Twenty-Four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

Twenty-four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

Ian D’Emilia

There were two girls named Giusy. The second was a pretty blonde-haired girl that I met at the pool one afternoon and then never saw again. The first was my cousin she would tell me almost every time I saw her. It was a small town and not many people spoke English. She was visiting for two weeks. I was here with my grandfather for twenty-four days. She lived in Munich. I lived in New Jersey. Apparently we were distant cousins. The first time we met was actually at the Jersey Shore but that was years ago. I remember we rode a tandem bicycle across the boardwalk but I hadn’t known that she was my cousin then.

The first night we met in Colle Sannita I told Giusy about this. We were drinking beer out in front of Bar Centrale and I told her that I remembered her from the tandem bicycle at the Jersey Shore. She laughed. She had a crown of red hair sitting atop her head and she had brown eyes. She spoke English with an accent that wasn’t quite German and wasn’t quite Italian. We had drinks together. She ordered a Prosecco with Aperol. I ordered one too. Matter of fact she ordered it for me. We smoked cigarettes together with our other cousins and friends. Later that night she told me that she was glad to see me again because we were cousins. Then she kissed me on the neck. That was how she said goodbye the first night.

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Another night when it was getting late and the rest of my cousins had left, I sat in piazza across from Bar Centrale finishing my beer and smoking cigarettes. Giusy was underneath the lamp near the bar. She was sitting at a table with some Italians that I didn’t know. I was watching the kids throwing around an American football that someone had brought. There were lights hung up on a big metal construction stretching across the street of the piazza and the Italians were trying to throw the football over it but they kept throwing it short. They didn’t know how to hold the football. Across the seams like I showed them when I got up to throw. They had called me over. They said show us how to throw. They knew I was American. It was a small town and the rest of my American cousins had left as I said to go to sleep because it was late.

The hanging lights were red and green and white and they weren’t lit up yet. They were for the next day’s festival celebrating all the visitors coming back to Colle, because the month of August was when everyone came back. Many young people had moved away to work in the big cities like Naples, or Rome, or Milan; or even to Germany and Switzerland, some in Canada, some in New York, and they would all come back home to Colle for August. Many young people were moving out of Colle and this is a problem of reality, my grandfather told me one afternoon when I was sitting with him in the living room of his house at the end of the street with the view of piazza from the porch and I was tying my running shoes about to leave. Many immigrants are coming in, my grandfather said. From Africa and the Middle East. And many Italians are moving out. Italian is a dying

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Twenty-four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

language even. Soon this town won’t be Italian. True Italian I mean.

I would be lacing up my shoes again because I had tied them too tight. I had to run every evening when I woke up from a nap. Or else I’d get restless. The back and forth to the piazza for coffee could get exhaustingly boring. And what you did is you ended up eating too much. At the grandiose lunches. Or just snacking along the day when people offered you food and you’d get fat that way. Smoke too many cigarettes. So I had to run; afterwards I’d do thirty pushups.

But before I could go my grandfather would warn of the changing demographics of Italy while we were watching TV. There had been an earthquake on the small island called Ischia which was near Naples and there were deaths. Stay for a minute, my grandfather would always say to me.

Where I ran was a track at the edge of town behind the mechanic’s shop where you could see the full landscape of the Italian countryside, the windmills moving again after the heat wave in the first week of August. We had arrived July 31st, my grandfather and I. Flew in from LaGuardia and landed in Naples, where a man named Tonino drove us two hours to the town of Colle Sannita. Home, my grandfather sighed.

Like Giusy was; home from Munich and she considered Colle home although she had never lived here. It’s where her parents were from. It’s where they lived before they moved the family to Germany and Giusy would come back every summer. She was 30 now. She often looked contemplative.

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She enjoyed sitting in the garden of her grandparents’ house in the afternoons and sometimes she even fell asleep. She told me about it. She was over there watching.

