Only in Naples (4 page)

So my mother was born to an Italian American preacher in the South. Things weren't easy for a preacher's daughter in the 1950s—Bonnie was expected to be well behaved, accomplished, and, most of all, beautiful. And the definition of beautiful for my mother, a naturally curvy Italian-looking woman, did not leave any room at the seams. Beautiful meant skinny.

Bonnie Salango stopped eating breakfast and lunch in the early 1960s, and hasn't partaken in those daytime meals since. She has never weighed more than 120 pounds, and looks, still, like Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. My mother showed my sister and me the photo of her in a West Virginia local paper when she graduated as valedictorian from Georgetown's foreign service school. When I saw the picture, I didn't feel proud of her achievement. I felt proud of her thinness underneath that robe.

A “chunky” daughter was simply not going to cut it.

So it doesn't surprise me to hear that when I was reprimanded by my mother at the age of three for picking my nose and eating the boogers, my response was, “Why, Mommy, do they have too many calories?” In elementary school, my lunchtime “treat” was a Flintstones chewable vitamin. The teachers at Saint Patrick's were told that when cartons of milk were distributed to the class, Katherine should be given skim rather than whole. “Sweetheaaaaart,” my mother would tell me in her Appalachian twang, “remember to always git the
blue
!”

“Mommy, why am I the only one that gets blue and everybody else gets red?”

She explained rationally and I understood rationally. So many extra calories, and for what? I trusted. I felt fine when the box appeared and I saw my blue carton buried in a sea of reds. And then one day in first grade my best friend, Robin, skinny and blond and a whole-milk drinker until high school, insisted that I take a swig from her red carton. At once my world was shattered and new horizons appeared.

That first crunchy, steaming bite of
sartù
did the same thing to my twenty-one-year-old body that a swig of cold whole milk had done at Saint Patrick's Episcopal Day School in the fall of 1981. My carnal transformation was under way, and there was no going back.

I
t was a morning at the end of September when I arrived at the Consulate with a great big Santa Claus sack of laundry slung over my back. I waved to the soldiers with Uzis, nodded to Clinton, and looked frantically for Cynthia.

My laundry had become an all-consuming preoccupation. I had no washing machine, there were no Laundromats in Naples, and when I took my sullied things to the
lavanderie
(dry cleaners), the women would take the bag and look inside. Shocked, scandalized, they would stare at me and say,
“Ma c'è roba intima!”
There are intimate robes!

What intimate robes? Where?

“You took your bras and underwear to the dry cleaners?” Cynthia asked me, horrified. “Oh, honey, no.” She explained that in Naples
roba intima
—bras and underwear and even undershirts—are to be touched by no one but the owner. They are extremely, extremely private. Here I was traipsing around the city with my bag of dirty panties, shoving them in people's faces! How humiliating!

“But what am I supposed to do, Cynthia? I certainly can't bring my intimate robes to Salva's apartment and ask Raffaella to put them in her washing machine!”

It hadn't occurred to me to do what any Neapolitan woman would have done: buy detergent and hand-wash my panties in the sink. I was raised by a woman who would never
handle
her intimates. She'd do what any respectable preacher's daughter from the South would do: she'd throw her stuff into the washing machine, and turn that temperature up as hot as it would go.

And so the political consul of the United States agreed to let me come over later that day with my unwieldy sack of soiled undergarments to use her enormous GE washing machine (the sack was enormous because my first solution to the no-washing-machine problem was of course just to buy
lots
of underwear). I counted the hours for the working day to end so that I could go to Cynthia's penthouse apartment overlooking the bay. I needed her words of wisdom as well as her washing machine.

“Let me explain,” she began, after getting my panties spinning (anonymous in all that American space! How I love the Department of State!). She opened a monstrous bag of Doritos from the military base and set it on the coffee table between us. “There are some things you do
not
mention in Naples when it comes to hygiene and private parts. First of all, they
have
to think you bidet. At your own home, you give guests who ask to use the bathroom one hand towel and one separate bidet towel. When you are invited to someone else's home and you are given a separate bidet towel,
do not say,
‘No thanks, I don't need this.' That is an admission that you, as an American, do not bidet.”

