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.

Junkyard 1, Week 2

An older man, gray at his temples, with a plaid collar protruding from his sweater vest, bats his granddaughter on the head with an inflatable morning star. She laughs, smiles.

Reading Response: An Italian Affair

The second person narrative in An Italian Affair almost seems to highlight the American/Western-centric feel of the story, despite the author’s attempts to include the Italian people in characters such as the Italian instructor and Lucia. Even though we’re not A Room with A View this time around, the story is still about this American woman. She is in Italy, she loves Italy, but we open with a story about her divorce from her husband a year before rather than anything about Italy itself.

Further, Lucia’s perfect English makes me cock my head. It’s like we were talking about in Davidson’s class the other day—you have to be careful what Italian words you sprinkle into your travel writing because you risk starting to sound like Dora the Explorer. In An Italian Affair, we experience this phenomenon, but with a curious reversal of roles—it’s the native Italians who sound like Nick Jr, this time, neatly packaged for the white readers.

I think what strikes me the most is that every Italian character, no matter how minor, only seems to exist to tell us something about Laura. This is the self-centered American emerging in the writing—every Italian has “dark hair” and “dark eyes” and shows up to tell us that Laura’s lonely, or Laura’s generous, or Laura likes Bob Dylan. 

Response to Diamond's Original Prompt, Week 1

Diamond,

I enjoy the use of microcosm here, the examination of something as mundane and ubiquitous as a fly to frame the "fading traces of Italy," and I find myself questioning, why fading traces? How is it that Italy can fade upon as even as we sit inside it, drink its water, eat its gelato? This, I think, is the question at the beginning of your foray into this exercise.

And what about this difficulty in detecting something foreign, even as the taste begins in your mouth? This seems like a way in, to me. Is this something we do ourselves, consciously, or do we block the foreign even as we are immersed in it out of the need to preserve of a sense of self? I want to know why--I'm reading it right now as a sort of defense mechanism, but I think that might be too easy. I think you might be able to spin it, as talented as a writer as you are, into something more interesting and revelatory.

In any case, keep the fly. He (or she!) is what draws the eye and pulls the mind along here, I think. Great work.

Prompt 1, Week 1

Your first moment of “understanding”

The automatic doors when I step off the plane slide away

like the gates of paradiso to Dante, smooth, pneumatic,

transparent, and baffling. I think, if I don’t move, they will cut me

in half. I almost stand still. I might leave behind the legs

which pull me away from you this time, the next.

A woman and her gray mop-dog split the walkway, and my flats

slip the moss from the cobblestones. If I don’t step forward,

I’ll fall.

Iove-iove-iove—my Italian instructor’s coconut voice.

iove-iove-iove, I say in Bar Duelle later that night.

The waitress does not smile. She slips the woven placemat

under my palms, blocks my American small-talk threaded

through the Italian. The prosecco spins up bubbles from the stem

of my glass like a conch, or an ear, both deaf to the ocean inside.

Do you know where I go? I ask the concierge,

swathed in damp towels and a mushroom of sheets.

Yes, he says, and waits.

In Zeppelin, buying hot dog speckled pizza, the clerk watches me pull

five euro from my bra, and before I can ask quant’e, a woman

with a woven placemat shirt cuts in front of me. She turns, asks,

What does piato mean? and her accent pockets Big Ben, biscuits. I understand

nothing, I understand

map-making, cartography, the conquistadors

sailing full-billow, the cut

of the shovel that ripped a canal

through the land instead of going around.

Reading Response: A Room with a View

I identified with poor Lucy in some places of A Room with a View and in others, not so much. We have our typical marginalizing of Italians occurring, but the notable difference here is that we at least see them long enough for the author to construct some sort of criticism of them. It seems, however, that maybe it's not the author who criticizes the Italians but rather the text's construction of the characters themselves. For instance, this passage--

Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it from monotony. In Mr. Eager's mouth it resembled nothing so much as an acid whistling fountain which played ever higher and higher, and quicker and quicker, and more and more shrilly, till abruptly it was turned off with a click.

I'm not sure, though, because at the same time, we have this image of the two Italian men fighting over a debt, and the stabbing that occurs therein. A Room With A View constructs Italy as this place of definite action, where things happen to Lucy that otherwise wouldn't if she were back in England at home, but the actual opinion of the Italians themselves is a little muddy to me. I'm hoping class will open this up a bit.  

Junkyard 4, Week 1

My roommates and I stumble half-drunk onto Via Giustolo outside an old, worn-down theater. A gray Fiat in the streetlamps catches my eye, and I see a couple in the front seat locked in a long kiss. Eyes averted, I hurry my companions away to give them some privacy. When I cast my eye over my shoulder, the woman has stepped from the passenger door, and the man watches after her as she totters away on precarious heels.

