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A Year in the World

Page 15

by Frances Mayes


  Moe loved the city of Naples . . . Those corners that gave onto nowhere, the sunlight slanting on a pile of rubble, those faces looking out laughing or weeping at him—all reminded him that his heart was a hinge not a valve. And most of all he loved the titter or hum or roar of Naples, saying to him things older than 1944, things that reached back into a time when men were more united in their chaos, willing to be put against a wall for something they believed. It seemed to Moe that in Naples there had somehow survived the passion and coherence of an old faith. All this he only felt, but the city of Naples comforted him. There was a poultice in its dirt, a natural humanity in its screaming.

  Sunday. The city closes. Traffic abates. Families flock to Villa Reale park, where they visit with friends and leisurely walk along the water. The children ride long-maned ponies that are saddled or attached to little carts. Older children rush toward the bumper cars. “They’re practicing for adulthood,” Ed says. And yes, the children drive with aggression and exuberance. A concert is in progress on the bandstand. We don’t go in the aquarium, stocked with fish from the bay, but I love the story of the feast prepared for American generals when the city was liberated during World War II. The larders were bare all over the city, so a seafood dinner was prepared—from the aquarium.

  A low-key antique market strings along the edge of the park on the second and fourth Sundays of the month. Vendors seem mainly to visit with other vendors. I pick up a silver saltcellar, and a florid-faced man with eyebrows as big as bird wings calls out, “Oh, lady, that was used by all the Borbone kings, and by Napoleon also.” I pick up another. “Where are you from?”

  “We live in Tuscany,” Ed says.

  “You are not Tuscan.”

  “No, americani.”

  “But you love Tuscany. You are very smart but not too smart. Tuscany is calm, but here”—his gesture takes in the bay—“here it more beautiful.”

  “Were you born in Napoli?” I ask.

  “Signora, where else would I be born?” We buy two saltcellars after a little stint of bargaining that feels obligatory on both sides but useless because he hardly budges and the price was low anyway.

  The centro closes to traffic today, giving us a taste of what a paradise Napoli would be if only cars could be brought under control.

  Sunday is best. On domenica you don’t feel obliged to go, go, go. A café will do, facing the Castel d’Ovo, the Egg Castle, with blinding light from the bay glancing on our faces. Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people’s travel clothes, Shirley Hazzard’s novel Bay of Noon, set in Naples, fried maccheroni cakes, and courtyards with marble busts and palms.

  The day seems to last a week. A soft rain begins. We walk toward the archaeological museum as rain pelts down harder. Ah, Napoli—a city where not only is love king but you can find a taxi in the rain. The museum, what a gift, is almost empty. We linger in all the Pompeii rooms. A few years ago you had to have an appointment to see the so-called “pornographic” paintings from the brothel at Pompeii. Now the door stands open. Pornography is supposed to be titillating; these paintings are simply funny. Someone’s gigantic penis must be carried on a tray before the man. There’s a little bestiality, not too convincing. We move on to the silver rooms. Wine cups with the grapes in repoussé and handles shaped like beaks of birds, bowls and cups with floral motifs, porridge dishes with short handles just adapted to the hand. These are decorated with hunting scenes, vines, and the head of Medusa. The cooking equipment could work in my kitchen today. Someone’s square baking dish and sauté pan lack only the nonstick coating. I wonder what was cooked in the muffin tin with a handle. Maybe the vegetable timbals (sformati) we like so much in Tuscany are a precursor of the rich macaroni in pastry timballi from the local repertoire. As we always do when we are at this museum, we visit the famous mosaics from the courtyards and garden walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Then we see from the window that the rain has stopped.

