Christmas in Naples is a Sport

Rosa called it “Christmas in Naples is a Sport” holding a killer hand of cards between burgundy nails on the 25th of dicembre also known as MEAT. She was gambling at the time, her lips the stance. The dinner table became a musical casino in my absence, I see. Standing at the bottom of the steps, I didn’t even make it through the meal. And hardly anyone does.

*

Earlier, as the car ascended into the cliffs of Sorrento at a sharp left, I asked Carmine, in pain, if he was even hungry. Giggino blasted noise at Emilio, his youngest born. His owl eyes shifted. “This is not the point.” Giggino started interrupting our conversation. Carmine did not lose his cool, he did not break, he never does. I wasn’t going to make it, Carmine, I wasn’t going to make it. “MARIA?” “Survival is not the point,” he wagged his finger, instructionally. “MARIA?” “You cannot survive Christmas.” “MA SCUSA…”

“This is not the point.”

Funiculi funicula! on the stereo.

I saw not one but two lasagnas descend from the heavens up above—bianca e rosa or white and red — with bechamel, even, that move blew me away, with fresh mozzarella and fior di latte, nutmeg, and then, of course, tomatoes cheese and meat. We were at “Il Secondo Round,” Carmine told me, as if we were at a boxing match, also known as MEAT. The lasagne took up the whole plate, even at a slight incline — right to the edge. Blew me away. I had eaten 20 courses of FISH the night before at “Il Primo Round,” Carmine said, so I didn’t know that we would be feasting today as well—at noon. I didn’t know, at the outset, that Christmas in Naples was a sport, a real sport, even impressively. There was no way I was going to be able to do this, and we were nowhere near the end of the meal. I had already eaten several, still on the pasta course.

You see, the tricky thing about Christmas in Naples is that the appetizers fool you into thinking that this is all there is, except that’s not true, there’s always more, we’re always giving more. That’s the sports mindset. We get what the goal is: abundance. The end, that’s just a chance to reach immortality. As Vico says, “marathon was a man.”

I could feel the darkness descending, getting up from the table, I lost my ability to construct sentences, operate, by the end of the first act. People were clapping, bravo was firing like canons…along with questions, comments, and reservations. “OLE OLE OLE OLE! I saw DIEGO MARADONA!”

I had eaten for at least three weeks straight, fearfully, but I lost my nerve in a bustling kitchen brimming over with talented boisterous girls buzzing around Assunta in lipstick and chunky jewelry, chic in navy. I didn’t want them to think that I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t going to be able…

Long behold, if not “hark,” Giggino was sitting right in front of me, my main antagonist, my personal coach through the season, my comedic foil, the father who dared to confront this absurd story I came back with after a long disappearance. “You don’t like it?” He asked, right on cue. The chandelier of glass tulips was swirling. The darkness was coming. “What’d she say?” Please, please, do not attract any attention to me. He did.

When the roasted meats hit the table, one stuffed with prosciutto, the darkness descended, I had fever, it was done. I had no more space, literally, within me to think, I shot up upon sight — left — didn’t even say goodbye. Up the tight squat staircase reminiscent of the Bolero print on the wall along with family portraits, I barely reached Rosa’s room upstairs. I fell flat on her bed, cheek squished against the sheets, forehead damp. Passed out.

There’s a print in Assunta’s staircase, before I forget, the cutest person, of a sensually plump woman smoking a long thin pipe, very fine, high art.

My mother gave me to a total stranger when I was four, except, that’s not really the topic sentence of my life: my mother wrapped up a stranger in a protective scheme against my father who she accused of being a child rapist when I was four. That sentence alone: a meaty, hefty content block to digest, an animal. Her name was Joy.

I woke up in the dark to a family singing and laughing. I was in pain, truly, I was about three weeks telling them this epic of what happened to me from that point onward at Christmas which I had not anticipated. Emma made me laugh through the hazy heaviness. I needed effervescent aspirin now.

I tried to come early, “il PRIMO DICEMBRE,” I fired at Giggino on the phone back in Paris a few months prior. My story didn’t go with Christmas, so I decided to go early. I knew the questions were coming. “The first December,” I said. “I COME THE FIRST DECEMBER.” Little did I know, though, that Christmas in Naples is a sport, it typically begins round then. “After summer we are free to put up the decorations,” my friend Marco said, as I even dabbled in a bit of journalism, by investigating the sport. He clarified over octopus and his mother Teresa’s adoring gaze, that “Christmas doesn’t really end… there is no end…”

The 25th of December? Players start going down on this day—it’s a bloodbath, a double feature, and we must, we must, rise again — we must, despite the obstacles. That’s why we watch sports. But could I? Make it through? Alive? With this story in tow — the story was an obstacle course. I could not help that I had it, unable to move.

Yeah, I got really into “the sport” of Christmas here because it was true beyond my wildest dreams, forget my feelings — the Christmas warmth I felt, at the miracle that I lived, over the course of this spectacular season. They rose to their feet, once again, to applaud and cheer beneath my body. Perfect timing. Bravo. Brav. That’s “bravo” in the Neapolitan dialect. We don’t do ending — we elbow that shit right off — it isn’t round or soft here, we’re not those types of Italians, we’re boisterous and HARSH.

Out of bed, head like a wet brick, stomach on emergency closure, my fever had broken a little. I couldn’t see a thing next to her shelves of family photographs, only a multicolored light around the edge of the door. Was I hallucinating? A little. I took a deep breath. I had to pump myself up that evening—Christmas. Putting it in my hips, lightly, I remembered her, though I was tighter back then. I never knew what to do with her.

She was from Brazil, the unsuspecting stranger who got wrapped up in a sex scandal over a four-year-old. Me. We were always dancing. She was. Love, love, love, life was a dance, she danced through life, space, that was her way.

Down the steps, the sounds grew louder and moved in waves of warm colors, my stomach, too. I tip-toed, not like I needed to. The glass reflected bodies in a blurry Caravaggio behind Vico, the family dealer, singing and selling cards. Dessert round had been cleared, the dining table freshened up with fresh clementines from the farm in a field of liquors: Grappa di Chardonnay, Sambucas, Barricata Privata, Pantelleria, Genziana, frosty strawberry, cherry, blueberry, orange, limoncello (for shits), walnut, laurel, and a box that read: in life, in everything that you do, no matter what it is, put your heart in it.

“Maruzzella!” They announced my return as Assunta, the cutest person, put down a plate of fruit as if it were just, another plate, unassumingly.

Vico held up cards for auction. His nieces and nephews taunted him by tapping their wallets and getting sneaky and manipulative. Rosa counted cash in a Christmas white sweater with a bullish hot confidence. The baby dragons, Gennaro and Persephone’s three boys, were flying around. The eldest, Frankie, as in Frank Sinatra, slapped a twenty on the table, and baby Marco was crawling underneath the table, his little hand appearing over the edge of the table from time to time trying to snatch bills from his family’s hands. And the beauty of it? Nobody cared. They didn’t even notice. They’re just twisting their wrists, carrying on with their conversations because, well, let me put it this way: Silent Night? Not happening here. This is the time for anthems— these are the big leagues round here: Christmas. We’re singing “My Way” by Frank Sinatra, you see. Remember the goal: immortality. The end is just a chance to reach it. Bravo. And I’m not even joking, it’s really like that here. Remember the siren, we trace our origins back to the siren that attempted to lure Odysseus.

