An opening from Christmas in Naples is a Sport

This is a beginning I have…I’m going to be crafting right now. Probably a lot is about to change but I might as well share what I have. Even if they don’t make it into the book. Isn’t this more exciting as a newsletter? Don’t know if this is the right moment to do that. At least, I can send a newsletter.

I wasn’t Zoolander, I wasn’t that pronounced as a character but I was a character and the sport of Christmas tickled me. I wanted to play the sport, survive, even. I knew where I was. Theater, sports: entertainment, spectacle, play, yes, these are all words that apply, superiorly.

“Christmas is coming,” I kept saying…

I knew they didn’t know but then Rosa SAID it. SHE SAID IT. She just doesn’t remember it because these people come from a volcano. She was gambling at the time. “Christmas in Naples is a sport, it’s really true, Meri, it’s really true.” In any case, that’s not really the tone of the book, though there are parts of it that are a bit like that but that’s what I’m figuring out right now.

It’s fun to talk about the sport as if it were really a sport because it’s already there.

As you will see…below.

Conversation is athletic. You will get fourteen people coming for you. It’s all…for sport, this is the point. Quick footwork. It’s competitive. This is how we talk. We do not talk, we make deals, and this is what my cousins seriously told me. I spoke like this. It tickled them. “Everyone,” Flora’s flat voice, “speaks like this.” Yes, yes, making deals. We didn’t even need language to understand one another.

“You do this,” si si, they even understood the word “deals.” Yes, that’s it exactly.

Here’s an opening I have right now.

Christmas in Naples is a sport not some hallmark holiday. The Neapolitans can trace back their lineage to the siren that attempted to lure Odysseus. This is ancient territory, the land before Christmas even. We aren’t playing patty cake baker’s man here. This is a sport.

And we just go. We do not need “start dates.”

The Neapolitans rose spontaneously from the subterranean channels to kick out the Nazis. No one needed to discuss it, send a note, or concoct a plot. They just blew like Vesuvius on the day. Same with Christmas. We just go. I didn’t know.

Last year, on December 2, Rosa cut into a pancetta-wrapped turkey stuffed with apples, prunes, and walnuts. I wasn’t expecting that. She said it, announced it. “Merry Christmas.” The next day, a live band hit the streets—Feliz Navidad. I couldn’t believe it. I dropped everything. I ran down alleyways under Christmas stars, dark and moody. A police officer stationed outside Intersport, our official sponsor, directed me to the opening ceremonies in an adjacent park dedicated to a man with glasses. I ran, I did, around the sparkling piazza.

Olive trees twinkled so fast, so fast. Ten years went by so fast. Men on stilts juggled past. Children flew in circles on swings, rode a dragon. Cheerleaders shook their pompoms in sexy Santa costumes. A short Italian man tried to dance with them, we were all dancing, the band played Feliz Navidad again. Santa took up shop, taking a seat in his chair, with an elf helper at the door.

Then, to make sure that the true nature of Christmas in Naples is clear before I begin my story, my play, how I got here, I could not linger: dinner. I lightly jogged to the pick-up spot to hop into the Christmas red Fiat to head to Sorrento to get to the prosciutto place.

Palms trees covered in Christmas lights streamed past our windows, glowing, down the bends toward Sorrento. Rosa and her best friend spoke about getting pizza with friends with streaks of gold across their faces. Lights wrapped around tree trunks, sparkling through their branches; presents and stars and snowmen and Christmas stockings floating in the night even over the tiniest streets without a soul. I was taken by it.

Christmas lights hung in strings above my head disappearing down the street.

The road it took to get here, lit up, a divine comedy.

Into the prosciutto place, big thighs to be thinly sliced, a bald man crouched down looked up. He turned on a Nutcracker under the bar. “We wish you a Merry Christmas,” the Nutcracker got to cracking.

We made our way up the stairs as one.

Zoom out—a ball flew across a green field, little ants running. Soccer was on TV. Cut—snowmen cheered in fits of confetti, more cheerleaders. The camera panned around the coaches. A man in mountain biking gear cut across the screen to take a seat in real life. A Neapolitan man paused and posed in chic black sweats under a canopy of Christmas lights.

So, as you can see, Rosa said it, and we sprang into action as one. We just know and we go.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know so much. Neither did my cousins.

I tried to arrive before Christmas, you see. I had disappeared to my cousins when I was about thirteen along with my father. It had been fifteen years. I had to think about it, whether or not I would pick up the phone. They knew nothing about what happened. I didn’t even know but I had reached a point in my life. I better start figuring it out. And here he was—a man who merits a full title: Franco Franzese.

I picked up the phone joyous, apologetic, tense. People lose touch, stay in touch, who knows? I was living in Paris, France, near Places des Vosges, though I was from America, the United States of America, that is, just to specify. Long-winded.

He was happy to hear from me. He wasn’t expecting me to pick up. Why? He had never tried before. No one knows what happened to you? What happened to you?

Oh, Franco. It was just crazy, crazy, sincerely, even. He wouldn’t believe it, but why did I do this? This is what I mean. I didn’t make sense in Italian. I could take sudden turns in my discourse not wanting to be closed off. Open and positive, I could hit the breaks. I was resolved. I lived with a lot of guilt especially when it came to family; disappearing was a theme.

Come for Christmas.

Oh, I laughed, my story didn’t go with Christmas. So, go early, I thought, and allow ample time.

“DECEMBER,” I began.

“PRIMO,” I said and I laughed.

“OSPETALE…”

(It’s ospedale in Italian.)

Franco Franzese was at the hospital.  

“SCUSA MARIA?”

 “December 1? I come December…”

I brought a fist toward my person.

“PER,” for, “December.”

I didn’t know the word for month.

“Four weeks makes?”

I couldn’t be polite so I apologized, said “mass” instead of “month.”

“…Si…”

He didn’t understand.

“I don’t speak Italian…”

I didn’t know the word for “anymore.” I started over. He cut me off.

“Maria, tutto okay, si. December…”

“Si? Vero?”

Vero means “true.”

Not speaking the language tickled me, made me bolder.

“Si, Maria, si…”

I repeated it. 

“Settimana UNA, non?”

Number one week.

I gave myself fists for using the feminine appropriately.  

“Si, MARIA, si,” he sounded as if we were saying the same thing.

I felt bad. I didn’t know how to feel.

“Okay…perfetto!”

I thanked him. I circled my fist around. “We…”

“Si, si, we’ll spend some time together, this is good, Maria, this is good.”

“Okay…”

 He cracked up at my “okay” in an Italian accent.

I thought I was impersonating them.

“Grazie…”

 He trilled the “r” in my name tight and fast and blasted.

“MARIA NorMALE,” etc.

“I am happy,” I said like a mascot.  

“Si, also us,” he said.

 “Si?”

I was strained.

“Maria, si,” he was confused.

“We all are…”

It was a little hard to believe.