Only in Naples (15 page)

A continuous struggle, conflict and argument and distrust. Passivity was not allowed. Although the medical care left much to be desired at Fatebenefratelli, on a psychological level the combat did these patients good. From the outside, I saw that it had the same effect as that hit of clandestine coffee. To live in Naples is to be on your toes, to have a thousand eyes, to stand up and fight for yourself and your loved ones. When you cannot or do not do this, it is a bad sign. It might even mean that you're too sick to risk going to the hospital.

T
he day after Easter is called Pasquetta, or Little Easter, in Italy. In Naples it is also called Fatta Pasqua, or Easter's-Done Day. If there is one day in the liturgical calendar that is a challenge for Christians, it is Easter Monday, Easter's-Done Day.

I had spent Holy Week catching a mass with Raffaella almost every day. I didn't miss the wooden crosses and perfect harmonies of the Protestant church services I grew up with—I loved the smell of incense and the sound of Giampietro's boots clicking on the marble floors; the dripping wax and Chanel perfume, the cleavage and ringing microphones. Holy Week in Neapolitan churches was that and more. It was also a crescendo of anticipation, of pregnant waiting. There was the palpable sense that something huge was about to happen.

For Catholics and Protestants alike, Easter Sunday is the culmination of that waiting. Out come the fancy clothes and bonnets, the chocolate for the kids and the explosion of orchids. The choir singing Hallelujah, the trumpets announcing the joy of Easter. Pump up the karaoke, He is risen! The tomb is empty!

RRRRrring!
goes the alarm clock on Monday morning. Wait, didn't we sing “He is risen!” yesterday? Hallelujah and all that stuff? What do you mean there are lunches to be packed, traffic to battle, life in all its banality to attend to? What a buzz kill.

When I was in high school, my Monday-after-Easter depression was due primarily to a Cadbury Creme Egg hangover. I would wake up on Monday morning in that lethargic, flatulent, morning-after-the-binge state. I would have to zip jeans that were too tight and make it through AP English, trying to get my mind on Elizabethan poetry and out of the rut of “Did I eat four or five chocolate eggs before lunch and six or seven after?” and then “How can I manage to eat only celery until next weekend?”

This is all to say that the day after Easter should be a holiday everywhere for Christians, like it is in Naples. A day to let it sink in: the chocolate, the music, the impossible fact that He died for me and rose again.
Insomma,
give us a moment to digest it all and figure out how we're going to live our lives.

On Pasquetta in Naples, families traditionally do a
gita fuori porta,
a trip outside the city. Usually people take a picnic lunch to the countryside, or a frittata to the beach. When Raffaella was a little girl, she and her family would go to the mountains near Avellino, where her maternal grandparents were from. On the morning of Little Easter, she and her brothers and sisters would come downstairs (wishing each other Happy Easter's-Done Day!) to find eight round
casatiello
rolls on the kitchen table. The
casatiello
is a dense bread made with black pepper,
salame,
lard, bacon, and cheese (provolone, Parmesan, pecorino,
più ci metti più ci trovi!
) and crowned by a hard-boiled egg.

Nonna Clara would make one
casatiello,
of varying size, for each of her eight children. Rosaria, the oldest, would have a roll as big as a tire, while little Nunzio's would be no bigger than a bagel. The kids would start shouting immediately,
“Chist' è mio! Non toccare!”
This one's mine! Don't touch it!

They would wrap their
casatielli
in cloth and hide them under their shirts for the picnic. You knew which one was yours, could recognize it a mile away. You had to protect it. That was your day-after-Easter lunch.

“How did Nonna Clara bake eight rolls, plus two enormous ones for Mamma and Papà, in a nineteen-fifties Neapolitan oven? Was she up all night?” I asked Raffaella.

“What oven? We didn't have an oven!”

Che problema c'è?
With the help of her older daughters, Nonna Clara would take the ten
casatielli
to the communal oven, which was located down two sets of stone steps from their apartment on the Vomero hill. The
forno
served the whole neighborhood, and there was always a line. When it was her turn, she'd give a couple of lire to the baker and wait for her babies to brown. She wouldn't leave the spot, staying watchful for the hour and a half it took to cook them. You never knew when other people might come and claim your
casatielli
as their own.

“How could she recognize which were hers?” I asked Raffaella.

Raffaella laughed and shook her head. What questions! “Ketrin, how does a mother know which child is hers?”

Raffaella made me a
casatiello
that first Easter Monday I was in Naples. We had decided to go to Caserta, a town near Naples and home to a palace that rivals Versailles (which few people visit, most go to Caserta for the mozzarella), and were planning on having a picnic at the palace gardens. I had eaten, and eaten, and eaten on Easter Sunday. Try the goat with roasted potatoes, Ketrin. The
ricotta salata
and
salame
is the traditional Easter appetizer—how can you not eat it? Taste these two
pastiera
cheesecakes and tell us which one is better, Zia Pia's or Zia Maria's. We need your vote.

So there I was, once again, on Easter's-Done morning, feeling flatulent and sluggish. I should skip lunch, my brain said, or at most find some celery in Caserta. But there was my very own
casatiello
on the counter. It was waiting to be wrapped lovingly. No brothers and sisters were vying for it, Salva and Benedetta had their own and were satisfied. I had no choice.

In 1751, when the Bourbon king Charles commissioned his architect to design the royal palace in Caserta, Luigi Vanvitelli presented him with a model of the building and gardens. It was so beautiful that it filled the king with an emotion “fit to tear his heart from his breast.” And this was a guy who grew up in the Royal Palace of Madrid—he knew magnificence when he saw it. The Reggia di Caserta is truly breathtaking. The palace has twelve hundred rooms and the park and gardens extend for nearly two miles. It is considered an architectural masterpiece.

