Kay Marie Bontempo
It’s Not True, But I Believe It
Non è vero, ma ci credo. It’s not true, but I believe it. It was the first thing I saw when I moved to Naples. Someone had painted the saying in huge block letters on a wheatpaste sticker, then stuck it to the door of the Montesanto station, which led me to the place where I would live. It could have been common local wisdom, or a private joke; I hadn’t the faintest idea. I was a transplant from the steel skyscrapers of Manhattan, which seemed the antithesis of the colorful laundry hanging out the windows of the Spanish Quarter a few blocks away, the loud, neomelodic music that emanated from the apartment next door and never stopped, the Vespas that careened from alleyway to corner, driven by two or three children at once.
The first week, I noticed the sentiment everywhere—in the streets, in people’s language.
“Take this string of plastic peppers,” street vendors declared as they thrust them into my hand. “Hold one in your left hand, one in your right, throw salt over your shoulder and you’ll have good luck forever. Then give the one in your right hand to the person you love and he’ll love you back.”
When I protested, not wanting to pay for the trinket, they rolled their eyes, dropping all pretense of superstition, and simply said one euro, that’s all. It’ll bring you good luck. It’s not true, but I believe it.
I felt it in my decisions, too. I had no place to live, so I booked three days in an Airbnb for the meantime. I asked the host casually if it was a good idea for me to live in this neighborhood, after all the talk I’d heard about crime.
“You won’t have any problems,” she declared cheerfully. “Our street was dangerous ten years ago, but now? You’ll be all right.” Behind her, her boyfriend shook his head darkly: It wasn’t true, but she believed it.
It was also a mantra for navigating the dubious charm of men I met, a few of whom seemed to say whatever might please me without much regard for the truth.
“We’ll see each other again,” one promised as he slipped out of my room the morning after. After he left I noticed his belt forgotten by the nightstand, curled up like a silver snake. Perhaps he’d left it on purpose, I mused, intending to see me again. It wasn’t true, but I believed it.
At the barber’s:
“So you’re REALLY from AMERICA,” shouted the woman beside me, who was getting bleach-blonde highlights. America, America. She whistled a few bars of that “America” song from West Side Story.
“Yeah, New York.”
“And you came ALL the way to NAPOLI?” she said with a smile.
She had headphones on, causing her to shout, but made no motion to remove them. Madonna. Ma.don.na. She overpronounced every syllable of the second Madonna, to emphasize how bizarre she found my decision.
“Here I am.”
“But what in the name of Jesus fucking Christ are you doing here?”
I explained my project. My elevator pitch took fourteen minutes in English but six in Italian, because I cut out the parts I didn’t know how to say. A journalism grant from the States. Funding from the U.S. government. Research about refugees. A trip across the Atlantic to recount the stories of others’ trips across the Mediterranean. A documentary film, eventually.
She nodded sympathetically. —I’m Neapolitan, she said proudly, seemingly a non sequitur. I’m from here, always and forever. The barber laughed and said something in dialect that I didn’t understand.
“I lived and worked in Rome, though,” she said. Eighteen years. “And I just came back here last week.”
“For work?”
“No. I left my job. I left everything.”
“For what?”
She looked at me as though I were crazy.
“For Napoli.”
“Because it’s where you were born?”
“When a place is in your heart,” she said with sudden emotion, “you can’t stay anywhere else. Not forever.” She shook her head at me. “I changed my entire life to come back to Napoli. You’ll understand someday, when you leave.”
Seven months into my year in Naples, I fell deliriously ill with a mysterious infection and sepsis. I woke up in a dilapidated hospital. Someone x-rayed me, declaring that I had pneumonia; a day later they apologized for misreading the scan, and said I had a kidney infection that spread to my bloodstream.
