Only in Naples (23 page)

The photographer arrived, and told us he wanted to get some candid shots of the wedding preparations. That's when Raffaella came up to me with my bouquet. She was silent, and she was still, two things that seemed odd for my future mother-in-law. I said, “Oh, thanks!” and then laid it down on a coffee table so I could have my hands free to touch up my lipstick again. After a few minutes, she came up to me again with the bouquet. Again I said, “Oh, thanks!” and then gave it to my cousin to hold while I adjusted the netting under my gown.

Apparently, the third time she alerted the photographer. He snapped what is possibly my favorite picture of our whole wedding (followed closely by the one of Zio Toto doing the twist with a Waspy Massachusetts schoolteacher aunt). In it, Raffaella's two hands are holding mine and the bouquet. She is looking at me with acceptance, gratitude, and love. I am looking over my shoulder, mouth open, shouting something about a safety pin to a bridesmaid who was having an issue with her bra strap.

Maybe it was a good thing that I didn't know about the bouquet ritual. Oblivious to the significance of the moment, I unwittingly was the one to
sdrammatizzare
, and nobody's mascara ran before the ceremony.

I
f you asked somebody in one of the lands that Rome conquered two thousand years ago what the Romans were like, you would probably hear that they were arrogant, aggressive know-it-alls who thought they were the shit. I asked Salva why he didn't like Rome, and he said that Romans were arrogant, aggressive know-it-alls who thought they were the shit. Center of the world, and all that (well, they were for an awfully long time, I wanted to point out…). Plus, they don't know how to cook.

Salva and I had moved to Rome in 2001 and rented a loft in Trastevere. We didn't sit down with a bottle of wine and decide our future; we didn't map out, as some couples do, the pros and cons of staying in Naples or moving north. There was very little free will in the matter, because we were literally shoved out by my mother-in-law.

The Avallones owned two apartments on the first floor of their building in Naples. One was Benedetta's, and the other was destined for Salvatore and his wife. It was rented out when Salva was finishing his studies, and I assumed that when we were married we would move in. We were next in line for the lasagna in the elevator, after all. I'd even gotten the hang of the recipe advice via intercom! But Raffaella had other plans. My mother-in-law almost never speaks in dialect and is careful to use correct Italian when speaking with family members, but when she heard us talking about moving into the apartment in Naples, she used pure Neapolitan.
“Te nè 'a í,”
pronounced
tuh neh ayeee
. You gotta get outta here. Her middle three fingers pointed down and sliced the air, showing me that we needed to leave, and we needed to leave soon.

Wait, wasn't a Neapolitan
mammà
supposed to wring her hands and beg us to stay close by? Wasn't she worried that her grandchildren would be raised on processed food, without cuddles and the sea and the music of Napoli? No, she wasn't.

“Ketrin, there is no future here. Go to the U.S.! To Rome, Milan, northern Europe! Anywhere. Naples would be a waste for you. For me,
figurati che gioia!
It would be such a joy! But for your family it would be the end.
Niente, non c'è niente a Napoli.
” There is nothing in Naples. “I will bring you the food in my suitcase, wherever you go.”

I was shocked. Salva's roots and the Avallones' love ran so deep that I'd assumed that if we ever suggested leaving, there would be resistance, a battle even. The opposite happened: the lady basically kicked us out. She was loving, but she was forceful.

When Salvatore and I talked about it, it was clear that the idea of leaving Naples didn't make him happy. But he would follow the plan. In true Neapolitan fashion, the man might be pampered, but in the end it was a woman who would decide.

Naïvely, I believed that the Eurostar train line connecting Italy's most important cities (Milan, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples) was a longitudinal measuring stick in which culture got more southern in degrees. If people in Florence are more laid-back than in Milan, I figured, then they are very relaxed in Rome, and in Naples, life's a beach. If everyone plays by the rules in Milan, most do in Florence, a few do in Rome, and no one does in Naples.

What I didn't realize was that Italy is a young country. Unification didn't come until 1861, and for a thousand years before that what is now Italy was composed of city-states, each with its own language, culture, and identity.
Insomma,
Naples is not just a more southern version of Rome. It's an entirely different country altogether.

