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.