The Italian Affair

by Helen Crossfield

  “There is no question of me leaving my wife Issy” Jeremy had said eventually towards the end of their relationship in a slightly irritated way when she’d asked him how he could remain in a loveless marriage. “Being married does not stop me loving you and wanting you,” he continued. “But I cannot destroy my wife’s life. It may be difficult for you to understand, but my religion, my background my own personal moral code prevents me from doing that. I hope you can find it in your heart to understand.”

  As Issy looked out at the Tyrrhenian Sea, she remembered Jeremy’s face as he’d said those words. It had darkened in sadness and looked haunted by the destiny he had already mapped out for himself. As she watched the ebb and flow of the sea, Issy remembered each syllable Jeremy had spoken with such finality – each one a shard of broken glass that had pierced her heart.

  She’d wanted to ask him what kind of moral code and religion gave him such latitude to take a wife and a lover but she’d caught the look in his eyes. She knew that whatever the reason, it lay deep inside and that she didn’t have the key to unlock his heart or free his soul.

  Looking back now nearly two months after their affair had ended Issy shook her head to stop her from remembering the desperate weeks that had followed the dark night of the soul when he had simply walked out and left her. As a slight breeze rustled her long blond curly hair on this hot steaming Neapolitan August day, it felt like her heart was being physically wrenched out of her body once more and laid out on a cold slab to die.

  And yet somehow, by some miracle, warm blood still flowed through her veins and her life went on, albeit now in an increasingly bizarre way.

  As the cars around them continued to honk, Issy allowed herself a wry smile. When she’d decided to escape Oxford, she’d envisaged her period of self-exile and personal reflection would be spent in a sparsely furnished apartment in an historic quarter of an Umbrian or Tuscan village not a heaving burning cauldron of humanity in various states of anarchy.

  “Issy” (pronounced IZZZZY) Gennaro shouted excited by the buzz of the street theatre around them. “This eez my city and it eez the most beautiful city in the world non? But the people can sometimes be shits,” he laughed.

  “Sorry” said Issy as her thoughts were transported back from Oxford to the world of pigeon English and general mania. “What did you say?”

  “I say…” said Gennaro. “This eez my city and it ezz the most beautiful city in the world but the people eez shits sometimes.”

  “Why are they are so bad?” Issy asked.

  Gennaro’s eyes widened amazed that Issy didn’t know the answer.

  “Because they are robbers non?” he replied taking both his hands off the steering wheel for a moment, and gesticulating with his fingers to communicate that they liked to steal things from under people’s noses. “There eez a story which says when God stand on top of Vesuvius he looked down and cry at how bad they are. We ‘ave a wine Christ’s tears called in this way because – the water fall on the ground making a fertile soil and a good wine.”

  “God is it really that bad?” asked Issy kind of getting the gist of what Gennaro was saying. “I had no idea Naples had this kind of problem. I normally know everything about a place before I land but I left England somewhat abruptly and it was the only place I could find a teaching job.”

  “Ah. But why you leave England in a hurry?” he winked before hurtling into a tunnel which scarily didn‘t cause him to slow down and if anything sped him up.

  “Because I....,” shrieked Issy as everything went black. “......you’re going very fast. Can you slow down please? I don’t feel safe.”

  Gennaro laughed out loud. “It is better to do the fast driving,” he said as he swerved out of the way of each car that looked like it was about to have a serious impact before shouting various profanities at the other drivers irrespective of whether it was their fault or not. His favourites were “go to hell” and “pieces of crap.”

  Despite the fear, Issy had to admit Gennaro was really good at avoiding high speed pile-ups and she consoled herself with the thought that, after losing her father and without Jeremy, life might be better anyway if it just ended now.

  As they torpedoed out of the other end of the tunnel Issy’s anxiety levels started to subside as they finally started to slow down. Not because Gennaro had hit the brakes, but because of a huge traffic jam to get into the city centre.

