Only in Naples (6 page)

That day, Giampietro's microphone whistled and popped. I wish, no, I pray, to DJ Mary that some talented sound technician might pay a visit to all the small churches in southern Italy. How much auditory distress could be resolved with a good sound check! Electronic amplification came on the scene several years ago, and if the truth were told, in most churches it is totally unnecessary, because they have cavernous spaces and domes that would make the acoustics ideal for even the least hellfire-and-brimstone of preachers. Giampietro was in no way hellfire-and-brimstone, mind you. But he was Italian, and his voice projected.

When amplification is used, nobody checks the volume level of the mikes and the piped-in music. And so, as Giampietro began his
Nel nome del Padre,
followed by the sign of the cross, his mike began popping and we heard a painful, high-pitched screech. Many of the women in the church were still talking. “I tried that risotto recipe you gave me but I wasn't sure if the
provola
cheese…”

Soon it was time for the responsive prayer. A young woman in jeans took Giampietro's place at the pulpet and instructed us in a monotone voice to repeat together
Vieni, Salvatore,
or Come, Savior, after she prayed for specific intentions. For the Church…
Vieni, Salvatore;
for the Christian family…
Vieni, Salvatore;
for the sick…I kept intoning with Raffaella and the rest of the congregation
Vieni, Salvatore.
Come, Salvatore.

I confess: my mind was on her son, not Mary's. It was blasphemy, I know! But, despite his physical forwardness, despite the miscommunications, despite the fact that I was seeing a lot more of his mother than of him, I realized that I was falling in love with him. I was falling for his long, tanned, graceful body. For the simple sincerity of his attraction to me, and for the smile that defied me to take myself or my problems too seriously.

Who knew? Maybe sitting next to his mother, saying “Come, Salvatore” together, was a sort of incantation and would do good things for our relationship.

As the Communion approached, recorded music began playing, with a synthesizer beat that sounded like bad karaoke. Wasn't there supposed to be an atmosphere of mystery and serenity for Catholic Communion? This was supposed to be the
actual
body and blood of Christ, after all. I should have realized by then that in Italy, and particularly in Naples, anything is possible. Magic happens. The chaos and noise and colors give way suddenly, unexpectedly, to solemnity. How? The answer is always in the food.

Giampietro fed his girls.

Il corpo di Cristo,
the Body of Christ, he was saying, and the ladies were lining up waiting for Giampietro to feed them their wafers. Most of them didn't put their palms out to receive the body of Christ, but opened up their mouths like little girls being fed their
mamma'
s
ragù.
There was silence; the moment was sacred. This is the whole point of Communion, after all, being fed or
imboccati
in silence. Shut up and eat. The sleek sounds of a perfectly rehearsed Broadway show are not necessary.

When the Communion was finished and Giampietro once again made the sign of the cross,
Nel nome del Padre, del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo,
I could tell he had something else to add. Before he dismissed the women, before the cacophony of voices started up and recipes were rehashed, he paid homage to the absent men. He was, after all, a man and a diehard fan of the Napoli soccer team.
“Ricordatevi”
—Remember, he instructed—
“Forza Napoli!”
Let's go, Naples!

If my grandfather Mimi had been in charge, he'd have called me to the pulpit to knock 'em dead with an “ 
'O Sole Mio
” finale.

W
hen Salvatore and I were together—in the Fiat, in front of the boarding school, in his room under a big Humpty Dumpty clock—his hands were all over me.
Basta!
I'd insist, swatting. (
They don't get offended,
Maria Rosa had told me.
Slap them if you need to.
) I was a good girl: I tried to be forceful and pretend I didn't like it. I never knew that romance could feel so much like play.

I started to call him
polipetto—
my little eight-tentacled octopus.

Octopuses (or octopi), I learned soon after, are solitary creatures. That's what makes them so hard to catch. They do not live in groups or schools, but can be found alone in a cave or holding on to the underside of a rock, camouflaged against the gray stone. Zio Toto, Raffaella's older brother, explained this to me on the feast day of Sant'Antonio, as Raffaella and her sister Pia prepared a massive meal. The highlight of the lunch was to be a six-pound octopus that Toto had caught the day before.

