My hands had turned to cool marble, yet I hadn’t had my fill of Naples; I could have stayed there all night drinking in its scent and feasting my eyes. Still it would have been in vain. The city was water seeping through my hands, and my very love for it filled me with sadness, especially at night. It was a sadness I could never fend off or even put my finger on. I’d given myself over to the city, maybe even betraying myself to do so, but even after all these years it still held me at a distance.
Vir’ Napule e po’ muor’, they say: “See Naples and die.” A city so magnificent that once you’ve seen it there is nothing left in the world to see. The saying had become such a cliché that I would never have used it in conversation, but right then I whispered it to the night as the truest of truths. Then I collected the firewood before heading back downstairs.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: November 30
Pietro,
I don’t know what to say. It’s been four long years since I last heard from you. Time makes everything bearable, even waiting. Or maybe I simply forgot what I was waiting for.
I still don’t know why you did what you did. Sometimes at night I look at the stars hoping for some kind of explanation from them. It’s crazy, I know, to think that the constellations could read like a sort of story with a beginning, middle, and maybe even a happy ending. But to be honest, I can’t make any sense of them. I can’t even recognize the simplest of constellations: the sky seems jumbled, upside down, unfamiliar. And yet I like looking at the stars anyway. Every single one of them is, after all, a trace of a luminous object that is unique and perfect and no longer exists. A luminous memory?
I’ve worked hard at forgetting everything to do with you. A kind of self-induced amnesia, which has been quite successful. Of course it helps not having people, places, or things around me that could remind me of you. Except the Roman figurine. But that’s not something I could regift or throw away. Maybe it would make more sense to one day give it back to the land . . .
My cat’s on my knee, she’s digging her claws in. She has beautiful gray fur. I rescued her from an animal shelter, so in a way I saved her life. But I think it’s more accurate to say that she saved mine.
Things are good. I’ve found a place where I fit in, I have a great job and new friends that only know as much about me and my past as I’d like them to know. It’s good to hear from you. It’s good to hear you say you’re sorry. Or have I put words in your mouth?
h.
2
THE DAY AFTER, the day of the hangover, I was sitting on my creaky bed turning the pages of my textbook when I heard Luca coming down the hallway toward me. I could tell it was him even before his voice broke through the mournful Bulgarian folk songs and the humming rain. It was the smell of his tobacco that gave him away. His smoke meandered in through my open door and danced before me as elusively as a wish.
For as long as I’d known him, Luca Falcone had always smoked those hand-rolled cigarettes: he was puffing on one when I was first introduced to him. Leaned against the dejected plaster outside the café across from my department, he was holding something very alcoholic and wearing out-of-fashion leather pants, seemingly oblivious to the historical era or the geographical location he’d wound up in. Luca was already in his third or fourth year and he was pockmarked, weathered like a traveler who had crossed the desert to get to that bar, that bourbon, that stopover.
That moment marked the beginning of my university life as I knew it now, for most unexpectedly Luca took a shine to me and slipped me into his inner circle—the alternative crowd majoring in Urdu or Swahili or Korean at the Department of Arabic-Islamic and Mediterranean Studies and the Department of Oriental Studies, whose remote Italian origins (Puglia, Basilicata, Sicily, Sardinia) branded them as outsiders too.
“The movie’s starting,” said Luca with the lilt of his native Varese, in the Lakes region.
“I’ll be right there. I’m just finishing the page.”
Up close, Luca smelled of lavender soap. He stamped a kiss on my forehead, a big one like he was farewelling me at the train station. Yet he didn’t leave. He lingered in the doorway to bore his eyes into me, as he sometimes did, as if to hypnotize me. That prolonged gaze always threw me into confusion while at the same time giving me the strange certainty, at least for as long as it lasted, that our friendship was not limited to this moment or these circumstances, that we had a bond which would outlast the rest. I knew it was ridiculous, and that I was no exception: everyone wanted a piece of Luca Falcone.
