Only in Naples (21 page)

T
he tour of
Jesus Christ Superstar
led to a tour of
Evita,
which led to small roles in Italian sitcoms. At dubbing studios, I was called to lend my voice to heroines in low-budget Filipino horror movies, or to neurotic badgers in Brazilian cartoons. There was work, but none of it was in Naples.

As I got ready to go onstage in Mantova, or Cremona, trying desperately to find a pocket of oxygen in a dressing room that was a haze of cigarette smoke, I would call Salva in Naples. The whole family was gathered for risotto and
arrosto
to celebrate Santa Benedetta, or San Salvatore. Or it was Nino and Raffaella's wedding anniversary, and they had gotten fresh
gamberi
for the linguine. It was Emilio's first birthday, and I should have tried that
caprese
cake! The family gathered, and I was missed.

How much longer, I wondered, until I can come home for good?

“How many years do couples usually date in Naples before getting married?” I asked Salva on the phone one evening, trying to sound like I was performing a sociological survey. He had only one exam left to complete his university degree, and I wondered where we stood.

Well, Salva told me, his cousin Giorgio had been with his girlfriend for fourteen years. Another friend was going on sixteen years, with no engagement on the horizon. Hard to tell.

“Comunque, più di dieci,”
he decided. More than ten years for sure.

“That is a decade. Of dating.”

“The reason is economic,” Salva explained. Italian
ragazzi
don't earn enough to rent their own place. (He didn't mention mothers, or lasagna.) You can't get married if you're still economically dependent on your parents, after all.

It was time to tell him about my family's history, and the money that my grandparents had set aside for their grandchildren, in the form of a trust. This was difficult, since there is no Italian translation for the term. Italian children who inherit wealth usually get it in the form of apartments or land or jobs. When their parents die, they get whatever they get directly. Taxes?
Eeeeeeh,
on the exhale—you don't pay them during life, you don't pay them after death.

“I have a trust fund.” (To trust is good, not to trust is better:
Fidarsi è bene, non fidarsi è meglio!
) I tried to explain. “It's this American thing where we skip generations.” My translation made it sound like all Americans like to hop over their kids on principle. “It isn't my parents' money, it was set up by my grandparents.”

“Why? They didn't trust your parents?”

It was a conversation going nowhere. The truth was, I had no vocabulary to translate terms like
estate tax
or
loopholes.
In reality, I didn't even know what they meant.

I was very confused about money as a child. I knew that we had an extravagant house, and that we took a lot of nice vacations. But my parents reminded me often that we weren't as rich as other people thought we were. Our family had never actually
owned
Wilson. My grandfather was just a shareholder when it was sold and it wasn't sold for much and I should just laugh when my classmates in elementary school asked me for a free tennis racket. When my family socialized with the Marriotts and Firestones, my mother always commented that “these people are just in a different
league,
precious.” And she was right, they were in a different league if you were going to compare the rich with the superrich. But my mother pushed the point so much that my sister and I believed that we were one step away from food stamps.

So I realized only embarrassingly late that the trusts in the hands of family bankers, the studying of tax loopholes, the bizarre generation skipping—all meant that we had money in our names. My father's grandfather, the industrial magnate, left him trusts. My grandfather, in turn, left me trusts. But these trusts, my mother believed, were not meant to be spent. “They exist to avoid estate tax,” she would tell me when I asked what a trust was. Interest could be skimmed off for emergencies, but the phrase
tapping into capital
was akin to
shooting up heroin.

For Bonnie Wilson, money that you don't earn shouldn't really be yours. Rags to riches is a heroic story to be told. It is the American dream, Calvinism exemplified! Riches to doing just fine—not so much. Better to pretend you're poor.

The trusts that I inherited were enough to allow me to buy an apartment in Italy, and Salva and I could establish ourselves as an independent couple. I explained this to him, but he seemed strangely uninterested in the matter.

