Falling Palace A Romance of Naples

1 Sidewalk-ology The Caffe Gambrinus, in Piazza Trieste e Trento, was the most convenient meeting place in Naples. Inside, politicians rehearsed the deals they would later strike in the city council chamber, the Sala dei Baroni; visitors and greenhorns from outlying towns staked out the sidewalk tables; and carabinieri gadded about in the streets, receiving their dole of female admiration. The cafe's interior was lined by mirrors full of shifting lights and decorative panels by painters of the Belle Epoque. Two gigantic Venetian chandeliers romped overhead, as though inviting you to do the same on the floor. Benedetta with her unique blend of affection and defiance inevitably claimed a lot of my time; but once, when she had to study for one of her "soul-destroying" examinations, I decided to embark on a study of my own, of the people's gestures in the Gambrinus. For several nights I took up a station at the bar and watched the patrons, and soon I began to recognize many of their gestures. I could say that I recognized them from Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx, or from Havemeyer Street, in Brooklyn, but really I recognized them from everywhere. I say this because so many gestures are actually universal, signals the body dictates and the mind passively ratifies. To signify money, for instance, we rub a thumb against a pointer; to show exasperation, we fold our arms and cock our heads. Other gestures, though not necessarily unknown to us Americans, seemed more intrinsically Mediterranean. These included nose-tapping, to signify the odor of something fishy; the pulling down of an eyelid, to suggest that one ought to keep one's eyes open; and the upward jerking of the lower jaw to indicate refusal, like an animal jibbing at suspect food. Still others were typically Italian, such as the hands pressed prayerfully together and shaken at someone who was behaving unreasonably, or the sign for "later," an index finger twirling around in front of the speaker's nose, like the hand of an imaginary clock. Some gestures enacted an entire social role, such as the hand held edgewise and palm up, rocking back and forth at shoulder height, pretending to threaten a blow. To understand this one, you had to remember that the classic Italian grandmother had two prime insignia, the matterello, or rolling pin, and the spianatoia, or pasta board. The hand held edgewise stood for the matterello. There was never a time when I conceived of Neapolitan mimicry--that rolling-pin gesture, for instance--quite apart from Benedetta. For all her chattiness, she was the archetypal enunciator of body language. Words came second for her: when she spoke, speech glossed gesture, rather than the reverse. Her body never stopped doing its wry little pantomime, her smile archly informing me that nobody's words could be fully believed, not even hers. "They can't fool me," she seemed to be saying. It never occurred to her that she might be fooling herself. In those days, prowling the historic Neapolitan bookshops--Treves, Colonnesi, Pironti--I found, at Colonnesi, I think, a book titled La mimica a Napoli, by a learned Neapolitan abbe named Antonio De Jorio. It made a big impression on me. Writing in the early nineteenth century, De Jorio had thoroughly researched his city's gestural vocabulary, and he furnished amusing plates to support his contention, showing standard types of quarrels and domestic calamities. De Jorio was a French-style positivist, and his writing was as ponderous as today's social science jargon, but he also championed the nifty idea that conversational mimicry had a grammar much like that of spoken language. He claimed that such mimicry had its nouns and verbs, its adjectives and expletives, even its metaphors. I made hHofstadter, Dan is the author of 'Falling Palace A Romance of Naples', published 2005 under ISBN 9780375414404 and ISBN 0375414401.