FISHBONE CONFESSIONS

by

    Lucille Bellucci

     Bronchitis is not such a bad illness when the doctor speaks the word; at least Bruno's trouble has been given a name, and it is curable.  The doctor administers the first injection and writes out a prescription for nine more ampules of antibiotics, pills for the fever, and B complex vitamins.  I have no idea where the nearest pharmacy is, but as I think on it the telephone rings and Bruno's brother is on the line, taking charge.

     Everyday for the next week, members of Bruno's family come by the hotel to take me out for an airing.  His nephew Dario comes with girlfriend Lucia, who has three words of English to supplement my dozen words of Italian.  Dario has no English at all.  But I have my trusty Mondadori pocket dictionary, which suffers a furious handling.  The sweaty pages contain more than a language.  They are my brains, my waning intelligence, my past translated into a very simple present tense.  I am five years old again.

     Adulthood returns abruptly when it is time to give Bruno his injection.  His cousin is a nurse and assures me that shots are easy to give.  She demonstrates once, swiftly.  Again I feel five years old.  I buckle under that crisp efficiency and say casually, No problem.  Once I am alone with Bruno, his bare backside offered in less than complete trust, my liver turns to mush while I do what I have to do.

     He says, trying not to quiver under the strange angle at which I have plunged the needle, "See Naples and die."

     "You, or me?" I reply.  The needle seems a yard long.  I wonder why I haven't hit bone.

     The next day it is the brother's turn to escort me out.  I see that I will not be allowed to explore Naples for myself.  My guidebook, studied in advance in California, remains in the hotel room. 

     Bruno's memories of his hometown are romantic.  As a teenager he sought midnight adventure in the alleys, walking on Greco-Roman cobbles 2,300 years old.  His rambles ended in nothing much, due more to luck than brawn or agility, for interlopers are at risk. The denizens of the vicoli are the true Neapolitans, Bruno says.  They are a venerable race, and look it.  Leonardo da Vinci sketched their precursors in caricature, warty and malformed; none look like Sophia Loren, that busty swan in carpet slippers in the film "Gold of Naples."  My own prospect of adventure fades as Bruno's brother Silvio steers me to a tame waterfront restaurant, where he recommends their specialty, zuppa di pesce.  When it arrives, there is a whole cooked octopus the size of my fist in the soup.  Silvio attacks his zuppa, all the while telling me, in a mixture of English and some recognizable Italian, of his parents' eagerness to meet me, at last.

     This is a meeting that has been postponed by Bruno's attack of bronchitis.  They have not yet spoken to me on the telephone, preferring perhaps to wait for an official presentation by Bruno.  Silvio remarks that his mother is a fine cook and baker of exquisite confections.  Do I like to cook?

     I think of my fast-frozen pastries that sometimes even turn brown in the microwave.

     I am sure she will like you, Silvio says.  My mother reads character like a Gypsy reads cards. 

     I smile, feeling a twinge of nervousness, as he laughs, and then I realize the morsel of fish I have swallowed is not passing through my throat.  Pain lances clear down to my breastbone, shoots sideways through my carotid each time I attempt to swallow it away.

     I'm going to die, I think, helpless to stop swallowing despite the agony.  I think I have stopped breathing.

     Eventually Silvio notices my frenzied chewing of hunks of bread.  "La spina?" he asks.

     I nod.

     At once he begins tearing off more bread for me and makes swallowing motions himself in encouragement.  The waiter appears and says I must eat the crust, not the soft part of the bread.  By now the entire restaurant is attending my death agonies.  How to say Heimlich Maneuver, how to demonstrate?  A woman at the next table gets up, clenching her hand, and slams it between my shoulder blades.  I don't know if that does it, but I discover I can breathe once more.

     Obviously relieved that I did not die while in his care, Silvio pays the bill and takes me out of the restaurant.  On the dock, as a precaution, he keeps between me and the water, which is just as well, for I can't swim. 

     Bruno is asleep when I am delivered to our room.  I lie down next to him.  If only I didn't have to swallow. 

     Apparently my ineptness at eating fish soup has been reported to Bruno's parents, for his aunt Elena telephones in the evening and sends their wishes for quick recovery.

