The Italian Affair (3 page)

Naples
- 5.30 pm local time - 28th August 1986

By the time they’d navigated the congestion, it was early evening. All around them surged the energy of a city awakened from a heavy siesta and fuelled by the expectation of a long and lazy summer Saturday night ahead.

The ancient piazza they’d arrived in had little shops around its circumference and was buzzing with activity. The air, although heavy with the day’s heat and exhaust fumes, carried a seductive whiff of fresh coffee beans and nicotine intermingled with expensive citrus smelling perfume.

As soon as they’d stopped, Gennaro torpedoed himself out of his mobile deli and shouted “Ciao,” across the street to a tanned man in a pair of bright red jeans standing next to what looked like an expensive lingerie shop.

“Theeze is your new home. It is the house of Pasquale,” cried Gennaro to Issy, as he simultaneously sauntered over to his friend giving him a jovial man hug and a kiss on both cheeks. As Issy followed and got closer to where they were standing, she could see that the shop was for real women who had the time, energy and desire to dress in lacy bras, pants, stockings and suspenders.

“God,” she thought. “I’m going to be living in a posh pant shop.” As she stared aghast at some of the items on display she wondered why on earth Italian women had to go to such lengths to look good under their clothes.

She’d never seen such under-garments in her life. In Yorkshire the weather was too cold for “itsy bitsy” underwear, and in Oxford people were more interested in being seduced by the density of grey matter rather than the brevity of pants.

As Issy continued to scour the lingerie shop window, she caught a reflection of Pasquale looking back at her unashamedly giving her the once over lustfully from behind. His eyes literally invaded the small of her back as she watched him take in her long blond hair and settle his eyes on her bum.

For Pasquale, it seemed, a woman was something to watch and lust over. His act of blatant staring and public lusting did not seem to be an embarrassment as it would be for an English man. Issy stared back marvelling at his audacity and his mistaken belief that it was ok to engage in full on rapacious gawping without any sign of subterfuge or subtlety.

As Issy continued to watch his reflection in the window, Pasquale’s face contorted in what could only be described as the look of a man indulging in seductive foreplay.

And then alarmingly, the tanned pant man moved towards her and started to undress her with his eyes – which did not take very long as she wasn’t wearing much so it got personal very quickly. Apart from her cotton beige dress and big feminist Dr Martens, Issy felt stark bollock naked.

“In England,” Issy ruminated in disbelief “there were laws that regulated this type of behaviour but here in Naples there were seemingly none.” Trying to shake him off she gave him a disparaging look via the glass frontage of his shop, but it just made things worse as he devoured the back of her body and came within millimeters of standing right on top of her. The more she fought with his reflection the more he lusted.

Finally, in total exasperation, she turned to face him hoping that this would cause him to avert his gaze but quickly realized that this hope was totally naive.

Nothing could have fuelled the burning embers in his red pants more. He scanned her up and down from the front like a caged wild animal about to be let out into the wilderness, before resting his eyes on the bit he wanted to start devouring first which – now he’d just set eyes on it in the flesh – was Issy’s braless chest.

When the sisterhood had advocated burning bras they had most definitely not factored in Naples. Issy no longer felt smugly equal and victorious but vulnerable and bloody stupid. She wrapped her arms across her chest to try and stop him intruding further.

But this was no distraction for pant man he’d already seen enough and his imagination did the rest. Speaking directly to her upper torso Pasquale said “You are beautiful. Mother of God. You stay at my ‘ome.”

Issy’s grasp of Italian was good enough to understand his first few words. The fact that, according to him, she was moving in with him made things ten times worse.

And yet somehow, despite her Greenham Common credentials, she was oddly starting to find his advances slightly hilarious, in a mad kind of way.

The last time she had held a man’s gaze at such close proximity, it had been Jeremy’s and all she had wanted then was for the world to stop so she could savour the feelings that the connection his eyes had stirred within her.

Now all she wanted to do was to laugh out loud for a very long time.

“We go inside. Yes?” asked Pasquale in great hope as he nodded towards a large open wooden door in the centre of a regal looking palazzo painted light green on the outside with dark green wooden shutters next door to his itsy bitsy pant shop.

He was getting more forward by the minute.

“Er, yes sure,” replied Issy slowly – keen to ensure the way she spoke and her intonation left him in no doubt that she would go inside because she needed to have a roof over her head and NOT for any other bloody reason.

As she turned to pick up her bags, she was more than delighted that Gennaro had already picked them up. As the three of them walked into the building with her huge “Ban the Nukes” suitcase they looked like an unlikely trio of anti-nuclear campaigners.

The entrance to the palazzo smelt old, but looked opulent in a slightly jaded and antique kind of way. Vast wide stone columns seemed to be holding the place up, and in the corner a small man slept at his desk. As he lifted his face from the table in front of him he looked irritated by the sound of the intruders and their footsteps on the marble floor more from the fact he had to rouse himself from his post-lunch slumber. And he didn’t try to hide the fact that he was PISSED OFF at actually having been woken to do some work.

The men exchanged words, in what appeared to be a local dialect, before he gesticulated towards a gold plated lift that just about squeezed all of them in plus the luggage.

In the harsh light of the lift, and reflected goldness Issy caught a glimpse of herself and grimaced at the big cotton grayish pants and braless chest that stared back.

Her private and most intimate secrets were on full display and Pasquale, she could tell was loving every minute of the hot proximity to flesh.

By the time they got to the fifth floor, they were all sweating and way too familiar with one another’s anatomy due to the fact the lift was not just gold plated but totally mirrored. Relief came when Pasquale and Gennaro started to talk and finally decanted themselves out of it into a narrow marbled landing.

