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A Memoir
by Andre Aciman
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We were prepared for the horrors of life in a refugee camp once we landed in Naples, and had been warned repeatedly by people who had been in a camp that you had to wash your own dishes before returning them to the canteen, eat what you were served and not complain, and use a Turkish-style toilet. And if there were lice, added Aunt Elsa, who always liked to expect the worst, so as to be pleasantly surprised if it failed to occur—well, lice and nits there'd be. Who hadn't survived lice once or twice in a lifetime? Both she and her sister had lived through two world wars, witnessed massacres of Armenians, and suffered through forcible displacements, the most perilous being her escape from Lourdes on her way to Marseille during the war in circumstances so befouled that running water was more precious than bread and soap itself. As for lice … We've seen what we've seen, another favorite locution, which meant Don't make us relive what we're happy to forget.
My mother didn't respond when she was told about lice and nits, though she confided that she did worry about dirty bedding and soiled towels. She didn't know Italian and in any case, being deaf, would need me to interpret everything anyone said to her. She had prepared two suitcases of real sharkskin into which she had put everything to tide us over for two weeks. We'd been told that a bus would take us to the refugee camp, so the three of us were prepared to ride with the suitcases spread across our laps. We'd all been told tales about Naples. We were never to let the bags out of our sight.
Uncle Claude was indeed waiting for us as we came down the gangplank. He had driven from Rome very early that morning and had sped down the highway in time to catch our arrival. "Not bad for a seventy-year-old man, don't you think?" he exclaimed. His accent in French was the same as his dead brother's, but the falsetto in his voice was altogether surprising. My mother barely understood a word he uttered. But she smiled graciously, which he was happy to infer was an intimidated woman's way of cowering before the proclaimed virility of his manner.
With a chuckle, he explained to us that we were going to go through customs but that customs in Italy was not the barbaric rite of passage it was in Egypt. In an effort to say something warm and grateful, my mother asked me to convey that she loved the weather in Italy. She loved the sea air of Naples; she had grown up next to the sea, and it brought her back to her childhood in Egypt.
He heard my words, but said that Egypt was out of our lives. "The sea air here is Italian. No nostalgia, please. If you have any regrets," he added, "it's that you should have left Egypt years sooner."
Someone from customs came to us holding a manifest and asked if we were the occupants of third-class cabin number 6. We were, I replied. Customs officials, he said, had counted the number of suitcases: thirty-one in all. I explained to my mother what he'd said, adding, "Plus these two." I was holding one, my brother the other.
On hearing the number of suitcases, Uncle Claude slapped his thigh and, within a few seconds, turned red and uttered an enraged and ferocious yelp. "Where do you expect to put these suitcases? In my car?" The official, who had given my uncle a scrawny, dented pencil to sign the manifest, immediately tried to calm him by saying that the suitcases were going to be stored, then shipped in three to four weeks once he provided an address. "Did you just say thirty-one?" Claude asked, raising his voice a decibel higher. "Please, Dottore," said the official, "do not be offended. I simply meant three to four weeks." "Thirty-one!" I thought my uncle was going to strike him. With an apologetic tone, the official repeated, "Three to four weeks, Dottore." Again, Uncle Claude gave out an apoplectic shriek, but this time even louder. There was no mistaking it: he was not yelling at the customs official but at my mother, who hardly understood anything he was shouting, while I was so dumbfounded by his screaming that I froze on the spot. Uncle Claude, at the top of his lungs, asked what in God's good name were we thinking, bringing thirty-one suitcases to Italy? What could possibly be in them? A grand piano? An automobile? A tank? What? My mother, realizing what had brought on his conniption, said only, "Clothing. And maybe some silverware?" "Silverware?! Are you mad? You could have been arrested in Egypt for smuggling." The customs guards in Egypt had been bribed to let us pass, my mother explained. "Bribed? And did you think bribing them would have stopped them from arresting you? Ten days ago they were mere street vendors and ruffians, and you—or was it your husband or my foolish sister—were going to bribe them?" And then came the coup de grâce. "Why on earth did I have to get myself involved with this band of idiots," he said. "Oray Kapa. Basta!" he blurted out in Turkish, then in Italian. And with that he threw to the ground the pencil that the customs official had just handed him and then, in a still more violent fit, using the hard heel of his shoe, ground it several times.
Excerpted from Roman Year by Andre Aciman. Copyright © 2024 by Andre Aciman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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