     At seven next morning Silvio telephones, waking us both after a torturous night because of Bruno's coughing and the knitting needles transfixed in my throat and chest.  Bruno's brother has been worrying about the draft in our room.  He suggests that we change rooms.  Bruno blearily says he will think about it, and adds that he feels much better and might be ready to go out soon.  It is the wrong thing to say, for this inspires an invitation to lunch at Silvio's next day; his wife will prepare all of Bruno's favorite dishes.

     The telephone wakes us up at six next morning.  It is Silvio again, suggesting that Bruno wear a hat when he goes out because it is going to be a chilly day.

     Well, as a matter of fact, Bruno says, I was going to call and beg off from lunch.  There's still some fever.  Silvio tells him to stay in bed, keep warm, and be quiet.  Sure, of course, Bruno replies from under his covers.

     At noon, as I work on a three-day-old crossword puzzle, someone knocks on our door.  Silvio is standing there, carrying an enormous cardboard box.  Behind him is his wife, Clelia.

     Clelia cooked all day yesterday, says Silvio, so we might as well eat here.  He unpacks the box.  The first thing he takes from it is a black knit cap which he puts on Bruno's head, fussing with it until he has Bruno's forehead well covered.  He shuts the window, our only source of air.  Then he goes back to the box.  Out come jars, plastic containers, a bottle of wine, fruit, knives and forks and plates.  Clelia commences opening things.  Bruno sits up in bed and tries to eat the mounds of food she serves him.  The room is hot, but as I go to open the window, Silvio admonishes me about drafts.  Silvio and Clelia both have loud voices, which rebound from wall to wall above the crashing of silverware and china.  Bruno looks as if he is being beaten to death.  What shows of his face under the black watch cap grows paler and paler.

     The food is delicious, though all of it has the texture of boar bristles when I swallow.  We have three full courses, pasta with mussels, veal with wine sauce, sliced apples with greenish buffalo mozzarella.  Clelia does not permit me to do anything, rinsing plates in the bathroom sink, dishing out more food, and Silvio says proudly that Clelia is a terrific, hardworking woman and is almost as good a cook as his mother.  He says one more, peculiar thing: every Monday without fail Clelia changes their bed linen.  I do not know how to respond to this.  Does he think that all the other wives in the world do this once a year?

     Anyway, I do not need him to insist on Clelia's worth; it is evident to me.  Bruno tells me his mother dislikes her and will not speak to her directly.  Apparently it is because she comes from a farming family, contadini, and speaks a vulgar sort of Italian.  My Italian will be hilarious; I wonder what his mother will think of me.

     When they leave, Bruno simply slides under the covers and passes out.  He doesn't even stir when I open the window and liberate his head from the watch cap.

     Two days later, his aunt Elena and her daughter pay us a visit.  They present me with Swiss chocolates in a marvelous box.  The lid depicts a hunting scene reproduced from some English master's work; I have seen such a box of chocolates in the gift department in San Francisco's toniest store, Neiman-Marcus.  The cousin also gives me a bouquet of flowers, yellow roses and tiny pink ones and yellow-pink freesias, wrapped in lace and bridal ribbon.  Their fragrance in the closeness of our single room is startling and makes me long for a piece of my California wilderness.

     In my turn, I present them with two crushed chocolate bunnies in torn foil and make the speech I had prepared: A little late for Easter, but Happy Easter, anyway.  Bruno's cousin is an elegant woman; the broken bunny in her beringed hand looks like a child's toy being cleared from a messy room.  At the time I bought the bunnies I was convinced they were a clever idea, especially meaningful for having been hauled all the way from the United States.

     Elena leans back in her chair and says to Bruno, You have certainly found yourself a beauty, we never had any idea you had such good taste. 

     I am not a beauty, never have been even when I was young.  In preparing for this trip I discovered strains of vanity never before suspected in myself.  The gray hairs among the auburn need not be there, I thought; one rinse at the beauty shop that cuts my hair once a month, and they'd be gone.  At the optometrist's I had myself fitted for contacts but balked at the moment of finalizing the order.  I went home and drank a glass of wine and scrutinized this person that was emerging from the sane, self-confident woman I thought I was up to now.  I compromised.  I tried to get my full eight hours of sleep and applied only the slightest bit of eyeliner above my blue eyes.

     Before they leave, the cousin remarks, with a twinkle, that her mother will be on the phone to Bruno's mother as soon as they get home.  Bruno jokes back.  He says, Tell my mother I love my wife anyway. 