I collapsed into a chair next to Rosa with a killer hand of cards between burgundy nails — the star gambler in the family— as if I had washed back up to shore. Nettuno as in Neptune was barking — one with the darkness outside the glass doors reflecting the crowd. A black pup with floppy ears, he insisted to be let in. He broke off the leash again. In a perfect trio, women broke out from the chorus and fired “Neptune” in a cascade, as, by God, the Neapolitans naturally and even instinctually become a Greek chorus when they are in groups: they are truly one and also one body. This is what I mean: they inspired me to desire to become the Bugs Bunny conductor — conducting the symphony of them — a Greek play, classic, yes, but Aristophanes. We do all have our point of view.

Bills tucked under rocks glasses and flutes, their tips caught the light from the tulip chandelier. They appeared to be gambling with tarot cards: a distant cousin of the pack. Vico was in the center of it, the dining now gambling table as the singing dealer, eyes glittering. I was underwater. I needed aspirin. Vico and Giggino shut it down. No, I didn’t. Gennaro appeared, or Hades, as I like to call him, with eyes like green laser beams: you will be judged for making such a request. I was dismissed. I did, though; no, they said outright. “No you don’t.” They ignored me. Could I go to the farmacia tomorrow? The farmacia? It’s the FEAST of la la la la…

Excuse me? I flashed them eyes.

“A FEAST DAY, TOMORROW, SANTO…” Now that, that right there, space warped into some light show — was I hearing things?! I was not expecting that! “SANTO WHAT?” My eyes CRAZY. “WHAT?” Giggino looked away like “seriously?”

“It’s a FEAST DAY TOMORROW MARIA — THE FEAST OF SANTO STEFANO…”

“CAFÉ!” Emma cried with her grandmother’s silver tray.

Rosa checked me out with cards in hand, her lips the stance: my face of shock, confusion, fear… Another festa? I looked at the cash in a pile on the table, Frankie slapping down bills. “It’s true, Meri, it’s really true,” Rosa said in full-featured agreement. “Christmas in Naples is a sport. A real sport…” And that’s when I saw the light break, “yes, Rosa, yes… it is, it’s a sport,” I knew it all along, my eyes desperate to be seen.

“Si Meri,” she said, “a real sport.”

Suddenly full of hope, beaming with recognition, I knew it, I knew it the moment I got here ROSA: this was ancient shit. Remember the siren; these people trace their lineage to this creature. I even needed to train to be able to keep up with them— I mean physical exercise. “You need strength for eating,” a random Neapolitan told me miming pumping weights. “Not exercise,” he flashed me a smile that could steal my money from me on the sly.

I approached the season as if it really were a sport, you see, a sport that never let me down, not from day one, December one, we rise as one, then, she said it here and now on the 25th of dicembre as we gambled as a family — the curtains opened and let God in. “You were right, child, you were right.” I took the news with joy, my mother’s name. Fist in the air. “Sensa sord!” I saluted the family. “Sensa sord!”

“Ahhhh,” they all jumped in. “What’s the expression Meri?!” They taught it to me earlier in the season, and I could not stop repeating it like a good little soldier. “Without money!” I demanded that they FINISH it — FINISH the family motto “WITHOUT MONEY?” What do we know, what don’t we do? Without money, what are we definitely not doing? “Nobody sings in church,” they answered as one. “SENSA SORD!” Fist in the air, once MORE. I want MORE. MORE. “WITHOUT MONEY!” “Here here.” “Go Meri!” I got nothing but crowd support and applause. Without MONEY nobody sings for God! Nobody’s doing nothing, yeah! I celebrated the idea, one I genuinely loved, and money was the first hook that caught this unsuspecting mother, so there’s always shadow, what can I say? How true it is. My mother’s name was Joy.

Merry Christmas.

We meet Giggino and Diodora: where are you? who are you? where have you been? The questions start coming

A faint sound of a canary tweeting a sweet unceasing ditty echoed in a stairwell. A window in the shape of a half-moon with a gate of squiggly diamonds brought in light through mandarin trees onto grey and white marble steps. It emitted an immediate aesthetic, feeling. An enchanted stairwell. But Naples has a charge in the air. It’s alive. We’re on a super-volcano so it’s fertile.

Taking a confident seat, he held his thought, brows raised.

I froze with wide eyes and my neoprene boot in the air.

I looked down at the carpet. 

 “Oh scusa,” I went to take off my shoe. I should have foreseen that, whispering. He looked to the side like why was I whispering? He patted down my fumes with a furrowed brow.

“With calm, Maria, with calm…”

Untying his black boots, he signaled to the shoes by the door.

“One must take off their shoes,” he said with a blunt tone. “When they come into a house. The dirt from outside, shoes, a clean house…” 

Not thinking I understood, he repeated the tale, as I was taking off my other shoe. 

I waited politely to follow his lead up a wrought iron staircase with a vintage wooden handle. The stairwell gleamed clean and modern with these old touches and paintings of ruins next to bodies of water on the walls.

I spoke softly.

“Tweet…tweet…”

“Filippo…

“Ah–“ 

A canary.

Out the half-moon window, the same architectural skeleton was still there, a parking lot, I figured, that had barely gotten started.

It was just as I remembered it, the house.

The eggshell door so shiny it looked wet had a carving of a diamond inside of a square. All the doors to the floors were kept closed at all times due to the draft. I always found this doorknob funny and nerve-wracking; it was built too close to the threshold. I had caught my fingers in this door, or almost, whenever I had tried to close it. I had had a habit, sometimes or often, of not closing it properly, which meant the doors were sometimes or often open––

“Maria?”

I turned.

“Who is?”

An antique door framed Carmine, a coat rack with brass hooks and an oval mirror. A Santa, I squinted, hung on the central hook—a little early for decorations, no?

Carmine signaled for my coat.

When my friend read the first draft of this book, she was nervous about this part. I hadn’t even stepped into the house yet, so a house, a family, wasn’t necessarily safe from the perspective of my friends. Maybe not all of them but I didn’t know what to do with that. She said, “considering your life.” I just beginning to. 

I threw my coat at him.

“Bello,” Carmine was impressed with my navy and white polka dot sheath, sort of transparent, twenties in feel, I think, with a large sailor collar.

“Vintage?”

“Si,” I was dismissive. I became known for my style but I didn’t want to appear like I spent a bunch of money on clothes so I had to apologize. That was my mother, Joy.

“Are those silver balls,” he looked, “on your ears?”

“Si,” I said.

Diodora rang.

“Marrria?”

Her nasal capacity was cartoon-worthy; it was clearly a cavity, you know what I mean? She rang your name with a very clear tone. I was a child once.

It stunned me, a little.

“La bella DioDORA…” echoed up the stairwell, a half-moon on each floor bringing in soft, gauzy light. “Go, go,” Carmine said.