“Ho capito, ho capito.”
Oh, I get it, is what he said. After a pause he added, “Why don't you buy new sneakers? The ones you have are all worn down,” and that was the end of it.

Inheriting money from your grandparents was a quirky American way of passing money down, he seemed to think, but there was nothing momentous about it. Salva came from a family that had had money, and had lost money, and were doing fine. He would graduate from law school, and find work. He would never be dependent on me or anyone else. As his parents had taught him,
Fidarsi è bene, non fidarsi è meglio.

“
F
acciamo la strada o le scale?”
Raffaella asked. Do you want to use the road or the steps? We were in Positano, carrying beach bags stuffed with towels, thick sandwiches, peaches, bottles of water, sunscreen, a change of clothes—a load of stuff—down to the beach. The Avallones have a house high on the cliff overlooking the water, and to get to the small pebbly beach there are exactly…I don't know how many steps. A lot. Salva, when he was little, would count the steps every day of his two-month summer vacation in Positano, and every day he would come out with a different number.

Salva would run down these steps barefoot, with no parental chaperone, at the age of seven. He would stop on the way down to the beach only to buy a chocolate
cannolo;
on the way up, a lemon granita made with those Amalfi coast lemons as big as a human head. The little granita cart that is strategically positioned at the Piazza dei Mulini made enough lire in the summer months to support three Positano families all year long.

The road, meanwhile, is winding, narrow, and petrifying, whether you are on foot or in a vehicle. In Italy, hairpin turns present no reason for cars, buses, or motorbikes to slow down. The use of brakes is limited to the moments when two wide vehicles meet head-on (the tiny roads on the Amalfi coast are mostly two-way). It is not uncommon to see the Interno Positano bus reversing and then scraping up against the cliff to leave space for the Montepertuso bus to pass. The clown-nose honking of horns echoes frequently through Positano. When you are walking down to the beach and vehicles whiz by, or two buses have a honking tête-à-tête, you have to hop to safety either by jumping onto and clinging to the cliff or by ducking into one of the chic jewelry shops carved into the rock.

Road or steps?
“Le scale,”
I tell Raffaella. Definitely the steps.

As Salvatore's callused little soccer feet ran down these steps thirty years ago, his mother's pedicured feet never stopped moving around the kitchen of their villa. She would bake all sorts of delicacies to bring down to the beach for lunch:
polpette al sugo, frittate, peperoni saltati
. “It was simple,” she told me when I suggested that food shopping, cooking, cleaning, and generally managing small children in hot, vertical Positano must have been exhausting for her as a young mother. She was on her own most of the time, as Nino, like most of the other fathers, stayed in Naples and joined his family for weekends and August. “We just ate sandwiches for lunch.” Well, yes, but the sandwiches weren't peanut butter and jelly—they were sandwiches filled with something she had
baked
that morning.

At the beach, the family rented umbrellas and lounge chairs close to their friends from Posillipo. There is a hierarchy to the positioning of the chairs: those closest to the water are the families who have been coming to Positano the longest and who spend all summer. Farther back are the families who don't have vacation homes, who come to Positano for only a few weeks. The Avallones' umbrellas and chairs have always been in the first row, despite the fact that they would spend at least a month every summer away from Positano, at their apartment in Roccaraso. They were, and are, prominent in the preening Posillipino-Positanese posse.

My one-piece bathing suit and last-minute depilatory efforts did not, I realized as we neared their
ombrellone
, cut it. Raffaella was wearing a Pucci caftan, and somehow, even in early June, was already deeply, uniformly tanned. She moved from umbrella to umbrella (only in the first row; her friends were as linear as a chorus line), praising wraps and pinching grandchildren, while somehow negotiating the sharp pebbles along the beach in her high-heeled flip-flops.
“Conosci
Ketrin?”
she asked. Do you know Katherine? The
americana
girlfriend of Salvatore was introduced as I struggled to stay upright. (How did one stand on rocks that felt to my bare feet like fiery shards of glass? My New Balance sneakers were up in the changing room.)