     Bruno's recovery is slow.  In the days that follow I reread the book I brought for the few spare moments I expected to have during my trip.  I do crosswords in the International Herald Tribune, which I purchase each day from the news vendor, one of two Neapolitans I have met who are not family.  The other is the waiter who serves me my nightly meals in the hotel restaurant.  I spend half a day on our balcony watching a regatta in the Bay.  From practically under our window, the hydrofoil ferries depart for Ischia and Capri precisely at the hour of ten every morning, and I am not on any of them.  The dusky cone of Vesuvius waits forever in the distance.  Our vacation, my first visit to Italy, has somehow become misplaced, yet I do not mourn the loss much.  My desires have shrunk to only one thing, that Bruno get well.  

     The sight of him at last shaved, dressed in crisp shirt and slacks, makes me so happy I tell him he is a bel guaglione, one of the new Italian phrases I have acquired.

     At the hotel entrance we find a taxi and Bruno gives the driver his parents' address.  It isn't far; apparently they haven't felt well enough to come to the hotel to see us.  Bruno has not told me much about his reunion with them, after twenty years.  He traveled to Italy two weeks ahead to see everyone before I, his American wife, arrived.  The two weeks, evidently, have been an ordeal.  In our telephone conversations I could never learn, to my satisfaction, why.  I heard only his exhaustion.  By the time I arrived, Bruno was reduced to monosyllables.

     As our taxi approaches his parents' home, he notices my hand is moist and hot.  Understanding, he attempts to explain and reassure.  "Don't be scared," he says.  "They're...." He doesn't finish.  This doesn't make me feel any better.

     When I see Bruno's father, I do not so much see an elderly man as a man fading into the beige-colored wall behind him.  His early photographs showed a tall, vigorous man.  In those days he was a radio officer on a merchant ship calling at ports from Athens to Alexandria and every stop to Cape Town on the African Continent, and then back up the other side.  He seldom stopped at home.  When he retired he found a female hegemony consisting of his wife and his wife's sister and their mother; their men, coming to rest, assumed as much substance as their postcards sent from exotic places.  Their children, mingled in the single household like trout in a hatchery, thought them good company.  Beyond that place in everyone's lives, these returned travelers did not advance.

     Here, before me, Bruno's father is small and uncertain, hardly bigger than myself.  Impulsively, I put my arms around him and kiss his cheek.  His eyes fill with tears and he says one word in a trembling whisper, figlia.  Immediately, the family around us emit jolly cries: He's going to get emotional, so let's let him alone for a while!  He's just so excited to be seeing you!  They carry Bruno and me off to the living room for refreshments.  There seem to be masses of family gathered to witness this historic event.

     In the living room I approach Bruno's mother.  She is seated in a big armchair, and crutches lean against its side.  As I embrace her, she too calls me daughter.  She has pain, Bruno had said.  I understand now that his casualness has been deceptive.  The pain she endures is written all over her face in white blotches.  All her bad days and dying nights are there in her cloudy eyes.

     They are old and sick, Bruno said when he came to meet me at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome.  He was sick, himself.

     The family are gathered around us in a semicircle as I try to converse with Bruno's mother.  Coffee and sweet things are served.  Like a well-schooled child, I hand around the dish, starting with my mother-in-law.  My back is straight, my feet take demure steps.  The lace-edged napkin is smooth upon my knees as I sip bitter coffee.  It is an espresso and the sugar is out of my reach, but I would sooner break into a sea chantey than perform one more move and sugar my coffee.  Actually, I wonder what would happen if I did get up and holler "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" 

     They comment on my auburn hair, of which I have an abundance; now that I am here I'm glad I left the gray in.  A cousin says my complexion is marvelous and she likes my aviator-shaped rimless glasses, they are so unusual.  Well, they are.  I'd read somewhere that three famous cult leaders who wore aviator-shaped tinted glasses were sociopaths.  I wonder if this is worth explaining in Italian but fear no one would see the joke.  At that moment I fail to see the joke myself.

     Bruno is in constant motion.  His behavior is clear to me, if not to his relatives.  He paces, flips magazine pages, goes from window to window as if looking for escape.  They and he are the same, after twenty years.  Their garrulity smothers him, yet when he is at a safe distance, in California, he will speak with fondness of every one of them.  A stranger would not catch the relief in his tones.

