IHAD TRAVELED ALL OVER THE WORLD IN MY HALF CENTURY ON earth and had seen quite a few sights: Hong Kong’s harbor with its roar of construction and thousands of man-made lights, the pyramids perched on the edge of the desert as the evening call to prayer was shouted from Cairo’s minarets, the view of blue Diamond Head from Waikiki at dusk, Venice by night as an orchestra played in Piazza San Marco. I had watched the sun rise over the red rooftops in Vienna, climbed a castle to get a good view of the bullfight below in a small village in Spain, visited the Eiffel Tower with my two children, drank Mekhong whiskey at night on the beach in Ko Chang, Thailand, with my husband, danced on the frozen Bering Sea, and had driven clear across my own beautiful country, through its prairies, badlands, and mountains. I witnessed the wonder of New York City pretty much every day of my adult life; I walked most of its streets and had seen it from a blimp and a helicopter and from countless planes, trains, and cars. On this last trip, almost home, I would take a ride on the back of a friend’s motorcycle through Rome. All thanks to Vita, who had come to America and had given me—and my family—the chance at a charmed life.
But all those things I had seen and done, they all paled in comparison to the Bay of Naples, the place where my great-great-grandmother had started over, for all of us.
That’s how beautiful Naples was to me at sunset—its violet waters tranquil, Capri whispering, the thousands of tiny houses aflame with orange light, and Vesuvio calmly looking down on it all like a patient mother. See Naples and die, the saying went. But I would see Naples and live. And so would Vita.
I had written thousands of stories in my lifetime, as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and author. But none of those stories compared to Vita’s life story. The miseria, the dead babies, the living babies, the murder, the trip to and then from Naples. She hadn’t written about others’ adventures, but had lived her own, which gave way to ours. She and all those millions of immigrants—your family included—who had come to make their lives and the lives of their children better.
The mothers, the grandmothers, the great-grandmothers, and the great-greats were the unsung champions who had cooked and cleaned and washed mountains of laundry and fed and taught and nursed us back to health decade after decade, pushing each generation forward, not out of self-interest or personal gratification, but out of love.
They were the true heroes. Not victims, but victors. Forget Odysseus and Hercules and the rest. Forget Zeus and Hera and the other gods and goddesses.
Vita had changed her destiny and ours. And I wondered suddenly if it mattered who my great-great-grandfather was and whether there had ever been a warrior gene in my family. Vita had helped make our lives what they would become, by sheer force of will.
IMMA AND I SPENT TWO DAYS SEARCHING NAPLES’ ARCHIVES FOR newspapers from the time of the murder. But we had no luck. I decided, finally, that our research was done. It was time to have some fun.
We ate a wonderful dinner at a place in the Latin Quarter called Hosteria Toledo. I didn’t feel guilty, like I usually would have, thinking of Vita’s hard life. I knew if she had been here she would have toasted me with some primitivo wine and told me to enjoy every damn bite.
A family of four flew past us on a moped as we ate, mother, father, infant, and toddler, none of them wearing helmets. People had told me to avoid Naples, that I would hate it. But I loved it. The excitement of it, the charge in the air, the feeling of life swirling all around you and threatening to eat you alive. Maybe it was the wine. Or maybe it was me, Vita’s spirit rising in me. I really adored it here. Though I guarded my wallet carefully.
The next morning we visited the veiled Christ, a delicate sculpture that seemed to be made of cloth, which was just down the street from our pensione. We ate pizza that was so good it was worth waiting ninety minutes in a cramped crowd, nearly getting run down by motorcycles. And drank pink Campari Spritzes as we sat outside in the neighborhood.
As we walked the narrow, crowded streets, we looked into the open living rooms of Naples’s citizens, freely displaying the details of their lives like the characters in some dramatic play. More than once, I saw a mother and her teenage daughter, clearly pregnant, screaming and flailing arms and making obscene hand gestures at one another, all right in front of us, the gray-haired grandmother joining in with a curse every now and then.
We saw rats. And miles of laundry. And piles and piles of garbage. We watched women go by dressed in short-short black netted skirts barely covering their thongs, their breasts spilling out of their skintight tank tops, their heels spiked, their hair elaborately teased, and their makeup bold and garish over unnatural orange salon tans.