  Walking “home,” we stop at the large Feltrinelli bookstore. Inside we hardly can move for all the people. I would like a Neapolitan cookbook. Ed veers off to find a CD of the traditional music of the area. We lose each other for a half hour because he moves on to poetry, and I start looking in the gardening section. This long gentle day with no push to see as much as possible must be similar to living here. The light on the water looks clean and silvery. Savory smells of roast pork drifting from windows clouded with pasta steam make me long for an invitation to dinner. I imagine living in an apartment with high ceilings and a geranium balcony opening to the view of islands and water. The bright colors inside are those of Matisse’s Mediterranean room paintings. In the kitchen, small but with thick marble counters, Ed makes ravioli filled with borage and ricotta, while a pomorola (ultimate tomato sauce) simmers. We’ll play some Villa-Lobos because it goes with the light Neapolitan air. A Sunday evening at home, when I will bake some olives with fennel seeds and lemon peel, fry a rabbit, and set the table near the balcony’s open doors so that when Fidele and Roberto come over with their wives to eat, we can see the last moment of the sunset—perhaps even the green flash. I almost see the frosted glass cups of almond and melon gelato and taste the zeppole, those crisp fried cookies. But so far the only reality of this meal is the silver saltcellars I bought this morning, now wrapped in tissue in my bag.

  We’re content, after all, with a late dinner at a trattoria. Grilled artichokes, pappardelle, cut wider than usual, with roasted peppers, a mixed grill, and the local bread that is like firm cake. I think I can taste the freshness of the wheat. “Put the basket over there. I don’t want it in my reach—what a disaster to love bread so much.” Every night we are exclaiming over the food. “How can it be so tasty?” And the restaurants are lively with talk and music, for in Naples inevitably someone comes in to sing. Eating out becomes the occasion it was meant to be.

  Our days fall into a rhythm. The churches begin to blur. The street food—how fantastic. We try all the ices, the fried macaroni pies and fried pizza, everything but the pigs’ feet. We walk until the soles of my feet wear off. “Che palle!” a man yells at two boys on a Vespa going full throttle the wrong way down Spaccanapoli. What balls! I notice that the local people give coins and talk to the Gypsies who beg. There are not many—my hometown, San Francisco, beats Naples a thousand times in the number of street people. The Gypsy women sometimes sit in groups with children, sometimes alone. We have been startled at the beauty of most of them, and their clothes don’t look bad, either. They’re not ignored; another hint of the beating heart of this city. Same with the Africans selling tissues and CDs and fake designer bags, and the Gypsy men who come through the restaurants selling flowers. They’re doing a job, and they’re treated politely. Ed always buys the flowers.

  The streets—what madness! But after a few days here we realize that our perspective is definitely a foreign one. After a few taxi rides across town, Ed begins to notice that the other driver expects to be cut off and will not barrel into the side of the taxi. He watches the maneuvers with admiration. “Are they good!” he says, and keeps congratulating the driver: “Bravo, bravo.” The U-turns in the middle of streets, which make me clutch Ed’s arm, are calculated. If there are four seconds or so before oncoming traffic reaches the driver, he will turn, knowing the approaching cars will brake for him. If there are only two seconds, he will wait. There’s choreography to traffic flow. Finally I relax, even when we swerve by a woman with her groceries, baby, and toddler balanced on a Vespa, then an ancient couple on canes, even the traffic cop. About half the time we are overcharged in taxis, but not much, and the detours are interesting. All the drivers like to talk, and we initiate conversations in order to hear the fast, clipped dialect. At tight, tight turns—there are many—everyone gets in on the act. Shop workers emerge to give directions, someone assumes the role of director of the scene, passengers get out of backed-up cars to see what’s happening, ten people are gesturing with abandon
, and inch by inch, with shouts from everyone, the car turns the corner without scraping the BMW left in the way.

  The long afternoons are for our room. I write a little, read, take baths. Late, we walk out again, go to Capodimonte Museum, a castle, or San Martino for the splendid view and a look at the vast presepio collection in elaborate presentations. Whole villages are re-created, with the nativity one activity of many. When we leave there, all the faces we meet look like the presepio figures we’ve just seen. The walk down from San Martino must be one of the world’s longest flights of stone steps—building them rivals the Pyramids. Every night we get to eat! In Napoli! We’re never home before twelve or one, when we fall into deep sleeps packed with dreams.

