A voice resonated on 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.
“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?”
Adjusting his glasses, it was impossible for me or anyone to truly grasp the complexities, “the layers” of the lyrics, according to him. No, I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. There’s what we see on the surface, he tapped the dashboard, and what is beneath it. “Tante tante layers.” No, no, tante tante. No, I didn’t understand. He rubbed his palm with his fingers as if there was dirt in it when he was thinking.
He spoke without inflection, wide-eyed, trying to explain it, which was touching about Carmine sincerely. 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.”
“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, 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.
“Teach.”
“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 the opposite of 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 had 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, 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.
“Do you not know who Roberto Murolo is?”
“No…”
“Your father didn’t share the songs with you?”
He found that curious.
“Your grandfather was a musician.”
“He was?”
“Si,” he paused.
“You don’t know?”
We would have to confirm that with the others, gentlemanly, 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 at “Vesuvio!”
We love him here.
In the backseat with Carmine as a child, I couldn’t believe that people would choose to live on a volcano. Little Carmine pushed up his glasses with owl eyes, swinging his sandal. 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 volcano, and I could feel the electric current instantly. That was home, actually. My cousins call me “electric.” I could connect to a current beneath the soil, in the air, as if it were in the blood. Family was one big catastrophe, I must admit.
“How is Vesuvio?”
I asked, sincerely, because it always gets me that we’re on a supervolcano.
Carmine stated that he was doing well.
I could switch subjects, that too, which ended up being Neapolitan, you see.
“You’re a musCHICHIS…”
“Mu-si-”
“SHE…”
“MUSI”
“SHISTA…”
“CISTA.”
“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. Giggino…”
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?” A smile on my face, sunlight bounced off the window. 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 Giggino 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.
“We play shows…”
I took note, excused myself, and I got angry at Giggino 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. He assumed a vertical stance, trying 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 Giggino,” 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?”
He described the fruit.
“Plums, you liked plums,” he paused. “You liked plums…”
I could have heard a ringing in my ear, um, okay. I got a flash, 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 in English, I said.
Without needing any other word, we ping-ponged back and forth, “the same, the same,” many of the same expressions existed in the same language. I got him onboard—stat—I needed to learn the language as fast as humanly possible. He wasn’t sure, seriously, that it would be possible. Neapolitan, on that one, there was no way…I can’t speak anymore. “Sure, you speak well,” he told me.
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 in a sense. 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 four-storied condominium-turned-house was the color of dandelion in the sun, beige in the rain, but always slick and well-guarded. A white wrought-iron fence of squiggly diamonds led to Giggino’s home office, a urologist. His name written in cursive handwriting. We typically didn’t go through the front door for this reason though Giggino split his practice between l’ospedale and a casa.
Nodding by the trunk, next to a white gate with yellow alarms, it made me laugh. I felt bad about the bag. He put up a hand, he had the suitcase, Maria. “MUSCHI.” Pointing at his nails, so excited that he was a “mushisician,” that’s what it sounded like in English. Pressing a buzzer from the 80s or 90s, his mother elbowed me in the face— “who is it?” suspiciously. There was a buzz.
“I can take my bag…” I said.
“Eh,” Carmine pushed the gate open to a courtyard with stone tiles of medallions that matched the gold coin on the dark front door. I spotted Giggino’s car —checking inside—a gold Audi without leather seats an unnecessary expense. Space speaks. The alarm on the metal gate—high-tech. We were encased in a little nest.
“Do you remember?”
“Si,” I smiled, excited, a little nervous.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he continued.
I was so happy I brought my Renaissance pants. Platoon pants.
“Obviously, do as you wish here. If you want to come great, if not,” he grimaced, “who gives a shit? Eh,” he shrugged. He glanced up a soft yellow wall with a giant window that opened like a door, a terrace overhead.
“This,” he threw the house around, “treat it like your casa…”
I took a step back.
People always say that, but no one would ever want me to treat their home like my “casa.” that’s what I mean. I never really thought about that. Make yourself at home.
“Meri,” Carmine sighed.
“You’re walking in the wrong direction.”
“Domentic…”
“Di.”
“No,” I said.
“Si.”
“Di, dimenticare…”
“I do not want to say…”
“Well,” he said.
“No forget…” I waved.
What did you want to say?
Um.
“So…”
He thought a moment.
“In the end, you wanted to say this?”
With the keys in his hand, he thought, and I wondered what that meant. He had a way of holding his keys. Oh, my suitcase was in his other hand, he gestured. “Everyone wants to know what happened to you…” You’re nervous. No, I’m not. He looked from side to side with owl eyes.
“Si,” he said plainly.
“Tu,” I said, cracking up.
He nuzzled his nose like what was that?
I, um, “poof,” I said.
“Si, si” he meant it.
He made the “poof.” I wasn’t bad. My gestures. Really? Si, si, he assured me. He got it.