“But I don't bidet!”

“
They cannot know that.
They must think that you use the specific
detergente intimo—
intimate detergent, or pussy suds as I like to think of them. And that you dry yourself with the bidet towel afterward.”

Her preemptive strike was too late. I remembered with horror that just days before, when Raffaella had handed me two towels when I went to the bathroom, I had actually said, cheerfully, “One's plenty! I'll use the same one for both hands!”

“But don't they understand that toilet paper, used correctly, can do the trick?” Or if not, I hoped, couldn't I be the one to enlighten them on the possibilities of what the Brits call the mighty loo roll?

“No.” Cynthia had patience. Oh, did she have patience. “They find it revolting. Not cleaning yourself with a specific kind of soap after doing
cacca
puts you in the category of animals and Gypsies.”

We munched on Doritos, and I told her more about Salva and the Avallones. I described how after dinner at the Denza, I would walk down the marble steps to the communal pay phone with a plastic phone card in my sweaty hand. My nerves would settle as soon as I heard his cheerful
“Eh, Pagnottella!”
In Salva's tone of voice, and in the honks of his horn as he picked me up in his little red Fiat to take me to eat his mother's food, I heard:
You are a woman, and you are beautiful, and you are full of healthy, human appetites.
I'd learned a lot of things growing up in America, but I'd missed that part. My whole body was starting to crave the way this guy made me feel.

As I began to fall for Salvatore, though, I worried about the negative preconceptions I had about Italian men. Weren't they all macho and didn't they all cheat on their girlfriends? Cynthia was single, but I'd seen her with several different handsome Neapolitans at events at the Consulate.

“Well, is he a nerd?” she asked.

I didn't know. He was Italian—how could I tell if he was a nerd or not? There weren't many cultural indicators I could read. How did he dress? Like an Italian. How did he express himself? Like an Italian. I couldn't use any linguistic or cultural markers to evaluate him.

“Because if you want to start something with an Italian, he
must
be a nerd. The others are slick and sleazy womanizers, and the nerds are handsome and charming anyway. Trust me.”

“He lives with his parents and studies a lot,” I offered.

“Good sign.”

Soon, the washing machine beeped, and I thanked Cynthia.

As I was leaving, she put her hand on my shoulder and asked, “Are you really into him, honey?”

I wasn't sure exactly what I was falling for. Was I infatuated with him, or his family, or both? But I was starting to realize that maybe it wasn't so important to put a name on it so that I could put it away in a little category in my brain. Maybe I was being fed and loved and the rest would take care of itself. Luciano De Crescenzo, a Neapolitan philosopher, once said that if the Lord wanted to take everyone in Naples to heaven, all He would have to do is pull one line of laundry and the whole city would come with it, because all the buildings in Naples are connected by hanging wash.

My intimate robes had been spinning in an enormous American GE washing machine, but De Crescenzo's image of the laundry lines of Naples was a more accurate picture of the connections that were forming in my heart.

N
eapolitan
ragù
is so central to the culture and the base for so many recipes (including lasagna and
sartù
) that Eduardo De Filippo, a playwright and poet of Neapolitan dialect in the last century, wrote a poem about it. A husband tries to reason with his wife that what she has made is nothing close to his mother's recipe. The poem is a worshipful ode to
ragù:

'O 'rraù

'O 'rraù ca me piace a me

m'o ffaceva sulo mammà.

A che m'aggio spusato a te

ne parlammo pè ne parlà.

Io nun songo difficultuso;

ma lluvàmmel' 'a miezo st'uso

Sì, va buono: cumme vuò tu.

Mò ce avéssem'appiccecà?

Tu che dice? Chest'è rraù?

E io m'o mmagno pè m' 'o mangià…

M' 'a faja dicere na parola?…

Chesta è carne c' 'a pummarola.

