Only in Naples (26 page)

T
he women of Salva's family assumed that I would hand over my baby—the piece of my heart, as they say in Naples—to someone from the Philippines, Ukraine, Sri Lanka, or Brazil. It was assumed that this lady would be not too attractive, not too expensive, and would live in a corner of our apartment and have Sundays off.

Things that were not taken into consideration were: carpet time, take-out dinners, sweatsuits with vomit stains on them. The concept,
insomma,
that mothering would be my job.

Immigrants from Sri Lanka are dirty,
and
The great thing about Filipina domestic workers is that they stay out of your way,
or
Brazilians are too pretty to be live-in babysitters
are all comments I heard from Italian mothers. Mothers who otherwise seemed to be kind, sensitive people dismissed whole continents because
fanno schifo,
they're gross. I, too, was an
extracomunitaria
, I reminded them. No, Ketrin, Americans don't count!
Extracomunitari
are people from North Africa, from Asia, from poor areas of Ukraine…people who don't look like us and who work for us.

Oh, and by the way, Ketrin, why don't you have one?

When Emilio was born, Benedetta had hired a lady named Marieli from Sri Lanka. At the same time, Raffaella and Nino hired her cousin, a young man with a Yankees baseball cap named Mitzi. (Nunzia the working-class Neapolitan had retired—Mitzi helped with the cooking as well as the “heavy cleanings.” He was young, strong, and knew how to fix appliances.) Both Raffaella and Benedetta would complain, however, that “they”—referring to Marieli and Mitzi—have no idea what hygiene is (they don't even bidet!); that “they” are clueless when it comes to packaging leftovers. “Look,” Benedetta told me one day, holding out a plate of sausages and
ragù.
It was covered with cellophane, but the edges were coming loose. “Marieli did this. This apparently is how they package things in Sri Lanka.
Limitate, sono limitate.
” They are mentally deficient. (Note to self: When in Benedetta's or Raffaella's home, get rid of leftovers and pretend you ate them. Do not try to wrap.) She obviously considered me an Italian
signora,
a lady of the house, who had nothing in common with these
extracomunitari
domestic workers.

But she was wrong. I have the same work permit issues as these women. I am far away from my home like these women. I don't know how to get Italian plastic wrap to stick around the edges of a bowl, just like these women. And I don't bidet. Sure, there are huge differences. I have a lot more resources and a lot less courage than these women. But on a human level, when I hear Neapolitan
signore
complaining about their domestic workers, how they
just don't get it,
I feel like they are talking about me.

How could people feel this way about “the help” and then hand their babies over to them? I wondered.

So I resisted. I became a stay-at-home mom, American-style. I was sleep-deprived and overweight (no bingeing, just eating what I wanted when I wanted it). I wore no makeup, didn't fix my hair. For me, these were the consequences of being a full-time mother with a baby. In a way, I was proud to look so bad: my scrunchies and sneakers were badges of honor, showing the sacrifices that I made for my “work” as parent. I don't sit around pampering myself, my crusty velour pantsuits said, I take this mothering thing
seriously.
I suffer for it.

For the Italian women in my life, my appearance was the start of a slippery slope that would end with unwaxed legs and microwaved dinners.
“Sta diventando una scema appriess'ai bambini,”
I heard a friend describe another mother whose nanny had left and who was reduced to wearing sweats at the park like me. She's becoming demented being around the kid so much.

They were not just worried about what I looked like, they were worried about my mental health.

When Anthony was about one and a half, I got a call from Zia Pia. “Ketrin, have you thought about the babysitter idea? You need it. You're with that boy way too much.
È troppo legato a te.”
He was too attached to me? But he wasn't even two! Pia's children lived at home until they were thirty! I got riled up. I interpreted her comments as an attack, a judgment on my mothering style. What I didn't understand was that she was not saying I was a bad mother, or that Anthony would suffer. She was saying that I needed to take care of myself. She was thinking of me.

Inexpensive child care is a mixed blessing. In southern Italy, you can hire a live-in nanny for a month at the same rate you would probably pay a New York babysitter for a day at Central Park. It made it
very
hard for me to say no thanks, I like my vomit stains. I like eating from a can, and asking Salva to pick up pizza five times a week. It's
so
good for my child. After all, he gets to be with me, on a carpet!

So I agreed to have someone come in during the day. No serving lunch at the table, or massaging necks, just some cooking and cleaning and taking care of Anthony while I went to get a cappuccino. Of course, he would
never
want to be with her. He would put up with it and count the minutes until I got home. I would help him understand that Mommy needed a little time for herself, too.

