Only in Naples (7 page)

“
W
hat is that lady's role? What is she
doing
?” I asked Salva. We were watching a soccer program as we snuggled on the sofa, digesting a baked
gâteau di patate
that Raffaella had prepared with potatoes, breadcrumbs, mortadella, prosciutto, and mozzarella. I was happy to be resting my head on Salva's chest.

“
Presenza.
She is
presenza,
” he explained.

Presenza
can mean physical presence, or can refer to cutting a beautiful or handsome figure when used with
bella. Una bella presenza.
This lady was certainly beautiful, and most definitely present.

Surrounding the lady was a group of middle-aged men talking (all at the same time) about the formation of the Napoli soccer team. While the men were all seated in very comfortable armchairs, the
presenza
lady was perched on a stool. A high stool. Which was convenient, given that the camera did not zoom in on her face, as it had with the men, but panned up slowly from her spike heels to her long, strategically crossed legs. The camera hesitated hopefully at her short skirt, even changed angles to see if any more nude flesh could be witnessed. It then continued up, slowly (what's the rush?), to her generous cleavage and stopped, finally, on her face. The men, still arguing in the background, were oblivious to the fact that they were not being filmed. The cameraman, apparently, had eyes only for Roberta.

It was a shame, though, that no one had told her that she was being filmed in close-up. She was clearly bored to tears, following none of the conversation. Instead, Roberta was examining her split ends.

The cameraman, instead of moving on when he found her entirely unengaged, lingered on her. The audience could hear the men in the background arguing about the attributes of this or that goalkeeper, but could see only Roberta and her self-grooming. A few seconds of this had passed when I distinctly heard a whistle. It was someone from the crew trying to get Roberta's attention! On air! She looked up, searching for the camera, and started grinning. A vacant, plastic grin. Believe it or not, she was more interesting to watch when she was examining her split ends.

There is someone sexy, bored, and present like Roberta on nearly every sports program that airs on Italian television. Game and variety shows feature the more energetic
veline,
scantily clad young models who dance and prance. They are more than
presente;
in one game show, a sexy
velina
appears at regular intervals and performs a lap dance with one of the contestants. Everyone else on the show looks on as if it's a natural occurrence—no raised eyebrows or laughing there.

A high point of a
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
–inspired show is the moment of the
scossa,
or the electric shock dance. A
velina
wearing a bikini a few sizes too small stands on a dance floor under a spotlight and jiggles her stuff. The challenge, the actress's fundamental conflict and the driving force of her artistic journey, as it were, is to keep the top of her bikini on as she jiggles without holding it up with her hands. Interestingly, when she fails at this and her boobs pop out, the camera does not move to something else. If she can't keep her stuff covered, the director apparently feels, that's her problem.

There is often a man in an animal suit (and remember, this is not a kids' program) who does a silly Smurf-like voice and spends a good bit of time trying to get his paws on the
velina
. He is very large and red and runs around the studio shouting something unintelligible (as always, everyone except the
velina
is talking at the same time). The host of the game show seems to find this hilarious. It's a marriage of Disney and porn: I mean, what else could you want from TV?

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, as the world knows, takes great pride in his country's
veline.
News of his
bunga bunga
parties shocked the world. But they didn't shock many people in Naples. The fact that the prime minister invited
veline
(some not quite eighteen) to his villa in Sardegna, the fact that before extending his invitation he perused their photo shoots—these were simply measures that powerful men take to ensure that they have…stimulating dinner partners.

No, what shocked many Neapolitans was the jiggling. A boundary was crossed when they learned that Berlusconi sat, pants down, on an armchair as the
veline
jiggled their bare breasts in his face. It was choreographed by his chiefs of staff to ensure that one
velina
from every racial group
bunga bunga
–ed by and jiggled. In his face.

This wasn't a TV show, it was national news. And he was the head of the nation's government. Even for the forgiving Neapolitans, that was a bit much.

In 1998, Italians were fascinated by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They would ask me what I thought of my country's
brutta figura.
Specifically, they asked me,
“Per chi sei?”
Who are you for? I interpreted this to mean, are you behind the Democrats supporting Clinton or are you Republican and in favor of impeachment? I would answer as best I could that although the president had humiliated himself and his country, I felt that impeachment was too extreme a measure….But no, they would interrupt, we meant are you for Monica or for Bill?

Wait a second. Him against her? That made no sense to me. Monica was not the protagonist but a supporting character. At the center was the president of the United States, who had abused his power and humiliated…

“Yes,” Italians agreed. “Humiliation. He really could have chosen someone who was more beautiful.”

The scandal here was not what he had done, but the fact that he had done it with someone whom they considered overweight and unattractive. So the one who got the respect was Monica. If she, without good looks, could seduce the president of the United States, it was she who deserved to be the star of the lurid
sceneggiata,
or show. The president of the world's superpower, with only one chick, and not even a pretty one at that? That girl must have something. If she were in Italy, they probably would have elected her president.

