Only in Naples (9 page)

Gary Coleman was screwing up his face and saying,
“Che cavolo stai dicendo, Weelles?”
(translated literally, “What kind of cabbage you goin' on about, Willis?”) when Salvatore came into the living room. He had been crying, and his eyelashes were stuck together with tears. He kneeled down and put his head on my lap. I could feel him taking huge post-sob breaths.

Salva was looking for solace on my big American thighs.

A door slammed. Plates clinked as Raffaella put things away in the kitchen. Nino and Benedetta silently licked their wounds.

In Salvatore's body, I could feel the depth of his love for his family. And as he held on to me tight, I felt like it wasn't just love for his family—it extended to me, too. Maybe this wasn't simply attraction or youthful infatuation on his part. Maybe it was something more.

When he looked up, I could see that his face was wet. His voice trembled as he explained,
“A mio padre non piace Mauro.”
My father doesn't like Mauro. Salva flicked his hand under his chin in the Neapolitan gesture meaning nothing, zero,
niente.
The guy, his hand gesture said, had no chance.

M
y internship at the Consulate became part-time at the end of October. We weren't exactly busy, so I asked Cynthia if I could start teaching English in the afternoons to earn some extra money. It didn't take much to convince the establishment, since I wasn't being paid.

The English-language schools I applied to in Naples had names like the London Institute, Wall Street Academy, and Cambridge Centre, and were located on the second or third floor of crowded apartment buildings downtown. They were made up of two classrooms at most, with cartoonish American and British flags on the walls. I was hired immediately because I was mother-tongue. The school I chose to start at paid 10,000 lire an hour (about five dollars), handed to me in cash by the director at the end of each lesson. He spoke no English whatsoever.

Unbeknownst to the director of the language school, my classes centered on two topics of conversation: What does everyone think of the United States? And, What does everyone think of my relationship with Salvatore and our future?

Like many Americans, I was fascinated by what my students, most of whom had never been to the States, thought about my country. Could it be that I was homesick? In part, but it was more that slightly adolescent and narcissistic curiosity common to a lot of Americans: our great big national desire to know what they
really
think of us. I had my students write short essays. Here are some highlights:

“The Americans are a beautiful people because they are simple. They are always saying what they think. Not like Italian people.”

“I think that United States is a big country full of people who lives in many different ways, trust in different gods, but they lives in a same place because they are like brothers and respect each other. Like blacks, chineses, European people.”

“In America, all the streets are crowded by people of different races and colors (whites, blacks, yellows, reds) and this is beautiful.”

“I'd like to go to the U.S. To learn how to be myself and, in spite of that, to be happy too. Not to make blood in my veins get water, to get alive.”

“U.S. is the place where all things leave before spreading all over.”

“If I will have time in America I'd like to ski in Colorado, in Aspen of course, running like hell on my skis with big black sunglasses and a crazy long hat. After this will I get a little tired? Yes, maybe. And then? Iowa!!!!!! I would go there for two months, getting fuel for myself, relaxing on the green, kidding with the dolls. I'd like to rent a big factory [I think he meant farm,
fattoria
in Italian] and sleep alone a very long time.”

After we'd pulled apart their perceptions, and misconceptions, of my homeland, we would move on to grammar.

The question of the day might be:
Do you-all
(plural of
you,
each student can give his or her opinion)
really think Salva loves me?
Or, let's try the third person present interrogative of
love: Does he love me enough to move away from Naples and his parents?
As their English got better, I challenged them to dissect my emotional state.
Am I in love with Salvatore, or with Naples in general?
Or even,
Am I simply in love with his mother and what she cooks?

Because I enjoyed teaching and sharing the beauty of my mother tongue, it was extremely frustrating for me that Salvatore seemed to have no desire whatsoever to improve his English. We were spending a lot of time together, and I was an English teacher, so wouldn't it have been natural for him to use the opportunity to better his language skills? Did I really have to be subjected to his singing, to the tune of John Denver's “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Hoven road, in the sun. To the place I rerun!
West Virginia!
[with gusto, he knew that part!] Sunshine Momma, run to road, in the song…”?

I understand that when you grow up listening to songs with lyrics in a language that you don't understand, you focus on the melody and the rhythm. A nonsense approximation of the words is just fine. But shouldn't it make him just a tad self-conscious that there was a native English speaker listening? Not in the least.

When I would correct his grammar, for instance by noting, “Salva, the first person of the verb
to come
is ‘come.' No
s,
capisci?
I come,” he would respond with his version of Boy George:
“Cumma cumma cumma cumma comeleon, you giva go, you giva go…”
There was no hope. Years later, I would have to leave this teaching job to my bilingual and easily embarrassed children.