     His aunt Elena is two years younger than his mother, who is 84.  Elena wears a shirtdress defining waist and hip and from the back looks decades younger.  She has a prodigious memory of the days when Bruno was a boy.  She talks more about her sainted, departed mother than of her husband, but does tell me a story about her husband entering Bruno's photograph in a competition for a film role.  Someone produces the photograph.  I look at Bruno in amazement, and everyone laughs.  In semi-profile, forelock tossed over one eye, he is devastating, down to the sexy grin.  Why, you sneaky matinee idol, I say in English.

     He shrugs.  "It was Uncle Raul's idea.  I didn't win."

     Raul is long gone.  Aunt Elena's husband and father, itinerant jewelers, hauled cases of gold and diamonds through France and Germany, going as far east as Romania but avoiding Yugoslavia.  The Yugoslavians were hardy people and cannier than Neapolitans, though Raul always told Bruno that he would have gone there just for the plum brandy.  Slivovitz set his heart on fire.  That was the style of his speech, which Bruno heard only when they went out together for coffee, an aperitif.  Bruno's grandfather took him, aged six, to see Josephine Baker in her by then tired and moldy banana costume.  His grandfather pledged him to secrecy over their excursion.

     I know more about all these people in the room than they can detect from my foreigner's demeanor.  The male cousins raised by the triumvirate of women (The Junta, Bruno calls them) allow their wives to support them.  The wives have been kneaded by Elena and Bruno's mother into watery images of themselves; they don't make women like they used to.  Elena's only daughter has lived with her mother all her life; 50 and plump, she promises to become opinionated like Elena and Bruno's mother, except she will not have a mother's reminiscences to pass on, and that is a thought that becomes further instilled in myself.  Bruno and I, marrying late, have no children either.  The prospect of a solitary old age does not perturb him as it does me.  He has sought to be solitary since adolescence; at the age of 18 he built a hiding place in the crawl space under their roof.  At 20 he ruptured the various maternal membranes and ran to live in Rome with the Franciscan monks.  The next step was out of Italy.  His childhood vaccination against family has held firm. 

     Who would you have liked to have around you, then? I asked once.  My father and Uncle Raul, he said.  Raul was funny as hell.  He and my father played mandolin and piano duets.  The women  thought it was healthful though unimportant, while they carried on the real business of life, which was criticizing everybody.

     The one left at home, his brother Silvio, is left with the care of their parents.  This is Silvio's destiny, and it is no use telling ourselves that fate long ago marked his place in the family.  It was Bruno who marked it, Bruno's fleeing.  

     One can say Silvio's nature is different.  Can one say his nature would have been different if he had had a chance to evolve it in another direction?  This is how families become what they are; a seed, a vine, a jungle of runners pointing every which way, and finally fusing into one solid.  The roots become immutable as the Book of Genesis.  Back in San Francisco this much family in Bruno's stories fascinated me.  My mother was a biologist and teacher first; my father and I managed on our own on the evenings she stayed late on campus.  Or she and I ate without Dad when he was away at his pharmaceutical conventions.  I didn't know I was supposed to be lonely; I wasn't, being a bookish type. 

     Feeling the cumbersome energy of Bruno's people here in this room, I decide I don't need a tribe, just the one child of our blood.  But as I think it the wish seems mechanical.  Amidst all the talking and laughing I ponder this discovery.  Have I passed the biological milestone that bedevils most women?  Does my freedom look more alluring than my flesh and blood in diapers?  I experience a sudden shaft of clarity: a child would divide us.  I'd rather have the Bruno I know than the child I do not. 

      Bruno's father has not spoken since his first word to me in the hall.  Suddenly he says something indistinct, to me.  Bruno translates.  I have a faccia di bonta', which means my face shows goodness.  The remark surprises me and I know I will never forget it.  My lips actually tremble. 

     This reminds me I have one more offering to make on my visit here, but it will be as futile as my chocolate bunnies.

     I present Bruno's father with a map of our city and point out the "X" with which I have marked our home.  This is how Bruno drives to work, I say, tracing the route with a finger.  Si, si, he says politely, but it is obvious he is not following.  Skip it, Bruno says in English and adds harshly, It is over for him.

     I fold the map for my father-in-law and go to sit by Bruno's mother, who asks me, What time do I get up in the morning at home?

