Only in Naples (27 page)

W
hen Anthony was two and a half, Salva and I decided it would be a good idea to enroll our son in nursery school. Actually, Salva thought it was a great idea, and I felt like I was dispatching him to a forced-labor camp. Anthony had become a
mammone,
a southern Italian mama's boy, and it was 100 percent my fault.

Before I gave birth to an Italian boy, I had passed judgment quickly and cheerfully on all the mama's boys in Italy. Actually, I had passed judgment on the mothers. After all, the problem with Italian men is really Italian mothers, isn't it? You will never hear blame being placed on an Italian thirty-year-old who still lives at home and has a special “Me and You” telephone contract so he can call his
mamma
free of charge to tell her to put the pasta on, he's coming home from work. That's the
mamma
's fault, of course! Why does she let him do it? Why does she put the water on to boil?

Before having an Italian son, I thought it was because these Italian women didn't know better. They cooked for and pampered their boys because they obviously hadn't read any books with titles like:
Helping Your Toddler Thrive
or
The Childhood Handbook
or
The No's That Help Them Grow
or
Boundaries and Love.
I mean, would it really be so hard to order some parenting books and make life a lot better for these young men and their future wives?

I was quite sure that my son would never become a
mammone.
I had read the books. Plus, I was American: food would not be the expression of my love. My love as a mother would be expressed by teaching, by guiding, by enriching. By reading! By practicing letters! Mother to son, brain to brain. The bodies and tummies of my son and me would be separated by some good old healthy Anglo-Saxon distance.

That was my thinking before having Anthony. Before hearing his first
“Mammmmmà,”
already the intimate Neapolitan dialect for Mommy; before seeing his little hand twisting his finger in his cheek (in the Italian gesture meaning
delicious
) after nursing from my breast. Um, can I return that
Independence and Boundaries with Your Toddler
book and get my money back?

So I confess that I am
guilty.
Guilty of aggravating Italy's problems—if things follow the
mammone
template, my son will not be part of a flexible and mobile workforce, but will hang out in his boyhood room with soccer trophies and Garfield stickers into his thirties. There will never be an empty nest. (Ah, the laughs I have gotten from my Neapolitan friends when I translate that expression! What do the mothers and fathers do when the kids go off to university so young? they ask.
Si guardano in faccia?
They stare at each other's faces?)

I was trained in my
mammone-
raising not only by my mother-in-law but by the nuns at Santa Chiara nursery school. When I would go to pick up Anthony, the elderly nun at the door, Suor Alfonsina, would tell us how the day went before letting us into the garden to collect our little ones. The conversations went something like this:

“Hello, I'm Anthony's mother. How was he today?” (Read: Did he hit/kick/spit/injure/offend, reflecting horribly on me as a parent and his environment at home?)

“Anthony, Anthony…
ah, sì!
He finished most of his pasta but ate none of the
cotoletta.
Does he not like veal cutlets?” She was worried. What
was
the situation at home?

“No…I mean yes! We're working on that. At home. And…did he play with the other kids?”

“Play?” Suor Alfonsina must have extra patience with this American mother who asks well-intentioned but totally irrelevant questions. “Well, I'm sure he did. And tomorrow maybe we'll start with the meat.” She turned to another mother. “
Mamma di Emanuele?
He was such a good boy! He finished all of the pasta with lentils!”

The
mamma
was proud. She beamed.

The menu of the week at the Santa Chiara nursery school was posted next to Jesus on the cross. The fact that conversation at pickup time was relegated to “Leonardo ate all of his tortellini but left some of his meat” and “Does Enrico have a problem with fruit?” made me wonder how these nuns remembered such details. And why did they care?

Anthony had major separation issues when I first began taking him to nursery school (okay, fine! I had major separation issues too. The
mammone
thing implicated both of us). He was so miserable in the mornings that he would vomit almost every day before we left home. I tried to talk to the other mothers about our problem. I learned the Italian terms for
letting go
and
separation anxiety.
I got a lot of advice. They cared, and they shared. One said lay off milk in the morning. Another said it was a problem of acidity—was I giving him orange juice? They discussed among themselves whether it might have been my tendency to give him too much cereal in the morning. Finally a grandmother came up to me and put her two cents in.

