Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson Page A

adjectives of the spoken language.
    When I first arrived in Naples, I would ask the doorman at the boarding school if there was any mail for me, and he would respond without a sound, looking me straight in the eye. He held, however, his thumb and index finger in the form of a pistol and shook his thumb almost imperceptibly from side to side. My response would be to look him in the eye and ask again, is there any mail for me? Once again, he would do the jiggling-thumb-gun thing, and jut out his lower lip just to make things clear.
Oh, grazie,
thank you! I would say, and wink, thinking I had just engaged in some profound covert communication but still having absolutely no idea whether I had any mail or not. I later learned that that hand gesture means
niente,
nothing, and can also be expressed with a click of the tongue and a hand flicking under the chin.
    Watch out, that guy is trying to cheat you
is expressed by pulling down the lower eyelid of one eye with the index finger.
Let’s eat
is all the fingertips of one hand together doing a pecking motion toward the mouth, while
pasta
is the index and middle finger doing a twisting motion simulating a fork gathering up spaghetti. These are just a few of many, but my all-time favorite is the gesture that means someone has died. It is (get this!) the index and middle fingers of the right hand straightened upward together, representing the soul of the deceased, doing a circular, Slinky-like motion up to the sky. The other fingers are closed in a fist. Along with the hand gesture, a quick (rather cheerful, strangely enough) whistle is emitted. This is apparently the sound of the soul of the deceased going to heaven. Just a hop, skip, and a jump! You will hear people in Naples (where to say someone is
morto,
or dead, is considered rather bad taste) describing how Aunt Maria (as soon as the name is uttered, there goes the soul up to heaven with a whistle so we remember she’s dead!) made the best frittata
….
    As for my spoken Italian, the language I was learning was Neapolitan dialect. Not
dialetto stretto,
or pure dialect, but Italian with a marked Neapolitan accent and with many expressions that are unique (I now know) to Naples. The idea of having a down-home southern accent in Italian did not bother me, because I think in some visceral way it took me back to my mother’s Appalachian twang. It’s a different language, I know, but I swear that the feel of it, the pull-up-a-chair-honey-soup’s-on of it, is the same. Ham hocks and beans in southern West Virginia or fried pizza dough smothered in tomato and mozzarella in the countryside surrounding Napoli. Tight Italian soccer shirts and gel in the hair or oversize basketball jerseys and Walmart. The cultures in many ways are polar opposites. But when you’re called to the table by Mama, or Mamma, in that way, in a way that goes straight to your innards…you could just as well be in Bluefield, West Virginia, or Secondigliano, Provincia di Napoli.
    An analogous situation might be an Italian girl, a bit shy, pretty in an old-fashioned way, who has come to the United States to learn English. “Oh, you’re from Italy! Whereabouts?” She responds with a smile, “I’s from Rome but learned myself English in Memphis.” That was the sort of impression I gave, linguistically. In Naples, I learned that any and every verb could be reflexive. I ate myself a plate of pasta, I watched myself a film. My vowels were long and lazy, especially the
a
(in Naples, it lasts so long that you don’t know if the speaker is going to get around to finishing the word). My
s
sounded like
sh.
“To have” was for me the Neapolitan
tenere
(which is more like “got myself”) instead of the Italian
avere.
“Tengo na famma ’e pazze,”
I would say, meaning that I was very, very hungry. Or, literally, “I got myself a crazy hunger.”

    It was the night before I left home for Princeton University. My father, uncle, and grandfather were all die-hard