One of Anthony's first English expressions was “When de Jackie come?” He would waddle over to the door and sit there, waiting. Another early expression was “Mamma leave now, okay?” Jackie would race him to the park, tell him about climbing to the top of the volcano near Lake Taal in the Philippines when she was a little girl, pretend she was a goalkeeper of the Serie A soccer league.

I, meanwhile, learned how the vacuum cleaner worked. I found a fantastic lemony anticalcium spray for cleaning the toilets. I had a blast. I didn't need to get a cappuccino or go to the beauty parlor. I simply needed to do
anything
that did not involve interacting with a two-year-old brain. I had judged my friend who said that you can become demented being around a kid so much, but I started to realize that she could be right. Admittedly, my excitement about getting the crud out of the bathroom tiles was a little disturbing.

For the first time since my English classes in Naples, I decided to go back to teaching.

I
strongly believe that acting is the best way to learn another language, to really learn to speak it. Everyone has to create a new persona when they learn a language that is not their own. So, I told Italian friends who wanted to learn English, instead of spending all your time studying grammar, try some dialogues and improvisation exercises. Create a character. The language will get inside you, emotionally and viscerally. You will free yourself of the little judge in your mind who says things like, “Wow, you really sound stupid! Are you
sure
that's the third person singular of that verb?”

An acting school located in a tiny black-box theater near the Colosseum hired me to teach a course for Italians called Acting in English. About ten actors in their twenties and thirties came for the first class. They didn't feel confident speaking English—they'd studied it in school but couldn't seem to
sbloccarsi,
or unblock, themselves with the language. Be an animal in English! I told them. Get pissed off at this other actor who has just stolen your girlfriend! Invent a joke and make us all laugh! Do whatever's necessary to free yourself and go for it.

At the end of the course, I told my students, we would work on dialogues from
Pulp Fiction
and
Death of a Salesman.

To help my Italian actors find their characters' truth (and focus on something other than their linguistic limits), I introduced some improvisations to tap into their emotional memory. To try to get them to remember the feeling of their first kiss, their rage in an argument with a family member. A moment of joy with a friend. Surprisingly, I got almost nothing from them. Or rather, what I got was fake, demonstrated, showy. I tried to get them to talk (in English, I know it's not easy) about their relationships with their mothers. Rather than tears and depth of feeling, I got “My mother is a little rigid” or “We are different in character, my mother and I.” Voices were level, faces were inexpressive. Were these really
Italians
? Talking about their
mamme
? These were people who, when describing the traffic they had encountered coming to class, were as dramatic as Jim Carrey in
Batman.

Part of the difficulty was cultural. While an American actor will dissect and analyze his parents, an Italian will protect them. There is, still, a certain respect for family. Young Americans often bond by dumping on their parents: Italian
ragazzi
most definitely don't. There are no who-has-the-most-dysfunctional-family competitions.

But the problem was more complicated. I didn't want the actors simply to air their dirty laundry in class, I wanted them to feel and then express with emotional intensity in English. I mulled this over as I walked home from school. Then the lightbulb suddenly appeared above my head. Duh! What was I, a dunce? How long had I been living in Italy? How was it that I kept forgetting that the answer was always in the food?

I put away the Stanislavski and Uta Hagen acting texts for the next class. I told the students that we were going to skip the sense memory exercises, I had to ask their advice on something. I wanted to try out some new recipes for my husband—we'd had a tough period with the baby not sleeping and had been fighting a lot. I wanted to cook something special for him. Can you each describe your favorite dish? If you remember, tell me about the person who makes it for you and how they do it. I need to learn.

The first actor was from Salerno, just south of Naples. He described his grandmother's ravioli. He showed us how her fingers pinched off the little balls of ricotta and
spinaci
and folded the dough in pockets. “In
this
way,” he specified, making a perfect
th
sound, tongue between the teeth and all! His eyes were full of tears; he didn't need to tell us that his
nonna
had passed away.

Barbara from Turin showed us how her mother cut the vegetables for the
bagna cauda
stew, and again we knew without being told that Barbara loved and hated her with a passion. She told us that her
mamma
cut everything in
ssstrips
(good—not ztrips! I had been working with them for ages on
s
plus a consonant!
Ssssnow,
not
zznow. Seven snakes slept in the snow!
). They lived the emotions honestly through food; they remembered through recipes. They spoke in English, with almost no accent.

Toward the end of our course, when we began to work on dialogues from movies and plays, those actors had so much to think about. The character's truth, their own truth, those big fat American
a'
s that felt so weird in their mouths! But my job as a teacher/director was easy. When they got lost in their brains, when they stopped being honest and started to fake it, I knew how to direct them. Michele, ravioli. Chiara,
pasta alla Genovese.
Barbara,
bagna cauda.
Tap into that and you will give us a performance that is nothing less than inspired.