Memory, Week 2

Megan tells me under a copse of orange trees in the Camping Zeus Hostel that my hair looks really good today, and then I am sitting in a spinning chair as my mother argues playfully with my Greek hair dresser, Ash. He is a tall, wiry man with a sun-and-smile-etched face and black hair shot through with streaks of gray. His hands are like brown leather as they pull all two-and-a-half feet of my hair on top of my head into a cumbersome fountain ponytail. He combs with vicious precision, and I try desperately not to wince as I feel strands separating from my scalp. All my life I have been told I’m “tenderheaded,” but I maintain that everyone else just has hands like hams. This hair is a sonata, and only one in ten is a conductor.

“Not too short, Ash. She wants the top layer long so it lays right,” my mother says.

The air smells like warm human hair from the dryers mixed with the chemical sting of hairspray and dye. She had her hair colored ambulance-red just a few weeks ago here in Sunlight Hair and Tan.

He nods, smiles in his—what I suspect is purposeful and crafted—absent way, then snips off a foot-and-a-half of my hair in one long stroke. I watch the enormous swatch fall to the ground, and it seems duller somehow. My neck arches, lightened.

The cropped layers fall around my ears, and I pay the stylist twenty dollars for the five minutes I spent in the chair as my mother fusses. She’ll never be satisfied with any of my haircuts, and it’s a fact I’ve learned to brush off over the years.

Reportage 2, Week 2

I turn from the screen with the grayed-out trains and call to Josh, “Got bad news for you, chief; we missed all the trains,” just as he swoops down on me with a man whose face now seems to me, in memory, like the face of ten men put together—amorphous, not too threatening. How could I have known to look for the lines of deception around his mouth? He should’ve been twirling an overfed caterpillar moustache or chewing the end of a cigar, but now all I remember was that he looked like any other Italian man who was honestly trying to help me out.

“This is Franco, he says the Pompeii conductors are on strike,” Josh says. Huh. This must be why all my options are unclickable in the ticket machine.

The lights of Naples seem to come down at all the wrong angles as I listen to Franco yammer about how we must take two cars, there are too many to transport, only two euro per kilometer. How many kilometers to Pompeii? I ask. I ask again, certain he didn’t hear me. “You see on meter, you see.” The r’s are hard in his mouth, the vowels warping to fit my bastard home-language.

My jacket feels like a fortress around me, my hair tall and defiant, my bag like an anvil. None of this solidity will protect me from the intangibility of adrenaline coursing through me fifteen minutes later as Franco demands three hundred euro. The five of us are not even two hundred meters from the front of our hostel just up the hill, even less distance from the closed entrance to Pompeii—yet we cannot escape. He’s got one of our 50’s up his sleeve and Camping Zeus only knows what in the glove box. I could’ve kicked myself. Twice. My dad would be apoplectic if he knew. Before I left, he said, “Remember what your back looks like,” and what did I do the day after I was on my own for the first time? Forget.

I will not tell him how I stepped behind Josh and Tyler and listened to them argue. I will not tell him how I sat on the stairs of Camping Zeus minutes later and cried tears of helpless fury. I will not tell him how Italian men have taught me powerlessness, whether with their cons or their stares or their hands.

I will tell him that I still have two-thousand-year-old grave dust stuck to my black ballet flats; that I missed him as I kiss his reddish, stubbly cheek; that the lawn looks nice and that Naples is a shithole that ought to be struck from God’s green Earth; that I could really, really use a glass of Dr. Beam after that plane ride.

Reportage, Week 2

I shy away from Shaunna’s arms just as I have shied from Josh. If I accept their hugs right now, I fear the hot anger roiling under my skin will spill on them, and they don’t deserve my ridiculous temper, least of all now.

The night manager at Camping Zeus Hostel is named Manuele. I wonder when the entire world got so boring with men’s names. In America, I have met and known over thirty Josh’s in my lifetime (I counted once—and those are only the ones I can offhand). In Italy, I have met three Luca’s, three Manuele’s, and countless other variations on those names. The one Alessandro I met was a balmy breeze.

On the way to the one café open at 11:30 on a Friday night in Naples, we pass the train station. It’s the size of my room at home, maybe a little bigger, and a shadow in the light from the doors pricks its ears. The enormous black dog makes me uneasy. I have already ignored my instincts once tonight, so I sidle past making cooing noises, hoping it will stay where it lies.

It doesn’t. Halfway down the hill from Camping Zeus, Megan looks back and emits a little gasp. I jump when I see the dog, reminded of the Grim. He trots to catch up with us, stops, sniffs a bush sprouting from a crevice below a guard rail, then lifts his leg. When he is finished, he bounds to catch up with us and nuzzles my thigh like a cat, crying sweetly.

“Shhh, shh, it’s okay.” I pet him, but he whines still, and I get the impression if he could make conversation, if he could say with his slightly gray muzzle, “Naples isn’t so bad. Sorry about your shit night,” he would. What a cliché.

He leads us to the café and sits outside the door. As Josh buys four Panini with salami and cheese, I shrug at the other shopkeeper, the one with thick dark hair. As if to say, “I don’t know this dog, but I’ll keep him at the threshold of your store.”

The bald shopkeeper nods, disappears into a backdoor, and returns with a plate of shredded meat. “His name Mario; he come every night.” This explains the layer of fat and the marks of age—gray whiskers, gray paw-bottoms. This dog is the hostel’s dog, the café’s dog. Mario scarfs his meat and follows us back to the hostel, still chattering in his sad language. He sees us back to the door and vanishes into the night.

Junkyard 4, Week 2

"Imagine you are gladiator, mm," Domizia says into her crackling mic. Mostly, I will remember the crows' feet at the corner of her eyes, the way they turn her black irises into happy little beans when she repeats her unique vocal tic.

Junkyard 3, Week 2

"Mafia is problem," Michele says. "Mafia is problem at night," he repeats, just before he robs us blind.

Junkyard 2, Week 2

"Una, due, tre..." A chubby little girl with sandy curls counts, hands over her eyes, outside the Youth Station Hostel. Her father ducks behind a tree too skinny and gnarled to hide him.

Reading Response: The Italian

How Italy functions as a setting and why in The Italian is curious for me. Similar to A Room With a View, we have this place for a splendid, rich backdrop to a romance--or what appears to be a romance in the first few chapters (not entirely sure where it goes from here with these hints at Ellena's dark background). We get quite a few breaks in the narration to describe the rich scenery and beautiful setting of Italy.

Further, this novel is set apart by its Italian protagonist. I'm left questioning this move, however--just how Italian is The Italian? Vincentio comes from the Marchesa and Marchese, from money and aristocracy, so I wonder how different this main character really is from a British or American one--in that his status allows the author to confer on him the same sort of airs a white Western character might have.

He seems to have the romantic notions and personality that a stereotypically "from Italy" character might have, though--I'm thinking in particular of his instant love for Ellena, which so overwhelms him he is forced to sit and take a breather outside her home before he speaks to her for the first time. This goes directly against some of the views we've seen previously of Italians as uncultured, but I wonder what this novel's depictions of more common Italians might entail.