I know that a big concern of the Italian government at the moment is the continuing brain drain, or
fuga dei cervelli,
of intellectuals from Italy to northern Europe and the United States, particularly in the sciences. Parliament is working on grants and other incentives to keep young, talented researchers from leaving the country. I can't help but think, however, of what would happen if there were a
fuga dei culetti,
or a tits-and-ass drain, in which
veline
found work elsewhere and left the peninsula. Now,
that
would be a national crisis.

Given the context, I think the
belle presenze
on sports programs are one of the least offensive things on Italian TV. For one thing, there's no camera positioned
under
the lady's skirt. But, more important, the
veline
who appear on the soccer programs are, perhaps without even realizing it, so honest and transparent. Roberta is objectified and degraded, yes. But there is something very human underneath: an Italian woman, like so many others, who is just plain bored by men talking about soccer.

I
was asked to leave the Denza to find alternative housing in the middle of October. The boarding boys had arrived, and apparently I was a menace. I had unknowingly broken all sorts of rules of the Catholic institution (bidets had nothing to do with it, but I can't help but wonder
if they had known…
). I had been seen walking with a student there, a young man
.
On another occasion I had been seen walking with a different young man. I had not always been wearing a jacket and scarf when I walked with these members of the opposite sex. I tried to explain to the priest who served as the dean of students that I had to walk across the campus to get from my room to the dining hall, and it was eighty degrees! Most of the students were men, how could I help it if we walked side by side for a few meters?

“Da noi non si fa così”
was his reply. That's not the way we do things here.

I started looking for a room to rent close by. Since this “experience abroad” was footed by my parents' dollars (and in 1997, dollars went far—thousands of lire far), I had no trouble finding a nice room in an apartment in Posillipo. I saw a big fluorescent yellow
AFFITTASI STANZA
(room for rent) sign on a building near the Calabrese girls' flat when I visited them for coffee one day. It was perfect—I would be near them and the Avallones.

“Will you have to cook for yourself?” Maria Rosa asked, concerned, when I said I was leaving the Denza. She and her sisters knew that things could get messy for me when it came to eating. “I'll be fine,” I told them.

Salva and his parents worried too. My new flatmates were two girls from Puglia who went home for weeks at a time and kept to themselves when they were in the apartment. No more dinner tray at the Denza, with its scrumptious
scaloppine,
little carafe of wine, and
Buon appetito, signorina:
I'd be left to my own devices at mealtimes.

Most of the time, I ended up at the Avallones'. “What have you planned for your dinner?” Raffaella or Salva would ask me on the weekends, when lunch was over and I suggested that it was time for me to go back to my apartment. If I didn't answer, with conviction,
“Pasta e fagioli!”
or
“Zuppa di ceci!”
—if I hesitated in any way, they would look at each other knowingly. Six hours later I would be sitting next to Benedetta with her teddy bear pajamas devouring Raffaella's lasagna.

It would have been unheard of for a Neapolitan girl to sleep in her boyfriend's room at his parents' house at the age of twenty-two. But the rules seemed to be different for an
americana.
The American women that Italians saw on TV may not have jiggled their stuff on prime-time game shows, but they certainly were promiscuous. In addition, I was from a culture where parents would send their daughter to live and work alone, on another continent, right after college! The Avallones would never have had the presumption to tell me what I was allowed and not allowed to do.

On holidays and weekends, I would find a cot prepared by Raffaella in Salva's room. I accepted the plan: If the Avallones weren't hung up on propriety, why should I be? (“
Non si fa così,
” I heard the housekeeper, a middle-aged woman from central Naples, mumble as she remade my cot one morning. Nunzia Gatti echoed the priest at the boarding school: that's not the way it's done. Apparently, my sleeping in Salva's room didn't bother the Avallones, but it certainly bothered their maid.)

“I'm renting a new place,” I told Cynthia and my other co-workers at the Consulate. I was grown-up and independent, I wanted them to know. There were two months left of my internship and I didn't want to publicize the fact that I'd basically moved in with my new boyfriend's parents. Or that, when left alone, I didn't know how to eat.

I can do this,
I would tell myself on the rare occasions that I cooked in my new apartment. The kitchen was tiny and attracted fruit flies. Hungry, I would open the refrigerator to find nothing. So I'd boil water for some spaghetti, open a can of tomatoes, and then open the refrigerator again, to find that there was still nothing. I learned that it wasn't a great idea to start cooking when I was starved, because that's when my mind embraced dubious mathematical calculations like: If Raffaella's
ragù
simmers over a very low flame for eight hours, it stands to reason that I can let my tomato sauce boil over an extremely
hot
flame for twenty minutes.

As a recovering binger, I had another problem: After years of all-or-nothing eating, it was really hard to know what a “normal” amount of food was when I cooked for myself. I would stare at the pack of spaghetti and wonder if I should boil two noodles or the whole thing. Any amount seemed too much or too little. I needed an Italian woman to sit me down, slow me down, keep me company, and show me what and how much to eat.

I felt that it was important for me to say
no, grazie
every once in a while to the baked gnocchi or
pizza fritta
that Raffaella was making at the Avallones'. I needed to affirm my independence, after all. But as I tasted the spaghetti that I prepared for myself, soupy and insipid, I had to wonder, who was I kidding?