Only in Naples Read Free Page B

greenery, the soccer fields, the buildings—the Barnabite priests who ran the place decided to take in male university students from other parts of Italy who would pay the Denza for room and board. That wasn’t enough. They were forced to take in (
ahimè!
horror of horrors!) female “guests.”
    Nobody explained this to me. A small, shuffling nun in white showed me to my room the first day with only a
“Buongiorno”
and a
“Prego”
—this way. The room had a single bed, desk, and two windows overlooking the tropical gardens. I could tell from the silence that there was nobody else in the building. Where were the other students in the dorm? I wondered. Was there a Meet the New American Girl social hour planned? Oh, and did they have any extra hangers for the closet?
    “Per cena,”
the nun remembered to tell me before she left,
about dinner
…and then she said a whole lot of words I didn’t understand. I followed her arthritic hand as she motioned to the left, then to the right. Did she just say past the third Madonna and right at the second soccer field?
    “Grazie.”
I smiled.
“Grazie tante.”
    When it was dinnertime, I would follow my nose.
    The
mensa,
or eating hall, of the campus was a good ten-minute walk from my building. Other than lizards skitting across the path and mosquitoes digging into my calves, there was no sign of life. A church bell gonged close by, and I hoped it meant
soup’s on.
    I finally found the
mensa
(can you call a space with that divine a smell
cafeteria
?), a huge room with marble walls and floors, crystal chandeliers, and many empty tables for six. There was no line, so I got a tray and watched as a nun with an apron ladled out pasta with fried eggplant and tomato. She then handed me a miniature carafe of red wine.
Buon appetito, signorina.
    There were only two tables occupied that first night at the Denza—at one sat four visiting nuns; at the other, three young male college students. I stood with my tray deciding where to sit as they all watched. It was clear that there was a right answer for where I belonged, I just didn’t know what it was.
    I went with the guys. (Enough with gender division!
Basta,
already!) But as soon as I sat down I knew that it was the wrong choice. No one spoke.
    Only a minute had passed when I heard female voices echoing throughout the dining hall. I turned to see that three smiling young women had just walked in the entrance. They were sisters, all with long black hair and almond eyes. They didn’t rent a room at the Denza, I would learn, but came to have their meals there. Their parents lived in a small town in Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot, and the girls had come to the big city to study. When they passed my table and said
“Ciao,”
I knew there was a God.
    Maria Rosa and Francesca (and their little sister Isabella, who nodded and smiled and was the silent one of the Three Graces) had never met a foreigner. They had never traveled north of Naples, or tasted ketchup. They were full of questions: What did I do at the Consulate? Were all houses in America like the ones in
Dynasty
? Did American women switch their husbands as often as the characters on
The Young and the Restless
?
    I held forth in my broken Italian about my homeland. It was a good thing I had a degree in cultural anthropology, because I was able to say things like
America, divorce, very easy!; Hospitals, very expensive!;
and
Too much guns.
My friends were enlightened, and I was no longer lonely.

I am five feet three inches tall, and in September of 1996 I weighed 155 pounds. The Calabrese girls at the boarding school thought, That’s what American food does to you. Salvatore thought, She likes to eat. What no one in Naples would have guessed is that I had binge-eating disorder. I loved food too much to become anorectic, felt disgusting puking it up, so what was left for me? BED: I would binge and then starve myself, avoiding food altogether for a few days or munching on