Only in Naples (25 page)

A
fter our frequent plumbing rows, there were frequent occasions of making up. In the summer of 2004 I found out that we were pregnant with our first child.

I learned that what a Neapolitan mother eats during her pregnancy is very, very important. I'm not talking extra protein, or cutting out caffeine and sushi. I'm talking cravings. If the lady doesn't satisfy her cravings, the baby will pay. Things can get ugly.

“I really have a
voglia
(craving) for
rigatoni alla Genovese,
” I told Raffaella sometime during my fourth month. I didn't realize at the time how important this comment would be, that it would set a great ball rolling. In Naples, if a pregnant woman has a craving that is not satisfied, her baby will be born with a
voglia,
or a mark. Usually this mark is a skin discoloration in the form of the object of her craving: a strawberry, for example, or a little cup of coffee. In the case of
pasta alla Genovese,
the birthmark might come in the form of a great big onion tattoo.

Despite its name,
la Genovese,
the sauce has nothing to do with the Ligurian city. Various theories have been offered to explain why this typically Neapolitan dish is called the dish from Genoa (one is that the Neapolitan cook who invented it was nicknamed
'o Genovese
), but nobody knows for sure. The fact is that you cannot find this recipe anywhere in Italy except Naples.

It is a kind of
ragù,
in the sense that the sauce is cooked with meat, but it is characterized by the kilos of Montoro onions that are sautéed to give it flavor.

Raffaella immediately dispatched Nino to the market to buy the onions, and bought her train ticket to Rome. Her grandson would not risk being born an onion face.

I was shamelessly spoiled, but honestly didn't feel guilty about it. I deserved to have my cravings satisfied; I deserved to see the schedules of my husband's entire family governed by my every whim. I deserved to be spoon-fed onion
ragù,
and lie on the couch watching bikini-clad starlets dance. I deserved all of this not simply because I was pregnant, but because the rest of my time was spent at the painful, exhausting, humiliating
centro di analisi.

The folder that contained the results of the lab tests was so thick you could almost call it a binder. The receptionist at the diagnostic center handed it to me, closed with a sticker for privacy, and I had the same feeling as when I was little and it was time to see my report card. Let's see how I've done, or rather how my blood and urine have done. Do I eat right? Is my lifestyle healthy? I can't wait to see!

My excitement turned to disappointment and confusion when I opened the folder to find that my lymphocytes were at 1,800 per microliter of blood and my cytokines were at 1.4. What did that mean? I leafed through the folder to find very ambiguous graphs that had disturbingly sharp peaks and cavernous lows…my C-reactive proteins were doing some pretty funky stuff. Did I have something serious? To find out, I had to make an appointment at another office on another day in another area of the city. This center did not diagnose, it only took your blood, urine, and stool samples, then ran the necessary tests.

When I went the first time to have my blood taken, I was unprepared. I had had breakfast, and blood is taken only on an empty stomach. So I was told to go home and come back the next day. When I showed up hungry and cranky the next morning, the receptionist asked where my pee was.

I really did not know how to answer, the matter being complicated by the fact that I did not know the word for bladder. So I repeated the question:
Dov'è l'urina?
The ball had been deftly bounced back into her court.
“Non l'ha portata?”
You didn't bring it? Now, whether it's linguistic, or because of my
permalosità
(oversensitivity), I tend to interpret questions formed in the negative about what I've
not
done as accusations. They're really not, particularly in Italian. They are simply factual. “Did this lady before me with the accent not bring her own pee?” the receptionist was asking.

It proved to be a problem. Once again I was sent home, this time with instructions to buy a little plastic pee cup at the pharmacy and to come the next day with my pee. But not any old pee, only the
first pee
of the morning. The purest pee. This kind of pee is best for the tests, apparently. Don't be coming in with any of that watered-down stuff, the
centro di analisi
clarified, we want the yellowest, smelliest pee you got.

This was all logistically problematic given the fact that I had to drive in Roman traffic the next morning with my plastic pee cup, without having had any sort of coffee or breakfast. Where was I to put the pee? The cup had a lid, yes, but it was flimsy. Aha! A lightbulb turned on in my brain. I didn't have to hold it in my hand or balance it on the seat next to me. I could put it in the little coffee cup holder! It fit snugly, and I was off.