On either side of the now empty doorframe were some of my black-and-white photographs, taken with a macro lens, hand-printed and taped to the wall. They were good shots, though somewhat abstract. Through the window, sandwiched up against another building and transformed by the rain into a game board of Chutes and Ladders, I couldn’t even see my neighborhood being beaten down by the weather and by the passage of time. But it was Sunday and I knew that at that hour all the shops would be closed and the markets packed up, and every last soul would be back home for a marathon meal, followed by the compulsory nap. Sunday lunchtime was the only time when people felt sorry for me. Poor stray, so far from home.
Home. The word itself puzzled me. Didn’t home mean my dad grilling steaks or my psychotherapist stepmom doing her on-the-spot dream analysis? Wasn’t it my mom’s shiatsu foot rubs, her chilly but soft hands, or my brother plucking the bass? The cats? Apparently not, because for all the other out-of-town students home was a place. Colle Alto in the province of Benevento, Adelfia in the province of Bari. Home was a red dot on the map, a reference point that was so very small and yet able to contain, it seemed, everything. People appeared to take it for granted, as if it were just another basic human emotion—happy, sad, angry, home—and yet their eyes lit up when they said the word. Casa. I struggled to grasp that extraplanetary sensation but in the end I couldn’t really feel it. I had to resort to logical analysis to get my head around it.
I was from everywhere and from nowhere. Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia Beach, the outskirts of Boston, Athens in Ohio, and a few other forgettable stop-offs. That was until, at sixteen, I was assigned a dot on the map by an international exchange program that landed me in the nation of Italy, the province of Naples, the town of Castellammare di Stabia, the apartment of a divorcée with two grown sons who told me to call her Mamma Rita. It was Rita, and not AFSAI, who begged me to stay on after the first year and who had the foresight to advise her “American daughter” to graduate from a liceo linguistico.
I became convinced that nothing in this world is random. It was that diploma, in fact, that got me into the Orientale. The admissions lady had narrowed her eyes. I wasn’t Italian, but with that piece of paper I couldn’t not be Italian. When she thumped my admission form with four glorious official stamps, she turned me into a university student like any other. And among Luca’s friends, who were now mine too, the camouflage was almost perfect.
The boys and I had a fun little game, which would start with a request for a cold beer and usually end with a cup of hot tea.
“Ah, c’mon, gorgeous,” pleaded Tonino that afternoon lying starfish on Luca’s bed. In the spastic light of the TV, I could see that Tonino looked as miserable as the old wallpaper behind him, covered only partially by Luca’s Arabic calligraphy. “If I don’t inject more alcohol into my bloodstream, I’ll never get rid of this bastard headache.”
“You did ask for it,” said Angelo.
“Like you asking for that bong . . .”
“Listen, boys,” I said, putting on my sternest voice, in no way meant for Luca, who was rolling a cigarette. “You have class tomorrow, bright and early. C’mon, boys, it’s the last week before the break. You can do it! Honey or sugar?”
Tonino cursed half-heartedly in three dialects (Neapolitan, Sicilian, and his own), but they both gave in straightaway. I smiled to myself on my way to the kitchen, knowing full well that what thos
e two really craved was not a drink at all but a bit of mothering. I paused in front of Angelo’s cracked door, catching a peek at his black-and-white cowhide rug we often lay across sipping green tea from Japanese cups while deciphering our respective codes, kanji and Cyrillic. I climbed the staircase, which had lost its railing, swerving at the top to avoid stepping on the crack in the floor, just in case there was some reality to that childhood truth. The fracture started at the fireplace in the kitchen, half a meter out from the wall, and shot through to the end of the living room, dissecting the tiles to where they met the terrace. I wondered, as brazen as that crack was, why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d moved in with the boys. I’d probably been too distracted by the aging beauty of the once luxurious apartment, by all its fireplaces, frescoes, and bas-reliefs flaking and fading in the shadows.