I slept on a gurney in the ER for days. The first night a prisoner in handcuffs occupied the gurney beside mine, until at 3 a.m. the police came to take him back to Poggioreale Penitentiary. I faded in and out of consciousness, but mostly I remember my roommates from our little apartment in the Pignasecca, Sandra, Elena, and Marco, parading in and out with tins of eggplant their mothers had cooked. Once, I woke up to see Pino the fruit seller with a kilo of oranges; another time the girl who lived downstairs from me came with clean pajamas, both anxious to help “their American” recover. Long before I felt physically better I marveled at the love and generosity of all these people with whom I had had such brief relationships.
After five days, a concerned friend of mine called the hospital. In Italian with a faked local accent, he posed as my cousin and threatened to trash the ER if they didn’t give me a real bed. It worked, though I thought his threat improbable. A week after they released me, someone really did vandalize the emergency room, and I wondered if he had understood something I didn’t about this place.
The day they released me, the whole world changed.
According to Sandra: A man in China ate a bat and got terribly ill. He went to dinner with a friend, who woke up the next day just as sick. Within a few days, hundreds of people were unable to breathe. At some point someone from China had boarded a plane to Italy, and now we were the country with the most cases outside of Asia.
“Italy” abruptly became inevitably linked to “COVID-19” in the minds of every Westerner. Other countries wrote scathing headlines. Americans were scared of us. But I was American, stuck here.
The world didn’t change all at once, however. For one strange week, we hung suspended in the air, living in confusion as to what would happen next. There was a vaguely ominous mood, yet the streets of Naples and the Pignasecca felt as lively and cheerful as ever. People still went to bars, drank their coffees in the morning and their spritzes in the evening, shouted off their balconies and called down gaily to their friends. Pino sold fruit to the neighborhood as he always had. The fish market stayed open. Its fishmongers screamed fresh fish incessantly, even though everyone could see and smell what they were hawking.
The president ordered universities closed for two weeks, then extended it to a month. For a time, everyone was unsure what would happen next. Their classes canceled, Elena and Marco returned to their hometowns. Sandra’s mother called her screaming and cursing that if she didn’t come home now, she might as well never come home. Sandra shrugged and said she’d go in a week. It wasn’t true, but she believed it. We both knew that once she did, anything could happen; the ferry back from Procida shut down every time Naples experienced a strong wind, so there was no guarantee she could return soon, even if she wanted to.
The two of us spent that week entirely indoors, though there was no rule—yet—against going out. The world seemed to wait for an answer, on its tiptoes peering over the edge of tomorrow, as if the future were already written and we had only to wait for the headline. Time seemed to stop, and we slowly melted into the dim, windowless living room. Sandra was already given to periods of lethargy, and was known to disappear into her dark room, in the bowels of the apartment, and not emerge for days. Now that the outdoors was suddenly imbued with a sense of fear, we closed ourselves in.
The intensity of the next seven days rivaled that of the prior seven months, already a turbulent period. Despite having lived with Sandra for the better part of a year, I felt I didn’t really know her. She was the kind of woman who wanted people to be a little bit frightened of her; with me she had succeeded, and as a result I knew her as a constructed character, a silhouette. She was exactly my age, but seemed larger in every sense—physically, because she was tall and shaped like a Russian nesting doll, and in personality, because she never spoke below a shout. She shouted equally for glee and for rage, and when she was particularly fired up, often about nothing in particular, she would flip off and on the switch that controlled the lights to Marco’s room, screaming a volley of affectionate insults up and hollering at him to come downstairs and sit with us. One thing I had always liked about her was that she spoke in an unusual mixture of Italian and dialect, even to me, the foreigner. It seemed like a deliberate choice, daring me to try to understand.
Over the months I had developed an instinctive reaction to being around Sandra. When I saw a message from her arrive on my phone, I often jumped or felt vaguely uneasy. I wasn’t used to the degree of confrontation she had brought into my life. She and the other two roommates maintained an atmosphere of tolerated chaos; they seemed at ease with a level of discord that to me signaled that someone was in the wrong. On one occasion, during one of our many fights about me leaving the lights on and raising the electric bill, the shouts escalated to insults and Sandra hurled a wooden spoon at Elena, which hit me instead.