Fumbling around for his keys through excitement, Pasquale opened a big carved wooden door which led them into the apartment where Issy would be living hopefully without him. “Welcome to my ‘ome Issy,” he said delighted to have her over the threshold.

The apartment felt cool after the suffocating heat of the past few hours and as Issy scanned the room she could see it had all the basics. “Will it just be me living here?” she asked Pasquale with her fingers crossed.

“Si,” he replied suggestively. Ignoring his humour, Issy walked through the apartment. A small kitchen table with four old chairs stood in one corner. A cooker stood in the other with the mandatory Italian coffee machine and a tin of freshly ground beans on the worktop right next to it together with an ashtray, a packet of Merit cigarettes and some matches – giving an immediate insight to living the Neapolitan way.

There was also a large old fridge buzzing in one of the opposite corners of the room which Pasquale grandly threw open to show off its contents which, apart from the nicely chilled water and wine, looked like the exact same ingredients that had been swinging about gaily in the back of Gennaro’s deli on wheels.

As he demonstrated to Issy how to open the shutters and windows, Pasquale remained attached to her like glue, getting up as close as he could, all the while laughing and joking with Gennaro in what was obviously a local dialect that Issy could not decipher a word of.

After the grand tour of the small flat Pasquale decided it was his turn to ask personal questions.

“You ‘ave a boy?” he asked, cheekily cocking his head to one side with the look of real hope that she hadn’t got a boyfriend and that he’d got there first. Issy felt trapped. It was his house and she didn’t wanted to be rude but there were limits.

“No. I don’t. I am single and that is the way I want it” Issy replied a bit snappily given the contents of the fridge. She didn’t like the innuendo, so to press the point home more strongly she added:

“I’m here to learn Italian, teach English and travel. Nothing complicated. I just wanted to get away for a bit. Maybe do some painting and writing and be ALONE.”

It was a romantic picture of what she intended to do whilst she was in Naples and not entirely true. What she was actually doing here was much more straightforward – but she had no energy to tell them the ins and outs of her recent past.

The truth was she’d been desperately in love with a married man and needed some space to think about how she could ever piece her life back together, which only a few weeks before had crashed messily onto the floor into a million little pieces.

She really didn’t want to go into that because it just meant more pain and she’d already told Gennaro too much. And so after nearly thirty minutes with Pasquale, Issy now craved some of that space that she had travelled to Naples for.

Issy desperately looked around the room. She wanted them to leave. How long did it take to show her round a tiny one-bedroom apartment? She’d seen everything that she possibly needed to see at least twice.

And the space was suddenly becoming smaller, as these wild Neapolitan men who wanted to own so much of her time and energy continued to stride around the place opening and closing cupboards and inspecting piping and plumbing.

The combination of intense heat and lusting was exhausting. So she tried to drop large hints that she really did have everything she needed.

“OK. Thanks so much for showing me around. I’m looking forward to starting teaching on Monday and I have the details of how to get there. Tonight and tomorrow I’ll spend sight-seeing and getting my bearings and I’ll be fine here on my own. I always am.”

Issy felt a bit guilty at being so blunt to her new hosts but sometimes a bit of straight Yorkshire talking didn’t hurt anyone. But she had yet to learn that subtle hints did not really work in Naples. Pasquale was a hot-blooded Italian and if he was going to be rejected he wasn’t going to go out without a fight.

“You come for pizza tonight?” asked Pasquale hoping to get a different answer to the one he thought he might get.

“No. No. Sorry if this seems rude. You’ve both been really kind bringing me back from the airport, filling the fridge and helping me settle in, but seriously I’ll be fine. I’ve got food. Maybe next week when I’ve settled in we can do pizza.”

“Ok, beautiful” grinned Pasquale determined to keep her to that. Using both of his bronzed hands to accentuate what he was saying. “We go for best pizza in Napoli,” he said whilst digging the knuckle of one of his fingers rather strangely into his right cheek. It was one of many hand gestures Issy would come to understand and use herself in time.

But on that first day, she was just confused by his gesticulations and was only to learn quite a bit later on that digging the knuckle into the cheek was a way that Neapolitans had of communicating how good something was or how good something tasted.

“Call, non?” said Pasquale putting an imaginary phone up to one of his large rubbery tanned ears. “Or you come to my shop if you need the help?”

“Yes. Yes. I will call you or come to your shop if I need help” Issy reassured Pasquale whilst at the same time thinking, “Over my dead body. I will not come to your pant shop if I need help and not even if I need new pants.”

When the front door had finally shut out this loud new world, an overwhelming silence descended around the apartment. Issy slid down the back of the door and put her head into her hands. “God,” she thought in utter despair. “How had she got herself into this mess? Wouldn‘t it have just been easier to sit it out at home and wait for the darkness to lift?”

Naples
– 8am local time August 30th 1986

When Issy got to the school at 8am for her first day of teaching, she found Gennaro sat behind an imposing desk, inhaling deeply on a Merit cigarette just about to knock back an espresso from a small white cup resting on a tiny white ceramic saucer.

Apart from an initial “Ciao”, it was quite clear Gennaro preferred afternoon airport pick-ups to early morning conversations.

He grimaced as his face and body appeared to still be in the process of waking up. Even the nicotine and caffeine didn’t seem to be having any noticeable effect.

There was a STUNNING receptionist called Mariella chatting alongside him in a Neapolitan dialect, and he responded to none of it.

“How can anyone look THAT good first thing in the morning” thought Issy as she self-consciously pulled at her old denim skirt – another item she’d picked up from Oxfam.

The art of dressing seductively had been on display over the weekend. Like many of the Neapolitan women Issy had watched from the balcony of her new apartment, Mariella was beautifully made up and pristinely turned out.