“We call these coarse women of Naples vrenzole,” Imma explained, like an anthropologist. “They’re not prostitutes. It’s just the way they dress. The male equivalent are called cuozzi.” She pointed a few out to me. They wore their hair gelled or with their initials shaven into the backs of their heads, their jeans tight and riding low, and their shirts unbuttoned halfway down to their stomachs, silver chains adorning their orange-tanned chests. “Wow,” was all I could muster as they loped past us, chewing gum and talking loudly.
On the way back to our pensione, I watched the city fly by from the taxi window, my head swimming from Campari and prosecco. Crowds of young people laughing, couples kissing, mopeds whizzing. Our driver, like most of Naples’s drivers, was an older man, with white hair and a quick smile, happy to have two women in the backseat of his cab. Shouting over the loud chatter of the dispatcher on his radio, he made small talk with us, about what we’d seen and where we were headed.
We hopped out of the cab at our corner. After three or four beats, I felt for my cell phone and realized—with panic—that I had left it on the backseat of the taxi. “My phone!” I shouted to Imma and then promptly took off running after the small white cab, which was at the top of the block, stopping for traffic, its red taillights lit.
“Fermata! Fermata!” I shouted. “Stop! Stop! Mi telefono! My telephone is in that taxi!” People on the street stopped and looked at the crazy American woman speaking her own incomprehensible dialect.
I chased the cab several blocks, my flip-flops nearly flying off on the wet, grimy cobblestone streets. I wished I was wearing my sneakers. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The cab was much too fast for me, its lights shrinking street by street. I heaved for breath, sorry I had smoked several Chesterfields that weekend with Imma.
Finally I stopped and put my hands on my thighs and bent over, gasping for air. I looked up and watched the taxi’s distant taillights disappear around a corner into the chaos of Naples.
I was slightly dizzy, not just from lack of oxygen, but from the alcohol. I was tipsy, and had no one but myself to blame for my lost phone. Not the ghost of Vita or Miserabila. No zingare. There were no curses. Only bad luck we made for ourselves.
Imma was waiting for me on the street back near the pensione. She was talking to a police officer, who shrugged and said that aside from calling the phone, he could do nothing. Imma had been calling my number for the past ten minutes. The radio dispatcher was no doubt too loud for the driver to hear the incessant ring.
It rang and rang. Until, after about fifteen minutes, it didn’t ring anymore. It was powered off. Someone had found it on the seat and had taken it, naturally. What did I expect from Naples?
But what was a lost phone compared with a lost child? How lucky was I to have only lost a phone?
I was experiencing perspective. The perspective of the blessed. I lived a blessed life. A charmed life, all because of Vita. I said a small prayer in my head, not to the saints or to Jesus or the Virgin Mary or the gods. But to Vita, to thank her for the life I had.
UPSTAIRS IN MY ROOM—MY MODERN, COMFORTABLE ROOM WITH ITS balcony and refrigerator and snacks and bottled water—I emailed my husband from my computer. I told him the phone was lost but that I would see him, and Dean and Paulina and my mother, the next day after my nine-hour flight. What was nine hours compared with ten days on a ship, throwing up without a bucket?
I realized not only that I had perspective, but that my perception of myself and my whole family and world had changed. I thought back on the story of the cave, not the ones here in Matera, or the Crypt of the Original Sin, but the one that Plato had written about. The Allegory of the Cave. I had been so young when I’d first read that. And so wrong.
The facts and the reality I thought I knew about myself and my family were, like those shadows on Plato’s cave wall, all a substitute for the truth—the reality that I had dug up in Matera. The reality that was Vita and Francesco.
I had had it all wrong. The murder genes. The card game. The lost son, who had turned out to be a daughter. I wasn’t even the person I thought I was, fighting off that defective DNA all these years. My perception was forever altered.
For decades I thought I had been outside the cave, one of the lucky ones, but I had been a prisoner—like Francesco—all along, gazing at the shadows of what I perceived to be the truth on the cave wall.
I was lucky to be at the mouth of the cave now, the darkness finally passed, squinting into the sunlight.