  After remaining stationary for a few minutes, Gennaro jumped up and down in his seat and hit the horn with his fist whilst spewing out a litany of rude words as if being crude and blasphemous in a continuum would speed things up.

  As Issy caught her breath and looked skywards she marvelled at the crumbling palazzo blocks that stood regally against the slightly fading sunlight.

  The colours of the buildings were amazing. Eggshell yellow and Wedgewood blue. As Gennaro continued forwards, even grander looking buildings painted blood red with green wooden shutters tightly clamped against the afternoon sun disclosed themselves as the deli van wove through ancient streets filled with locals, food, debris and noise.

  But despite the wonderful sense of antiquity, and slightly aristocratic feel to some of the architecture, Issy became fascinated by the total lack of regard for civic order and refuse collection.

  “Does the rubbish not get collected round here at all?” Issy asked in amazement as they remained stationary by a huge pile of rotting garbage.

  “Yes but….,” Gennaro said putting the deli van jerkily into second gear “it eez complicated to explain Issy.”

  Surprised at why the collection of rubbish was so complicated, Issy decided to ask the obvious next question. “WHY on earth is it this difficult, is it the traffic?”

  Gennaro’s answer to her second question was a HUGE shrug of the shoulders. A first clue to understanding some of the story that would unfold over the coming weeks – but on that first hot day in Naples she was too busy looking at the chaos to follow her inquisitive instincts.

  And anyway new sights had sprung into view. In the midst of dusty old cars and scooters – which were parked in what looked like highly illegally places – Issy caught sight of wonderful pineapple shaped trees which lined the streets and fabulous cascading bougainvillea and geranium in shades of cherry, purple, deep pink and red tumbling in profusion over hundreds of ancient palazzo balconies.

  With time on his hands, and hoarse from swearing at the traffic, Gennaro returned to the impertinence of his first question. “Who you running away from Issy”?

  “God,” Issy thought. “Gennaro is bloody persistent. He’s like a pig looking for a rare truffle. He may only be driving a deli van, but he knows he’s onto something.”

  Issy looked directly at him and decided to get the explanation over with. “I left England because….” Issy replied screwing her face up against the kaleidoscope of colour that streamed into the window on the crest of a sunbeam. “My heart was broken by a married man.”

  “Why he leave you? He is the crazy man,” shouted Gennaro as he jumped up and down in the seat next to her.

  “It doesn’t matter why he left me,” Issy said with a long sigh. “He just did. I really don’t know why. It’s a very long and complicated story and I doubt I will ever find out the truth of what really happened.”

  Naples - 5.30 pm local time - 28th August 1986

  By the time they’d navigated the congestion, it was early evening. All around them surged the energy of a city awakened from a heavy siesta and fuelled by the expectation of a long and lazy summer Saturday night ahead.

  The ancient piazza they’d arrived in had little shops around its circumference and was buzzing with activity. The air, although heavy with the day’s heat and exhaust fumes, carried a seductive whiff of fresh coffee beans and nicotine intermingled with expensive citrus smelling perfume.

  As soon as they’d stopped, Gennaro torpedoed himself out of his mobile deli and shouted “Ciao,” across the street to a tanned man in a pair of brigh
t red jeans standing next to what looked like an expensive lingerie shop.

  “Theeze is your new home. It is the house of Pasquale,” cried Gennaro to Issy, as he simultaneously sauntered over to his friend giving him a jovial man hug and a kiss on both cheeks. As Issy followed and got closer to where they were standing, she could see that the shop was for real women who had the time, energy and desire to dress in lacy bras, pants, stockings and suspenders.

  “God,” she thought. “I’m going to be living in a posh pant shop.” As she stared aghast at some of the items on display she wondered why on earth Italian women had to go to such lengths to look good under their clothes.

  She’d never seen such under-garments in her life. In Yorkshire the weather was too cold for “itsy bitsy” underwear, and in Oxford people were more interested in being seduced by the density of grey matter rather than the brevity of pants.