Over in front of Bar Centrale watching the Italians and me trying to throw the football over the lights. The thing about the metal construction was that where the lights didn’t hang there were spaces through the metal that were almost perfect for a football to fit through. But we didn’t actively try to get it stuck up there. Sometimes we would just hit the metal with the football and it would bounce off. Sometimes I would throw too low of a ball and an Italian on the other side of the lights would try to catch it. He’d have to run for it. He tried kicking it up there like a punt. Another Italian tried this method. The punt went way up and hit against the side of an abandoned building next to Bar Centrale. The crowd followed it. One of the Italians who spoke English was named Mario and he asked me if I had been quarterback when I used to play, and I lied to him yes. He threw me the football underhanded after he gathered it from where it had bounced off the side of the abandoned building. Now throw it over the lights, he said. I backed up. I pretended like I was a real quarterback and dropped back several feet to get more on the throw and it went spiraling straight into one of the spaces in the metal where it stuck.

After they were finished being amused, everyone still left in piazza all expressed different ideas of how to the football out from where it was stuck. Mario had one way. He’d use a soccer ball, and he had one in his trunk parked right there underneath the lights.

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Twenty-four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

And now the Italians were trying to kick the soccer ball up to the lights to get the football out. They kicked it way up there. They kicked it with skill. I went to sit down with Giusy when she called me over.

She asked me where my cousins were and why had they left. I told her because they were tired and they said it was late. She said it’s not late, and I said that’s what I’m saying. She was sitting at a table by herself because she was waiting on her drink and the people she was with were inside Bar Centrale. She was smoking a cigarette. She told me to sit down next to her. How are you, she asked me, and I told her that I was alright. If not a little hungry after everything. It was a constant feeling of wanting.

The people she was with came back outside. The man introduced himself to me and his name was Donetto. He was around 50 and had a gray goatee. He carried a bag with him, which he put down next to his seat and sat on the other side of Guisy closest to the open doors of the bar. A couple in their thirties came out and sat next to me and one another. A man wearing glasses came out and took the other seat.

Guisy introduced me in Italian as her cousin and I shook everyone’s hand but I forgot their names except for Donetto. Donetto pulled out a bottle of wine from his bag on the ground next to him. Glasses were already on the table because he had put them there and that’s why he had been inside the bar. He filled everyone’s glass. We drank the wine and I listened to everyone speaking Italian to each other and we kept drinking the wine until Donetto pulled out another bottle from his bag and I listened to everyone.

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“What do you think of Italy?”

I watched the Italians in piazza, three of them now including Mario trying to get the football that I had thrown up there out from the hole between the metal by kicking the soccer ball at it. I stood and took off the Giants sweatshirt that I had been wearing because it had been chilly out. I told Mario to give me the soccer ball and he did. I threw it up there and it hit the metal and bounced back. I dropped back and threw the soccer ball like a quarterback and it went way over the lights but the football was still stuck there. Mario ran after the soccer ball. I took my seat again and when I did the second bottle of wine was finished.

Bar Centrale was closing up. The bartender Valerio shut the lights off and locked the door. Then he zipped up his jacket and walked away to get his bicycle. We were still sitting there, smoking. We smoked another cigarette, Guisy and I, while Donetto went to get his car, which was parked around the corner. Apparently we were all going over to Donetto’s house because he had more wine there. He made his own wine. This was his wine, he had said to me and he wanted me to teach him English. I wondered where his wife was. I was starting to feel like I might be drunk. The couple in their thirties smoked cigarettes too. The man had a beard and earrings. The woman had long straight black hair. The other man there had glasses that he kept taking off and putting on the table before picking them back up again like a tic.

Giusy told me the big news. That she had decided to take a job in Austria and that she would be moving soon. She said she had decided today. Sitting in her grandmother’s garden

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Twenty-four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

she had been thinking about what the opportunity to manage in the executive branch of a supermarket chain would mean to her and if she could see herself in Austria. Then she had fallen asleep and when she woke up from the nap she had decided that she was going to do it. She told me about it, and I was the first one to know. Nodding her head like she had come to terms with life. We smoked another cigarette to that. She was turning 31 soon she told me. She felt like she was getting old.

