Ciao bella! I remember well when you told me, “You know, I also like being called beautiful.” So I took great pleasure in calling you beautiful regularly. You would dress yourself with great pride and I would look you up and down and say, “Wow, quanto sei bello oggi, Amò!” “Wow, how beautiful you are today, Amò!” You also taught me how to dress as we prepared to “fare la passeggiata sul Corso,” to go for a walk down the main drag, to see and be seen.
Meeting your mother was a very big deal. The word for mama’s boy in Italian is mammone. Mama’s boy doesn’t quite grasp the quality of attachment. The literal translation of mammone is large breast. Your mother called you beautiful a lot.
Your mother was bed-ridden when I met her. I didn’t understand her Neapolitan but I would listen and respond with “lo so.” “I know.” She never got over having to leave her hometown, the next town over. She didn’t understand me either but I would complain too and she would say, “Uffa!” Mirroring my frustration. Upon arriving at her house, I said that we needed to clean the place out. You said, “Good idea.” And I said, “No, I mean right now.” I gained your older brother’s respect from that. He was as serious as you were not. He was a frame artisan. I’m looking at my wall right now with the exquisitely framed sketch of the inside of the Pantheon by an architecture professor from New York.
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You had a dream to live on Corso Italia, the main drag of Sorrento and so although our relationship was already flailing, we moved there and we had a balcony that overlooked the bay of Naples. And the other balcony, the town of Sorrento. In the course of a year, we’d entertain almost a dozen of my guests from the US. I remember still the look on my brother’s face when you told him that he could, indeed, have the entire pizza, for himself. He relaxed around you like I did. He still uses the Italian canvas bag that you got for him to put his catalogs in.
We started to fight something awful. It was so bad that it was embarrassing to see our neighbors the next day. You’d tell me to ease up and I’d tell you to take your life more seriously. You’d try to read my favorite books in Italian translation. I’d help take care of your bed-ridden mother. You’d go to English language school. I’d show you the world is much bigger than being the King of Sorrento. I’d grow you up, you’d grow me down. I’d enjoy the affection of your many friends, colleagues, older brothers and sisters in law. And you, Tu Vuo' Fa' L'Americano - you’d enjoy capitalist Christmas in the US.
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When I said how much I loved you, your land and your people, you’d reply with “You’re just an American refugee, you’re going to leave us.” I’d say, “Come back with me, we’ll live in NYC and you can work at Eataly!” But you were never going to leave your home.
I said I got a job up north as if that wouldn’t completely and irrevocably change everything. You couldn’t protest because you knew I felt tearfully suffocated in the isolation of the peninsula. “Why are you crying? It’ll be fine, we’ll visit one another,” I said. And we did. I took you skiing and ice skating for the first time. Southern and Northern Italy are very different - you enjoyed regaling your friends with tales from the North. They called me Polentona, a term southerners adopted to make fun of northerners, mocking their propensity to eat polenta. The term was a response to anti-southern prejudice and epithets.
When we said goodbye on the train platform in Naples, I lost control in my grief, just as I lost control of so many defenses in the field of your love and land.