I came ashore onto her living floor the color of sand. A window by a Christmas tree flooded the linoleum floor with a bright light like a lamented beach. White lights wrapped around a Christmas tree—wasn’t it a little early? I turned. My mouth dropped. Diodora was in the same outfit as fifteen years ago! A fitted-neck cashmere sweater, black house pants, and platform slippers. Carmine took after her the most with darker olive skin and brown eyes and hair. Holding green olives in a plastic bag, she ran to embrace me, beside herself. Tiny and fit with foulard, her dark eyes became slits when she smiled behind cat-eye frames. She was always an honest, rugged person with a tight haircut. She amazed me. I did not have the ability to say: you have not aged a day. “Eternale…?”

She spoke with ellipses built-in so she could remain agile in conversation, knight-like in her verticality and playful sparring. She could be flirtatious but tough, restrained, Diodora, with a gaiety to her. A trickster, also. She looked at me as if she could see a child in me, which was odd. She had a way of holding her hand, very satisfying, as if it were a turtledove.

“Um,” I gestured to the Christmas tree.

“Why…” is this here.

Energetic and scared — I switched thought very fast. I had to keep that in mind as I moved forward with this story. 

“You is, are 20 years.”

I stuck my thumb in the past, taking a couple of steps into it.

“Passate,” I said. Past.

Carmine raised his brows.

“Learn Italian first.”

Diodora was gracious, formal, adjusting her glasses.

“No,” I refused him.

With his hands on his hips, he paused next to his mother before telling her that Maria wants to learn Italian and Neapolitan in, his turned his finger, “one month,” and “ah,” she punctuated, wasn’t sure if that was going to happen. I tried to let it go—my attempt to make a sentence. They wanted to know, though, what did I want to say? “Go, go,” Carmine said, somewhere else. “Tell us Maria,” Diodora even got languid like Carmine could. After a light round of charades, Carmine got it, the effect of the lighting too.

“Eterna,” he mirrored the ball I made and put it into the space.

Without words he asked me why…?

His mother laughed.

“Maria, eternale?”

“You, no ago? No years on…” your face.

Getting flirty, jabby, she flashed her brows, does this mean she looks good? Maria? She was a close combat person. My hands were always very, she conjured a little magic with a smile to seal the deal.

“Un po’ fantastical.”

I blinked, put a little bend in my knees to pop up.

“Vero?”

“Wow,” she said, “si si,” si si, Carmine echoed, I was always like this.

Her “si si” was legendary, musical, could sear cutlets.

I looked at her. Really?

“Wow, tu, you have changed…”

I nodded, also.  

“Maria,” she rang to signal my attention, touched the bag very nicely.

“These are olives…that I made.”

“Wow…”

“Ma,” Diodora strained yet casual placed a little olive tree at various points in the distance.

“Maria, olive trees are everywhere…tante tante a Napoli…”

She hushed tender words that I didn’t understand.

“It’s been so long…I can still see you, si, si…Maria, look at this dress, it’s chic.”

“You look bella,” she put up an ok sign and enunciated. 

“Maria, wow…”

“I like…clothes…”

I shrugged in the Neapolitan. She laughed. Two fingers pointing at my eyes, I went searching for pieces because each one was “a story.”

“They like you also,” she shrugged.

I thanked her.

In his white coat, Giggino slid open the mirrored door from his office like an old lady searching for good gossip with a round belly protruding a little more than it used to. He kept his crew cut tight, clipped like his cash, with a salt and pepper suave wave.

“Maria!”

He trilled the “r” so forcefully, it took the feet out from under me, which I demonstrated. “Wow,” Diodora said. “Si, si, always like that.” “What?” Even that. “I was?” Carmine said I studied mime or something. “Mimo, Maria?” She rang my name like, seriously? Bello.

Giggino greeted me like a cousin with two kisses on the cheek. He offered me a mountain of fried mini dough balls with honey and sprinkles on top. Giggino is a bulldozer but an alligator so he’s gentle at heart. He only chomps the endings of all words. His accent was legendary swishing, swashing, sweeping, chucking, to throw me down. “Where have you been?” 

Giggino moved his body like he was joking but not, taking me in. He was concerned already. He was ready to bust my chops, anyone’s chops. He complimented my dress. Si, si, vintage. I started saying things I couldn’t really say. They were surprised when I picked up. Why?

“Where have you been?”

“Um,” I went blank and it would work to my advantage, sometimes, acting like I don’t understand. Eager, bright, I said it was crazy, just crazy.

“You’re nervous,” he saw it immediately. “No.”

“Siii,” he said as if I were a baby.

He tipped his head into my resistance. Still had some fight, alright.

Giggino handed me the plate, screwed his cheek, the Italian gesture for tastes good.

“Buono, questo, Marrria.”

“No grazie…I don't want questo adesso.”

“Questo adesso…”

“This isn’t even food…”

He gestured to the mountain of tiny fried balls.

“These are just little fried balls of dough.”

“Do you eat? You’re skinny…”

Diodora tipped her head to one side.

“NO,” I snapped.

“Me? I am muscle…”

He sizzled, I was skinny, I wasn’t. I took a superman stance. Giggino. He gestured to Diodora as if it had to be taken care of immediately. He was being dramatic, so I stepped into the kitchen even more dramatically. The window that opened from the wall like a door. A curtain of embroidered daisies: Diodora.

“Do you like curtains?”

Giggino mocked me.

I hurried over to the door.

You’re skinny, I am muscle, no, yes, how was your flight, where have you been? How are you making money? Eat, Maria, eat. AHHHH, Diodora rang. What the hell are you doing, goofy guitar playing man? Carmine never moved his face, also strategic. This guy, his father indicated. Why is she laughing?

Orange and mandarin trees from the garden below met a terracotta patio.

Giggino was funny, that’s why, ready to BUST CHOPS, boom. Boxes of nuts, bowls of fruit, leafy greens exploding out of crates on a white plastic table. Taking his position on his bench: the radiator under the window, Giggino was assessing my “wow” attitude already. Didn’t expect that.

“Do you remember?”

Diodora tipped from the stove with a stalk of pasta in her hand.

“Si…”

I said with a bright smile, because I did, I did.

“Barbeque,” I said with an Italian accent for Giggino…

“Sull’escalier, um, the stairs” leading down to the garden.

“Senti,” Giggino honked into the pressing subject at hand.

“IO,” I said with fist, “imparar’ Italian rapid.”

“Oh?”

Carmine began in a state of suspension.

Giggino rocked himself immediately forward about our “tweet tweet” secret language. I snapped wide eyes, amazed, like “you remember this?” Scratching the top of his head, careful about germs, always, the urologist made two little birds chirping at one another, “tweet tweet.” He wondered what my grand gestures were about but he remembered that I was always like this, even fondly. Right, assessing me.

“Really?” He looked at me. “Do you still do theater?”

“NO?”

“What the hell do you then?!”

I ran to Diodora. “Can I help you?”

“Who the hell is this? Help her? What the hell are you going to do…?”

“No, no,” Diodora said, adjusting her glasses. “I don’t remember you having curly hair…”

My eyes grew wide.

“Si…”

“No.”

“No,” Giggino said, simply.