  While I’m packing to leave, the maid comes in. Ed slipped out early to take a last turn around the neighborhood. I am in the web of a dream—I’m steering a boat, almost flying over the bay, and a ginger cat sits on my shoulder. I have my sights on—where?

  I don’t want to leave. When I ask the maid if Naples causes you to dream, she says, “No, signora, you must have eaten pepper.”

  The Sun

  on Its Throne

  Taormina

  Europe can be divided into two categories—countries with riotous balconies of geraniums and bougainvillea, and countries without. Italy falls into category one, and nowhere more so than in Taormina. Like Capri, Taormina is where the gods tumped over their baskets of blessings. The earth has not formed, nor can I imagine, a place more captivating. Taormina’s wavering coast below the town, a limpid sea, the perfectly positioned Greco-Roman theatre, and craggy Monte Tauro (here’s our bull again) rising above the village would be stupendous enough, but that basket of blessings also deposited Mount Etna, often disappearing in mist and suddenly reappearing like a mirage in the distance. In winter, from a sunny window, you see the cone frosted with snow. Today the volcano is clear-cut in the blue air, and I easily imagine lava beginning to ooze down the slopes.

  I walk before breakfast, savoring the architectural details along Corso Umberto Primo, greet shop owners who are sprinkling the street from a bottle of acqua minerale before sweeping around their thresholds, and explore the intriguing vicoli that ascend or descend on either side of the street. A stepped street, appropriately called Vicolo Stretto, must be eighteen inches wide; someone could get stuck. I like being out early before the tour buses arrive. Taormina’s magnetism has pulled travellers for centuries. Early, then again by evening, the coast clears. One of my favorite things about Taormina: very few pigeons.

  There’s a reason we congregate in these hot spots—to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream. I am here for another reason as well. I am reading and rereading the Sicilian writers, Leonardo Sciascia and Giuseppe di Lampedusa. A few months ago I came across a telling line in Sciascia’s The Wine-Dark Sea. After a funny, ironic exchange on the shortcomings of Sicilians, a character “brightens up at the sight of the sea off Taormina. ‘What a sea! Where else would you see anything like this?’ ” I suddenly thought I would like to read these native Sicilian writers in situ and try to see how the island affects their work, how their works are shaped by the place. I would like to know Sicily; what better way than through the insights of passionate writers?

  I missed Taormina on my first trip to Sicily. Then two springs ago I was on a boat that let us off here briefly for a tantalizing glimpse of town and a quick tour of the Greek theatre with a stupefying view of the coast and looming Mount Etna. Always a fool for beauty, I said to Ed, “How soon can we come back?”

  Sicily, with the possible exception of Napoli, seems to me the most complex place in Italy, and yet most of us arrive burdened by so many Mafia stereotypes that we hardly see the real place. What if I would like to write a novel set here? I hope my stack of books on the bedside table will give me clues to approaching Sicily as a traveller and as a writer. I am a Californian by persuasion, a southerner by genetic stamp. But in the fifteen years since I have forsaken my native land and adopted Tuscany as a new home and way of life, my ingrained sense-of-place ideas have been forced to adapt. Because Sicily seems so profoundly itself, I am curious to know if writers reflect that.

  Writing Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany made me realize the depth of my interest in the mysterious intertwining of character and place. The southerner, especially the southern writer, knows instinctively that those swirling tornadoes, the smoking vat of barbecue sauce that could scour your throat, a suffocating scent of magnolia, the snake handlers, kudzu creeping over the windowsill, the throb of cicadas—all have as much to do with their personal stories and written narratives as any character or action at play in the imagination.