     I make up my mind on the spot.  Seven o'clock, I answer, and ignore Bruno's look.  Usually I am lucky if I can crack an eye before eight-thirty.  It is beyond me, for so many reasons today, language being almost least, to explain that I am having career problems.  As marketing representative for a steel company, I do some traveling and frequently make independent decisions.  The only woman at my career level, I am a new species of animal in an ancient forest that dares me to survive.  The older men I meet among my clients are intensely conscious of gender; one can clearly see them curbing lifelong tics--shifting from incredulity that they have been sent a woman, to a bluffness that I endure like bad weather.  My job--which I do well--is nevertheless a weary business.  The knowledge that, by middle age, I shall have developed a spiritual carapace does not sustain me.  And so, not certain if I will return to my job, I have taken a leave of absence.  Would my mother-in-law, touted by Silvio as a keen judge of character, consider me weak?  Waking at eight-thirty isn't so bad, I think.  Yet I lie to her, seeking approval from an old, old lady who has no concept of what our life is like.  She cannot fathom the turn the traditional battle of the sexes has taken.

     And then what do you do? she asks.

     Then I cook breakfast (I understand now that she has not cooked much or baked any of her exquisite confections in years).

     She seems to be pleased with my reply.

     Again I choose not to notice Bruno's glance.  My breakfast is cold cereal drowned in milk.  Bruno has one cup of black coffee before he drives off; at work he will complete his breakfast with a Danish pastry.

     Are your parents well? she asks.

     I still have my mother, I say.  In one afternoon I have learned to be a shifty sailor, tacking with the wind (yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum) notwithstanding my comparative muteness.  I still have my father, too, but I cannot bring myself to mention divorce in the presence of a family that has kept its roots tangled together despite one disappearance (a son of one of the cousins), several infidelities (Raul's, and Bruno's father's), and a child expected by an unmarried granddaughter of Elena's.  There are more irregularities, transient though no doubt destined to bow the roots into larger, more complicated knots.

     My mother-in-law leans back and massages her hip.  Time to go, Bruno says.  She has to lie down.

     We kiss and embrace everyone.  Are we saying goodbye now? his mother asks.  Of course not, Bruno says.  We won't be leaving until tomorrow.

     Only I know he is not going to see them again, that his goodbye will be done by telephone, perhaps from California.  This is Bruno's way.  His parents' tears of leave-taking are already etched in him in advance.  He will not give them the satisfaction of a final embrace because he believes this way is easier for them.  And himself, I note silently.  I am pleased, though, that he's happy with just me; I never quite believed he meant it.

     I reserve a special farewell for my father-in-law.  I kiss his hand, and at once he kisses mine.  The family chorus starts up: Oh, he'll get emotional again, but you've made him very happy!  Don't worry, he'll be fine!

     We are escorted to the door on a wave of well wishing.  Bruno's brother Silvio leaves with us and talks animatedly about this and that relative, replete with gossip. 

     He is less sanguine next day when he takes us to the train station, driving with seemingly no sense of direction and shouting at Clelia when she attempts to point out the correct route.  He makes two wrong turns, each costing ten minutes before he is back on track.  It is close to train time when we reach the Campo Flegrei station.  When we are finally settled in a compartment, our luggage stowed overhead, Silvio tells Bruno, the note of love in his loud voice sounding as if he too has a fishbone in his throat, that he should take better care of himself; his kid brother never did have any sense, working on ships, going off to the desert of Saudi Arabia, and then building airstrips in Vietnam during the conflict.  Instead of becoming an American, he should have come home to Naples.  And don't wait twenty years for another visit. 

     Older than Bruno by six years, Silvio is also larger and taller; his head is extravagant in proportion to his body.  He has Bruno's straight nose, prominent chin, bushy eyebrows, and fleshy earlobes, or Bruno has his.  In their youth the brothers were sometimes mistaken for each other, but Bruno proved himself sleeker, swifter, elusive.

     Silvio and Clelia wave and wave as the train pulls out of Campo Flegrei.

     Bruno is quiet during the ride to Rome, where we will catch the plane to New York. Then he takes my hand and says, with the smile only I have ever seen, “It’s you and me, Babe.”

     While the train clicks smoothly through the tidy countryside to the north, I watch for clusters of red poppies that flash by like bright, momentary gifts.