Only in Naples (18 page)

Our cruise ended in Miami, where a Princeton classmate of my father's had a house that he wasn't using. It was a sprawling estate in South Beach, and on our arrival, a handsome young
maggiordomo
showed my parents and me to our bedrooms in the main house. Salvatore, he told us, would be staying in the guesthouse, a separate structure across the lawn. It was a young man's dream come true, complete with a Jacuzzi and beers in the refrigerator. A bachelor pad! I thought Salva would be thrilled.

During the afternoon he seemed to be. He asked me to take pictures of him to show his friends in Naples: in front of the house, relaxing in the hot tub, reclining on a lounge chair. But after dinner, when we kissed good night before going our separate ways, I sensed that something was wrong. “Is this the only key?” he kept asking. “
Solo questo?
You just turn it once like that?”

Hollywood has conditioned the world to think that an isolated house in America is inevitably going to be a site of violent crime. Plus, Gianni Versace had been killed just a few weeks before in Miami, and newspapers were still covering the story. My father thought it very funny to tell Salva that Versace's murderer was a serial killer ready for more Italian blood.

I was preparing for bed when I heard a tentative knock at the door.

I opened it to find Salva in pajamas printed with flying soccer balls.
“Mi sono cagato sotto,”
he whispered. I got scared, shit-in-my-pants scared. He crawled into the single bed with me. “It was so quiet. And those wooden doors wouldn't keep out a fly.”

Back in Washington, Salvatore and I went against his mother's advice and trusted—we ate out. We consumed burgers at restaurants. We drank bottles of ketchup. We got free refills. Salva was awed by straight lines of customers, by waiters who told you their name, by eighteen-wheel trucks. We hopped from enormous thing to enormous thing, from shopping malls to supermarkets to sports complexes. Having grown up in Naples, he had never seen spaces like these.

At one point, I feigned interest in joining a Gold's Gym in Rockville, Maryland, so that we could get a full tour. The trainer shook our hands, and smiled with a lot of very white, very American teeth, telling us that his name was Gary.

“Why is he telling us his name?” Salva whispered to me in Italian. “What does he want from us?”

“Tranquillo, tranquillo,”
I reassured him. “He's just going to show us around.”

Salvatore marveled at the high-tech equipment and the spacious changing rooms. When we finished the tour, Gary invited us into his office to discuss prices for membership and various personal training programs. What are you most interested in? he asked us. Cardio? Weight lifting? I was about to answer (Salva's English was still shaky, and I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible to introduce him to the great American phenomenon of fudge at another food court) when my boyfriend spoke up.

“She needs…how to say…the leg part…here?” He turned to me and pointed to his thigh.
“Ketrin,
come si dice
coscia
?”
How do you say
thigh
?

Silence. I did not translate. I would not translate.

I had a vague sense of where this was going.

But Salva would not be stopped. Nor would he let the language barrier get in his way. Oh no, this was too important. “Do you have some machine for
thees
?” Now he pointed at my thigh. “To make more slimmer?”

Now, I should mention that I have a character flaw the Italians call
permalosità
.
Permalosa
is the word that is used to describe someone who is thin-skinned, who takes everything personally. Like, for example, me. Watch what you say around Katherine, she's
permalosa
. Oversensitive, easily offended. I readily admit that I have never, and will never, like sentences that start with “Don't take this personally, but…” I don't like them and I don't like the creature who utters them. If you know that I may take it personally, that I probably
will
take it personally, just keep your mouth shut, no? I am highly
permalosa
. And, like many young Anglo-Saxon women, nowhere is this more the case than when it comes to body image.

So, if I weren't
permalosa
, I might have seen this episode as an example of my boyfriend's encouragement, of his desire to lovingly nudge me and my thighs toward self-improvement. But since my ego and hence insecurity were about as enormous as that Gold's Gym, I asked the personal trainer if there were any machines that would make my boyfriend's biceps look like they'd lifted something heavier than a fork. There was confusion and fear in the eyes of that trainer as he quickly dispatched us, handing over a brochure and telling us to call if we needed any more information.