  As Issy continued to scour the lingerie shop window, she caught a reflection of Pasquale looking back at her unashamedly giving her the once over lustfully from behind. His eyes literally invaded the small of her back as she watched him take in her long blond hair and settle his eyes on her bum.

  For Pasquale, it seemed, a woman was something to watch and lust over. His act of blatant staring and public lusting did not seem to be an embarrassment as it would be for an English man. Issy stared back marvelling at his audacity and his mistaken belief that it was ok to engage in full on rapacious gawping without any sign of subterfuge or subtlety.

  As Issy continued to watch his reflection in the window, Pasquale’s face contorted in what could only be described as the look of a man indulging in seductive foreplay.

  And then alarmingly, the tanned pant man moved towards her and started to undress her with his eyes – which did not take very long as she wasn’t wearing much so it got personal very quickly. Apart from her cotton beige dress and big feminist Dr Martens, Issy felt stark bollock naked.

  “In England,” Issy ruminated in disbelief “there were laws that regulated this type of behaviour but here in Naples there were seemingly none.” Trying to shake him off she gave him a disparaging look via the glass frontage of his shop, but it just made things worse as he devoured the back of her body and came within millimeters of standing right on top of her. The more she fought with his reflection the more he lusted.

  Finally, in total exasperation, she turned to face him hoping that this would cause him to avert his gaze but quickly realized that this hope was totally naive.

  Nothing could have fuelled the burning embers in his red pants more. He scanned her up and down from the front like a caged wild animal about to be let out into the wilderness, before resting his eyes on the bit he wanted to start devouring first which – now he’d just set eyes on it in the flesh – was Issy’s braless chest.

  When the sisterhood had advocated burning bras they had most definitely not factored in Naples. Issy no longer felt smugly equal and victorious but vulnerable and bloody stupid. She wrapped her arms across her chest to try and stop him intruding further.

  But this was no distraction for pant man he’d already seen enough and his imagination did the rest. Speaking directly to her upper torso Pasquale said “You are beautiful. Mother of God. You stay at my ‘ome.”

  Issy’s grasp of Italian was good enough to understand his first few words. The fact that, according to him, she was moving in with him made things ten times worse.

  And yet somehow, despite her Greenham Common credentials, she was oddly starting to find his advances slightly hilarious, in a mad kind of way.

  The last time she had held a man’s gaze at such close proximity, it had been Jeremy’s and all she had wanted then was for the world to stop so she could savour the feelings that the connection his eyes had stirred within her.

  Now all she wanted to do was to laugh out loud for a very long time.

  “We go inside. Yes?” asked Pasquale in great hope as he nodded towards a large open wooden door in the centre of a regal looking palazzo painted light green on the outside with dark green wooden shutters next door to his itsy bitsy pant shop.

  He was getting more forward by the minute.

  “Er, yes sure,” replied Issy slowly – keen to ensure the way she spoke and her intonation left him in no doubt that she would go inside because she needed to have a roof over her head and NOT for any other bloody reason.

  As she turned to pick up her bags, she was more than delighted that Gennaro had already picked them up. As the three of them walked into the building with her huge “Ban the Nukes” suitcase they looked like an unlikely trio of anti-nuclear campaigners.

  The entrance to the palazzo smelt old, but looked opulent in a slightly jaded and antique kind of way. Vast wide stone columns seemed to be holding the place up, and in the corner a small man slept at his desk. As he lifted his face from the table in front of him he looked irritated by the sound of the intruders and their footsteps on the marble floor more from the fact he had to rouse himself from his post-lunch slumber. And he didn’t try to hide the fact that he was PISSED OFF at actually having been woken to do some work.

  The men exchanged words, in what appeared to be a local dialect, before he gesticulated towards a gold plated lift that just about squeezed all of them in plus the luggage.

  In the harsh light of the lift, and reflected goldness Issy caught a glimpse of herself and grimaced at the big cotton grayish pants and braless chest that stared back.

  Her private and most intimate secrets were on full display and Pasquale, she could tell was loving every minute of the hot proximity to flesh.

