Only in Naples Read Online Free PDF Page B

when I took my sullied things to the
lavanderie
(dry cleaners), the women would take the bag and look inside. Shocked, scandalized, they would stare at me and say,
“Ma c’è roba intima!”
There are intimate robes!
    What intimate robes? Where?
    “You took your bras and underwear to the dry cleaners?” Cynthia asked me, horrified. “Oh, honey, no.” She explained that in Naples
roba intima
—bras and underwear and even undershirts—are to be touched by no one but the owner. They are extremely, extremely private. Here I was traipsing around the city with my bag of dirty panties, shoving them in people’s faces! How humiliating!
    “But what am I supposed to do, Cynthia? I certainly can’t bring my intimate robes to Salva’s apartment and ask Raffaella to put them in her washing machine!”
    It hadn’t occurred to me to do what any Neapolitan woman would have done: buy detergent and hand-wash my panties in the sink. I was raised by a woman who would never
handle
her intimates. She’d do what any respectable preacher’s daughter from the South would do: she’d throw her stuff into the washing machine, and turn that temperature up as hot as it would go.
    And so the political consul of the United States agreed to let me come over later that day with my unwieldy sack of soiled undergarments to use her enormous GE washing machine (the sack was enormous because my first solution to the no-washing-machine problem was of course just to buy
lots
of underwear). I counted the hours for the working day to end so that I could go to Cynthia’s penthouse apartment overlooking the bay. I needed her words of wisdom as well as her washing machine.
    “Let me explain,” she began, after getting my panties spinning (anonymous in all that American space! How I love the Department of State!). She opened a monstrous bag of Doritos from the military base and set it on the coffee table between us. “There are some things you do
not
mention in Naples when it comes to hygiene and private parts. First of all, they
have
to think you bidet. At your own home, you give guests who ask to use the bathroom one hand towel and one separate bidet towel. When you are invited to someone else’s home and you are given a separate bidet towel,
do not say,
‘No thanks, I don’t need this.’ That is an admission that you, as an American, do not bidet.”
    “But I don’t bidet!”
    “
They cannot know that.
They must think that you use the specific
detergente intimo—
intimate detergent, or pussy suds as I like to think of them. And that you dry yourself with the bidet towel afterward.”
    Her preemptive strike was too late. I remembered with horror that just days before, when Raffaella had handed me two towels when I went to the bathroom, I had actually said, cheerfully, “One’s plenty! I’ll use the same one for both hands!”
    “But don’t they understand that toilet paper, used correctly, can do the trick?” Or if not, I hoped, couldn’t I be the one to enlighten them on the possibilities of what the Brits call the mighty loo roll?
    “No.” Cynthia had patience. Oh, did she have patience. “They find it revolting. Not cleaning yourself with a specific kind of soap after doing
cacca
puts you in the category of animals and Gypsies.”
    We munched on Doritos, and I told her more about Salva and the Avallones. I described how after dinner at the Denza, I would walk down the marble steps to the communal pay phone with a plastic phone card in my sweaty hand. My nerves would settle as soon as I heard his cheerful
“Eh, Pagnottella!”
In Salva’s tone of voice, and in the honks of his horn as he picked me up in his little red Fiat to take me to eat his mother’s food, I heard:
You are a woman, and you are beautiful, and you are full of healthy, human appetites.
I’d learned a lot of things growing up in America, but I’d missed that part. My whole body was starting to crave the way this guy made me feel.
    As I began to fall for