Tutto a posto
, or everything in its place, everything going well, until a kamikaze
motorino
swerved in front of me and I had to slam on the brakes. I need not delve into the details of where my pure pee ended up, but my next stop was the car wash, not the
centro di analisi.
When I returned to the center, I did so on foot, carrying my deep yellow pee cup very carefully by hand.

I really wanted to find out from those little old ladies how they did it: I now noticed that everyone who entered the
centro di analisi
was discreetly carrying their pee. A veritable bring-your-own-pee party! At my doctor's office in Maryland, there is a sterile bathroom where you put your pee in a cubbyhole. From there, it mysteriously disappears—you don't have to hand it off, or even write your name on it. It's a totally anonymous procedure.

I struck up a conversation with a grandmother next to me, pointing to the plastic cup in her hand and saying,
“Difficile, no?”
“No!” she answered. “It's more difficult with the feces.” What were they going to make me do next?

Mercifully, the feces examination was reserved for Salvatore. To be present at our son's birth, he had to be tested for salmonella. He was given a little transparent gelato cup and a plastic spoon and told to bring his sample to the
centro di analisi.
Now it was bring your own poo.

“Ketrin? Mi porti un giornale
?
”
His request for a newspaper was the first coherent communication that emerged from behind our locked bathroom door the next morning. Salva had been in there muttering and cursing for the better part of an hour (the Virgin Mary had been called all sorts of unkind things in Neapolitan dialect). The atmosphere was tense. I was confronted with the choice of giving my husband the
Gazzetta dello Sport
or the
International Herald Tribune.
Was the newspaper to help him relax enough to relieve himself or to be implemented in another way?

I was taking too long.

“Ketrin!”

“Ma per…leggere?”
If it was to be read, then I should definitely go with the pink
Gazzetta
with the picture of the star soccer player Buffon jumping for a miraculous save against Milan.

“No! Macché leggere?”
Not to read! What are you thinking?

And so I handed him the
Tribune.

Our bathroom was plastered with the advertising supplement of the newspaper—really, there are so many reasons to visit Vietnam!—when Salva emerged. He'd been stabbing at turds for an awfully long time, poor guy. In his triumphant hand was the little plastic cup, on which he wrote his name with Magic Marker:
SALVATORE AVALLONE.
He was ready for show-and-tell at the
centro di analisi.

“Ecco.”
Here it is, he told the receptionist later, and placed his poo proudly on the counter.

Recently my father told me that he had to send a stool sample to a lab in suburban Maryland. I was interested to find out how that worked in America. As in Italy, a little plastic ice cream spoon was provided, but it blew my mind when he told me that he
sent it away in the mail.
You mean you took your little transparent cup to the post office? No, he told me, he put the little anonymous prestamped package in the door slot!

“Now, that's what I call a great country, where you can send your shit out anonymously into the world without carrying it anywhere!” I was about to break into “The Star-Spangled Banner” when my father told me the addendum: the sticker with the lab's address had come off and his poo was returned to sender.

A
fter Salvatore and I had survived the
centro di analisi,
there was nothing that could rock our confidence as new parents. That is, until we tried to figure out how to clothe our newborn.

The following are comments Raffaella has made to family members who are not properly dressed:

“Nino, mi sembri un sacco di patate.”
Nino, you look like a sack of potatoes.

“Amore mio, mi sembri un figlio di nessuno.”
Sweetheart, you look like the child of no one.

“Che sei? Uno scaricatore di porto?”
What are you, a dockworker?

Family members are subject to these comments if their shirts are untucked, if there is lint on their sweaters, or if one of their pant legs is hitched in a sock. If they have a stain, or a collar that has not been ironed to perfection, they might get a simple “Don't worry, there's time to change before we go.”

I am off-limits—I do not receive these comments. This may be because I am a daughter-in-law. It may be because everyone knows I'm
permalosa.
I think, though, that it has more to do with the fact that Raffaella first met me in fleece: there was nothing but room for improvement. There was nowhere to go but up from my bingeing, intellectual feminist look of 1996.

I get a proud smile if I wear something that matches. I get a
come sei carina!
You look great! if I so much as put a belt around my jeans. That beautiful freedom, however, that license that I hope lasts until I enter an Italian nursing home, does not carry over to my children.