  From what point, I wonder, does the Sicilian who feels the desire to write begin? How would the intense sense of place I—a foreigner—feel work out if I had learned to walk on stony streets, had been given sips of wine as a one-year-old, had been doted on by an entire village, as babies are in these parts? Or what if I’d had to eke a living from the parched land where the feudal world only recently ended? Art and refinement belonged to few indeed. I assume I would seek in my writing epiphany, illumination, revelation, memory, and the joy of seeing, glimpsing a moment, satisfying a passion for texture, form, or (more elusively) color. But that’s what I do now. I need to know more about the writers’ intertwinings with this big greenhouse floating in the sea.

  I tended to think of the South as the landscape that formed me and informed my writing, that the influence was fixed. As I lived in Italy and began to write memoirs, I was changing, and my writing was changing as well. I don’t remember which writer said that his home was his subject matter. I resist that idea but may someday accept the truth in it. My feelings bolted their arbor and started scrambling up the subject of a house in a foreign country.

  The scene reenacts every morning in thousands of piazzas all over Italy. We are drinking coffee under an awning, looking at the facade of the duomo. A man in a crisp blue shirt is engrossed in a Nadine Gordimer paperback. Two French tourists order caffè americano. A girl tossing her strawberry-blond hair breaks the fast with Coca-Cola and a cigarette. Across from me, Ed in a yellow shirt, my own ray of sun, is intent on La Repubblica. The Italians, of course, rarely linger. They take their espresso as though they’re having a shot at a clinic. One motion, gone. But one signora sits outside with cappuccino reading Venerdi. The waiter notices my bookmark, a metal flower on a red ribbon. “Carina,” he says, adorable. Very original, he continues. His delight in something so insignificant delights me.

  As I leave, I take the bookmark to him. “Un regalo piccolo,” a little gift. You would think I’d given him a Rolex. His shouts of grazie, grazie follow us across the piazza, and I wonder for the thousandth time—why go anywhere, ever, other than Italy.

  In most of Italy, art feels as innate as breath. Natural as this is for the Italians, a frontal confrontation with art causes major shock to the traveller, especially the one who comes here to work on books, paintings, music, or photographs. Suddenly one’s passion for making a creative work becomes a natural act. This is profoundly stirring. An unknown sense for most Americans over the age of ten.

  I wonder sometimes if the strongest drive throughout the history of the Italian peninsula has been the impulse toward art. Around Cortona archaeologists still are discovering thousand-year-old Etruscan tombs, digging out of the muck a gold necklace fashioned so delicately that it stops your heart, a bronze animal votive so cunningly wrought that you want to grab the tiny bull and run. The reach of the artist is long, long, long as time. Across Italian history this has been so, and who knows why. “Cortona is a spiritual center; there’s a magnetism in the earth you can feel,” the owner of the bookstore tells me. “Go stand on the steps of San Francesco—it is especially strong there.”

  Although I am not inclined toward the mystical, I never doubted her for a minute because when I went to Italy, I began to write spontaneously, with pleasure, wi
th focus, with ease. My form changed. The fatalistic, elegiac, and dark motion of my poetry turned toward the Italian light as easily as the local giant sunflowers swivel toward the sun. The people I have come to know in Cortona are genuine, direct, courteous, expansive, with a few rotten characters thrown in the mix. I get so accustomed to the constant kissing that when I return to the United States I find myself kissing people who do not expect that. The more I heard the laughter in the piazza, the more laughter I found inside my daily life. Could these qualities shape a writing style?

  A place never can be neutral; wherever you put yourself, the filings are magnetized and begin their alignments. That lover of the Mediterranean world Lawrence Durrell believed that “you could exterminate the French at a blow and resettle the country with Tartars, and within two generations discover, to your astonishment, that the national characteristics were back at norm.” All landscapes, he says, pose the same question to the traveller: “I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?”

  Both Lampedusa and Sciascia are skilled liberators of the revealing image, what T. S. Eliot called the objective correlative. What they “set free,” as Michelangelo freed his images from marble, is what may enable me to grasp a Sicily that is probably otherwise unavailable. Images, when they arise from the place, turn emblematic, transcending mere sensory detail. Through the giusto, just, image, we are time travellers.

 

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