I carried back beer mugs of tea and a pack of cookies; the bed sagged in the middle under our weight. I’d missed the opening scenes, but then again it was a movie we’d watched over and over, a New Zealand film I knew only by the name Una volta erano guerrieri, and I was very familiar with the plot. Tattooed Maori thugs bashing each other at night in parking lots and bars and on green lawns, spattered with blood and foul language dubbed in proper Italian with a northern accent.
“Man, what an awesome place New Zealand must be . . .” said Angelo dreamily.
“Awesome my ass,” Tonino spat back.
“It can’t be all that dangerous. Look at those wide-open spaces, they can do whatever the hell they want. I’d love to go there one day.”
“Sure, blondie, better to get an ass whipping from a Maori gang than a kneecapping from the Mafia.”
Angelo frowned, defiantly pulling up the plaid blanket. He had a nose ring and a proud Sicilian accent that should have lent him an air of toughness. But, whatever the situation, Angelo was like a kid in a candy shop and this was something Tonino just couldn’t let him get away with. It certainly didn’t help matters that Angelo had the complexion of a Swede, a washed-out color that didn’t stop at his face and hair. I only knew this because I’d nursed him back to health once when he was suffering from excruciating neck pain. Angelo had turned facedown onto that cow rug and pulled down his pants; quickly, before I lost the nerve, I jabbed the syringe of anti-inflammatory into his right buttock.
“Well, one day I’m gonna go there,” Angelo reiterated through a mouthful.
“You’re as baked as that cookie,” said Tonino.
“You should go. The world is a book . . .”
That last enigmatic sentence emerged from Luca’s smoke. I hadn’t even realized he’d been listening. Yet another night scene plunged the room into darkness, but Luca’s Arabic pendant, carved out of what looked like bone, shone as if reflecting light from an unknown source.
“New Zealand’s too far,” I said, and in fact I preferred destinations like Sardinia, Umbria, the Netherlands, Kiev, Vienna—with or without my family. Or better yet, Capri, Procida, the Phlegraean Fields, the streets of Naples. “Who wants to come with me to the Maria Santissima del Carmine Church during the break?” I suggested. Another one of my “field trips,” as the boys called them.
“A church over Easter?” said Angelo. “I’ll pass. I’d rather be sitting around a table stuffing my face with cassata.”
“It’s also known as the Fontanelle Cemetery,” said Luca. “Definitely worth a visit.”
Hope swelled up inside me. Maybe, just maybe, this time Luca would set aside his band practice or research for his thesis to wander with me through the city that was his by right of blood. But he said nothing more and slipped definitively back into the darkness.
“Well, I wouldn’t be able to go for all the pussy in the world,” Tonino said. “March is when we prune our olive trees . . . Oh, that’s right, you intellectuals wouldn’t want your hands getting dirty, now would you? But it would actually do you some good. Check out these muscles. You think they’re just for show?”
The boys burst out laughing and I sat up with a jolt. Pietro. I hadn’t even looked at the tape since he’d given it to me the night before. I had a habit of doing that, setting aside letters and packages from home, sometimes for days on end, savoring the anticipation of opening them. Or maybe I’d just wanted to forget all about it after Sonia’s confession. But now I was beset by a sense of urgency. Where had I put it?
“Hey, where are you going?” Angelo called out behind me. “This is the part where Nig gets initiated into the gang!”
My suede skirt hadn’t forgotten last night: it smelled like a bonfire and was still holding on to the fragile little package I’d entrusted it with. In good lighting I could now see that the neatly written song list was framed by cartoonish drawings of ladybugs and fish in rust-colored ink, a detail of such playfulness, kindness, and undeniable intimacy as to make my head spin.
I sat on the bed and put the cassette into the tape deck. The first song was Aretha Franklin’s version of “Son of a Preacher Man.” I let out a sigh. My love life up until then had been a series of melodramas and misunderstandings.