“SI!” I felt bad. I looked down. I forgot that I forgot. No. “Si,” remembering, confirming. “No.” “Si!” “No.” “ES—” I grabbed my hair. “SI,” they insisted that I didn’t have curly hair. I forgot that I forgot. “SI.” I had to fight, you see, this is Naples. It’s my hair. NO, no it’s not. I had this! “SI.”

“Di,” Carmine corrected me.

“Regulare?”

Who’s this? Giggino snapped. I paused because I shouldn’t say that. Carmine paused. I didn’t want to say that I forgot, that I forgot that I forgot. Laughing already, si, clapping, Napoli, “si, curly hair! LANGUAGE,” I thrust through the difficult. “Rapido. The most rapido possible.” “The most rapido possible…” Giggino looked at me through gator eyes, at the side of his head. “Is it regular?” “TEE TEE,” Giggino barked at my “TEE TEE” energy. “Si, it’s regular,” Carmine said. But what did you forget……Carmine communicated without words.

“Tweet, tweet,” Giggino made two little birds tweet-tweeting with his thick hands,  hilarious. Putting his chin into it, crossing his arms, “artisti…” artists, the bane of his existence, though he would use “cultured hands” around the word “arte” as if you treated it with respect also. Oh my God, I forgot that I forgot. My hair, everything. Wow, they remembered me, I said, awkwardly positive, looking at Giggino like “wow.” I didn’t have…I ran over to Carmine, clearing a basket of walnuts. Giggino visibly stared at me as if he lived in a magical world. VISIBLY. “Why are you nervous?” “No, si, no si, I CAN SEE your NERVES!” “Can…” I pointed at the nuts. “SI,” Giggino’s eyes were wide. Diodora didn’t have to turn around. “These are local Maria…” Giggino and Carmine told where the nuts came from at the same time. Diodora came in at the end. “MARIA EAT THE NUTS!” Giggino barked; I became suddenly scared, not wanting to disturb anyone, holding onto my hands, retracting. “You don’t eat!” “Si!” I came forward. “IO EAT.” He pointed to his eye as if I were a baby. It wasn’t what he was seeing on my figure. “I do sport!” Giggino judged that. “MOUSSE puro,” I slapped my my biceps. Diodora congratulated me. “DIED, Maria…your father? HE DIED? HE DIED?

Naples requires quick footwork.

Through the murky waters, the smooth white bums: mozzarella. These are just balls in a bucket to us. We don’t have special packaging here. I was gleeful. I was skinny. The LASER BEAMS, Giggino indicated, suddenly the Hunchback of Notre Dame, coming from my eyes should be directed toward the FOOD, Giggino pointed with wide but beady eyes. “Good, food, it’s good,” he assured me as if I were a baby. “NON SONO UN BEBE.” Diodora smiled with flirtatious eyebrows.

“I remember you always loved bufala…”

“Si? Really?” 

Giggino collapsed a little, looking at Diodora. “MARIA, don’t you REMEMBER? Are you trying to be a comedian? She has a quality though doesn’t she Diodora?”

“Si, si,” she said.

I laughed.

“A little magical, no?”

“What?”

Giggino tipped, gave me sparkly fingers. 

“QUALITA.”

Palm open, Giggino was confused. Making his way to the large ceramic bowl with kaki and clementines at the patio door, I insisted that I could not eat first, even proudly, like I got the point a long time ago. He let me have it low—Maria, eat. He wasn’t eating. Everyone made fun of his “dieta” which always remained a theory. “Non,” I was final. I could not do that.

A quick glance at the cheese, Giggino about to begin his interrogation into the case of me, Carmine cut into his mozzarella with precision, a formidable bite, and broke a bit of bread. I cracked up. They thought I was joking. No, it was their reaction. “La politesse,” it was French. Then, I said police, short-circuiting, cracking up, “when you…the language,” I loved speaking like this, wanting to tell them. Free, bold, so excited! Language. Bufala! “IS THIS NOT BUON?” Gesturing to Carmine in the formal fashion, I could proceed. I took a bite…my eyes closed.

Creamy, touch of stank, a delight, I was pure, renewed. I rubbed my fingers together though there was no reason to. Giggino caught it…asked me what I was doing, delighted at my play, so confused as to what I was doing with my life! If not THEATER?

“Wet grass, green, earth, hooves, cow hide, a cool bath thick of cream. FRESHK!”

“FRESCO…”

“I speak Neapolitan!”

“Brav.”

“MA MARIA,” Giggino perched himself on the radiator — directly in front of me. He wanted me to SEE him. “Does FOOD not have taste in AMERICA?”

“Fa freddo,” Giggino shivered.

“Yes,” Diodora said with a warm smile.

“Good, Maria?”

“It’s not…(that)…cold,” I teased him.

“Oh?”

I opened my fingers, trying to find a word better than good. “You’re seeing green, right? Is that what you said? You’re talking about the grass…” Carmine said. “Ahhh,” Diodora said, “it’s good, Maria? Good?”I pressed my fork into its flesh, the liquid, the water. “Buon,” I rubbed my fingers together, but the word was not good enough. I threw my hand — for MORE. “A qualità superior,” I pressed my fork, again, since the — aqua — says everything. Giggino told me to stop PLAYING with food! EAT IT. THE WORD FOR WORD, MAN, I did not have it.

“HOW YOU SAY…”

Taking a deep breath, all forehead, “SAY WHAT MARIA SAY WHAT?” Giggino.

Pasta released steam under Diodora’s stirring, the cockles salty on the nose. Giggino drew his hands to the classic, Italian triangle—about to go in for me. Siiii, I gazed at the glistening, slippery noodles piling on my plate.

“Where’s Benedetto?”

“Verona…”

Giggino spun it up in the future. “He will come…” he tossed it. “Next week.”

“Pesce?”

“First pasta,” Diodora clarified.

Carmine’s brows were raised. Giggino was disturbed.

“I cannot eat…” Carmine cut me off. “She says this…”

“OH?” Giggino interrogated. I was laughing. “Next week. Ma MARIA…“

“Niccolo?”

Diodora chimed in with a bowl of lentils with green olives and her gluten-free bread, it turned out, for I became keenly interested in the LOAVES. Pointing, frowning, she had a machine to bake her little loaves. “Niccolo sta a Roma…he’ll come closer to Christmas…” Sizzling, clenching his jaw, what’s the meaning of this? He tackled the subject with a deep brow. “YOUR FATHER.” I got noodles in my mouth— quick. Al dente. Everyone jumped in to support me except Giggino twinkling his little head around like I had a cute song and dance. “Piace?” She lifted her brows with a smile. I sucked a cockle, a tender, warm, salty babe. “Maria,” Giggino frowned. “What about the lentils?” Carmine wanted me to eat the lentils as well. I demonstrated my chewing mouth! “Brav,” Giggino was just checking—my fight. Si, si, good, normale, etc. Geez, he crossed his arms.

“SCUSA MARIA,” Giggino blurted.

“I do not speak Italian!”

Everyone disagreed. I could not help but laugh. “Si, my father…obviously…” my hand extended in the formal fashion. “MOURIR,” in French. Giggino cast his gaze downwards and put his nose into it, sincerely. He was sorry to hear it. They all were. I wanted no sympathy. They misunderstood. “Maria,” Giggino said as if I were a kid, “he was older…”

“I KNOW,” I snapped.

