Sunday, September 29, 2013

Vedi Napoli e poi muori













 For the first time after visiting a city that I love, I felt no nostalgia coming back home. No fantasizing about relocating there, no thinking I can find that sough-after balance in that place, no yearning to stay. As I dragged my luggage down the steep stairs of our graffiti decorated building near Piazza del GesĂș Nuovo, I felt swollen with experiences that I know I’m far from understanding. My family was staying for a few more days in Italy and I was taking a cab to the train station, on my way back to New York. We had arrived to Napoli just three days before, after visiting Rome and Venice. North Italy had been beautiful so far, but where was the magic everyone promised?

I felt privileged and relaxed while we walked and dined in the streets of Trastevere in Rome, the rustic buildings draped with lush vines, shiny cobblestones under my feet and soft jazz oozing from some street corners. The ochre colored buildings of Rome made me feel calm and tiny, like a hung painting in a museum. Pristine, elegant, refined.  Venice only exacerbated that feeling, as if someone had carefully plotted and fabricated a unique experience that was sure to make me feel special. But it never did.

As the cab driver loaded my bags in his white minivan, I turned around to say goodbye to my family; I hugged Josie last, and when she approached me I felt my mouth dry up and both our eyes filled with tears. We embraced urgently, both knowing how much this trip had given us. This was the third time I cried during my short stay in Napoli. What is it about Napoli?

Maybe it is how much of my Dominican identity I see reflected in the effusiveness and passion Neapolitans have. How we both talk with our hands, kiss loudly and how men’s asses look perfectly plump in those really tight jeans. Perhaps it’s the tone of our voices; how a perfectly normal conversation can be misconstrued as a heated argument and quickly turn into one. Every detail and gesture about the way they communicate is pure pleasure to me; how they frown and swing their fingers forward as they speak and how tension-filled flirtation of youth in the street includes gentle slapping and pulling of hair, like a risky and passionate dance, heart to mouth, no filter whatsoever. They like you, they whistle and let you know it; they’re pissed at you, they will let you have it; they want to kiss you and they’ll tongue you down in public, gently tugging at your bottom lip and embracing you tightly at the waist, making foreigners jealous and wishful for a similar treatment.

Despite what north Italy thinks, Neapolitans are the masters of authentic living. I witnessed time spent sincerely in things that really matter: dutiful work, loud and prolonged chatter in the street, endless vivacious outings with friends and good beer, embracing and kissing a loved one by the sea shore at any given hour, sharing an impossibly delicious meal with family. Napoli is full of awe-inspiring churches, landscapes and piazzas, but its core beauty lies in their ordinary life and how everything in that city is lived authentically and uncomplicatedly. For the first time during a trip I felt I wasn’t retreating to another reality to lessen the burden of my own; this wasn’t escapism or leisure, it was an education.

On my cab ride back to the train station, I opened the window and let the breeze and humidity ruin my hair. I remembered my first meal in Napoli at Sorbillo, and how I cried because of a profound sense of belonging there, of sharing a desire to live “well”, in the amplest sense of that word. I also remembered the Amaretto I drank with my cousin Marianela on my last night in Napoli, at that literary cafĂ© in Via dei Tribunali, and how it pleasantly burned my throat as I cried telling her that I was beginning to understand what family is, and how I wished I had brought my son Amaru with me. 

As we approached the station, I tried to communicate with the cab driver in a horrible Italian, tears still rolling down my cheeks, telling him that his city is so beautiful and that I will never forget it. It feels paradoxical that the city I loved most in Italy did not intoxicate me with an excessive happiness; there was so much joy, but also calmness to it, the kind that you feel when you have already learned how to love without letting irrational passion ruin it. This feeling was taught to me in Napoli the first day I arrived, when we approached a man selling Maradona memorabilia and other soccer paraphernalia. While looking for a shirt for my son, I saw a black one with a stencil of Maradona's face and it said: "Chi ama non dimentica"; when I asked the man what it meant, he said: El que ama nunca olvida. When we got to the station, I closed the cab door and dried my eyes with the sleeves of my sweater, profoundly understanding what he meant.