At the same time Salva refused to learn English, I was getting more fluent in both spoken Italian and in the parallel language of hand gestures, which is necessary for survival in Naples. Americans use hand gestures too, but they employ them in a completely different way. Except for a few precise ones (“Tsk, tsk” with the carrot-peeling movement of two index fingers; curling up one index finger to mean
Come here
), American hand gestures are large, sweeping, and general. And they vary from person to person. In Naples, they are so specific that there is even a dictionary of
gesti,
complete with pictures of someone's hand and the description of the movement. As a foreigner, you must learn this language just as you learn the verbs or adjectives of the spoken language.

When I first arrived in Naples, I would ask the doorman at the boarding school if there was any mail for me, and he would respond without a sound, looking me straight in the eye. He held, however, his thumb and index finger in the form of a pistol and shook his thumb almost imperceptibly from side to side. My response would be to look him in the eye and ask again, is there any mail for me? Once again, he would do the jiggling-thumb-gun thing, and jut out his lower lip just to make things clear.
Oh, grazie,
thank you! I would say, and wink, thinking I had just engaged in some profound covert communication but still having absolutely no idea whether I had any mail or not. I later learned that that hand gesture means
niente,
nothing, and can also be expressed with a click of the tongue and a hand flicking under the chin.

Watch out, that guy is trying to cheat you
is expressed by pulling down the lower eyelid of one eye with the index finger.
Let's eat
is all the fingertips of one hand together doing a pecking motion toward the mouth, while
pasta
is the index and middle finger doing a twisting motion simulating a fork gathering up spaghetti. These are just a few of many, but my all-time favorite is the gesture that means someone has died. It is (get this!) the index and middle fingers of the right hand straightened upward together, representing the soul of the deceased, doing a circular, Slinky-like motion up to the sky. The other fingers are closed in a fist. Along with the hand gesture, a quick (rather cheerful, strangely enough) whistle is emitted. This is apparently the sound of the soul of the deceased going to heaven. Just a hop, skip, and a jump! You will hear people in Naples (where to say someone is
morto,
or dead, is considered rather bad taste) describing how Aunt Maria (as soon as the name is uttered, there goes the soul up to heaven with a whistle so we remember she's dead!) made the best frittata
….

As for my spoken Italian, the language I was learning was Neapolitan dialect. Not
dialetto stretto,
or pure dialect, but Italian with a marked Neapolitan accent and with many expressions that are unique (I now know) to Naples. The idea of having a down-home southern accent in Italian did not bother me, because I think in some visceral way it took me back to my mother's Appalachian twang. It's a different language, I know, but I swear that the feel of it, the pull-up-a-chair-honey-soup's-on of it, is the same. Ham hocks and beans in southern West Virginia or fried pizza dough smothered in tomato and mozzarella in the countryside surrounding Napoli. Tight Italian soccer shirts and gel in the hair or oversize basketball jerseys and Walmart. The cultures in many ways are polar opposites. But when you're called to the table by Mama, or Mamma, in that way, in a way that goes straight to your innards…you could just as well be in Bluefield, West Virginia, or Secondigliano, Provincia di Napoli.

An analogous situation might be an Italian girl, a bit shy, pretty in an old-fashioned way, who has come to the United States to learn English. “Oh, you're from Italy! Whereabouts?” She responds with a smile, “I's from Rome but learned myself English in Memphis.” That was the sort of impression I gave, linguistically. In Naples, I learned that any and every verb could be reflexive. I ate myself a plate of pasta, I watched myself a film. My vowels were long and lazy, especially the
a
(in Naples, it lasts so long that you don't know if the speaker is going to get around to finishing the word). My
s
sounded like
sh.
“To have” was for me the Neapolitan
tenere
(which is more like “got myself”) instead of the Italian
avere.
“Tengo na famma 'e pazze,”
I would say, meaning that I was very, very hungry. Or, literally, “I got myself a crazy hunger.”

It was the night before I left home for Princeton University. My father, uncle, and grandfather were all die-hard Princeton alumni. They went to reunions every year with orange top hats, they sang the college anthem “Old Nassau” at family dinners, their response when they found out that someone had gone to another Ivy League school was, “What a shame, he seemed like such a nice man.” Throughout my childhood I thought my father's legal name was Edward Wilson '63.

So everyone was ecstatic when I was admitted to Old Nassau and decided to go. I was supposed to be ecstatic, too. I was supposed to be “
so
psyched.” My mother was supposed to be relieved and proud and ready to enjoy her husband's company in a peaceful empty nest. We both pretended that we couldn't wait. I was going to be Katherine Wilson '96! There were auditions for
Kiss Me, Kate
with the Princeton University Players that very fall! In the checkout line of Bed Bath & Beyond, pulling the biggest suitcases down from the attic, attaching that luggage thing on top of the station wagon, we talked about how “cool” it was going to be.