[Los Angeles, 1990]
Tonight is party night – lights, glasses, guests: a dazzling and varied collection of Italian designers, Italian models, a very choice set of imported beauties (tutti questi Italiani). The only non-Italian is our host, who introduces us to his new boyfriend Gianfranco, a richly dark man with remarkable hands who, in the most sensual of accents, debates the problems of sending a letter through the Italian postal service; I cannot imagine where he got his idea of English word order, but it’s lovely to watch him. A brawny, mustachioed Martello is explaining the incestuously tangled schedule of trains from Florence to Rome, which seems to hold great fascination for one of several Antonios, who leans against the wall and glows in shades of brown and black, the way they do at that age (che bello ragazzo).
I push through the lovely tangles of the limbs of partygoers to squeeze into the bathroom, where (after, of course, shutting the door nonchalantly) I take myself in hand, perhaps a bit too fondly: the Italianism of the crowd seduces me into thinking of pissing as an ironic gesture, sensual but mocking, a way of making subtle fun of the passions of organs. Then pausing, looking through the mirror’s Venetian glass into my eyebrows, my cheekbones, at the total effect of the image of my face, the soft glow of brown-black hair in the dimmered light. I think about rebirth, and I think about belonging.
•••
Being Italian gives you permissions that other races don’t have. It allows for a certain loosening of boundaries, a certain willful freedom; people expect you to be just a bit much, people ask you to be a little wild for them. They expect the fabric of your pants to twist with dramatic shadows that conjure blurred, warm pictures in their heads, and they expect your smile to have a slight demand in it, an aggressive, slightly coy sensuality. It’s nearly as good to be half Italian and half Greek, which is what happened to me. But my parents didn’t teach us either of the Mediterranean tongues, they decided that we would be purely American, because we were living among the cool white monuments of Washington, D.C., and because my mother had had rocks thrown at her by the Irish kids in the park when she was a little girl. So we would be more Anglo than the Anglos, whiter than white, and we had no accents of any kind.
How can you tell which one is the bride at an Italian wedding?
But it didn’t quite go over in the nation’s capitol, where Italian jokes were a main source of information about us, ranking well ahead of disclaimers from any anti-defamation league. It was clear to the various Thompsons and Fitzgeralds that we were ethnic types, passionate and undependable, and we probably smeared ourselves with olive oil at midnight and danced naked around lascivious idols. I went to a university in the hills of Virginia, and at a party for my fraternity one of the alumni said, and he was so very drunk: “You know there’s never been a member of the board with a vowel at the end of his name.” I was livid. If I could have spat poison, exuded from dark olive fangs, I would have done it. Or perhaps a gypsy curse, complete with waving hands, bandanna, and a golden ring in my ear. It was several years later that I saw him kneeling on the basement floor of the nastiest sex club in New York, near the toilet stalls, his blond hair a mess of grease and spit, and I wanted to snarl at him: Looking for something ethnic, perhaps? Instead I raised my hand in a brief, emotionless greeting and walked from the room.
Do you know why Christ couldn’t have been born in Italy?
•••
I finally abandon the bathroom mirror and open the door to find two men waiting outside. My apology is breezy, seductive, quite unapologetic; one of them hastens past me and quickly shuts himself in. The other walks back with me into the main room, speaking English with charming ineptness; finally he solves his difficulties, and mine, by leaping into a rush of shimmering phonemes that are incomprehensible to me. It is this tongue that flows, pours, drowns (and every word does end in a vowel: ello, illo), those glittering, dark faces grin at the flashing cameras (tinillo, tinello), and fervent, impassioned arguments ring from the balcony as though we hang in the air above a Neapolitan street. Laughing and somewhat drunk, I read bits of the diccionario aloud, and discover a word I hadn’t known: inguine – which makes Gianfranco choke and redden, then grin. He relaxes when I grab his broad shoulders, rub the heavy interlocking tendons, and ask if I could study the language with him, look into that cauldron of clear vowels and consonants (and all the words sound the same, but with an endless singing grace that most tongues can only envy in their awkwardness). He grins, he says: we will spend time. (And I think of a line of Dante: 'We read no more that day...') I want to swim in these men, move in a lazy crawl through this sea of olive oil, through slow ripples of gold-green muscle.