We had come to Positano to celebrate Salva's graduation from university. Raffaella and Nino were so proud: their son had graduated with top honors and was now Dr. Avallone. Hallelujah! He had done it. Six years of pulling teeth, of sweating bricks, of memorizing tomes, and now he was a free man. Free, I assumed, to marry me and move out of his parents' apartment. Everything else was immaterial.

But every time I uttered the word
marriage
, Salva would change the subject.

A Neapolitan expression that Nino taught me helped me to avoid a diplomatic coup d'état and dramatic breakup:
'O purpo s'ha dda cocere dinto a ll'acqua soia.
Literally translated: An octopus must be left to cook in its own juice. After boiling an octopus, apparently, you turn off the flame and leave it in its pot, where it continues to emit its own juices. You can write emails or pick up the kids from soccer practice while the big, slimy, puckering animal stews, because the longer the
polipo
steeps in its own dark pink liquid the better.

Nino taught me this expression that fateful weekend in Positano. When, on Sunday night, Salva hadn't popped any questions except of the “Do you like the stuffed calamari or the steamed
cozze
better?” sort, I confided in Nino and Raffaella. Salva was showering after our day at the beach, and I was sitting with my future parents-in-law on the terrace of their villa. The twinkling lights of Positano were reflected in the blackness of the sea below; the light breeze and smell of orange trees added to the aura of potential romance.

On the other side of the mountain we could see a religious procession, complete with a band playing music that resounded against the rocks. From the terrace they looked like the tiny figures of a Christmas
presepe.
With raised banners and statues of the Madonna, the Positano faithful slowly snaked their way around the winding roads. What a perfect setting to dispatch the parents, get on one knee, and present a ring! Any goddamned ring!

I came out with it: Why does Salva change the subject every time I bring up the idea of getting married? Is it because I'm American? Is it because he wants to stay single, living at home and eating magnificent dishes? “He's like an octopus,” Nino replied. “He has to be left to cook in his own juice.” Raffaella nodded in agreement. I was not to pressure him or add any external stimuli, but let him come to the decision on his own. Salvatore is a handsome guy, and I was attached to the image of him on one knee asking for my hand in marriage. Instead, I was presented with the image of a bubbling sea creature who, perfectly content for the time being to stew in the pot
by himself,
needed to cook for another five years or more.

Apparently the whole “Will you marry me?” scene with ring and candlelight is an American tradition. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize this, but at a certain point it came to me in a flash. People don't do that here! They just start planning for the wedding. I was waiting for the Easter Bunny! When I tell Italians that in the States, a proposal is often romantic like in the movies, they can't believe it. It cracks them up. We thought that was just another
americanata,
they say, a cheesy and dramatic exaggeration invented by Hollywood.

Having grown up in fast-paced, do-it-yourself North America, I realize that letting people and situations cook in their own juices is decidedly not my forte. (This is probably why my
ragù,
even after almost twenty years in Italy, tastes nothing like that of my mother-in-law.) So, to leave Salva alone and trust him to come to a decision without my prodding was a challenge. I succeeded, I am proud to say, for exactly twenty-one hours after that conversation. I probably would have managed longer, except that I found myself, returning from Positano, in a position in which I thought that I was surely going to die.

My puckering
polipo
and I were returning to Naples in his tiny Fiat, on the narrow two-way coastal road. The view of the crystal-blue ocean five hundred feet below; the sea air coming in the open windows: it could have been an enjoyable and picturesque drive. Except that Salva was speeding like a madman around the curves and actually passing other cars. He would honk his horn. (The English verb Salva uses is
to horn.
As in, “I was just horning! The man is going too slow.”) I thought this was the moment for our conversation, as it was probably my last.

“So are you going to ask me?” I yelled. We had trouble hearing each other for the wind.

“What?”

“To marry you!”

“Who? What?”

“Wedding!
Matrimonio!
Us!”

“Okay!”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

The octopus was cooked.