“She’s a nervous wreck,” Giggino punched me out of the water, emotional. “She doesn’t eat, and she cannot speak!” Eh, they made sounds. “Of what?”Breaking her bread and throwing chunks into her lentils, she remarked again. “You did not have curly hair.” No, Giggino came in fast to kick me down. “YES!” No. “YES! I HAD THIS! THIS! NO YOU DIDN’T. No… I started laughing. “What’s funny?” Giggino on his bench turned his cheek. I clapped my hands at him.

“YOU — WANT? SAPER? WHY I poof,” I made a poof with my hand. Giggino pointed. “YES. Exactly, just like this.” Now I was on his page. “Poof,” he looked at Diodora like I had something, something of value which he expressed with refined hands. The poof. “What is,” I made the poof. Diodora made “ehh” sounds. Si si they GOT THE PICTURE. I pinched my fingers at them and did not have the word for word! “PER THIS!” I poofed. THEY GOT THE PICTURE, goddammit! “Si…” Diodora slid. “Maria,” Giggino frowned. “What about the lentils?” Slippery pasta between my lips, I demonstrated my chewing mouth! She doesn’t eat, Giggino illustrated. “SCUSA MARIA,” he blurted. Diodora came with more cockles. No, what, who, no, ONLY FISH?

“I…” unable to see straight, I snapped at Carmine with his owl eyes. “When you don’t have…” I could do that. “I didn’t have your number…” I made a phone. “Couldn’t communicar.” With “BIRDS?” flying out of my hands — il papier! Where it is WRITTEN NUMBERS. “MARIA?” Giggino rang. And suddenly, on my feet, Carmine simply following me — I did not have — I went searching PER — PER PER? — the number, putting a phone to my ear. Giggino honking, Diodora confused, Carmine looked side to side as I patted my figure down, WHERE? WHERE? “You lost?” YES! PERDRE, FRENCH! Pointing, happy, electric, to Giggino cringing. Tweet tweet. ARTISTS! He honked.

“Of what? MARIA? OF WHAT?????????”

Back in the game.

Diodora broke her gluten-free bread and threw chunks into her lentils.

“ALZHEIMERS…?”

“ALZHEIMER?

“ALZHEIMER?”

“Is it…?”

“Si, si the SAME.”

“THE SAME. THE SAME.”

Giggino ripped the ending of “eguale” right off.

“EGUAL.”

A whole fish hit the table.

“Bello!”

“MARIA, have you SEEN a FISH?!” 

Diodora sat down to de-bone it elegantly. “Giggino,” Diodora said, and he defended himself. I cracked up. I told her it was alright, less because it was, but because I could take it! I assure you, chief, ehhh, that’s right, just having a little conversation here…

“When,” Giggino pressed, “WHEN did he get Alzheimer?”

“When I was ten…”

I made a slow-motion explosion. They got it immediately.

“This was my life…”

“Explosion? Maria?”

Giggino pressed.

“Everything has exploded?”

“Tutto boom.”

“Tutto boom?” Giggino echoed. “Tutto boom?” Diodora did as well. Carmine did not.

I was sorry— WHAT?

“Carmine,” Giggino did not move his face. “Why is she using this word?” He had never been more concerned. I made a nice, slow circle with my index fingers.

“My life, globally,” I froze, was it? What was it? That didn’t make sense to them—no matter where I started, it never did. “Piano piane, Maria, piano piane,” Giggino rocked. I laughed. “Piano, piane?”

“Pia-no, pia-no, Maria,” Giggino rocked on his heels, “piano, piane.”

“Softly, soft,” he assured me in the Neapolitan that it would unfold in time as if I were beginning a song. Nothing about Naples was piano piane.

UP NEXT:

IN A QUARTET we headed for the suitcase.

The Neapolitan at Hogwarts drives me home

A VOICE RESONATED across the stereo. What a voice! It sounded like a passionate siren had just arrived robust and riding a chariot along a sparkling sea, wind in his romantic hair, in love with it! Carmine nodded, neutrally. He agreed that my silly thrusting upon the moment was “giusto” or just, true, it’s in the song, Meri. It has that inspirted feeling, yes.

“I am with you? The sea. You with me?”

“No, no,” Carmine wagged his finger. Hand on my heart, this siren stunned me.“It is his wild abandon, Merí, in his heart…”

“It is the love in his heart that brings him to the sea…” He gave me his chest, drily. I looked at him. “Do you understand?”

“Eh,” he held out his hand as if it had dirt in it, weight. His brows raised slightly, no inflection, he, superiorly, breached the impossible topic: music. “It was impossible for me or anyone to truly grasp the complexities, ‘the layers’ of the lyrics. There’s what we see on the surface,” he tapped the dashboard, and what is beneath it. “Tante tante layers. No, I didn’t understand.” He rubbed his palm with his fingers when he was thinking. He tried to explain it, sincerely, which was touching about Carmine. Seriously, with owl eyes, music sprouted “here,” he pointed, like plants and trees. Fruits, “as many of the trees are fruitful.”

“WHAT IS?”

He created a brume with his hands and stick-shifted. “Allummato,” he said, “you asked.” Pinching his nose, “it does not mean the city is illuminated by let’s say the sun, moon, or street lamps…”

“Si, si,” I imitated his furrow-browed shrug.

“I under…”

“Allummato… signifies something more…like you.”

I looked at him. “Io?”

“Si si, like accendere…” Striking a match, he was neutral and wide-eyed. He lit the freeway on fire, and he became thrilled, but chill. He swept his hands briskly in the air and communicated it as best as he could. To get carried away by excitement. Did I grasp the concept? Doing a quick etymology, I got the flames. He kept explaining it. “Are you recording?” I sat up. “Si. This is my strategy. I give language course,” I put my chin into it. “Really?”

“Say again…The word for this. “You remember…me?”

He blinked. “Cosa?”

“On, about me?”

“In this sense,” he adjusted his seat. “Napoli is ignited from within.”

“Wow,” I was touched. No one remembered me like that, not in my life anymore. “Thank you…”

“Thank you?”

“Si,” I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t started this train of thought. Breaking into a little laugh, he wondered without words — why was I thanking him?

“Sorry,” I shook my head.

“Sorry?” He asked. “Why are you…”

“How do you say a person but contrast a person? When there isn’t a person? Nessuno, si, si, thank you. No one stays? Left? Meaning, still here? Tutto ciao?” I cracked up, jittery. I went to turn the stereo up, but I was scared that I overstepped my boundaries, so I started waving my hands at him like I didn’t mean to do that. This confused Carmine further, which made me laugh. He had no idea where we were to a peppy melody and a booming voice and the wheels of the car spinning down the highway. I mimed running away on the chorus fearfully.

“No,” Carmine wagged his finger. “Not fleeing Naples.”

“He is going towards it. Here, here is Naples.” He was neutrally taken by the sight, full of understated passion. I tipped my head from side to side.

“Don’t you know Roberto Murolo?”

“No…”

“Your father didn’t share the songs with you?”

“Your grandfather was a musician.”

“He was?”