Junkyard 3, Week 1

I pass two couples gathered around small, scruffy dogs on leashes. A white Westie lays belly-flat on the cobblestones, legs splayed backward like a swimming frog. The couples chatter affectionately about their pets in a way I recognize.

Reportage, Week 1

The “tebro-wifi” signal in my living room taunts me, waving the ease of translators and Wikipedia just out of my reach. I rise early, despite the cold seeping from the stone floor into my bare feet, despite the way my left lower back wheezes. I shed the remnants of a dream in which I destroy my friend’s impending marriage, the scraped-eyes feeling of waking up alone following me through my breakfast of half a chilled Granny Smith. My jaw aches. I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep again.

The smell of my leather jacket and the empty fireplace bring to mind camping with my family as I exit my apartment and round the corner, black ballet flats failing to keep the cobblestones from my soles. Outside the door to Tebro is the slender stone statue, androgynous, faceless, and entirely too real in the night when the wine clouds me and the streetlights beckon. Beside the door, the first black man I have seen in Spoleto jingles a palm full of change I am only just starting to comprehend.

Tebro is lit, and I spy a barista behind the counter of perfect pastries glazed like jewels, but when I pull, the door sticks. Maybe they are still preparing to open. I turn to leave and the homeless man babbles something in a language I have not yet begun to understand. He shakes his head, and I feel my neck warm. The door is push.

“Grazie,” I stutter. At the coutner, I order a cappuccino and ask for the password. “Privato,” says the barista with curly black hair. Disappointed, I try to say good morning to the balding man beside me. He does not respond, merely stares, foam peeking from the corner of his drooping lips.

When I leave, I drop .70 centesimi into the homeless man’s open palm. “Grazie, grazie,” he calls, white teeth splitting his face, a shaft of sunlight falling across the slender statue.

Memory, Week 1

The sweet, almost nutty smell of decaying earth hits me, and I am in the woods in Earl Cook Recreation Area again, where the leaves have fled their perches above and been laid to rest beneath my brother’s and my shuffling feet. I was as clumsy then as I am now on Monteluco, finding rocks under the deadfall with startling laughable efficiency. Compared to our slogging Nikes, my Dad’s Redwings are almost soundless. He walks gracefully for a man who spends ten hours a day treading the concrete in steel-toes.

He casts one eye over his shoulder, crows’ feet and receding hairline the only testament to his being 43. The gray in his reddish goatee will not show for another five years or so. The recent rain wets my pants up to the knee, and yellow spotted leaves cling to my shoes. I know around the corner is a park bench decrepit with moss and damp. On the left corner of the seat, the soft wood bears the scars of our initials carved by my father’s pocket knife: RSR, MDR, JCR. In five years, he will add my stepmother’s.

He wants to show us the limited wildlife of the nature trail, but our street sweeping shoes make it almost impossible. I have many memories like this one. Sometimes, he grows bored of the precut trail and forges into the briar-threaded woods. Sometimes, the dogs gambol beside us.

This time, he opens his pocket knife with the jade green hilt and throws it at the trunk of an oak. IT sticks in the bark, vibrating, and he places it in my hand and curls my fingers around it, pulls back my arm like a trebuchet.

“Never point it at someone,” he says in his low, carrying voice. A black spider with yellow-banded legs hangs in the middle of a web to the right. My aim goes wide, just misses it and the tree as well.

“Try again.”

This is not the time the wild turkeys stray across our path with confusion in their opaque eyes, but it might be.

Junkyard 2, Week 1

Buon giorno, calls my classmate. I turn. No, buona sera. The bald wineseller grins around his cigarette. Si, si. 

Come ti chiami? Mi chiamo MacKenzie.

Tomaso.

Tomaso, Tomaso! I point from Thomas to Tomaso, pleased. With some difficulty, he sells us two bottles of Montefalco Rosso. I see him later in Bar Duelle, and he nods and recognizes me.

Junkyard 1, Week 1

Scarpeta, my professor explains to Lucas. Little shoe. He motions for the younger man to soak up his leftover sauce with a piece of bread.

Tutti notta, says Luca. One leathery hand pats his rounded belly. Scarpeta every night.

Reading Response: Shelley and Browning

I find myself interested in Shelley’s framing of Italy as this place of consuming celestial fire. Once again, we see here this idea of the cities of Italy as a place where an almost holy transcendence of inspiration and art occurs—hearkening not just to the beauty of art, but to figures such as Apollo. The cities and geography of Italy are painted in precious jewels and metals, lending it a sense of pricelessness, but also a sense of unreality. Once again, where are the actual people of Italy? I doubt when I make my visit to Venice I’ll be witnessing actual walls made of sapphire and gold.