In Castellammare di Stabia I met Franco, a rookie in the Camorra, the local Mafia. At the time it felt a lot like love. Or a movie about love, with scenes of gripping his thick waist on the back of a Vespa that snaked through the ruins of his ghostly neighborhood, which over the centuries had taken one too many punches from earthquakes and landslides. Watching his mother in their poorly lit vascio wail with chronic pain in legs as swollen as tree trunks. Listening to the story of how his friend had been shot dead by a rival gang. Holding Franco in my arms as he broke every code of honor to cry and cry against the backdrop of a friend’s uninhabited apartment that didn’t even have electricity. I was sixteen and I wanted to save him. One day without an explanation he broke it off. The ending was unsurprising, even desirable. After that, those adolescent sunsets over the polluted sea became even more beautiful and raw, like blood oranges.
Cesare was an error in judgment I paid dearly for. In hindsight, I could have guessed that his brilliance and eccentricity were the early symptoms of schizophrenia. But at the time I was enamored with how enamored he was with me, his searing gaze, his crooked teeth. He was disheveled, possibly even ugly, but he possessed a blinding confidence and wrote terse, dense poetry that read like haiku. Cesare quickly betrayed signs of obsession: only later did I learn he’d given me the cheap, useless gift of his virginity. Long after he left the university to be hospitalized back in his hometown of Catanzaro, he continued to send me packages, even to my dad and Barbara’s house in DC, containing self-published volumes of love poems or top-secret instructions for building a bomb. Those declarations of undying passion, which became more and more grandiose, intensified my bouts of cold sores and also my shame, verging on disgust, for how I’d played the part of the carefree girl and used sex as an intellectual experiment in carnality, for how careless I’d been and how easily my instinct for self-preservation had won out over my compassion.
And then there was Luca. Or rather, there wasn’t. Late one night while watching a movie on his bed we’d drifted into sleep and he tangled himself around me. I woke up. The movie was over and Luca’s torso was rising and falling in a faraway, untroubled rhythm that seemed extraordinary in itself. His hair had come loose from his ponytail and his lips were slightly parted, but even in his sleep Luca was still ruggedly handsome. I was only pretending to sleep. Paralyzed with pleasure and awe, I let the night tick away with the flashing green of Luca’s digital clock as his pendant pressed its cryptic script onto my skin. I was afraid to wake him. I wanted to lie next to him for as long as the universe had miraculously granted me, to absorb everything about him. His esoteric knowledge, his composure, his patience and faith in himself. During that long magical night, I gained an important insight: what I felt for Luca was not a crush, it was far more than that. I didn’t want Luca Falcone, I wanted to be him.
I dropped back on my pillow and listened. There was a certain euphoria, and an unmistakabl
e sensuality, to the song that I’d never noticed although I’d heard it a thousand times. I wondered if Pietro could fully understand the lyrics, if he was aware he’d given me a love song.
3
I COULDN’T QUITE picture Pietro’s face. Our encounter had been so very brief and I’d even rushed it to a premature conclusion. The harder I tried to conjure up his image, the more it slipped away, until it was no more than a collection of indistinct features blending with the many eyes, noses, and mouths all around me, like those in the audience at my glottology lecture in the Astra Cinema. Fearing I would lose it forever in the crowd, I told myself not to dwell on it and to focus on my lesson instead.
The theater was warm and dark, womblike, the comfy seats upholstered in red velvet, my professor’s voice a low frequency. I couldn’t be dragged away from here even by wild horses, I thought to myself before realizing it was not a thought at all but a line from the second song, by the Rolling Stones, on Pietro’s mixed tape.
I refocused on my notebook, where I was attempting to transcribe every word coming from the stage. “All the world’s languages vary according to what we call taxa, or language families,” I jotted down in tidy, compact letters. “Colors are a type of significant taxonomy: in fact, we might even say there is such a thing as ethnic chromatism . . .”
“Please shoot me now.” The dark-haired girl next to me widened her made-up eyes, adding in a low whisper, “Signorelli’s head looks like an Easter egg, don’t you think?”
“He’s really good, though.” Actually, to me he seemed like a rock star.
“Sure, but he can’t teach. He just reads straight from the textbook.”
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 2