Crazy in the Kitchen (17 page)

THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER

My father takes a little piece of cardboard, pulls a pencil from the pocket of his shirt, draws a diagram of the neighborhood
in Italy where he lived for a year when he was a child: a little village called Scafati, in the province of Campania.

He shows the location of a road, the Via Nova, that passed through Pompeii on its way to Salerno; another road, perpendicular
to the first, in Scafati. A piazza. A fountain. A church. A small river near the church. A house by the river. The canning
factory down the second road, where his mother worked.

"This is where we lived," he tells me, pointing to a little square he's drawn to represent his family's home. "This is what
I want you to find."

Scafati is not too far from Positano, where we're staying, the village where his mother lived when she was a girl. But before
we go to Scafati, we want to see if we can find any members of my grandmother's family living in Positano.

We've asked the owner of the hotel, whose family has been here for generations, if he knows anyone with my grandmother's maiden
name. He says he doesn't, says that it was common for entire families to leave the village at the same time. During the great
emigration, people left in large numbers because it was difficult to grow food in Positano, for there is no arable land. The
village is situated in a fault in the earth's crust; the houses, terraced into the limestone and limestone dolomite of the
mountainside; its terrain is some of the most rugged in the region. To grow anything, even today, you must cart soil into
the village from far away, and unless you own property elsewhere, you must buy the soil. If you are poor, the soil is too
expensive to buy.

As I walk the alleyways and staircases of the village, I wonder whether every house I pass is the one she lived in; whether
she went to school here— probably she didn't; wonder whether she played by the seaside; whether she helped her mother carry
water from the well.

Positano is achingly beautiful. Still, this upscale resort was once so poor, so isolated, so incapable of sustaining its people,
that in 1931, fewer than two thousand people remained. "The people move out, the tourists move in," the hotel owner says.
I go to Santa Maria Assunta to light a candle in the Starry Chapel in memory of my paternal grandmother, as I have lighted
candles for my mother's mother and my stepmother in every church I visited in Puglia. This ancient church is where my grandmother
worshipped as a child. But as I traverse the little alleyways and stairways leading to the sea, I see little girls in white
dresses carrying lilies, little suited boys trailed by relatives moving slowly, reverentially along. Today is their First
Holy Communion.

As the procession moves inside, the organ begins to play. Then there is a moment of silence.

A group of old women sitting together sing "Maria Madonna," their voices deep, guttural, dirgelike. This is church music unlike
any I have heard before. It is not joyful; it instead honors life's inevitable sorrows, even in moments of celebration.

I light my candle and imagine my grandmother, more than a century ago, taking her First Communion here. I see her moving slowly,
up the center aisle, surrounded by her family. My family.

I am connected to this place, although by a very fragile thread. Who I am, who I have become, is rooted in this beautiful
place that my grandmother's family was forced to leave.

I want to stay in Positano. I don't want to go to Scafati. I've looked on a map, and it is a winding drive from Positano up
the Amalfi coast, and around and through a confluence of highways leading to Naples. No matter how hard I stare at the map,
I can't figure out how to
get
to Scafati, can't figure out how to find my father's home. When my father tells me about Scafati, he recites a well-known
jingle about the place: "Scafati, scefeti, malacqua, malagente, pure erbe et malamen-ti." He writes the words down as best
he can, probably incorrectly. Though he doesn't translate the saying, the meaning is clear. There is a lot of bad stuff in
Scafati— water, people, and bad things that grow.

My father planned to come to Italy with us, but he's not well enough now to travel, might never again be well enough to travel.
He says it's all right; if he dies today, he has no regrets, he's lived a good life.

But he wants me to find where he lived, take a picture, come home and tell him what it's like now.

Though I know our chances of finding my father's house are slim, I promise him I'll try. He's old now, and rarely asks me
to do anything for him. "This is the least I can do," I think. And Scafati is a place with meaning for me too.

My father is old now, his memory imperfect. He can't remember which way is north, which is south, or, on second thought, whether
the fountain is by the church or down the road. Whether his house was one or two blocks away from the church, or many.