And as for Browning, he frames Italy as this place of Romantic entanglement, where two spirits connect, and there's this attempt to escape the bodily, but even as he tries to escape the bodily presence, he's anchored and mired in it. There's a lot of sexual imagery, this binary of Rome as "ghost," in "heaven," watching the two lovers. Oddly voyeuristic despite its attempts at divine atmosphere. Binaries of barrenness and fertility (Rome and May), spirituality and bodily, female and male. This is all about fleetingness, impermanence, yet we're set in this place that's been around almost as long as history. 

First Impressions

(I probably could have gone on much longer, but dinner's in 20 and I have to shut up sometime.)

On the first day, I pull the knit sweater from my sticky armpits and wonder why a short-sleeved shirt would be made from material this warm and clinging. The driver of the bus straddles the white line dividing the road, competing with an off-white Fiat for control. The Fiat wisely yields, the steep green sides of the mountain looming in its shiny top-coat as my constricted chest relaxes. I sleep for half an hour to escape Italian driving and the sight of the rock contained by something like chicken wire.

When we disembark in front of Hotel Clitunno, Lana del Ray’s subpar pout squeaks a greeting to me, and I understand that awful music is inescapable, even by oceans. The sun sits on my shoulders like two unfriendly parrots, and the laptop bag I was so pleased to have packed lightly earlier almost anchors me to the cobblestones. The buildings are labyrinthine, and I swear we took four lefts on the way up the city. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, only with fewer mythological fauns and more frescoes.

When I have stowed my bags in room 142, I enter the lift alone to see the lobby. The space seems very small shared by myself and a tan woman in a French maid’s outfit. She rattles a sentence off in Italian, and a long noise, like a car horn dying, escapes me as if to say, “Not only do I not speak Italian, I am also an idiot.” My shoulders seem hooked to my ears. She points to the [1] and says “Una,” then to the [2], says, “Due,” repeats this several times, and gives me question mark eyebrows. “Una,” I wheeze—incorrectly. The ground floor is zero.

Pizza, bira, and some coca-cola sew up my threadbare nerves to some extent. The ambient lighting casts the cobblestones into images of moonlight, brooks, and the lamp with the taupe shade I keep on my desk at home. My back aches, my right leg mutters prophecies of later agony, and my lungs and eyes debate which will leap from my body to roll around in the grass first. At dinner, I use the restroom, and someone knocks. I vocalize, there is a pause, then the handle jiggles. When I open the door a scant thirty seconds after the initial intrusion, a worn-faced woman snaps, “grazie” as if I have inconvenienced her. I stand with hands dripping for a moment, unable to operate the paper towel dispenser or escape her inscrutable scorn. Later, the pizza burns my wet fingers, and I wonder if I will ever be able to smooth my eyebrows down to a normal height. Their arch seems to be the only thing keeping my eyes open. 

2 Clichés Associated with Writing About Italy

Generally, the literature associated with Italy with which I am familiar has been chick-lit, and even that I've only seen in slant-eyed passing.

Cliché 1: Vespas. There always seem to be highly attractive young Italian men willing to appear at a moment's notice with a Vespa for the purpose of saving some lost white lady from unwanted advances or existential crises.

Cliché 2: Italy seems to be the place to go for the middle class white woman Pilgrim to rediscover herself and be figuratively reborn. I don't know if it's the nice pairing of "extremely old country" with "young American" that's the draw or how relatively easy it is to sketch in some nubile young Italian men willing to come a-courtin'.

Expectations/Baggage

I think my expectations/baggage about Italy are less about definite facts I've erroneously constructed in my personal vision of Italy and more about a series of anxious questions I keep re-mapping in my mind. Mostly, I'm gearing up to be okay with being completely and totally lost, which is not exactly my area of expertise. You know, being lost.

It's the little things I worry about. Are Italians the type of people to make eye contact, give a brief smile and a nod? Or should I keep my oddly intimate southern greetings to myself? How do I address people? I barely even know how to say hello, much less how to politely convey my meaning with points and grunts. I'm looking forward to this ten hours of Italian training.

And the food! I'm expecting the food to be magnificent, but I'm also expecting to screw that up big time, more than once. I don't have any idea what the Italian standard of table manners is like, but I'm interested in figuring that out.

I feel it'll be a lot easier to travel by foot and public transit, but I'm wondering how easy the latter will be navigating in a foreign country.

As for the people themselves--every country has its stereotypes, but I'm not really familiar with many stereotypes for Italians (besides silly ones about spaghetti), and I'd prefer to keep it that way for now. That way, I'll just learn while I'm there without having any rudely preconceived notions to dismantle.