“Si,” he paused. “You don’t know?” We would have to confirm that with the others, gentlemanly, he communicated, pinching his nose, but he believed so…

I pointed at his long fingernails, well-kept, cared for. “Muschichi…” I couldn’t say musician for the life of me. He looked at his nails.

“Musicita.”

“Moooo, how do you say this animal in Italian?”

“Musicita, Maria…”

I was so excited to be back — Napoli!

“La musica,” I said with feeling out of the window. “Vesuvio!”

In the backseat with Carmine as a kid, I couldn’t believe that people would choose to live on a volcano. I was in an aqua ensemble from the United Colors of Benetton. Little Carmine pushed up his glasses with owl eyes, swinging his sandal.

“Vesuvius va boom, Meri.” His sweet voice. Vesuvius goes boom.

Big, humpbacked, and unapologetic, no matter where you go, he’s there: the volcano around which this entire region turned. The region is on a supervolcano, and I could feel the electric current instantly. That was home, actually. My cousins call me “electric.” That was my mother, actually, she was. Not my father. I could connect to a current beneath the soil, in the air, as if it were in the blood, nonetheless. Family was one big catastrophe, I gotta admit.

“How is Vesuvio?”

Carmine stated that he was doing well.

“You’re a musCHICHIS…” I pointed to his fingernails.

“Mu-si-”

“SHE…”

“MUSI”

“SHISTA…”

“CISTA.” With an okay sign, Carmine, a conductor, also.

“Wow!”

“No è wow,” he said.

“Are you in a band…do you have EP? Tour?” I was firm. I wanted to listen to them.“Yes,” he was in a band, but immediately, we dove into the problem.

I raised my brows. He made sounds “eh, ma, eh” that spoke sentences. “Ma, ma, ma…what you say?” What could he say? “There is no money in music. Franco…” He adjusted his glasses and seat referring to his father up ahead. I gave him a look. “This is Naples, Meri, everyone is a singer, musician.” How to communicate what music meant here? “There is no separation, eh eh, between the land and music, it was profound. Music is considered food here — you eat it every day, no? So it’s not the biggest deal…”

A smile on my face, “sure,” sunlight bounced off the window. He kept talking about music, needing to rephrase his sentences because he thought I didn’t get it, I couldn’t, I couldn’t understand how profound music was, here, it’s basically a fruit tree. A source of sustenance. “No, no,” he insisted that I didn’t understand. “This is FOOD,” he put it in his mouth. “Food that you eat. Ehhh,” he trailed off. I was overjoyed. Naples, music, it’s mythic, even, to us. Hills rolled outside, graffiti appeared on aqueducts, social housing, and abandoned masserias; rusty red in color. I gave him a palm that laid out the situation from top to bottom. I was not pleased, not in agreement with Franco already.

“There are no jobs here,” he defended his father’s point of view. I didn’t know the word for “play shows.”

“YOU, this group…” I made a small circle with my finger, graining away.

“Do the music for you only…” I scanned the world outside with index and thumb.

“Or for the population.”

“Si, si,” he furrowed his brow. He didn’t laugh at how I talked, which made me want to press the pedal to the metal. “We play shows…” I took note, excused myself, haughtily now, before I said something really stupid. I got angry at Franco already.“But,” he didn’t know what to say, “Maria, you’re a singer…do you still sing…?” Our eyes caught the others wide and blank, the song too enrapturing like a cinema. Swinging his hand with dirt in it, though there was one, he tried to rephrase the question.

“SING,” he sang into an invisible mic. “No,” I threw that away, shocked, laughed. He paused. So was he. “What are you talking about?” I wasn’t expecting that. Neither was he. “That’s all you did…what do you mean you do not sing?”

I was a writer now, “bello,” but “because you write, doesn’t mean you can’t sing,” he tried to rephrase it, thinking I wasn’t getting it, which itched me a little under the skin.“I write now…”

“That’s what you did, that’s all you did. You wanted to be a singer…”

“Sant’Anastasia!” I pointed to the sign. “The…” I struggled to find the word, “the firma…”

“Firm?”

“Farm!”

He patted my fumes down. “Meri, we’re all good, it’s ok…ssi, ssi, you remember the farm? “L’altro Franco,” he punched altro, referring to Vico. “I remember,” I waddled in my seat, “walking with…” “Ssi, ssi, with the buckets, right…”  He nodded, “of artichokes and broccolini and tomatoes…”

“Plums,” he guessed. You loved.

“What?”

 “Plums, you liked plums,” he paused. “You liked plums…”

I could have heard a ringing in my ear, um, okay. I got a flash that ripped right through me of running to a plum tree when I was four. I liked plums? I hardly ate a plum.

We turned off the exit, I still recognized it. Olive trees came into bloom, which I gasped at, sincerely, as they passed. “Ottaviano!” I shook my fists. “Don’t blink.” Carmine thought. I got it. “Really?” He asked. “The expression” you can’t flap your eyes open and close.

“Existo in English.”

I exist, I said, in English.

“The same, the same, the same,” the same expressions existed in all languages. I ended with the “prayer hands” to punctuate it. Speaking in Italian always cracked me up. I got him onboard — stat — I needed to learn the language as fast as humanly possible. He wasn’t sure that it was possible. Carmine, brows raised, is my duo because he’s taking me 100% seriously. We’re going discuss it as a real idea. There was no way…I can’t speak anymore. “Sure, you speak well,” he told me, tensely.

To my surprise, he felt the change in my temperature as we turned down the street that we would then turn right at up ahead. I remembered that, to arrive to the house on the left — down a street almost as wide as an alley with facades of faded blue, green shutters. Some were apartments, some were houses, like theirs. Vesuvius was visible between the apartment buildings at the end of the block.

Persimmon trees coming into view, a few citrus groves patched here and there. The suburbs are poor, but then, I haven’t found a person who isn’t rich when they belong somewhere. I feel a little weird saying that but it’s true. Their neighborhood is like an island setback in an unused landscape.

“La palestra…” I read a tiny sign on a diamond-shaped fence. The palace.

“Si,” Carmine threw a dart–“Tha gym.”He showed me the square I could run around — after the permission tree. Watch out for the dogs, I think, he said.

The Neapolitan at Hogwarts picks me up at the airport

I SMELLED THE RINDS of a clementine cupped in my hand. It was the first thing I grabbed. I always loved the scent of its remains, sharp and sweet like a quiet day down the shore long ago. Here we go, I thought.

The glass doors opened to a blue sky, the color of my mother’s eyes, a bite in the air. I came into the light with a bright smile, my mother’s: Joyce. “You’d never think that I came from a story like that,” people told me, though I never knew what to do with it since they clearly knew no one who did.

I didn’t know I came from “a story like that,” you see, did I? It was the personality that came along with it; spritely, I guess, out of the box, and happy to be alive, genuinely, and that was an obstacle. My genuine joy, my mother’s name, was an inheritance, and it was either impossible or too “touching,” I think, which is what…Carmine, the man of the hour, I call him, making his approach, called me.

“This is your primary quality.” Was it? I didn’t know.

I hadn’t wanted to be seen in the hugest Mongolian fur coat you have ever seen with a mop of curls on top, big bird, my former friend had picked it out. I had tucked myself away behind a trash can beside the glass box of the airpor with a cappuccino. I smelled the rinds, like I always did. I didn’t want to stand there waving like an idiot, “remember me?”

