was smart, funny, spoke excellent Italian, and, I soon realized, had the best life I'd ever seen. In addition to the cappuccino breaks, our days were made up of two-hour lunches with Italian businessmen at yummy fish restaurants near the Consulate. Cynthia would talk most of the time, stopping only to dig into a plate of
calamari fritti,
and the handsome southern Italian magnates who hoped to win American support for some industrial enterprise would sit silently, not really knowing what to make of this Tina Turner with her loud laugh and the chubby little white girl who accompanied her.

My working day ended at 5:30
P.M.
, at which point I would walk the winding coastal road back to Posillipo. I didn't hear the whistles and catcalls of men on motorbikes—inevitable when a young woman is walking alone in Naples—because I was listening to early nineties rock on a cassette Walkman with fuzzy earphones.

I would get back to my dormitory just in time for dinner.

The Istituto Denza was a Catholic boys' boarding school that didn't have enough Catholic boys boarding to pay its bills. In fact, since it was September when I arrived in Naples and school started in mid-October, there were
no
Catholic boys boarding when I arrived.

The campus was lush, with pine and olive trees, magenta bougainvillea, and illuminated statues of the Madonna sitting at the intersections of the walkways. To keep it all up—the greenery, the soccer fields, the buildings—the Barnabite priests who ran the place decided to take in male university students from other parts of Italy who would pay the Denza for room and board. That wasn't enough. They were forced to take in (
ahimè!
horror of horrors!) female “guests.”

Nobody explained this to me. A small, shuffling nun in white showed me to my room the first day with only a
“Buongiorno”
and a
“Prego”
—this way. The room had a single bed, desk, and two windows overlooking the tropical gardens. I could tell from the silence that there was nobody else in the building. Where were the other students in the dorm? I wondered. Was there a Meet the New American Girl social hour planned? Oh, and did they have any extra hangers for the closet?

“Per cena,”
the nun remembered to tell me before she left,
about dinner
…and then she said a whole lot of words I didn't understand. I followed her arthritic hand as she motioned to the left, then to the right. Did she just say past the third Madonna and right at the second soccer field?

“Grazie.”
I smiled.
“Grazie tante.”

When it was dinnertime, I would follow my nose.

The
mensa,
or eating hall, of the campus was a good ten-minute walk from my building. Other than lizards skitting across the path and mosquitoes digging into my calves, there was no sign of life. A church bell gonged close by, and I hoped it meant
soup's on.

I finally found the
mensa
(can you call a space with that divine a smell
cafeteria
?), a huge room with marble walls and floors, crystal chandeliers, and many empty tables for six. There was no line, so I got a tray and watched as a nun with an apron ladled out pasta with fried eggplant and tomato. She then handed me a miniature carafe of red wine.
Buon appetito, signorina.

There were only two tables occupied that first night at the Denza—at one sat four visiting nuns; at the other, three young male college students. I stood with my tray deciding where to sit as they all watched. It was clear that there was a right answer for where I belonged, I just didn't know what it was.

I went with the guys. (Enough with gender division!
Basta,
already!) But as soon as I sat down I knew that it was the wrong choice. No one spoke.

Only a minute had passed when I heard female voices echoing throughout the dining hall. I turned to see that three smiling young women had just walked in the entrance. They were sisters, all with long black hair and almond eyes. They didn't rent a room at the Denza, I would learn, but came to have their meals there. Their parents lived in a small town in Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot, and the girls had come to the big city to study. When they passed my table and said
“Ciao,”
I knew there was a God.

Maria Rosa and Francesca (and their little sister Isabella, who nodded and smiled and was the silent one of the Three Graces) had never met a foreigner. They had never traveled north of Naples, or tasted ketchup. They were full of questions: What did I do at the Consulate? Were all houses in America like the ones in
Dynasty
? Did American women switch their husbands as often as the characters on
The Young and the Restless
?

I held forth in my broken Italian about my homeland. It was a good thing I had a degree in cultural anthropology, because I was able to say things like
America, divorce, very easy!; Hospitals, very expensive!;
and
Too much guns.
My friends were enlightened, and I was no longer lonely.