“I’m not used to fighting with people like this,” I had said tremulously. “If I did something wrong, or you thought I was angry, I’m sorry. We can talk about it calmly.”
“Fight?” Sandra said, visibly confused. “This isn’t fighting. We’re just talking about things.”
Sandra neither worked nor studied, so she lived without obligations. She had a way of extending routine errands into grand events, and could spend an entire day on a mission to buy dish soap: deciding what time she ought to go, considering which vendor was likely to sell the brand she liked, dressing and making the descent, as she called it, from our apartment perched above the Pignasecca, haggling with the vendors once she arrived. What was more, her demeanor had a way of taking charge, drawing you into her, so that you too felt as though going to the market stall to exchange a sweater with a hole in it was the day’s central focus. Even on days when I zipped in and out of the apartment, sweating and lugging camera gear to film interviews at different ends of the city, if we spent a few hours together, I tended to look back on Sandra’s one non-activity as the main thing I had done that day.
Now we sat in the smoky apartment, the two of us, for a week. Time seemed to expand so that each instant felt like its own day; it reminded me of childhood. We had no windows save for the one in my room, so all hours felt the same. I felt myself comfortably slipping into indolence. It was pleasant to live this way, I thought. The university closures didn’t affect me, since I wasn’t a student, but a sense of unease was spreading and it suddenly felt unwise to gallivant around the city. I was happy not to work; since my illness, I felt slothful, constantly drowsy. Inevitably upon waking, I’d have between one and thirty texts from Sandra, though she was just in the next room. The first one was always Uèèèè!, followed by a string of exclamations. In her texts she always addressed me as tesoro (“dear”) or amore (“love”)—something she didn’t do in person. When I walked over and pounded on the wall, she’d emerge from her dark cave in the back of the apartment, and we’d put on the livestream she had pirated on my computer so we could watch reality TV.
As for the lights, Sandra won; not having to work, I saw no point in keeping them on, so we lived the whole day in the dark. In this sudden uncertainty, the little adjustments that had made our life seem hard no longer mattered. I didn’t care if there wasn’t always hot water; I didn’t mind showering in the dark. I didn’t care that the sink sent electric shocks down one arm and up the other if you touched it while touching anything metal. I didn’t even care that the bathroom was so narrow I had to sit sideways on the toilet. After seven months of quarreling, I finally embraced Sandra’s way of life, and our apartment became home.
One evening, while we watched our fifth Alessandro Siani film in two days, she said in an uncharacteristically shy voice, “Can I ask you a question? There’s something I’ve always wondered about America.”
I turned to her in surprise.
“Sure.”
“When two Americans are in love, which ‘I love you’ do they say?”
“In English it’s ‘I love you.’”
“Yes, but how does the other person know what they mean? Is it Ti voglio bene or Ti amo?”
I thought about it. The former was more casual, something you could say easily to anybody; the other cut deeper.
“I guess you just have to guess from context.”
She cocked her head, unsatisfied with the answer. I pondered the converse of her question: did they have to push all relationships through two separate stages, first declaring a milder love and then a more intense one? How confusing. Without warning, the walls shook with some of the loudest explosions I’d ever heard: erupting boom one after another. It was hard to place exactly where they were coming from; it felt as though it were inside our building. But, ruling that out as impossible, I assumed it was from the street outside or the balcony of an adjacent building. Sandra screamed.
“What’s happening?” I shouted over the din.
By now I was used to the fireworks that were frequently shot off in the nearby Spanish Quarter, but these were closer than I was used to.
“It must be Carnevale,” Sandra yelled.
