if you have to explain a joke...

how to know you're a local

There is a grocery store in Napoli that I love because it reminds me of American health food stores. I know I should be more Neapolitan. I do buy most of my veggies at the fruttivendolo and my fish at the pesceria but sometimes a girl wants whole wheat bread. Or natural cleaning products. Sometimes I just want to feel a taste of home. I want to win someone over with my charm. I want to elbow my coworker during an awkward moment or share an inside joke.

Piazza Bellini in Napoli

One of the men who works at the grocery store is Argentine and has a very raspy voice. He wears tortoiseshell glasses, has longer black hair, and is always happy to chat with me. Sometimes he asks me what I’m going to make with my ingredients and we talk about our favorite “zuppa” recipes. When I brought my Cuban-American friends, he talked to them in Spanish for ten minutes and we held up the entire check-out line.

Yesterday when I was checking out, I pulled out my credit card, and he said in Italian, “Foreigners always pay with a card, and Neapolitans always pay with cash”. This is one of the “old-fashioned” habits of Naples - it’s a cash economy because no one wants to pay Italian taxes.

I said, “I pay with a card because I’m paying in dollars,” however I pronounced dollars wrong.

The Argentine man replied, “No it’s not pain (dolore), it’s dollars (dollari).” Unlike French people, who correct your speech all the time, most Neapolitans forge on. They don’t correct my Italian when they understand what I mean. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because they are biologically wired to keep talking. The only people brave enough to correct my Italian are non-Italians. “Pain (dolore) is like this” (he mimicked a very sad person and caressed his arms).

“Well, I am also paying with pain (dolore),” I winked, thus recovering from my mistake and making my first-ever joke in Italian.

The Argentine man laughed so hard. He kept chuckling and repeating “dolore,” and I felt like I was accepting the Academy Award for funniest person. The Neapolitan woman waiting in line behind me did not even crack a smile. I imagined her thinking something along the lines of, “These foreigners are ruining our country”.

I’ve often heard that making jokes in a foreign language is one way to know that you’re heading in the right direction. Most days I feel like I’m not making any progress. But yesterday reminded me that foreigners stick together, you can make lemonade out of lemons, and I really need to find a bank that doesn’t charge me international ATM fees.

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