T
he typical dish of Bologna is
tortellini in brodo.
Traditional Bolognese sauce (which is not anything like Neapolitan
ragù—
it has almost no tomato in it, in fact) is eaten with tagliatelle or fettuccine, while the meat-filled tortellini must be swimming in broth. At hardcore restaurants in Bologna, they will refuse to serve you
tortellini alla Bolognese.
Only
in brodo.

At restaurants in Naples, pasta doesn't swim. Get a soup.

When I arrived in Bologna to begin my year at SAIS, Salvatore and I decided that we would see each other every other weekend. He came north bearing Styrofoam care packages from his mother, which he would toss on my desk before undressing me. The
parmigiana di melanzane,
mozzarella, and
pasta al forno
could wait
.

“She told me it's all for you,” he would say, after we had gotten our fill of each other and were hungry for food. “Mamma made me promise not to eat it. I get it all the time and you don't. She said you're
sciupata.
”
Sciupata
is the Neapolitan word for scrawny, but it also means pale and generally unhealthy. It's what one becomes when one doesn't have a
mamma
in the kitchen. When, for example, one pursues a master's degree in a city where the pasta is swimming in broth.

My fellow students, my fellow
sciupati,
were from all over the world. They were smart, sophisticated, global. They were twentysomethings who could write cover letters in three languages to attach to their impressive résumés. They hopped continents frequently, had work experience in places like Burma, and most already emailed in 1997.

Meanwhile, Salvatore stayed in Naples, memorizing by heart three-hundred-page law texts in his room of teddy bears and elementary school soccer trophies. We both purchased cellphones as big as small toaster ovens and talked in the evenings. My head was full of kinked supply curves and what was happening in Bosnia, while he would tell me what wonderful things he had had for dinner. “And what did you eat, my
pagnottella
?
”

I refused to answer him. Word would get out.

In the United States that summer, Salvatore had been enthralled by what was, in 1997, a consumer culture that was much more advanced than that of Italy. Although he was challenged by verbs like
to be
and
to go,
he immediately learned expressions like
reward points,
preferred customer,
and
supersaver.
What intellectual energy he had left after eight hours of rote memorization of his law texts he used to redeem coupons to get a 20 percent discount on bath soap (yes, on another continent), or to write letters to places like Walmart (with my linguistic consultation) that went something like this:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like the new Bonus Club Membership. Please. Thank you.

Salvatore Avallone

Via Manzoni, 140

Napoli, Italia

In economics class, I learned that southern Italy was the Appalachia of the EU. Unable to withstand regional shocks and bounce back with labor mobility, it was a place where market capitalism was turned upside down. How did young Neapolitans do that and manage to get away with it? By living at home until they're thirty, by working in the black market, by ignoring the rules and being so very
grounded.
Neapolitans turned the global system on its head in one
gesto
, like a flick of the spatula when frying a frittata.

The young people I knew in Naples didn't seem the least bit interested in being mobile, flexible, independent, global.
No, grazie,
they seemed to say. We're just fine here, with our extended family, smelling things simmering in a pot for hours. But we do like that supersaver discount idea; do we qualify?

Every other Friday afternoon, I would get the Eurostar to Naples, to soft sheets and deep red
ragù
and the world of sensory satisfaction and emotional connection. Five hours passed quickly. Medieval Bologna, Renaissance Florence, the aqueducts outside Rome. (They always made me remember the signs on the Beltway pointing to Washington, the unquestioned seat of the Empire in 1997.) When I saw the sea at Gaeta, I knew that Naples was near and I was coming home.

Pulling into the Napoli Centrale train station, I could see the laundry (intimate robes, pajamas, and all) on the lines that connected the buildings to each other.
“Pronto, Mamma?”
Cellphones would start ringing as we neared the station, loudly, all at the same time. From middle-aged businessmen to young girls in university up north, everyone got a call from their
mamma.
Their conversations were the same, no matter the age or gender: Yes, the train is on time, that sounds good for lunch, but did you get the mozzarella?
Sì, sì, see you soon, love you, Mamma.

My to-do list in Bologna:

My to-do list in Napoli: