Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson

of Americans: our great big national desire to know what they
really
think of us. I had my students write short essays. Here are some highlights:
    “The Americans are a beautiful people because they are simple. They are always saying what they think. Not like Italian people.”
    “I think that United States is a big country full of people who lives in many different ways, trust in different gods, but they lives in a same place because they are like brothers and respect each other. Like blacks, chineses, European people.”
    “In America, all the streets are crowded by people of different races and colors (whites, blacks, yellows, reds) and this is beautiful.”
    “I’d like to go to the U.S. To learn how to be myself and, in spite of that, to be happy too. Not to make blood in my veins get water, to get alive.”
    “U.S. is the place where all things leave before spreading all over.”
    “If I will have time in America I’d like to ski in Colorado, in Aspen of course, running like hell on my skis with big black sunglasses and a crazy long hat. After this will I get a little tired? Yes, maybe. And then? Iowa!!!!!! I would go there for two months, getting fuel for myself, relaxing on the green, kidding with the dolls. I’d like to rent a big factory [I think he meant farm,
fattoria
in Italian] and sleep alone a very long time.”
    After we’d pulled apart their perceptions, and misconceptions, of my homeland, we would move on to grammar.
    The question of the day might be:
Do you-all
(plural of
you,
each student can give his or her opinion)
really think Salva loves me?
Or, let’s try the third person present interrogative of
love: Does he love me enough to move away from Naples and his parents?
As their English got better, I challenged them to dissect my emotional state.
Am I in love with Salvatore, or with Naples in general?
Or even,
Am I simply in love with his mother and what she cooks?
    Because I enjoyed teaching and sharing the beauty of my mother tongue, it was extremely frustrating for me that Salvatore seemed to have no desire whatsoever to improve his English. We were spending a lot of time together, and I was an English teacher, so wouldn’t it have been natural for him to use the opportunity to better his language skills? Did I really have to be subjected to his singing, to the tune of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Hoven road, in the sun. To the place I rerun!
West Virginia!
[with gusto, he knew that part!] Sunshine Momma, run to road, in the song…”?
    I understand that when you grow up listening to songs with lyrics in a language that you don’t understand, you focus on the melody and the rhythm. A nonsense approximation of the words is just fine. But shouldn’t it make him just a tad self-conscious that there was a native English speaker listening? Not in the least.
    When I would correct his grammar, for instance by noting, “Salva, the first person of the verb
to come
is ‘come.’ No
s,
capisci?
I come,” he would respond with his version of Boy George:
“Cumma cumma cumma cumma comeleon, you giva go, you giva go…”
There was no hope. Years later, I would have to leave this teaching job to my bilingual and easily embarrassed children.
    At the same time Salva refused to learn English, I was getting more fluent in both spoken Italian and in the parallel language of hand gestures, which is necessary for survival in Naples. Americans use hand gestures too, but they employ them in a completely different way. Except for a few precise ones (“Tsk, tsk” with the carrot-peeling movement of two index fingers; curling up one index finger to mean
Come here
), American hand gestures are large, sweeping, and general. And they vary from person to person. In Naples, they are so specific that there is even a dictionary of
gesti,
complete with pictures of someone’s hand and the description of the movement. As a foreigner, you must learn this language just as you learn the verbs or