While no one in the family could be described as a shrinking violet, Zio Toto gets the Oscar for being the biggest
casinaro.
In Naples, this word refers to someone who is constantly making
casino:
noise, mess, confusion. The word
casino
(cas-
ee
-no) is a different one from
casinò
(cas-ee-
no
), the site of slot machines and poker. Nonetheless, it helps to think of the noise of slot machines in Vegas to capture the feeling of being around a
casinaro.
Zio Toto,
casinaro
extraordinaire, makes a hell of a lot of racket.

He is also totally shameless.
Faccia tosta,
they would say, which is literally a tough face, meaning that he doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of him. When he came to Washington for our wedding, he spent twenty minutes trying to persuade the ticket seller in the Washington metro to give him a discount. I should mention that he speaks absolutely no English, so it was all in pantomime. I did not offer to translate.

Zio Toto is missing a hand. He lost it in 1972, when he was setting up fireworks for New Year's Eve. In Naples, New Year's Eve is celebrated with explosives. On balconies, terraces, and in the streets, people set off their prized whistlers and bottle rockets until all hours. And every year on January 2, the newspaper of Naples publishes a list of the injured and sometimes the dead. Often they are children. The parents are people who would
never
feed their children mayonnaise or ketchup or let them out of the house without a hat and gloves in October because of the danger to their health. On New Year's Eve, however, they give little Guglielmo a leaping lizard to set off and tell him to have fun.

One would think that losing a hand might have interfered with Toto's octopus catching, particularly because he doesn't use nets, or rods, or underwater guns. (He did use dart guns for a brief while, before giving them up in favor of the visceral thrill of hand-to-tentacle combat.) But the loss of his hand didn't slow him down in the least.
“Che problema c'è?”
he says. What's the problem? He doesn't scuba-dive, so when he gets a glimpse of a
polipo,
he has to take a deep breath and plunge. His long gray hair trails behind him like a merman's as he dives for his prey.

Sometimes Toto hides behind a rock and throws a spearlike instrument into a cave where he suspects an octopus might be lurking. When the little bugger rolls out, Toto attacks. He keeps his left arm and stub close to his body and pumps his flippers to slice through the water to the
polipo.
With only his right hand, he grabs the octopus, squeezes and twists its head, sticks two fingers into its brain, and then pulls it up to shore. The octopus tries to position its tentacles on Toto's stump and pull him down to the depths. When Toto manages to bring an octopus up to the surface, he holds its tentacles and beats its head against a rock (with one hand, somehow managing not to let it slide out of his grip and go flying back into the sea).

Eight arms against one, and Toto is always the victor.

I am in the living room of the Avallones' apartment listening to Toto describe yesterday's slippery battle with the
polipo.
We are sitting on the silk couch, and he hasn't stopped grinning, or talking, for the last twenty minutes. I should be helping to prepare the meal: I am a woman, after all. The sea smell of the octopus overpowers the doughy scent of the spinach pie in the oven. I can hear the shuffling efficiency of Raffaella and her sister Pia in the kitchen, and know that any attempt at “help” would basically mean my getting in the way of their all-important preparation of the
polipo.
Giving my undivided attention to Zio Toto, I've decided, is my most useful contribution to the cause.

“Isn't it dangerous? I mean, the octopus could grab you and pull you down,” I ask him.

“Eeeeh,”
he exhales, making a Neapolitan sound which is used to mean, What are you gonna do? That's life. I hear this often in places like the post office or bank, when I protest that they shouldn't be closing at 1:15 in the afternoon—it says on the door they're open until 1:30 and I have a bill to pay!
“Eeeeh,”
on the exhale. That's life.

Toto proudly rolls up the sleeve of his dress shirt. He unscrews his prosthetic hand so that I can get a better look at his war wounds. All the way down to his stub, there are reddish-brown hickeys.
“Quelli s'aggrappano, t'abbracciano.”
The little suckers grab on to you and hug you tight. Once, he tells me, he got badly bitten by a particularly aggressive
polipo
(one has to be careful not only of the suction cups but of the octopus's little hidden beak, too!).

The ritual for octopus preparation is this: after the battle, after the triumphant beating against the rock, Zio Toto, with long gray hair and Speedo dripping, delivers the octopus to his sisters, who stick it into a plastic bag. Back home in the kitchen, Raffaella pounds the creature again, this time on a cutting board with a meat tenderizer. Then, after she's cleaned him and removed his hard “beak,” she holds his head above a pot of boiling water and dunks his tentacles three times. The tentacles curl up on contact with the water, creating an instant 1960s bob hairdo. There is a cork floating in the water—it makes the tentacles more tender. (Beating against a rock, dunked three times in boiling water with cork: Is this some kind of witchcraft?)

