Initially, she thought I was joking and mumbled sure, of course, while continuing to tend to something in a sizzling pan. But as soon as I could, I yanked her away from the stove, showed her the books and the index cards I had to fill out, and explained: if you don’t help me, I can’t take the exam.
It took a while, but when she understood that I was serious, all color drained out of her ruddy face, she became flustered, her lower lip trembled, and tears sprang to her eyes, just like when my father humiliated her. Usually, she was willing to do anything for me, but this must have seemed enormous, how could I possibly need her Neapolitan words for my exam. She stammered short, confused phrases, suspicious that someone was pulling a prank on me, or even worse. She giggled nervously and blurted out that the professors might end up using the cards against me, proof that, with a grandmother like her, I didn’t deserve a university degree. She even went as far as comparing me to those aspiring carabinieri who weren’t allowed to become officers if their forefathers didn’t have clean records. She got so worked up that I felt pain for her.
I tried to calm her down by asking her lots of questions. I wanted to understand what she thought of the university so that I could say no, it’s not like that. What slowly emerged was that she imagined it to be the exact opposite of the pit of the dead she had described to me when I was young, which she no longer believed existed.
It wasn’t exactly paradise, because she didn’t believe in that anymore either, but based on how she gesticulated and the direction her eyes went while she was speaking, for her academia was somewhere high up in the sky, almost in heaven. It was pointless trying to explain that all she had to do to get there was walk straight down the Rettifilo, the entrance was on the right coming out of the station, that she had walked by it countless times. She continued to glance upward and gesture toward the ceiling, the university was up there, and you got there by climbing a kind of staircase that had sifters for steps, because only the purest grains actually made it through. Although she, as a child, had been chucked out almost immediately, even though she knew how to multiply and divide, I, thank goodness, was of a higher quality grain and therefore had every right and privilege to enter that place filled with elegant people, that heavenly white space where no one had to work, everyone spoke in Italian, there was no shouting obscenities like vafancúlachitèmmuórt from morning ‘til night; people studied, they spent time thinking, and they communicated their ideas with joy and kindness to others whose only concern was providing for their families, people who didn’t have time to think.
While it was nice to go back to being a child, it became clear to me as never before that our roles had definitively been reversed. I was now the old one. I was taking advantage of her gullibility as if she were a child. I wanted her to play a game—something like shucking fresh peas or fagioli—that was actually work. I would corner her in the kitchen when everybody else was out of the house and get her to tell me the names of kitchen tools, foods, the ingredients of a certain dish, anything from her world of grandmother-servant, since she—a hard worker, widow since the age of twenty-four, left alone to provide for a two-year-old daughter and a baby in her belly—knew more Neapolitan words than anyone else. I’d write down all those words in the phonetic alphabet and in a matter of hours, with no trouble at all, I’d have my five hundred index cards. As for other interviewees, I’d simply invent them.