I always felt some real root here, even if it was small. That tart freshness, Naples. A chilly December day. A shot of color in black stone. Contrast, high contrast, and I guess that’s me. I really didn’t know, as the world always appeared a vast place to me. In most people’s eyes, my story appeared to be like arriving in a foreign country, but they didn’t necessarily understand that I had told the story before. It wasn’t my first time as the tour guide.

Gliding through the lot with hair like black silky sails, my cousins sent Carmine to pick me up. He could understand me when no one else could. I remembered that, right. He wasn’t my cousin, he was my partner. We were a duo. We had a magical ability to communicate, which, evidently, they remembered, despite no real words having been exchanged. Peculiar.

It struck me. He was no longer a boy. His cheeks were my favorite feature back then along with his signature owl eyes behind his round glasses that eliminated any possibility of discerning what he was thinking. They weren’t round anymore and neither was he. Had a beat in his head. That is why I called him “the Neapolitan at Hogwarts” because that’s who he truly is.

The Neapolitans exist in the Harry Potter universe, it’s an enchanted group of people who still believe in enchantment, mystics, mystery. They trace their origins to the siren that attempted to lure Odysseus, which, uh, we were fine, she was our siren. He’s that boy with owl eyes and his cute round glasses and cheeks who would “channel the siren” to bring “V” to his knees. “Harry.” In an Italian accent. He would be the special foreign student. And the funny bit? His whole family would agree, especially hot Rosa.

A friend of mine from Genoa remarked that the Neapolitans were “the actors of Italy,” if you can simply take that in. She snickered at my accent in Italian because it was Neapolitan. So Neapolitans in Italy are considered to be their own entity. I have regular Italian cousins, so I can tell you that they truly are. Cool, matter-of-fact yet poetic, he’s going to become an opera for you with owl eyes as Neapolitans are “the actors of Italy.” He mastered the “not acting” technique, which is a real approach to the craft, and he’s worthy of awards, in my opinion.

Subtly stunned to recognize me in stride, fist over his mouth, how to cross fifteen years? He did it because it wasn’t a dense material to him, and I couldn’t move. I also had luggage. I moved my hands like the storm, the storms! He had no idea what I was saying. The years flew with his steps, ages flickered across his face. I searched for the words. He hugged me. A direct hit. I wasn’t expecting that, 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…”

“Merí!”

My coat was “totally enormous.”

I forgot that they called me by that name — Merí. I masked that with a bright smile. “Yes,” he nodded. “This is you, Merí.” I took this as an opportunity to practice the letters of the alphabet. “Not…” He nodded. “Mary,” I cut it short. “Baa baa,” I made the sounds for lamb; he found my coat “bello, is it vintage?” But Italian lambs do not make the same sounds as English ones. “Mangiar.” I patted my hands, moved around “l’animale…” with hair that you shave to weave. He thought I looked “bella.” I got uncomfortable, he noticed, which made me respond strangely. “You! You look.” He reached for my giant suitcase, I felt bad, so we did a pas de deux over who would take it. “No, no,” I didn’t want him to take it. I packed for a month. He dismissed me politely. He wasn’t going to let me…I liked taking my own bag. I was strong, brightly, too! I meant it. I did not…He stopped.

He adjusted his glasses, a stone pine behind him. What was my fidgety insistence about? He spoke with a blunt tone. Just like his mother. No inflection. Nasal. Though his mother is cartoon worthy, and that’s a compliment. I did a readjustment dance, he got it. “Work…” as in “job…”

“Ah,” he was sincere, “agnello.” And with two claws going into the subject, “this,” I said. He patted down my nervous fumes. I didn’t remember the word for “lamb.” Everything was okay. That was first. Taking in my hair, my coat, my giant beat-up suitcase, my pristine ostrich carry-on….

“Si, si,” he said flatly, “you were always like this.”

I had to laugh at his tone. “What?”

My hands were always “imaginative.”

“What?”

“Si si,” no change in tone, my hands were always creative, even a little fantastico…

“Vero? True?”

I asked him with a bright face…I arched my thumb into the past.

“You, you, know, this? Me?”

Carmine said, “si, si. You were always like this.”

Uh, laughing…really? I cast my gaze toward the ground. It was a compliment, he lifted me up since I appeared lost. His owl eyes shifted. He didn’t make fun of me, Carmine, that’s first. “This is a quality…“

“You,” I gestured, “you think this, you know this, you,” I made an arch backward with my thumb. “Si, si,” he looked away. He rubbed his palm when he was thinking though his face rarely changed. I interrupted him in feeling. I understood what he was going to say. Shrugging, it was obvious. He looked side to side as if it say — isn’t it? And then, with a small shrug, if not a stare, it would be strange…I got it before he had to say it. He didn’t care. We shrugged back and forth. It’s just a little song and dance. Everyone has one here, it’s just my way. I was so excited! Suddenly. He was unmoved. Napoli! I froze. Too fast. I got self-conscious. He rang to signal my attention. “Meri — ”

“We must hurry, it is time to eat…”

I froze in fear. His brows rose, his eyes owl. “I cannot eat…”

He didn’t know how to take that with my cracking up at his straight face and blunt tone, a little nasal. “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. Looking at me as if I were strange without moving his face, he broke into a slight smile. I laughed. He rolled on with my bag.

“Mama, lunch-time, let’s go…”

Slowing down my steps to delay his, he whistled like he knew. If there was one thing I couldn’t forget, it was how much they ate.

He wagged his finger as if he remembered me more and more with every step he took. I caught up with him, the wind through his jacket, his fair. His chest affrontedthe seas once more. Carmine was sensitive to the shift in my feeling, but he didn’t know what it was, 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 that. My bag was a little awkward. I lunged for it apologetically. Like a sharp conductor, he paused in suspension, his eyes large and innocent. “Be careful.” I didn’t want anyone to do anything for me! It was my responsibility, sincerely, Carmine shifted his eyes from side to side, to take the large bag. I packed enough for a month. Yes, yes, I did well. “Why are you apologizing?” I acted like a dumbbell so this moment would pass and threw my hands around my mop of curls. I was “tired,” yeah. Claws for hands…um… he rolled on. I inserted my hands where words should have been. “I loved!” With a fist. All this! Speaking like this, with fists, not knowing the language, cracking up. “Ti!” My steps quickened, emotional. I caught his nails — they were longer — he played guitar! I beamed and pointed. “Muschi!” I stumbled over a curb in my black suede boots.

“Musician” was not an easy word for me to pronounce. “MUSCHI.”

Carmine threw his hands at a silver car, attempting to go around the parking kiosk by accelerating up and onto a grassy median we were crossing. “HO!” He kept moving as if there was nothing abnormal about it, me, 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…”

I saw little Carmine in the backseat swinging his sandal in the summers, just the cutest, with slick hair, too. We were always together, a duo, more so than cousins. We began turning our fingers towards the point we would never arrive at like the “wheels.” His eyes owl. But, that’s the thing, we always did to the amazement of our family. “Maria’s talking about Zeus,” he’d say. He saw the swan; that’s the funny thing about Carmine. I tried to describe the swan Zeus became, and he got a picture of it in his head. “Ugly when baby?”