It was hot that year on Pasquetta, and we followed Raffaella to a spot near one of the baroque fountains. She rolled out a blanket and set up the drinks and plates. We took out our
casatielli.
Mine was a little smaller than Salva's, a little bigger than Benedetta's. We compared, and then we dug in.

Sitting on a soft 1970s blanket with the Avallones, I ate it all. I ate the bacon, the lard, the hard-boiled egg. When I'd finished, satisfied (aah, this
casatiello
is not too big, not too small, but juuuuust right!), I rested my head on Salva's lap. Raffaella was carving a juicy melon and talking about where she could find electricity to plug in the hotplate for the little espresso maker she'd brought. Benedetta was spreading coconut sun lotion on her arms. Nino was reading the paper.

I was realizing that I was no longer B.E.D.-ridden.

In all my years of bingeing, it wasn't the actual binge that was the problem. It was the punishment afterward. I had a healthy appetite, and sometimes I ate too much, but I was human. I got hungry again. On depressing, mundane, life-back-to-normal Pasquetta my body needed to be fed just as it did on the sunny, sacred morning of Easter. Even the day
after
the celebration, after the chocolate and the lamb, or the
pastiera
and the ricotta. I realized in Caserta that if I punished and denied myself on Easter's-Done Day, as I had for the last decade, then maybe I was continuing to miss the whole point of Easter itself: The sacrifice was
Jesus's
body, not mine. To us, He said, “Take and eat. This is my body.” He didn't say, Take and eat my body…and then feel guilty about it and don't eat anything for a while. He said,
Buon appetito, signorina.
Enjoy.

B
enedetta's wedding was planned for the end of June in Positano (Nino's objections to Mauro notwithstanding) and the spring was a flurry of wedding preparations. I was part of it all. I went with Raffaella and Benedetta to choose the wedding dress, put in my two cents as to which
bomboniera
was the prettiest. (The
bomboniera
is a little souvenir given at Italian weddings. It is usually silver and small and collects dust in people's apartments for years afterward.) We all went to a huge clothing store near Pompeii to choose the suits for Nino and Salva. Or rather, for Raffaella to choose the suits for Nino and Salva. She pinched and straightened and stuck her fingers all over their bodies. They stood stock-still while she manhandled them, although Salva sent me air kisses across the room. I was asked whether I liked the wider or narrower pinstripe, the Armani or the Ferré, and I did eenie meenie miny moe silently in my mind.

I could not believe that they were about to spend 1,500,000 lire (nearly $1,000 at the time) on a suit. But I realized later, for a well-to-do Neapolitan family, this was borderline thrifty.

Raffaella was a highly talented costumer, and Salva and his father both looked dashing. “You really like the Ferré?” Salva asked me in the car on the way home. We kissed in the backseat, and then he asked, “Now I want to see what you're going to wear, Pagnottella!”

My stomach lurched. We'd never explicitly talked about when I was leaving, but I assumed that he knew I wasn't going to be here at the end of June. Who ever heard of a semester that finished at the
end
of June?
“Vediamo,”
I said. We'll see.

From that moment on, everything that happened would trigger tears. I was leaving soon and Salva hadn't even realized that this was the end. The next Saturday I called him, bawling. I loved him and I loved this crazy place and I loved his family, but I certainly couldn't leave my country and move to Naples at the age of twenty-two! Salva sped over to pick me up, asking, What's wrong?

When I couldn't answer in any intelligible way, he said how about
gelato alla nocciola
? His suggestion made me cry even harder. How could I stay here for a man who thought that all of my pain could be alleviated by buying me an ice cream? When my answer was even more tears, Salva took off for Ciro, the best
gelateria
in Naples, and triple-parked. He bought an enormous cone of
nocciola
and got extra Kleenex. With one hand he dried my tears and with the other fed me the ice cream.

It was just what I needed. Once again, I needed to shut my brain off and be fed.

We drove around the city all afternoon, the elephant in the Fiat being my departure and our future together. Finally, I told Salva that we had to talk. He parked in a piazza in central Naples. “About what?” he asked. “About us. About next year,” I explained.

“Okay, then, talk,” he said.
“Parla.”
(Salva still does this when I say we need to talk. He says, Okay. Talk. It is the one word which makes me, normally a chatterbox, totally tongue-tied.)

“Well, I was thinking…I like you…I would probably miss you….” As I stammered on, Salva's eyes were not looking at me but out the window at another car that had parked nearby. I had no idea at the time, but Salva realized that they were planning a
scippo,
a robbery. He knew that we had to get out of that spot as quickly as possible if we wanted to keep our wallets, our watches, and our car.

I was telling Salva that maybe I could see about doing a master's in Italy—my parents had both studied at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, and there was a program in Bologna, a five-hour train ride from Naples. I didn't love political science or economics, but I liked the idea of staying in Italy the following year to see where this relationship was headed. International relations might be an interesting field after all….

But Salva wasn't listening to a word I said. He wasn't even looking at me. He was focused on those guys in the car next to ours.

“Va bene, va bene.”
Okay, he said, and started the car. He drove off so fast that I thought maybe he was angry that I wasn't staying in Naples the next year. But after a minute or so, he looked at me and smiled. We still had our wallets, we still had our car, and, although I didn't know it at the time, we had a future without an ocean between us. There was much to smile about.