Salva got an internship at the Rome soccer team. He was in the marketing office, working with their sponsorship group. Salva's passion had always been sports. When he graduated from law school, I encouraged him to look for something in sports marketing. After all, the law stuff would come in handy sooner or later. But he left our apartment in the morning with the face of someone going to work in a sweatshop.
It's not my team, Katherine,
he explained to me when I wondered at his lack of enthusiasm. I would find him sitting in a chair near the window looking at the “view” of the building across from ours in Trastevere. He might as well have been uprooted and dumped in Detroit.

Raffaella advised me about what to cook
. Maybe we shouldn't have moved to Rome after all
was met with, “If you can't find
friarielli
greens at the market, Ketrin, try
broccoletti.”
She knew that if her son ate what he loved, things would work themselves out.
He mutters under his breath how he can't stand Rome,
I would tell her. So? she answered. Let him mutter.

During the week, I spent my time reproducing Raffaella's recipes and keeping Salva away from the Romans. But every weekend and holiday, we were on the train for Naples.

O
ne such holiday was the feast of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. “He ain't no second-class saint,” a wizened man told me in the Duomo on the nineteenth of September when I went to witness the miracle of San Gennaro. Only a few weeks before, the government had issued a decree eliminating the holidays of patron saints. There are about twenty important saints' days throughout the year, and the government decided that they could be attached to celebrations on the Sunday before or after. The decree would mean that those delicious long weekends, or
ponti
(bridges), when Saints Peter and Paul fell on a Friday in Rome or Saint Ambrose fell on a Monday in Milan—or even when it fell on a Tuesday, the vacation bridge spreading over four days!—would disappear. Most Romans thought, Shucks, that would be a shame. Most Milanese thought, Too bad for us but it had to happen sooner or later.

Neapolitans went positively ballistic. Not because they would miss another day off work (although that would be bad enough—“Work makes you throw away your blood” is an oft-heard Neapolitan expression) but because whatever scandalous thing you do in Naples, whatever combinations of food you order, however you eat your pizza
, you do not under any circumstances mess with San Gennaro.

The old man in the Duomo was a San Gennaro groupie. He came to the Duomo to witness the miracle every year, he told me, he wouldn't miss it for the world. The idea of taking San Gennaro's day away? “You can't just ask San Gennaro to liquefy his blood on Sunday the sixteenth because on Wednesday the nineteenth you have better things to do!
Ma stiamo scherzando!
” You've gotta be kidding.

The decree was a sacrilege, an offensive blow to Neapolitans and to their history and identity. Not to mention, my gentleman friend reminded me, that it would piss off San Gennaro himself, and then the trouble would really start. “San Gennaro loves us. He protects us.
Ci ama. Ci ama
…” He kept repeating “he loves us, he loves us,” almost inaudibly.

Gennaro was the archbishop of Benevento (a city not far from Naples) in the fourth century, and was beheaded for his Christianity by the Roman emperor Diocletian. Legend has it that a woman collected an ampoule of his blood and conserved it as a relic to be worshipped. The blood solidified, or rather goo-ified. It is kept in an elaborate golden safe at the Duomo, an exquisite church hidden in the dense, old center of Naples. The blood did not, however, remain solid: two times almost every year for centuries (in May and in September) a miracle occurs—the blood in the vial liquefies.

On those rare occasions when the blood has stayed solid, disaster has struck the city of Naples—or so it seems to Neapolitans. They will point out that after San Gennaro's blood failed to liquefy in 1980, an earthquake struck Naples and killed nearly three thousand people. Another solid-blood year was 1528, when plague devastated the city. If the blood stays solid, Naples could be prey to any catastrophe from the eruption of Vesuvius to international terrorism.

So it is no wonder that women stay in the church the day and night before praying to San Gennaro to liquefy his blood and thus protect the city. These faithful
signore
don't take their eyes off the statue of the saint, which is displayed next to the altar. He has a pointy red hat, a red cape, and a pose that is serene and Buddha-like. He's kind of grimacing, though, and honestly looks a little pissed off.

The women flatter him.
“San Gennà, comme si bbello,”
how handsome you are! And
“Tu si 'o primmo santo nuosto,”
you are our first, our most important saint! (As the competition between the saints is ferocious, the women have to reassure him that he's their guy.)