I take his diagram, ask a few questions, scribble a few notes, hope for the best. In one corner of the diagram he's written
a name: Joseph Bulari. A relative, he says. The man who owned the canning factory where my grandmother worked.

"Stop someone in the square," my father suggests. "Ask them if they know him. When we lived there, everybody knew him. He
was a factory owner, a big shot. If you can find him, he'll show you where we lived, show you where my grandmother lived,
show you the factory he owned, show you everything."

"But Dad," I say, "how old was he when you lived there?"

"A grown man," my father says. "A prosperous man. An important man."

"Then he's gotta be dead by now," I say.

"Oh yes," my father says. "Of course. But maybe you'll find someone who knew him."

"Why don't we tell him that we tried to find where he lived, but couldn't?" This is my husband talking, on the morning that
we're supposed to find the house by the river in Scafati.

It's one of those mornings to cherish, when you want to abandon your plans to find the village where your father lived, and
sit on a little patio looking at what you'll probably never see again, this village tucked into a bowl in a mountain, with
colorful houses stacked like children's blocks, with its tile-roofed domed cathedral so near the sea, this improbable place
where your grandmother once lived when it was a poor and desolate fishing village with people in astonishing numbers leaving
for America and other parts of Italy. So that, by the time your grandmother left, there were hardly any people living there
at all.

You want to go nowhere else this day. You want to look at the water, at the village, at the cathedral for hours, to imprint
them in your memory, so you can revisit them to warm you on another day— a wet and rainy one in New Jersey in mid-October.
You know that, though you may want to, you will never return here again.

On this day, the sky is cloudless. The sea, glistening. The breakfast, magnificent— little pastries, cappuccino, freshly squeezed
orange juice.

There is the possibility of pizza for lunch, in a little restaurant above the water on the Via Positanesi d'America, that
street named to honor emigrants who sent money back home from America so the lives of those who stayed behind would be less
harsh.

Why leave this place on such a beautiful day to find a place where an old man lived more than eighty years before? Why drive
many miles on a dangerous road that switchbacks up and down mountainsides? Why thread your way through a maze of highways,
trying to find the right road? Why stop people and ask, in execrable Italian, if they can tell you how to get to the village,
to a church by a river that has a fountain? Sorry, you don't know the name of the church. Sorry, you can't tell them the name
of the river. Sorry, you have no idea, really, where this church or river is, except that it's in Scafati, and that your father
lived there some eighty years ago.

"We won't find it," my husband says, "so we shouldn't go." But I say, "I gave my word."

I know that finding this place, if we find it at all, won't be fun. My husband will be driving because he can't read maps,
can't navigate. He gets distracted, engrossed in the scenery, forgets to look at the map, turns the map around and around
because he can't figure out whether we're heading north, south, east, or west, can't figure out whether we should turn right
or left at the intersection where he's not absolutely sure we should turn at all. Which means that I navigate. He drives.

But although I read maps well— flawlessly, in fact, if I do say so myself— when I tell my husband to turn this way or that,
he might not take the turn I indicate. Maybe he's drifting off and not listening to me. Maybe he's mesmerized by the road.
Maybe, though he hasn't even looked at the map, he doubts I know which way to go, though I always do know which way to go.

And so I know we'll miss an important turn. I'll become exasperated. It will take three quarters of an hour for us to get
back to the right turnoff. And I'll be pissed that he didn't listen to me.

I know that it will be a hellish day— him driving, me navigating. Or, as I tell people, him driving, me navigating and screaming.

I know I'll say something awful to him. He'll tell me to calm down, chill out. I'll tell him I won't calm down, chill out.
When I travel, I like to know, at all times, where I am and where I'm going. I don't like to stumble upon places by chance.
I plot routes carefully. Check and double-check directions.