Indeed it was. I had forgotten the holiday. In our late February haze, we had forgotten the outside world entirely. We ran to my room and flung open the windows that looked out on the market. The night sky exploded with purple and maroon, sunbursts of dripping fire. Official celebrations had been canceled due to the pandemic, so these weren’t city-sponsored fireworks; they were the homestyle ones we often heard echoing through the neighborhood. I couldn’t make out any human figures, but I imagined guys like Sandra’s cousins standing on rooftops and street corners, sending Roman candles into the air. Sandra seized my hand.
“I’m orgogliosa to have a friend from New York,” she said, apropos of nothing.
“What’s orgogliosa?”
“Fiera.”
“I don’t know that word either.”
I pulled out my phone and looked it up. It meant proud.
I received daily emails from the institution that had given me my grant. I was first “encouraged” to depart Italy, then “strongly urged.” They assured me there was “no cause for alarm,” then announced that “a state of emergency” was imminent. I let the email headings turn from normal to all-caps to bright red, deleting each one as it arrived. On Saturday, Sandra’s friend Aurora was there; she had argued with her mother and arrived at our doorstep, tear-streaked and with a suitcase, to stay with Sandra. The three of us sat around the dining table, smoking and playing cards. Months ago the roommates had taught me scopa, a game whose name meant “sweep” but was also slang for “fuck.” It caused me great confusion, and I avoided referring to “sweeping” in daily life in case it were interpreted as fucking. Usually I just gestured vaguely towards the broom and announced, — Let’s make the floors clean, a phrasing which was awkward but accomplished its intentions. Scopa the game was like poker, except not at all, and the cards themselves were incomprehensible. There were fewer than 52, and often I threw down a hand triumphantly saying I had a jack, when in fact the card was an eight and I just couldn’t tell the difference. Having the rules explained to me in raucous dialect hadn’t helped, but the game was a favorite pastime in the apartment nonetheless.
“Scopa!”
“What are you talking about? That was a four.”
My phone vibrated, and I picked up. It was my parents. I spoke to them every few days on the phone, which felt excessive in the U.S. but which my Italian roommates considered shockingly negligent.
My father was practically shouting.
“Do you have any idea what’s going on in the news?”
Sandra and Aurora listened with interest. Sandra once said she found it charming when I spoke English on the phone, though she couldn’t understand a word.
“Did another Democratic candidate drop out?”
“This coronavirus thing is real,” my mother said. “The news says there are a lot of people sick in Italy.”
“I won’t get sick.”
“Their government is about to lose its mind. They could shut down the metro and intercity travel. And if they do, you won’t be able to leave the country.”
“Why would I want to leave?”
“If there’s a quarantine.”
Quarantine. The word sounded so absurd that I burst out laughing.
“There won’t be. Everything is fine here.”
It wasn’t true, but I believed it.
“I’m still coming to Italy to visit you,” the text read. It was from the boy I had loved all through college, whom I hadn’t seen in a year. Every month or so he would mention visiting me, but always half-joking. Most recently he had mentioned a trip in early March—six days from now—but I’d assumed the pandemic had thrown a wrench in his plans.
“Meet me in Rome this weekend.”
I stared at the pixelated words, dumbfounded.
“They might not even let your plane leave.”
I’d seen the headlines from the U.S., the travel concerns. I knew he was still on campus, with one semester left of law school.
“I’m coming to see you anyway.”
“If you travel to Italy they won’t let you back on campus.”
“Graduating is overrated,” he responded. “Piazza Venezia, Friday night.”
“It’s insane,” Sandra declared as she poured coffee from the Bialetti. “It’s dangerous. The trains to Rome are barely running anymore.”
“He’s coming all the way from the U.S.”
“I heard travel is limited to government officials now. They won’t sell you a ticket.”
“That’s bullshit, and if it’s true, I’ll hide in the train bathroom.”
She stopped questioning me. I bit my nails, edited footage, disinfected the doorknobs as I agonized over the decision. I looked up the train schedule and let myself miss one departure, then the next.