“Dear, I went through exactly the same thing with my son, for years. I know what you're going through.” I was starting to feel relieved, looking into her wrinkled face. I was talking to someone who really understood my predicament, and her time-tested advice about mothering with boundaries and love was going to be wise and true. “I'll tell you the secret,” she whispered, “
no
breakfast at all! He'll have nothing to puke up!”

I accepted this advice with genuine gratitude, even though, as a woman raised in a culture of psychoanalysis, it offered me no solution to my problem. I knew that for the grandmother this was not something trivial. A
nonna
, after all, telling you
not
to feed your child was a rare event. She too had suffered, and she had found her answer.

When kindergarten began, Salvatore and I set up a meeting with Suor Alfonsina to talk to her about Anthony and his behavior. He was misbehaving big-time at home—challenging Salva and me, refusing to take time-outs, jumping on the furniture, you name it. I wanted Suor Alfonsina to help us understand what was going on at school and maybe give us a few pointers. I was working on the veal cutlet issue; she could give me a hand with the discipline thing.

We were flabbergasted to hear that Anthony was an angel at school. She used the words
obedient,
social,
sensitive,
and—get this!—
caring.
Anthony Avallone? Were we talking about the same kid? Brown hair? Wears a Naples soccer jersey twenty-eight days a month? After verifying that we were in fact talking about Anthony, I expressed my contentment that at least when he was out of the house he knew how to behave. Better that way, I later told Salvatore.

“What, are you crazy?” my husband replied. “It would be much better if he behaved himself at home and misbehaved at school! Then someone
else
would have to deal with his tantrums, not us!”

I, as an American, felt that our son's behavior outside the home was a positive indicator that in the future our son would perform, socially and professionally…and then I realized that for a Neapolitan, your behavior
inside
the home is the real indicator of your character. Not in the workplace, not in school. Sure, it's nice to look good when you leave your home, and make a
bella figura
. But in terms of your identity, the most important thing is who you are with your parents, with your children, with your cousins. The important thing is how you behave with the people who
really
matter.

A
s soon as Anthony learned to walk, he joined in the free-for-all to open Nonna's suitcase and dive into the
pizzette
and
mozzarelline
she brought when she came to Rome
.
Anthony and Raffaella loved each other with a passion. Raffaella spoon-fed him, cuddled him, played with him.

She also lied to him, regularly. I was ready to embrace a whole lot about the Avallones' Neapolitan parenting style, but when it came to telling the truth, my American cultural conditioning ran deep.

One of Anthony's favorite games as a toddler was Memory. Because I have never liked to make life simple for myself, I gave my son a Memory game of horses that included about thirty pairs—all of which looked almost exactly alike.

Raffaella and Nino were visiting, and it was Anthony's bedtime. He wanted to play Memory with his
nonna.
I told Raffaella it would take too long, to which she replied that I should distract Anthony in the kitchen and she would try to memorize the position of the cards so she could win quickly. “I'm good at cheating,” she explained. “We'll be fast.”

“What's Nonna doing?” Anthony asked me. Raffaella, sitting on the living room floor in a Fendi suit, was memorizing the stallions as quickly as she could.

“She's setting up Memory, sweetheart,” I told him. I was complicit in the cheating. The child would take drugs and lie about it as soon as he hit puberty.

“Siamo pronti!”
Let's start! She was excited about the game. Not surprisingly, she racked up pairs quickly, peeking at the cards whenever my son looked away. It was a challenge, and she was having a blast. Anthony was suspicious. Every once in a while he said, “Nonna! You peeked!”

“What are you talking about?
Quando mai!
” she laughed. But never!

I expressed my reservations later to Raffaella, saying that it might be a good idea to teach Anthony that it's better not to cheat. It's better not to lie.

“But didn't you want a quick game of Memory?” she answered, confused. “Who knew where those damn stallions were? And now he's sleeping soundly!”

