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.

Part II: Montefioralle

We had been talking about it forever but I suppose nobody really thought we would actually go. Why? Abroad, all these questions would not reside and neither would we – just needed a month to relax and blow off steam, only wander among the ghosts of an ancient city speaking a foreign tongue; pouring libations to our mythical ancestors in the ‘old country’ was really all we needed to know that we actually exist. When after our time was up and we didn’t come back, it came as a big shock to just about everyone in the New York metropolitan area. It shouldn’t have.

It was not all really clear at the beginning even to me, but it went back years, before Jimmy and I had even met to my 20th birthday – I was in Rome for a semester and had been easily picked up by exactly the type of guy you’d expect to pick you up in Italy: young, lithe, big sunglasses, tight red jeans, if a touch slim he still had the words and the accent to make up for the fact that he walked daintily with his friends and addressed grown men as ‘bello’ – ah, Gianni. It was 1994, and Italy and I were still untouched by those universal forces that would later conspire to destroy us both.

Driving through the Tuscan hills on the Feast of All Saints as the sun dipped below the vineyards and ancient Etruscan villages, Gianni wound me higher and higher into the Elysian fields of wine, his Fiat resisting yet seemingly made to buck and grind those turns to Greve, a quiet town, but all considered lively and in a jovial mood. We parked almost inside a dark little bar and rapidly polished off a bottle or two of the popular local table wine that I still believe has alchemical properties. After the bottles were drained – and Gianni had forgotten my name, referring to me only as ‘Beatrice’ (like this: ‘Bee–a–trēē–che!’) – he led me out of the enoteca and had something to show me. I protested at first when he went for his little car, even though I was feeling quite soporific by then, but Gianni laughed, ‘Don’t worry, Beatrice, this is Italy – there is no such thing as drunk driving here’ and under its own power, the Fiat lifted us ever further into the hills to an ancient crumbling place where you could reach up and imbibe the moon.

It was a tiny medieval walled city, but its walls didn’t enclose – it seemed as though all the houses, had been carved from the very same piece of rock, a giant sculpture whittled away over an eternity into a village. The town was but a single structure where spaces had been hewn for people to experience the glorious time between their birth and death. It was dark and infinitely quiet; he whispered as little squares of light began to appear on the sides of the stone walls. Families are enjoying their dinners, laughing and gossiping, babies crying, cats begging for scraps of meat, grandmothers pontificating; the smell of gorgeous juicy steak wafts through and we duck into a doorway to be silent within the damp stone, listening to the night and watching the particles of each other’s breath mingle in the narrow space between. The walls were alive! They heaved their heavy sighs, had remained unchanged over hundreds of years and the laughter emanating from above was ancient.

Outside the city walls – they were not so much walls as precipices that had erupted out of the hilltop – looking down a steep stone staircase into the orchards below, we had left this earth and there was only an old man voice, strange, singing among the fruit.
‘What kind of fruit grows here, Gianni’?
‘…I cannot tell you…’
‘Why?’
‘There is no word for this fruit in English. It is a fruit that only grows here in this paese … delicious.’ (Gianni was a lightweight when it came to the vino.)
We stayed silent, studying the orchards, letting our eyes wind on down the path in its diminishing light. The singing grew louder and very sad; the old man was winding his way up, right up through it, and I understood that that he was singing to us: two young lovers he had seen on the precipice, who must have looked stunning in the glow of the lights.
‘siete bellissimi’. Indeed.

Part I: Escape from the American dream

Now, I want to sit down and tell my story, about how I completely transformed my life, or rather how my life transformed me – it was more of a passive experience. Does anybody have an idea of how difficult this has been? If it were easy to change, everybody would be doing it, but then again its not so easy to stay the same either.

Of course, it’s all been done before, but let me tell you, it was no small thing, except we had no choice – something deep within me led us there like lambs to the slaughter – it was imposed upon me from someplace deep inside, some troubling dream bubbling to the surface, that hammered the soul day and all night while I slept and fought, until I gave up and broke down and fell right into it, helpless and panting, and then I imposed it on him. I consider myself one of the lucky ones and for his sake I hope he does too.


So, it happened, but not all at once – took years off our lives, this transformation. But I figure it’s worth it because trying to play by the rules and live the American dream and pop Prozacs (or what was the name of my brand?) wasn’t the answer. Instead, one should do something to change the situation – but most of us seem content enough with our cocktails of pills and booze because we are so much more fortunate than those poor people in Africa after all.

Let me tell you something: (!) I recently went to one of the poorest parts of Kenya, where everybody lived in shacks or huts or what-have-you, and they were laughing at our people, laughing with derision: ‘My brother moved to Texas some years back and lives in a big house, but he has the saddest life, he writes me often and he never never sounds happy. So I told him to come on back here to our village, but he said he can’t because once your kids get used to that life over there, become American, you can never bring them back – I feel very sad, very bad for him because he sounds so alone there in his big house’.


I didn’t know it either, about the sadness and the empty life, was just living up there in Yonkers – met a guy lived across the street, his bedroom window faced mine and we used to watch each other at night, skilfully avoiding mutual eye contact, in our isolation-box apartments on opposite sides of the same street, mirror images of each other’s ridiculous lives like zoo animals opening the blinds when we were both safely in our pyjamas (we had a mutual understanding that it was to go no further into tawdriness), both seeing the same shrink and never introduced! we kept dutifully on while the doctors and insurance companies and pharmaceuticals kept sucking it up and performing alchemy with the chemicals in the little gaps between our nerves: make us feel more American, make us little golden androids in the big wet dream.…but there is no point in continuing down a path we didn’t end up taking because you never really know what’s down there and you don’t care…


I don’t even remember how it finally happened…I do, but it’s not that interesting. Maybe we waved at the sidewalk one day rather awkwardly and there was a stilted conversation. Since we’d been watching each other for the better part of two years, the awkwardness now seems a bit strange, but since we were both months (and months) into sexual frustration, we didn’t let the silence between us get too much in the way; we quickly became quite used to it.

He dribbled back and forth with his guy-things out of his place and into mine little by little and scattered them around, marking his territory on my warped wood floors with the symbols of modern male consumerism – always lots of wires spreading across the room and up my walls like gray and white tendrils. My cat took to sleeping in his great-black shoe. Those

Victorian monstrosities up our street used to be the summer palaces of the New York City rich and now they were cracking up into scores of rumbly boxcars for young, mobile, college-graduate hobos like us, jobs too ridiculous to describe (it’s like they keep having to think up stuff for our generation to do and can’t come up with anything good).


Perhaps in the end that’s why we never returned from our month-long language study. That’s it – we never talked about what we did and there was no plan to get lost over there, but somehow we both knew and followed this thing to its logical end – even the idea seemed to be cast in finality, Caesar silently crossing the Rubicon: ‘hey, wouldn’t it be nice to spend a month learning Italian?’…‘yes, honey, it would’.

Friends and loved ones and we believed we just needed a month-long break from the grind of our decent hard-working career paths. There is no point in musing on what really went on in our heads or why; by now we had been living together and continuing to gaze at each other in our pyjamas for the better part of two years and it probably was just time. Would have been more difficult not to do it (that’s what people don’t understand – that it takes more energy to fight against things). We just thought would be better for us to communicate with each other in Italian – that way we could always be misunderstood.