The last train to Rome was from Garibaldi station at 11 p.m. Normally Sandra could no more stop herself from criticizing than from breathing, but at ten she ran into my bedroom and flung my camera bag open.
“You have to pack,” she yelled. “Bring everything you can in case you never come back.”
She opened my closet without hesitating and flung underwear, jeans, dresses at me. I stuffed my camera inside an old sweatshirt for protection and packed that too. I couldn’t discern whether she secretly wanted me to go or had just given up arguing.
Sandra kissed me twice and then surprised me by wrapping me in a hug.
“I love you,” she shouted as I zipped the backpack. “What if we never see you again?”
The “I love you” she used, I noticed, was the second type, the real one.
“Of course you will,” I mumbled into her hair. She smelled like tobacco and Wonder Rose perfume from the Zara store in the mall. “I’ll be back soon. We’ll watch every episode of Gossip Girl. This virus thing will pass.”
She gave me a skeptical look.
I couldn’t help laughing as I ran out the door without locking it.
“I’ll come back, I’ll come back,” I called over my shoulder.
It wasn’t true, but I believed it.
Love in the time of coronavirus is spending all day in a windowless room, idly smoking cigarettes with your roommates but making sure never to share. It’s learning to wash your hands for twenty seconds, and learning how long twenty seconds really is.
Love in the time of coronavirus is Sandra’s cousin calling from Procida and begging her to buy six bars of hashish, because who knew when drug dealers would start to shut down business? It’s Sandra coming into your room for the first time ever, sitting on your bed with uncharacteristic shyness, and begging you to come with her because she’s frightened of drugs. It’s walking up the crumbling streets to a hill in Materdei, crouching between parked cars beneath the crimson sky, giggling as you wait for the dealer to show up on his motorcycle. You can almost pretend things are normal as she stuffs the sticky bars of hash into her bra and you walk back through the deserted streets to fry eggplants in the apartment. Love in the time of coronavirus is Italians trying not to kiss one another on the cheeks, instead standing awkwardly for an eternity every time they say hello. It’s the thousand and one texts from the US asking if you’re alive. It’s your parents staying up all night to call you despite the time difference, because they need to hear every update to make sure you’re OK. It’s Sandra packing up alone and going back to her island, possibly forever, but still sending you a weepy voice message in farewell.
It’s the boy you’ve been crazy about forever impulsively flying to Italy to see you, only to arrive five hours before a quarantine shuts down the entire country.
It’s going to Rome to meet him, only to get trapped when the lockdown begins. It’s his flight home getting canceled, too, and him being stuck at his aunt’s place in Prati while you’re in a B&B by Porta Maggiore, finally in the same city and yet worlds apart. It’s the call from the embassy saying your visa is canceled, ordering you to evacuate and fly back to the US. It’s the moment you realize your passport and belongings are all back in Naples, sitting in the dark musty apartment with Sandra, and you may never see them again.
It’s nervously inviting him to come over, even though no one is supposed to go outside. It’s the cool dry air in Piazza Venezia at night, and the realization that the two of you are among the only people in the world who have ever seen it empty.
It’s giving him the plastic good-luck pepper, and hoping the vendor was telling the truth about the love spell.
It’s filling out a handwritten autodichiarazione—a form claiming you have the right to travel between cities—with both your names, and the madcap drive down the vacant highway back to Naples for the passport. It’s him asking four hours in if this is illegal, and neither of you knowing the answer. It’s leaving your clothes and books behind in the abandoned apartment, hoping Sandra and Elena will keep them if you never come back.
It’s the realization that despite being trapped together in a pandemic, your relationship isn’t any more certain than it was in college. It’s having an impromptu dinner party with the strangers in your B&B and inviting him because part of you still wants to see him. It’s wondering if a dinner party is subversive now—someone got arrested for having one, I swear, Sandra saw it on the news—and that we do it anyway, because humans need each other.