“Yes.”

“Also ballet?”

“Yes.”

“Si si,” he had the cutest lisp when he was a kid, subtle. His cheeks. His eyes. He was a baby owl. “Who becomes beautiful Meri?”

Yes, Carmine nodded with a furrowed brow on the driver’s side of the car. A handsome man, now, good-looking. His eyes went side to side — si. No, he got the picture. I wanted him to see the past in the car. He did.

“We did questo!” Remembering our turning, mine, I guess, fingers.

He turned my wheels towards the present — the passenger seat I needed to get into, putting invisible food in his mouth. I laughed. He made sounds as if the deal had been made. I proved his point. He got into the car.

Naples, just a place I longed to return to, yeah. On guitar strings, we took off down the autoroute.

Please don't adopt me

PLEASE, I THOUGHT, DO NOT ADOPT ME. I told myself to stop it. That’s ridiculous. Just go in like a blank slate. What did I know? I had to think about it, though. My family saga somewhat dominated my life but then some people I knew might say that they didn’t know. I didn’t even know. I was tied to something that I didn’t understand, that I didn’t want. I had a different family than the one I started with, and when people asked a simple question about my family, it provoked a strangely revealing, if not funny, response.

“Which one?”

So, before we even begin, this is about identity.

My parents didn’t exist anymore by this point. “My mother is a teacher…” when she wasn’t originally. Mexican, even. She called my first mother, whose real nickname is Dr. J, “Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians.”

This was all beginning to dawn on me since my problems didn’t exactly go away though today, as a totally different human being, so I don’t even know what to say about that sentence. What problems? People could get attached to mine. My last family mirrored the first touch too closely, but I couldn’t grasp it, as if awareness were more of a layered experience. We might even inhabit different times at once, in fact, but in the end, I had to question everything I thought I knew to be true. Okay… here we go, I said something weird about time again, because my story also brought “gurus” into my life, a wiseman, as this is a Christmas story, who heard the first sentence of my life: my mother gave me away to a total stranger when I was four, and suddenly, I was getting “help” that’s not helping me, again, but I’m supposed to be grateful, the only one at fault, the only one in a relationship, and I’m hearing things like “You are Carl Jung.”

I was “special,” in short, because I came from an otherworldly story; I do not know; maybe it was exclusively my good looks, though I don’t tend to present myself as an attractive woman as I wasn’t always treated like one. But I came from “an otherworldly story,” so I became “magical.” I was basically Tinkerbelle. Or something. I don’t know. It depends on who you talk to.

At the window, in Paris, France, I had to think about going back, and looking back, I feel like I’m speaking from several different points at once, speaking of time, how we recall, as we start getting older. This was one of these moments that set me into the next decade of my life, which I almost didn’t survive.  

This draft, this book, would mark the end of a life that began at four “if not before” which became the joke in this draft and my life because it changed unimaginably when I was four years old.  I lived in a Brazilian-Jewish household for four years, beginning then because my mother, Dr. J, told her that my father was a child molester, rapist, and a beater, generally.

The saga that continued isn’t the subject of this story. This epic, this very Greek epic though Naples is its own specific character, is the story of where I ended up toward the big 30 mark, and going into that decade, as this story took ten years to make my way out of. “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra, a Christmas carol in these parts; this is what Christmas is about to us. Not Silent Night, not happening here. We don’t understand…silence.

I made the decision to go back to Naples to go through this story one more time to learn why it never ended, more so than wanting to reconnect with my roots at first. I loved Naples so much, and I longed to return but I never could because of what happened, but then, it’s hard to say.

I don’t know what I was aware of and what I wasn’t at that time as my whole understanding of my childhood shifted so deeply in these ten years. I don’t fully know what even happened anymore. And you will understand me.

 It didn’t go with Christmas, my story, and trust me on this one, already, since I experienced “oh, she’s probably exaggerating,” too many times. Just too many times. It didn’t. The story itself posed me with more obstacles, it seemed, than the actual experience that I went through. Usually, once I started talking, it usually came with a lot attached that…that I didn’t really want, and I can say that now, it was partially how I approached it, and you know what they say, you can’t change the world you can only change yourself, it’s just the way it goes.

I was stuck.

It wasn’t the type of story that people listened to and said, “Oh, okay. " It always came with questions, which I welcomed, though I didn’t have to. People had such strong reactions to my childhood, so I thought that meant there was a deeper chord that the story struck, especially Dr. J, my mother. J stands for Joyce. Call it an inheritance. Another problem.

I felt on some level that I had a duty to tell it due to the larger themes it touched, questions such as “do you think she knew what she was doing?” My mother. “Do you think she knew?” And all I heard was the justice system. “Do you think she knew what she was doing?” Having stepped my foot into, hm, a weird area. Speaking of the subject of awareness. Not everyone gets that benefit of that doubt, which people know, too, but not in every context. My mother was severely mentally ill. That took 30 years. And you will be surprised that it took me that long. But, the audience, I must admit, was a beast.

I was a bit obsessed with learning back then. I was here “to learn” even though this story: a sport, like I had to put myself through this. But if I was going to go back, the questions were coming, that I knew. That’s all I knew, at the time. The questions were coming. I couldn’t lie, either, because of the catastrophic lying that passed between my both my parents.

And due to where I was at, I had to — out the window. Think. I lived in Alexander McQueen’s old apartment in Paris just off Places des Vosges. It was, at 30 years old, a new dawn. My father recently died. I was free. And now, I’m in a hostel in Thailand in a cute dress somehow, almost 40. I totally restarted.

At the time, I wondered, why hadn’t these “problems” gone away? Looking at the phone, at my current adopted family, my brother who confessed his love to me, etc. It didn’t go away, what happened, in fact? I got adopted more like taken into different families? What? I was at the dawn of another waking up, and it felt like that, a series of revelations to get here. This old narrative was just beginning to surface into the foreground — I was sort of adopted but I wasn’t. I had this adopted narrative, and it never made sense in English let alone a language I didn’t know. Perfect.

HE SAID come for Christmas, I had to think about it

HE SAID

“Come for Christmas.”

I had to think about it, whether or not I would pick up the phone. People lose touch, stay in touch, who even knows? I was living in Paris though American. I mean, from the United States of America, just to specify. Long-winded. I had disappeared to my cousins when I was about thirteen along with my father. It had been fifteen years. They knew nothing about what happened. I didn’t even know. I had reached a point in my life though. I better start figuring it out.

I picked up the phone joyous, apologetic.

He was happy. 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, Giggino. 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, but I wanted to go back. So, go early, I thought, allow ample time.

“DECEMBER,” I began.

“PRIMO,” I laughed.

“OSPETALE…”

(It’s ospedale in Italian.)

Giggino was at the hospital. 

“SCUSA MARIA?”

“December 1? I come December…”

“PER,” for, “December.”

I didn’t know the word for month.

“Four weeks makes?”

I couldn’t be polite so I apologized.

“…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. 

“I can come DECEMBER ONE? 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.

“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.

“Okay…”

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.