When I was eight months pregnant with my son, the private clinic where I was to give birth gave me a list of clothes to bring with me for the newborn. There were articles of clothing that I'd never heard of before:
bodino, ghettina, tutina.
They all ended in
-ino
or
-ina,
which meant they were little and cute, but what were they?

If this wasn't enough to send my hormone-assaulted brain into a spin, the clinic specified the required type of fabric. So my fetus and I set out to find a
ghettina di lana leggera
(light wool leggings) and other outfits that would compose his first foray into the world of Italian fashion.

My plan was to hand the list to the lady in the store with my credit card and be done with it.

The shopkeeper was around sixty, a beautiful, gravelly-voiced grandmother. I was done for. Approximately two hours and hundreds of euros later, my fetus and I emerged, sweaty and agitated. The
signora
had regaled me with questions. Which kind of cotton do you prefer? Lace at the collar or on the sleeves? Oh, she was full of questions. But somehow I couldn't get up the nerve to ask mine. I had only two, and they were fundamental at that point in time.

Which is cheaper? And, where is the bathroom?

Later, I handed my completed assignment over to Raffaella. She put her glasses on to examine the list and to feel the tiny garments. She was Giorgio Armani before a
Vogue
photo shoot. She was a Hollywood image consultant. She described the workmanship of each minuscule article, saying things like “cross-stitch embroidery” and “cream and sky-blue appliqué.” I tried to figure out if these descriptions meant the clothes passed the test. I did not want to visit the exacting, gravelly-voiced grandmother at the baby store again.

My son was not yet at term and his look was already being scrutinized. He would have to be stylish and elegant as soon as he saw the light of day. Weren't they going to give him a couple of months to get into the swing of things? Couldn't he be given a few weeks of leeway on account of his American, sweatpant-wearing mother?

“Hmmmm…”
Raffaella would have to think about it, work on it, match some of these things with items she had bought. But it looked like my job was over. Hallelujah.

“You know, in the U.S., we usually buy baby clothes that can go in the washing machine,” I ventured, finding renewed confidence in my ninth month.

“Are you serious? They get ruined that way! What about the satin lock-down stitch?”

I didn't mention that we also tend not to spend two hundred bucks on a wardrobe that would last less than a month, and that was destined to be covered with milk and vomit. It was pointless. I didn't want my son to get the
figlio di nessuno,
the “no one's kid” label, as soon as he was born, so I let Nonna Raffaella handle my newborn's wardrobe. After all, I figured, who cares what they dress him in? I had enough on my mind.

So it's ironic that what I remember most vividly about the birth of my first child is a tiny cardigan of merino wool. When the nurse brought Anthony in, an hour after our C-section (I do not believe that the disproportionately high percentage of cesareans in Italy has nothing to do with aesthetics. The mommy looks better, the baby looks better. The mommy can get her hair done and hands manicured the morning of the birth; the baby's head is a perfect orb. I mean, natural delivery?
Per favore!
), he was wearing a pinstripe lambswool sweater. It was cerulean and cream, and must have been chosen by Nonna Raffaella and approved by a panel of nurses. His hair had been combed to the side, a dab of cologne had been applied behind his ear.

My first thoughts were: What if he doesn't like me? What if I have bad breath? What does my hair look like? Can somebody please get me a
mirror
in here?

I was ready for fatigue, depression, joy. I wasn't ready for an eighth-grade crush. No one prepared me for the butterflies in my stomach, the dry mouth, the sweaty hands. Oh Lord, help me. For the second time in my life I was falling for an Italian man.

“Mamma!”
Raffaella came into the room and used a term that nearly paralyzed me with its weight of responsibility. All those
m'
s spoke of lasagna made by hand, ironing shirts for a thirty-year-old, and a love that was
totale
. She saw my face, she saw Anthony in my arms looking for my breast, and she knew that it was time to
sdrammatizzare
. “Did you see the pullover? It's so elegant!” Yes, he was elegant, and the sweater was a jewel. Let's focus on the lamb's wool.

But where was Salvatore?

“He's splashing some water on his face. [Read: bawling for joy in the men's room.] Tomorrow I'm thinking that Anthony would look dashing in the white silk romper suit. What do you say?”

“I totally agree.”