We were packed like sardines in the side chapel of the Duomo, where the safe was located. In just a few minutes the mayor of Naples, with the archbishop, would open it with a special golden key to take out the vial of blood. When the vial was removed, there would be a procession into the narthex and we would all follow the blood, the priests, and the politicians to the main altar, where the blood would be placed next to the statue of the saint. Only then would we learn whether the blood had liquefied.

I had come to the ceremony alone. “I want to go with you to San Gennaro,” I told Raffaella when she described the blood and screaming and magic that went on at the Duomo. “Oh, we don't go to San Gennaro,” she told me. Then she continued to tell me how women weep and wail all night long to the saint. They fall on the floor! They start screaming curse words at him if the blood doesn't liquefy—even the eighty-year-olds! They…

“Wait—you don't go?” I was surprised. Raffaella is devout, and she is Neapolitan. Yet she had never been to the Duomo on September 19 to witness the miracle? I couldn't figure out why. “Can I ask Zia Pia?” Raffaella's sister Pia is even more devout than she is. She regularly makes pilgrimages to Lourdes and Medjugorje with twenty of her friends. Recently I got a call from her as her tour bus was en route to the Medjugorje shrine. Earlier, I had asked her about her frittata and she wanted to make sure I had the recipe right. In mid-conversation I heard a booming voice amplified by the microphone on the bus. “Our Father, who art in Heaven…”

“Gotta go! It's the
Padre nostro
! Remember, one egg for every one hundred grams of spaghetti! And then throw an extra egg in at the end for good measure!” (One Lord's Prayer for every ten Hail Marys is the rosary ratio. Zia Pia probably throws in an extra
Padre nostro,
too—she's that kind of lady.)

Surely Zia Pia would be at the Duomo praying to the saint all night long, I figured. But when I asked her about the miracle, her sentences (like Raffaella's) started with,
“Si dice che”
—I've heard that…She'd never been, either.

I soon realized that it was a matter of class. San Gennaro is a saint of the
popolino,
the “little people,” the working class. The Duomo is located in the poor inner city of Naples, and the ceremony itself is viewed by many middle- and upper-class Neapolitans as a hocus-pocus ritual that gets the ignorant
popolino
worked up.

That is how I, a Protestant, a rational anthropologist, ended up alone at the Duomo. I expected folklore. I expected voodoo. I didn't expect to be profoundly moved.

The tension in the side chapel grew. The ornate, frescoed chamber smelled of incense mixed with BO. I rested my arm on what I thought was a pedestal but soon realized was a lady's shelflike hip. We were that close. As we all waited for the muckety-mucks to arrive with their Alice in Wonderland golden key, there was silence. There was no wailing. There was no screaming. Even the man next to me had stopped murmuring,
“Ci ama.”
There was only prayer.

Only prayer…until a cellphone started ringing. Its standard default ring signaled that the owner was of the older generation. It was in a purse wedged in the middle of the crowd, forgotten by the owner (whose mind was certainly on San Gennaro's blood). There were a few whispered, “It's yours!” “No! It's yours!” until one of the priests waiting next to the safe shot his finger to his lips and performed a hearty, loud
Ssssshhhhhh!
that involved his entire cassocked body.

When the mayor and archbishop arrived with the key, people started pushing and standing on their tippy-toes in a futile attempt to see whether the blood was liquid.
“Si vede?”
Can you see? they started asking each other.
“È liquido?”
Is it liquid? And then, “He's closing the safe! He has the blood!”

The man next to me had begun to cry quietly. He was wiping his nose. He saw me looking at him.
“Signurí, lloro 'o ssanno! Lloro sì e noi no!”
They already know! They know and we don't. It was almost unbearable that the priests knew whether the blood had liquefied and we would have to wait.

Thankfully we didn't have to wait for long. We followed the procession, led by the vial of blood (held in a golden reliquary high above the head of the bishop) to the altar where the statue of San Gennaro watched over the proceedings. The bishop positioned the reliquary near the altar—ceremoniously, calmly, God! he was taking forever!—and we tried to distinguish whether the black that we saw in the ampoule was liquid or solid. It was impossible to tell.