  By the time they got to the fifth floor, they were all sweating and way too familiar with one another’s anatomy due to the fact the lift was not just gold plated but totally mirrored. Relief came when Pasquale and Gennaro started to talk and finally decanted themselves out of it into a narrow marbled landing.

  Fumbling around for his keys through excitement, Pasquale opened a big carved wooden door which led them into the apartment where Issy would be living hopefully without him. “Welcome to my ‘ome Issy,” he said delighted to have her over the threshold.

  The apartment felt cool after the suffocating heat of the past few hours and as Issy scanned the room she could see it had all the basics. “Will it just be me living here?” she asked Pasquale with her fingers crossed.

  “Si,” he replied suggestively. Ignoring his humour, Issy walked through the apartment. A small kitchen table with four old chairs stood in one corner. A cooker stood in the other with the mandatory Italian coffee machine and a tin of freshly ground beans on the worktop right next to it together with an ashtray, a packet of Merit cigarettes and some matches – giving an immediate insight to living the Neapolitan way.

  There was also a large old fridge buzzing in one of the opposite corners of the room which Pasquale grandly threw open to show off its contents which, apart from the nicely chilled water and wine, looked like the exact same ingredients that had been swinging about gaily in the back of Gennaro’s deli on wheels.

  As he demonstrated to Issy how to open the shutters and windows, Pasquale remained attached to her like glue, getting up as close as he could, all the while laughing and joking with Gennaro in what was obviously a local dialect that Issy could not decipher a word of.

  After the grand tour of the small flat Pasquale decided it was his turn to ask personal questions.

  “You ‘ave a boy?” he asked, cheekily cocking his head to one side with the look of real hope that she hadn’t got a boyfriend and that he’d got there first. Issy felt trapped. It was his house and she didn’t wanted to be rude but there were limits.

  “No. I don’t. I am single and that is the way I want it” Issy replied a bit snappily given the contents of the fridge. She didn’t like the innuendo, so to press the point home more strongly she added:

  “I’m here to learn Italian, teach English and travel. Nothing complicated. I just wanted to get away for a bit. Maybe do some painting and w
riting and be ALONE.”

  It was a romantic picture of what she intended to do whilst she was in Naples and not entirely true. What she was actually doing here was much more straightforward – but she had no energy to tell them the ins and outs of her recent past.

  The truth was she’d been desperately in love with a married man and needed some space to think about how she could ever piece her life back together, which only a few weeks before had crashed messily onto the floor into a million little pieces.

  She really didn’t want to go into that because it just meant more pain and she’d already told Gennaro too much. And so after nearly thirty minutes with Pasquale, Issy now craved some of that space that she had travelled to Naples for.

  Issy desperately looked around the room. She wanted them to leave. How long did it take to show her round a tiny one-bedroom apartment? She’d seen everything that she possibly needed to see at least twice.

  And the space was suddenly becoming smaller, as these wild Neapolitan men who wanted to own so much of her time and energy continued to stride around the place opening and closing cupboards and inspecting piping and plumbing.

  The combination of intense heat and lusting was exhausting. So she tried to drop large hints that she really did have everything she needed.

  “OK. Thanks so much for showing me around. I’m looking forward to starting teaching on Monday and I have the details of how to get there. Tonight and tomorrow I’ll spend sight-seeing and getting my bearings and I’ll be fine here on my own. I always am.”

  Issy felt a bit guilty at being so blunt to her new hosts but sometimes a bit of straight Yorkshire talking didn’t hurt anyone. But she had yet to learn that subtle hints did not really work in Naples. Pasquale was a hot-blooded Italian and if he was going to be rejected he wasn’t going to go out without a fight.

  “You come for pizza tonight?” asked Pasquale hoping to get a different answer to the one he thought he might get.

  “No. No. Sorry if this seems rude. You’ve both been really kind bringing me back from the airport, filling the fridge and helping me settle in, but seriously I’ll be fine. I’ve got food. Maybe next week when I’ve settled in we can do pizza.”