Here goes with my translation (De Filippo is turning in his grave):

Oh
ragù

the
ragù
that I love

was made only by Mommy.

Since I married you

we've talked about it, but the talk is just words.

We shall talk of it no more.

Whatever! You decide about the
ragù.

I don't want a fight.

But tell me, you really think this is
ragù
?

I'll eat it just to fill my tummy…

but will you let me say just one last thing?

This is simply meat with tomatoes.

The key to cooking real Neapolitan
ragù
is to let it
pippiare.
This onomatopoeic verb in dialect refers to the
pi pi
sound of bubbles popping when the sauce is on a low flame for hours and hours. (Shouldn't I be doing something to it?
“Lascia stare!”
Raffaella told me. Leave it! Leave it! Why do you have to be doing?) Raffaella's mother, Nonna Clara, who had raised eight children in postwar Naples, used to cook her
ragù
for at least twelve hours. Any less and the sauce would be bright red. “You never want your
ragù
to be red, in Naples it must be closer to black and so dense that it's hard to stir,” Raffaella told me. Stirring
ragù
for ten people in an earthenware pot for twelve hours: Nonna Clara must have had biceps to rival Rocky's.

I had been to the Avallones' numerous times for dinner. Thanks to the
ci sentiamo
mixup, Salvatore and I talked on the phone almost every day. There were no cellphones, and he lived at home, so I would inevitably talk to his mother first when I called—Beautiful weather, isn't it? How was the Consulate today, and what did you have for lunch? (Young Neapolitans dating could never
not
know each other's parents. An American mother might pass the phone like a baton, but in Naples that would be considered beyond rude. When Salva called my house in Washington months later and my mother said, “Hi! Just a second I'll get 'er,” he asked me,
What have I done to your parents that they hate me so?
)

On the evening of my first
ragù
, rigatoni with
ragù,
to be precise, Salvatore had finished studying late. He walked into the kitchen wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. Even before he sat down at the table, his mother brought a wooden spoon overflowing with her dense
ragù
over to him, and he opened up. She cupped his chin with one hand and inserted the spoon with the other.
Imboccare
is the Italian verb, to spoon-feed.

I was floored by Salva's total lack of self-sufficiency and independence. And pride, for Christ's sake! He was twenty-three! When Raffaella saw me watching, disturbed, she did what she had to do. She used the same spoon to
imboccare
me.

Salvatore and I had swapped saliva but had yet to kiss.

Our plates of pasta that evening were so full of
ragù
that you couldn't see any white of the rigatoni. Raffaella mixed all of the pasta with all of the sauce, spooned it out in the dishes, and then put a whole ladle of
ragù
on top of each serving. “There needs to be enough sauce for the
scarpetta,
” she explained. The
scarpetta
(literally, “little shoe”) refers to the piece of bread that you use to sop up the sauce after finishing your pasta.

By the time Salva dropped me off at the gate of my boarding school I'd forgotten my discomfort about the spoon-feeding.
Te piace il ragù, eh, Pagnottella?
he laughed. Yes, okay, fine, I loved the
ragù,
I told him. I also loved his smile, and the way he touched my cheek when he said “Pagnottella.” Little Muffin-face.

It was time for him to say
Ci sentiamo
or
Ci vediamo
and speed off in his Fiat, but he didn't. He got out of the car and stood there. The air was moist, and smelled of magnolias and sweet fetid garbage. A motorbike buzzed by. I giggled to fill the silence.

Salva looked around awkwardly, everywhere but in my eyes. The moment was hesitant and charged and then his mouth was on mine. It was so sudden and forward that my only thought was, When did he get drunk? I've been with him all evening! No one could do that if he weren't drunk or on drugs! “Come on, Pagnottella, get in the car,” he said. I did as I was told. Was this Salvatore? The guy I had been spoon-fed with an hour earlier? The one who tenderly cut my pizza into tiny pieces? Where were we going?