“You got a lot of sun today,” I said to her; because her face was all red I could tell even with the lights from Bar Centrale off. “Did I?” She said, “What do you mean? I’m not red, am I?”

And she was. Very red in the face and it’s because she had fallen asleep in the afternoon in her grandmother’s garden right underneath the sun, and the sun was strong here. It had only rained once in Colle. There was the heat wave the first week of August that I mentioned and the rain that came after it was short and that was it. But it was good for my grandfather because he had felt trapped in the house. He’d walk around with his cane from the kitchen to the living room and back and forth to get exercise. He felt helpless for the whole week. And we’d all go out; my cousins and I to eat and to the pool. But he had to stay and listen to his books on tape and he was listening to one on the history of Rome but he didn’t like that the narrator was British. And when the man from town finally came over like he said he would to fix the television, my grandfather could watch TV.

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This part of Italy was in a drought they said. We had to conserve water at my grandfather’s house. The water was shut off at 9:00 pm—that was what they said—and I wondered what would happen if we turned it on. Sometimes one of my cousins would. In the house there was Michael, Johanna, Gabriella, and Gabriella’s friends, Abby and Jessica. I slept alone on the third floor. There was a balcony out there where I’d do pushups in the mornings because you could eat so much in Italy. Not to mention drinking—

Donetto came back through piazza with his car and Giusy and I got in. The couple got in their own car parked right next to Mario’s in piazza, and the man took his glasses from the table and went with them. Mario had stopped kicking his soccer ball up there and the football would stay up there until the next day. He had his trunk open and was putting the soccer ball back in. He was one of the only people left in piazza. The lights would still work anyway if they went on and the football was more noticeable if you looked for it.

Donetto’s house was not more than two minutes away but it was a habit of Collesi to drive their cars into piazza. It was something my grandfather hated. Every morning he would complain about it. We would be walking from his house into piazza and cars would be driving down the narrow street behind us and we’d have to use the sliver of sidewalk against the houses. He’d be trying to tell me how this abandoned lot is where he was born and lived before the earthquake when he was a child and cars would be honking. The earthquake had destroyed the building and my grandfather had to flee. Now it was abandoned like so many of these other buildings

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Twenty-four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

near piazza because of the direction in which the town is moving.

In Donetto’s kitchen there were the six of us. Donetto pulled two bottles of wine out from a kitchen cabinet and put them on the table. They were warm and fresh. Sweet-tasting like all the wine he made, and he poured glasses for each of us and we cheered to nothing in particular. Donetto said, cheers. He wanted me to teach him English and he would teach me Italian. It was past five in the morning now. Donetto had a beautiful, modest home, and I went to the bathroom, which was very clean.

When I came back to the table Donetto had started to make pasta. He had set up a pot of boiling water and he had created a sauce out of olive oil and tuna that he was preparing in a saucer over the fire on the stove. I was starving. This was the only end to an Italian night I thought. I sat down across from Giusy. She was drinking wine even faster than I could. She poured me another glass even though mine was half-full. We cheered to her move to Austria.

Colle could be a meditative place I thought sometimes when I was alone. Like when I stopped halfway around the track on my run and just looked out at the windmills. How they were stopped still and how they had started again. You could hear yourself think then and I was in one of those times of my life when I needed to think. When I had the time. To figure out some sort of future for myself, because I was 27 now and still floating, just floating. And when I was by myself and tired from a run, I felt like I had figured it all out. What

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to do next. But in the night it all seemed to melt away in the beer and the wine but it wasn’t without desire.

I told Giusy I could barely keep my eyes open but she must have seen me. I felt like my head was nodding back and forth. When I blinked it was hard to open my eyes again. I drank more of the wine and then Giusy said, let’s go smoke a cigarette, and we headed over to the open window of the kitchen. It was just getting light out spreading over the tops of buildings that we could see going out to the countryside. Giusy lit my cigarette and she told me that she was glad to be here with me now. It made her happy. She looked me in my eyes when she told me that she was my cousin.

Ian D’Emilia is a graduate of the University of San Francisco’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

Volume 6, Number 5 | May 2018, Balsam Issue