•••
Sometimes our family used to visit my father’s numerous brothers and sisters and their own families, all of whom were so much more obviously Italian than we would ever admit to being. The nights spent sleeping in the same bed with a cousin, only two years older than me but already with shoulders like a bull’s, and his brother, already a man. And when the brother got up to go to the bathroom and I saw the light go on and the mirror showed the black pelt of his hair pouring across the dark skin, it showed the massive bronze cock, I thought: will I grow up to look like that? and the desire was named in the question. But they were Italian in other ways too, ways I couldn’t envy so deeply: there was the uncle who lived on welfare scams for years, and later his son came to borrow money from my father for a deal of uncertain legality, because of course my father was his family’s only success story. My father, so white, so wise and careful, said no. And later, another cousin came for money, he was wearing tight pegged pants and a huge gold chain around his neck, and again my father said no, so gently, with such civilization. But this cousin was one that I remembered in a deep place inside, curling hair barely covering opulent curves of olive brawn. If I had had money to offer, what might I have done?
Why does an Italian move his hands when he talks?
And back again to an earlier time, the year between junior and senior years of high school, when my cheekbones suddenly sharpened in the light of a dramatic manhood that I had already stopped expecting. I had somehow passed through the mirror of gazing and being gazed upon, and I began to understand my cousins and their animal power. Mediterranean faces, our profiles like golden marble, and our eyes are darker than yours, and you look into them with panic and longing. To suddenly be given such eyes offers a power over others that should be handled delicately, but it’s so hard to control – the paler races, the ones who pride themselves on responsibility and emotional restraint, get so stupid around Italians, it is as though they get drunk, leering and mumbling suggestive phrases. For a little while, a year or three, I used the eyes, the cheekbones, to make the northerners hop through their awkward mating dance. I’d catch their eyes and grin, and they’d drop whatever they thought they were doing to make inane remarks about the weather, and then perhaps – greatly daring – they would say something about – the heat.
What’s the difference between a watermelon and the Italian army?
But, when I was hopelessly done with college and flung out into the world, my original training began obliquely to return, and the calculated whiteness of my parents’ eternally neat home returned to chill and slow my blood. I was juggling too many cities, a confusion of unpaid bills and unrealistic ambitions; and I was trying to ignore the growing sea of non-feeling engendered by allowing myself to be used hastily by too many men, one after another. To my horror, I realized one night, standing at a bar and looking grimly into the crowd, that it had become physically impossible for me to smile, or to weep. I could only clutch my glass and glare into the lights as though I wasn’t interested, as though these men’s bodies were a matter of perfect indifference to me. I carefully put my glass on the bar and pushed my way through the crowd as though it were a subway, abrupt, rude, cold. And then the despair of my own bed, utterly empty and holding only me, could not be satisfactorily explained to anyone at all. And so, gradually, I returned myself to the cold, safe prison of those who were not, who could never be Italian.
Has anyone ever explained to you the etymology of the term ‘wop?’
And thus it remained, for months and years – but now it is all changing, winds howling over cracking ice: when did I begin to turn this corner, how could all of this come back into me, not to be denied? It is as though I saw a roughly printed poster, written – of course – in the vernacular: the government has fallen, new laws are in effect, the exiles are welcome back. The border guards won’t stop you, just come home. Come home. But perhaps I never really left.
•••
On the way home from the party, the spring wind is warm, the street lamps spread a gentle candlelight; a dark boy walks past leading two dogs, and I smile at them all. Once inside, I pull off my clothes and take a late, hot shower. I walk in an Italian body, sinews liquid links corded with force, pulleys generating energy as though in a da Vinci drawing, across the hall. I am visible in the street lamps, and I move to the bed, and take the warm body with me. I pull myself slowly through the rough sheets, back and forth, I think of men who have been my lovers and of men who have almost been, and turn under the thick, light comforter. And the strangest feeling: my body is somehow transforming, becoming the surface of a heart that beats with the sun, of organs that swell and wink at each other, of laughter exploding between hot white teeth. Leaning on my side, my hand reaching down my side, my hip, my head lying in the crook of my arm. As my hair pulls over my warm skin, I hear a slight groan – and was that really my own dark voice insisting: yes, it’s wonderful, go ahead, do it. I twist my head a little farther across the muscle of my shoulder, my back slowly arching, I lean into the soft, naked flesh under my arm and, very gently, I bite.
[Los Angeles, Irvine, San Francisco, 12/9/90-5/19/95]
[Published in in Hey Paesan!: Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent, anthology edited by Giovanna Capone, Denise Leto & Tommi Mecca. Oakland, California: Three Guineas Press, 1999.]
Comments