GLASS DOORS OPENED to a blue sky, a bite in the air, a bittersweet taste in my mouth. Stone pines with rough skirts grew tall across the parking lot. Words with sharp beginnings and harsh endings crashed into one another like waves and cymbals. Doors slammed shut, a beautiful day—sole, sole, sole! O Sole Mio, my sun, a Neapolitan classic song. It is sung here as if for the first time every time.
I remembered Franco waddling to his kitchen window every morning, rubbing his hands, yearning to see it. “O Sole! O Sole Mio!” Feeling the tensions in the song, the lyrics were his evidence as he lifted his heels in a white doctor’s jacket to my laughter and delight as a child.
“It’s in front of you…”
He gave me a palm which I was holding all these years later: a platter of a hand scanning the scene as if it spoke for itself. What a beautiful thing is a sunny day. I felt it this chilly December morning. The air is serene after a storm. Naples, Italy, a place I longed and feared to return to. From my pocket, I smelled the rinds of a clementine cupped in my hand. I always loved the scent of its remains, sharp and sweet like a quiet day down a shore long ago.
In a beige Mongolian fur jacket that matched my curly hair, I sipped a cappuccino with a faint aroma of grass in it, a little out of sight so I could spot my cousin first. I didn’t want to stand there, and not be recognized, waving like an idiot. Of course, the family sent Carmine to pick me up which was, coffee and clementine on my tongue, the truth.
Emerging from the lot, I caught black hair silky like sails gliding through the seas of flying limbs and voices shouting out of cars speeding unnecessarily through the parking lot to women in sweatpants. It struck me: he was no longer a boy.
Beat in his head, he was lean, handsome, bearded, and a man of thirty years old now. His cheeks were my favorite feature back then, coupled with his signature owl eyes that eliminated any possibility of discerning what he was thinking.
“Everyone,” as it is known, “has a strategy in Naples.”
A friend of mine from Genoa remarked that the Neapolitans were “the actors of Italy,” snickering at my accent in Italian. Carmine was cool, matter-of-fact yet poetic, he wasn’t going to become an opera for you. Supercilious and professorial at times, he was wearing dark olive frames no longer round that matched his skin. He resembled his mother, Flora, the most out of his two brothers: the middle child in purple cashmere and a black windbreaker this morning.
Scanning the glass façade of the airport as if he knew I was tricky, I wanted to run towards him and hide at the same time, so I tucked behind a trash can. A Neapolitan remarked it and drew attention to me with a blasting voice. Our limbs extending to their full potential, I did a little dance; he did not find it strange.
With two fists, Napoli was freedom! I cried.
Not surprised to see a scene around me but taken by my gigantesque presentation, Carmine was subtly stunned to recognize me in stride. How to cross fifteen years? He did it for me, for it wasn’t a dense material to him. With a strict focus to cut through the chaos that was Naples, Carmine was coming in for a landing.
I was moving my hands like the storm, the storms! He had no idea what I was saying. The years flew past with his steps, ages flickered across his face, and I was searching for the words with my hands. He hugged me. A direct hit. I wasn’t expecting that. Or, I wasn’t anticipating that fifteen years could be so easily crossed.
He pulled me in front of him with a firm grip as if to feel the reality of me.
“Merí, your hair…”
My coat was “enormous.”
I forgot that they called me by that name — Merí.
“Merí!”
I masked tears that came with bright eyes realizing how naïve I was, that a second would go by that would be merciful, even if it was joyous. I would remember spontaneously, moment to moment, too slow for the current. In the thrilling sea of incomprehensible voices, I would be inebriated and giggling, but with words and feelings and images guiding me towards sentences, I would learn.
“Yes,” he said.
“This is you, Merí.”
I took this as an opportunity, nervously, to practice the letters of the alphabet.
“Not…”
He nodded.
“Mary,” I cut it short.
“Baa baa,” I made the sounds that lambs do because he found my coat bello, “is it vintage?” But Italian lambs do not make the same sounds as English ones.
He took in my outfit: a thin navy and white polka dot dress with a large sailor collar.
“You can eat it!”