(Once, a friend I'm traveling with tells me to put away my map, to enjoy the scenery. I say I can't put away the map, can't
enjoy the ride unless I know exactly where I am. She tells me you always know exactly where you are because you're always
exactly where you are. "Very Zen," I say, nasty. She laughs. I laugh. But I don't put away the map.)

I know that at some point, and well before my husband and I get to where we're going, he'll be hungry. He'll want a snack,
a cup of espresso, or a real meal. "What's the rush?" he'll ask, when I say we shouldn't stop. "Why can't we enjoy the journey
as well as the arrival?"

On this day, as always, I will insist we press on, though I know that if he isn't fed, we're sure to start fighting. So I
will concede and we'll try to find a bar, a cafe, a trattoria. But not just any bar, any cafe, any trattoria. We'll try to
find one that's charming.

This will take a long time. This will take us out of our way. This will require superior map-reading skills on my part to
get us back on track, to get us to where we're going.

(Once, years ago, my husband, our two sons, both young adults, and I were driving from Rome to Florence on the Autostrada,
and we were hungry. It was well past noon. I suggested an autogrill on the highway. I knew that you could get wonderful
panini,
a respectable pizza, a lovely
tricolore
there.

But no, they decided they wanted a glorious picnic in a bucolic setting overlooking Florence. And that we'd pick up fixings
for the picnic in Florence. "By the time we get to Florence," I say, "there'll be no place open to buy food for a picnic."

"That's ridiculous," my elder son says, not knowing Italian ways.

"Trust me," I say. "It'll be siesta. Everything'll be closed."

"I'm absolutely sure," says my newly-graduated-from-business-school son, "that there will be at least one enterprising Florentine
who'll keep his store open so we can buy food."

I say, "Fine."

So we drive and drive and drive and drive. And go into Florence. And of course can't find a place to buy provisions. Can't
find a restaurant. So we go back on the Autostrada to find an autogrill, which we know will be open. And get stuck in a traffic
jam from hell that lasts for hours.

I scream at them. They scream at me. Each of us screams at every other person in the car. They blame me for not sticking to
my guns. I blame them for not listening to me. I say "I told you so" more than once. We hate one another; wonder what we're
doing on this miserable road; wonder why we've come on this goddamned holiday.

But in the cars surrounding us, also stuck in traffic, no one is screaming. Mothers are pulling out little treats and snacks
for their families and handing them around. Biscotti and bottles for the babies. Panni and Orangina for the grown-ups. These
mothers, Italian mothers, understand what happens to Italians when they're hungry. These mothers have come prepared.)

The drive to Scafati is as awful as I feared. The road we need is accessible, it seems, only by making a U-turn across four
lanes of traffic. We get stuck in a traffic jam in Pompeii amidst a gaggle of tour buses. Policemen stop traffic so that tourists
following leaders holding umbrellas aloft can cross the road from the parking lot to the ruins.

Finally, we find the road to Scafati. It looks like Union City. There are rundown stores selling cheap clothing, used auto
parts, flimsy baby carriages, ugly furniture. We've driven miles and wasted a day to find a place that looks like the worst
of New Jersey, looks like any poor neighborhood there, like the one my grandparents lived in after they came back to the States.

We expected to find a small road, meandering through farms, with a view of Mount Vesuvius, that will lead us from the ruins
of Pompeii, where my father played as a boy, to a little village on a river where he was his happiest. For my father, this
place is immutable.

We stop some old men who wear peaked hats like my father's. We figure we'll have better luck with old men with long memories.
We ask them for directions. The old men speak dialect, which I understand. We go where they tell us. Find a church. Find,
not a river, but a slimy green stream.

We climb out of the car, shuffle through garbage to a tiny church. But there are no houses nearby. Just derelict cars.

We find a woman, tell her what we're looking for, tell her my father once lived here. Hope she'll see us not as intruders,
but as people who belong here. She's warm, friendly. Laughs. Says there are many churches in Scafati, many rivers in Scafati,
many churches on rivers in Scafati, can't we be more specific? No, we're sorry, we can't. Then I mention the fountain in front
of the church.