I was attracted to Salva and wanted to kiss him, but his behavior shocked me. I didn't have a lot of experience with American guys, but the ones I had “hooked up” with in college were gradual and tentative in their advances…unless they were drunk. At Princeton in 1996, men were encouraged to ask, “Can I kiss you?” and not make a move until they had verbal consent. This guy went from zero to a hundred with no warning, and he was sober! There was no stepping back to see what my reaction was, no checking in with me about whether I liked it or not. What was he going to do next?

Salvatore parked the little tin-can car in a row of similar cars perched on the high promontory of Posillipo, where during the day we could have seen the sea and the islands of Nisida, Procida, and Ischia. The car next to us had newspapers covering all the windows and windshield and was rocking slightly back and forth.

I later learned that coming to this spot to have sex in the car is a necessity for Neapolitan
ragazzi,
or young adults, who live in small apartments with their families and don't have any privacy. (The very word
privacy
does not exist in the Italian language, so the English word is used. It is pronounced with a rolled
r
and a long, languorous, luxurious
eye.
) There was even a man who stood behind a little table selling condoms, year-old newspapers, Kleenex, and Scotch tape. (It took me a while, but I eventually figured out the uses for all of these accoutrements.) I never figured out, however, why all these
ragazzi
chose a place with a gorgeous view. I guess a romantic context helped to set the mood, even if the women ended up staring at newsprint.

As I took in this 1996 Neapolitan equivalent of a 1950s American drive-in, Salvatore continued to kiss me. The pressure of his full lips and the smell of his cologne kept me in the moment, but the
ragù
breath took me back to his mother's kitchen. The cars were rocking around us, and his hands moved over me quickly, trying here and trying there. It was too much too fast. I moved his hands away. I even said no, semiforcefully.

Salvatore didn't push it, he just finished his kissing and said,
“Va bene!”
as if we had just finished a game of UNO and it was time to go home. He started up the car and drove me back to the Denza. When I stumbled out, vaguely nauseous and with unsteady legs, he called,
“Ciao, bella Pagnottella!”
out the window and sped off.

He didn't say “Listen to you tomorrow,” and I was glad. I didn't know what to make of him now. How could I reconcile the sweet, dependent mama's boy with the silent groping man in the car? I needed to talk to some Italian women who weren't related to Salvatore. I needed to find out if this was normal behavior.

The next evening in the dining hall I waited anxiously for my Calabrese fairy godmothers. They would be shocked at how forward Salvatore was! If my Italian managed to sufficiently convey what had happened, they would surely commiserate with me. In the end, however, it was I who was in for a surprise.

I told them the story as best I could, leaving suspenseful pauses and playing up my role as unsuspecting victim. They ate their veal cutlets
con calma,
and with impeccable manners, nodding at the right times. When I finished, there was a long silence. Then Maria Rosa said, “And?”

“Yeah,” Francesca added. “What did he do that was so awful?”

“He didn't even ask, or hesitate, or wonder if I wanted to be kissed! Or touched! He just kept going!” I answered. “His hands were everywhere! Do you think he might have been drunk?” I honestly believed that that was the only possible justification for his aggressive behavior.

“Of course not. He's a guy! What did you expect him to do?”

Now
I
was shocked. They interpreted it as completely normal male behavior! “So that's just what guys do here? They're that forward physically?”

“
No! Anzi!
” said Francesca, and gave me the gift of another Italian word that I will never forget as long as I live.
Anzi
means to the contrary, and is said with raised eyebrows and a decisive, descending, very long
a.
“Guys do much more! Let me get this straight: You've seen each other six or seven times, he's never even touched you before, and he didn't try to have sex?”

“That's accurate.”

“Are you
sure
he's not gay?”

And so, in a sense, my relationship with Salvatore was saved by these two southern Italian women. They explained to me that here, a guy will keep going until he's stopped by the girl. Always, with no exceptions. And usually, the guy will be much pushier about it than Salvatore was. Use a slap when you need to, Maria Rosa told me. Offended? Why would a guy be offended by a slap? Never forget that men are needy and pathetic when it comes to sex. You have the power. Use it.