I patted my hands, searching for, hands moving forward, “the animal…”
Pushing up his glasses and looking into my eyes, he remembered that my hands were “very imaginative.” I was shocked, but he wasn’t, the two of us taken aback. What was this landscape I attempting to cross, these sounds I was making, was I on a farm? Ah, lamb?
“Si! From Mongolia…”
Si, he didn’t pretend like I hadn’t vanished out of thin air.
“You! You look at you!”
“You’re the pretty one,” he dismissed me gallantly and took the compliment simultaneously. I got uncomfortable, he noticed, which made me respond strangely. He reached for my giant suitcase, on top of it, and I felt bad about it, so we did a pas de deux over who was going to take it, which stopped him in his tracks. Eyes moving side-to-side at my demonstration of strength, he grabbed it in a swift move and stopped. I hopped.
Squinting in front of a stone pine tree, he adjusted his glasses, wondering what my fidgety insistence was about. Taking in my hair, my coat, my suitcase, and my carry-on without needing to move his eyes, he remarked and remembered and explained that I always moved creatively to passing audience members who were also players.
“I did?
We had not the time.
“Merí— ”
He rang even-toned to signal my attention.
“We must hurry, it is time to eat…”
I froze in fear. His brows rose, his chin turned, his eyes like an owl.
“I cannot eat…”
We were having many conversations at once, which was typical, and words were not always necessary in Naples, especially between us. “What do you mean you cannot eat? You are not hungry, or you cannot eat because you feel sick or tired or something? Are you okay?”
Uh, no, yes. I didn’t have the words.
“Sorry, thank you…”
Looking at me as if were strange, which made me laugh, he purposefully rolled on with my bag leading with his sails. “Mama, lunch-time, let’s go…”
If there was one thing I could never forget, though I didn’t remember that I always like this, whatever that meant, it was the amount that the Neapolitans ate. Slowing down my steps to delay his, he whistled; he knew. My bag was a little awkward and I lunged for it apologetically.
I inserted my hands where words should have been.
Like a sharp conductor, he paused in suspension, his eyes large and innocent, and cued my hands out. “Be careful,” he wagged his finger as if he remembered me more and more with every step that he took.
I caught up with him, the wind through his jacket, his chest affronting the seas once more. Carmine was sensitive to the shift in my feeling, but he didn’t know it, I could tell, but then who knew what he knew and what he didn’t? I was nervous, for sure, though I wouldn’t say that I was totally aware of it at the time.
Catching the nails on his left hand— they were longer—he played guitar!
“Muschi…”
“Musician” was not an easy word for me to pronounce.
“Muschishi…”
“Merí,” he charged forward, turning—giving me eyes—switching his hands, rolling my giant suitcase along the pavement.
With a full extension of my arm, I snapped at him and shot stars out of my fingers feeling the electric current beneath my feet surging through my veins. I wanted to know what the word for “sound” was. I spontaneously remembered, laughing at the gestures that accompanied my speech. “Ehhh,” making sounds like his mother, he was a little unsure about my play. A language barrier was an instant tickle for me. I loved ripping this mask off, in particular, and plunging into the nonsensical humor of communicating in another language.
“But,” I stumbled over a curb in my black suede boots.
Carmine threw up his hands at a silver car attempting to go around the parking kiosk by accelerating up and onto a grassy median that we were currently crossing.
“HO!”
He kept moving as if there was nothing abnormal about this type of behavior because there wasn’t.
Stopping at a white 90s Peugeot, opening up the trunk, I pointed to it.
Plumping onto the pavement, the silver car booked it.
“Hey! Franco!”
“Si si,” Carmine was smooth with his keys. It was his father’s old car, “si.”
“We were children in the…”
Through the glass, I saw little Carmine in the backseat swinging his sandal in the summers, the two of us children beginning to turn our fingers towards the point we would never arrive at like the “wheels.” Yes, he tried not to smile, debating whether or not he should inquire further into the meaning of my gestural discourse.
Spontaneously frustrated, I wanted him to see the past in the car.
“We did questo!”
“Ssi, ssi,” he shrugged with a furrowed brow. He turned my wheels instead towards the car I needed to get into, putting invisible food into his mouth. I was laughing, and he, in sounds, made a deal with me that I had proved his point.
He got into the car.