Lunch is ready, and I move to the dining table with the men. (Benedetta is at her fiancé's home, helping her future mother-in-law prepare and serve the Sant'Antonio lunch—there probably isn't one household in Naples that doesn't have an Antonio to celebrate.) Raffaella and her sister are buzzing, tasting, sprinkling things with last-minute salt or parsley or Parmesan. They begin serving. Young, able-bodied, and female, I guiltily wait to be served.

Raffaella has seven brothers and sisters. Their mother, Nonna Clara, cooked three-course lunches and dinners every day, washed sheets and blankets by hand, canned vegetables, and scrubbed floors. Her children, she used to say,
“non hanno voglia di far niente. Sono nati stanchi e vivono per riposare.”
They don't do anything, they were born tired and live to rest. She called theirs a “rotten generation.” Seeing Pia and Raffaella baking and serving, and hearing of Toto and his one-handed battle with the octopus, I wonder what Nonna Clara would have thought of my generation. Rotten? Not just moldy but positively in decay.

Toto is still describing yesterday's strategic strikes when Pia's thick fingers (how can fingers be so muscular?) set down in front of me a plate of
insalata di polipo,
octopus salad. I look at the little pieces of Toto's nemesis, mixed with garlic and olive oil and parsley, and feel that I know him. Poor little guy was just minding his own business in that cave when Toto's spear shot through! I put my sentiments aside and prepare to take a bite and exclaim to the table that it is the best
polipo
I've ever tasted.

When everyone has been served, Pia and Raffaella stop moving. They don't sit, they stand at attention behind the high backs of two gilded eighteenth-century dining room chairs. (There is an expression in Neapolitan dialect,
'A mamma stà assettata, 'o pate stà allerta e 'o figlio fuie.
If the mother sits down, the father gets worried and the kids run away. In other words, a mother sitting is an unnatural sight.) There is silence: Toto has stopped talking, plates have stopped clinking.

We all taste the octopus.

“È duro 'sto polipo
.
”

It is Nino who has broken the silence. He speaks with his mouth full, exaggerating the movement of trying to cut through the chewy octopus with his overworked molars. Have I understood correctly? Has he just said that the octopus is tough, no good?

“È buonissimo! È buonissimo!”
I start my performance immediately. It's fabulous! It's fabulous! Let's pretend Nino didn't say that!

I am completely ignored.

Salvatore seconds his father's statement.
“Ha ragione Papà.”
Daddy's right.

Boing boing boing go our molars, and I continue my praise.
“Mai assaggiato così buono.”
I've never tasted octopus salad that's so good, I say with the strongest, most authoritative voice I can muster. I swallow a huge chunk whole. My canines have not even punctured the flesh of the animal. I haven't lied—the truth is that I've never tasted octopus salad at all.

No one counters Nino and Salva: apparently, they're right. It isn't tender, it isn't tasty. The only question that remains is, whose fault is it?

After an excruciating silence, Pia declares, “Toto, this octopus you caught is really tough.” Not the octopus that we cooked. The octopus that
you caught.
Fightin' words.

“Lella, did you perhaps forget to beat it?” Toto asks Raffaella nonchalantly. Since he is certain that his octopus was not by nature tough, the only question he has for his sister is where she went wrong. Raffaella was supposed to mash the octopus with a hammer before performing the dunking torture, Toto explains with authority, even though I suspect that he has never cooked an octopus. He knows each step in the process, and wants to make sure everyone remembers that.

“Forget?! Of course I didn't forget!” she yells over him. “It's the octopus, it wasn't tender at all.” Clearly, the women did the absolute best they could with what they had to work with.

I was glad to stay at the table so I didn't have to watch the sisters wiping the octopus into the trash with oily paper towels. In the kitchen, they talked of the toughness of the octopus; at the table, the men lamented that when women get to a certain age, they don't care for cooking anymore. They forget to hammer the octopus, or they get lazy and figure no one will notice.

“You should have tasted Nonna Clara's octopus salad,” Toto tells me. He closes his eyes and imagines it. Succulent, tender.

“Was it much better than this one?” I ask to humor him, knowing the answer.

“Eeeeeh”
on the exhale is his only reply. What can you do? Life sucks when the preparation of something as important as a
polipo
must be left in the hands of women from a “rotten” generation.