Part III: Inferno

Some people believe that purgatory lies in the hinterlands of Yonkers and this is not entirely false. But in a more spiritual sense, purgatory is where one goes to face their sins before entering paradise, or maybe not paradise after all. In the weeks before our departure, it dawned on me that for various reasons, we wouldn’t be returning from our upcoming trip to Italy. There were too many questions about the future that remained unanswered, so many disappointments of the past to reckon with. What really was out there? But there was no turning back now – we had just to follow our instincts no matter how mad these voices seemed. We had our tickets.

We could always come home. I could always come home. It was so simple. But I knew we’d stay. All there was to do was just call a cab to the airport and grasp each other’s hand and board the plane: it hadn’t been spoken, but he knew it too – ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’.

There was, actually, a plan. We had never actually discussed this, sure, but it seemed a pretty sound plan nevertheless. The plan was to fly to Naples, take a cab from the airport to an apartment we had rented for one month while we were enrolled in our intensive Italian course. Once the course ended, I would convince Jimmy that the best thing to do instead of going home was to head to Rome, where Jimmy and I would look for jobs with our one month of Italian language skills. So far so good.

Our first moments in Italy jolted us out of fantasyland and into the inferno. After landing in Naples one hour late we realized that one of our suitcases was lost (If you can count on Alitalia for one thing, it is losing your bags). In a hurry to claim our apartment, we greeted Naples in a taxicab whose driver had made an ostentatious show of the fact that because it was Sunday and we were Americans, he would be ripping us off. It was one of those situations, among many to come in Italy, that we didn’t necessarily get ourselves into but that was thrust upon us, victims of our own unbridled hopes and dreams. We had arrived.

It was raining hard and the landlord had been waiting all morning for our arrival at the apartment with his wife and little baby. By now, it was well into the afternoon, soaking wet, and we were trapped in some mammoth Brazilian automobile with an obvious sociopath at the helm. But as our criminal driver sped down a long hill into the city through colorful slums, mopeds and copious amounts of laundry hanging to dry, I could see individual rays of sunlight hitting the buildings across the bay and the colors lighting up against the dreary sky, and I actually became tearful. No matter what happened to us, we were on the right path.

It was right then that I noticed the driver was turned completely around in his seat, giving Jimmy a long hard menacing stare; his sun–baked and cigarette–tightened face was wound like a clock. Even now as a Vespa mounted by a guy both smoking and talking on the phone disappeared under the right front wheel, the driver remained completely rotated in his seat. Upon reaching the bottom of this huge hill we had been descending all the way, we entered a solid, honking traffic snarl – ah, but our ever–savvy driver headed against the flow of traffic just as I had expected him to, back still to the road. When he finally did face front, gave a bit of a jump and corrected himself, he then grabbed the wheel with renewed interest and pressed on strait into the oncoming traffic, expertly rounding the circle against cars and trolleys like a salmon fighting its way upstream to mate with its last dying breath.

Of course, he charged us extra for this service – and for the rain, and the fact that it was Sunday and we were Americans who obviously no scruples if we had willingly climbed into his car – and abandoned us in the cavernous entrance of a crumbling, cave–like structure – our building – whose exterior and interior walls had not seen paint since before our country was even a glimmer in George Washington’s eye. The street was so narrow, it could not accommodate vehicles, and although our cabbie had indeed driving on it, he had charged us extra for this too. We stood in the dark, staring at the gauged–out dripping walls, half expecting to see stalactites emerge out of the haze, until our thoughts had settled enough to locate our proprietor.

We eventually located the landlord. Salvatore: the most gorgeous man around 30 but looking ever youthful with his dark smiling eyes; he was pretty chipper considering that that he had been waiting for us with his young wife and an angelic infant in a little car for the past three hours. He happily informed us (in Neapolitan dialect) that our apartment was up on the fourth floor and that there was no elevator (somehow the ghost of my Nana intervened and allowed me to understand this sad news). Then I realized that in Europe, the first floor in buildings does not start until you have already gone one flight up: ‘Jimmy – why the hell did you bring so much goddamn shit?’ At the moment, he didn’t seem to understand Neapolitan or English, just stared at our crap–packed American suitcases idly looking like they were getting ready to wander off with a passing band of gypsies. I could see the American guilt–inspired paranoia mounting in his eyes: if the local folks saw us with all our ridiculous accoutrements, would they not feel more than justified in liberating our belongings from their state of imperialistic servitude? (this and not much else was the fruit of four years at a top liberal–arts college).

Salvatore, our chipper, godlike Neapolitan landlord informed us, as we lugged our bags up the crumbling, graffiti–covered stairway that we were very fortunate because this was the famous borgo degli orifici – the gold and silversmiths quarter, and for this reason, there were ‘eyes everywhere’ – this, I think, was a gesture meant to comfort our troubled souls.

He handed me a hilariously large haunted-house key, took his money for the month and left us in a dark little room with 20–foot high ceiling containing: a fold–out couch, a small gas burner, a sink and a little table. There was a bathroom – oh yes: toilet with no seat, smallest sink in the world and 35–year old washing machine. Outside, the rain continued unabated and inside the dim stairwell I would not have been surprised to see Jesus pop right out of the huge, neon-lit shrine outside our apartment door that had little effigies of people burning in hell planted under his dangling feet – Jimmy, we are not in Yonkers anymore. The graffiti surrounding his head was like a post–modern halo composed of swastikas and curses upon all Romans. (By the way, Italians invented graffiti – and fascism too! and the Vendetta!) And with these chilling facts in mind, we began our beautiful new life in Nana’s land, the Old Country, Napoli – the city called ‘Neapolis’ because it was the New City – in the 6th Century BC. It looked that way.