Twenty-Four Days in a Village in Southern Italy

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. Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures 39 Ian D’Emilia 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 Volume 6, Number 5 | May 2018, Balsam Issue 40 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. Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures 41 Ian D’Emilia 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. Volume 6, Number 5 | May 2018, Balsam Issue 42 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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