“I understand,” I tried to be diplomatic, “but in the long run…cheating at Memory could mean cheating at school—”

“What does school have to do with it?”

And at that point I remembered Salvatore's reaction when I was in graduate school and complained about a difficult exam. His response would be, “Wasn't there someone who had studied sitting near you?” His law exams were all oral, but little slips of paper and huddled desks were common when there was a written exam in Naples.

“We can't do that. We don't do that.”

“You could save yourself a whole lot of trouble. You Americans, why is it that you are always making life so difficult for yourselves?”

In Naples, people do not lie. They re-create, artistically and playfully, their own truth. It is normal to tell untruths, creative reconstructions of reality. These untruths are told with great calm and finesse. They are told not only to dupe or deceive but also to protect, out of love for the person being misled.

In a culture where the truth is like a game, relationships often focus on trying to
svelare,
or take the veil off, a friend's version of the truth. This is done with very little drama, and almost no condemnation or judgment. So what if a person just invented and described an imaginary experience? He could be, using the vulgar vernacular, a
cazzaro,
or a person who tells
cazzate,
meaning lies. In Naples the expression would be
spara cazzate:
he shoots off the lies.

“That's fascinating that Alessio went to India for a month!” I say to Salva.

“Oh, Alessio's a
cazzaro,
” he'll reply, not all that interested whether his friend lied or not.

But the friendship sails along smoothly, despite Alessio's tendency to shoot off lies. Nobody's pants are on fire or anything drastic like that. As an American, I immediately take this tendency to the next level. I assume that if he lies to you about a vacation, he'll lie to you about important things. Where's the trust in that friendship? Just like Clinton: If he cheated his wife, he'll cheat the country, right? If he lied under oath about sex, he's capable of any sort of deception.

But in Naples, that is not the line of thinking. What does sex have to do with politics? It's totally irrelevant. What does a lie about a vacation have to do with what kind of friend he is?

Disturbed, I continued to try to talk it through with Raffaella. How about Pinocchio? I asked my mother-in-law. Wasn't the moral of Italy's most famous fairy tale that one should never tell a lie?

“Oh, that Pinocchio story,” she began, and I understood immediately that Pinocchio was not Neapolitan but northern, and thus foreign. “I guess it can be useful to teach children not to lie to their parents. But Pulcinella…”

She went on to describe animatedly how Pulcinella, the Neapolitan clown from the commedia dell'arte, lies regularly and gets caught only because he isn't smart about it. Now
that's
an important lesson for a kid.

I heard a revealing conversation take place between my mother-in-law and my son, the evening of a dinner party and bridge tournament at the Avallones' apartment. About forty people were to arrive in a few hours. The new Sri Lankan housekeeper Mitzi was frying zucchini to make
zucchine alla scapece,
a marinated zucchini, mint, and garlic dish. He had already set up the card tables in the living room, and had collaborated with Raffaella on the other nine dishes that were going to be served when the players took their ten o'clock break.

Raffaella wanted to get Anthony to sleep before the guests arrived. The only way was to tell him that nothing was happening later.

“Nonna, are you having a party tonight? Are people coming over?”

“
Ma no! Che dici?
No, of course not. What on earth are you talking about?”

“I saw the card tables in the living room….”

“Oh, those! I set them up for next week when your grandfather is going to have a meeting with his friends.”

“Meeting? Nonna! That's not the truth!” He was smiling, and adorable. He was thrilled that he'd won the little truth game. She started laughing and enveloped him in a hug.

“Amore mio! Quanto sei scetàto!”
My love, you are awake!

Kissing and tickling him, Raffaella was so very proud that Anthony had called her out on her lie. Her grandson wasn't no kid sleeping with his mama's titty in his mouth. He was being raised well.

Anthony accepted the Find the Truth game as just that, a game. He knew that he could play it with his Neapolitan grandmother, aunt, and cousins. But if I was around, his little eyes made contact with mine as if to say, Mommy, I'm going to ask you later what the real answer is. As he grew, Anthony enjoyed the game less and less, and sought out the truth more and more. He knew where to look.

After all, this wasn't a game his American mommy knew how to play.