“Hey, toothpick!”
It was a young girl who’d checked me out and summed me up and was now staring me down, raring for a catfight; she may have only been nine years old, but in Neapolitan years that was something like nineteen. It was always hard to tell what the locals thought of us university lodgers. It was said that they tried to shield us from their criminal dealings, but who knows. Sometimes they appeared curious, at other times violated. But mostly they looked at us the same way they looked at the neighborhood’s stray dogs, with annoyance but not without tenderness, and kept us at arm’s length.
The girl gave up and moved on. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something black and white run up a side street and into a vascio. A goat, I was almost sure. And I thought I’d seen everything there was to see in the Quartieri, including a white rabbit living in the woodpile under a pizza maker’s oven. The goat seemed like a good sign and I dived into the alleyway after it. There was a farm smell but no trace of the animal. Locals were glaring at me from their doorways. I kept my eyes glued to the volcanic street stones, but I could already feel panic digging into my bewildered feet with its small, desperate claws.
I recoiled into the first right-hand alley. A deli, thank goodness. I took cover under the dangling meat and stole a glimpse at the street sign. Via De Deo. So much like Dio, it occurred to me. Real or not, the goat had shown me the way. Naples always came through for me in the end.
My thighs tensed up as I made my way up the steep incline. It gave the motorbikes a good workout too: men drove up it with their heads down in concentration, fat widows rode on the back, sidesaddle as their skirts and their years required. Women heaved uphill the burden of their shopping and of their children. Twenty-three. Twenty-five. Twenty-seven. My heart was racing. I blamed it on that ridiculous street, which, if it didn’t ease soon, would take me all the way to San Martino, the monastery just beyond the Spanish Quarter that appeared to hover above it like the very gates of heaven.
Thirty-three. Through the gate I could see a courtyard sunken in darkness but positively thriving with potted plants. My gaze slid up the dizzying face of the building. Above was a blue rectangle, a hint of vastness that made me feel I was about to burst.
I tried to remind myself that it was just a coffee. And yet, as I pressed the button and heard the instructions to go to the top floor, the ensuing click at the gate sounded like the nonnegotiable voice of fate.
Pietro looked up from a table. The buttery smell of coffee was already permeating the house and a cigarette smoldered next to several others that were doubled over in the ashtray. He stood to greet me with a tight-lipped grin, his shirt tucked in hard. He seemed poised to shake my hand: he didn’t, but neither did he kiss me on the cheeks.
“It’s very . . . sunny up here,” I said, out of breath.
“It’s our Monte Carlo.” He let out a short laugh. “Have a seat. Wherever you like. The coffee’s ready. How do you like it?” He was firing words at me as he made his way to the adjoining kitchen.
“With a splash of milk, if there is any. Otherwise don’t worry.”
I took a seat at the table and looked around the spacious living room. Other than the size and the similarity of being on the last (and likely illegal) floor, the apartment was nothing like ours. As if it had just been moved into, there were no pictures or posters, just a sigh of white space interrupted only by the metal of a desk and a line of books. Above a vinyl sofa was a modern staircase that led to a second floor. Windows and still more windows allowed the sun into the deepest recesses of the room, even under the stairs, cottoning everything in a soft glow.
“Sugar?”
“Yes, please.”
“Gabriele, coffee!” Pietro’s call reverberated in the uncluttered house. “My older brother,” he added as he put a cup before me. His hand was shaking slightly: Was it too many cigarettes or the fact that we were now truly alone together for the first time?
“I never asked you,” I said, stirring my sugar with undue care. “How was your stay on the farm?”
“Same old same old.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hellish as always!”
This clarification came not from Pietro but from an equally deep voice. A man with thinning black hair and a familiarly sharp, if slightly subtler, nose came toward me. Still standing, he said, “Gabriele, pleased to meet you. Let me tell you now, if you ever get invited to the farm, just say no. It’ll save you a lot of grief.”
“Don’t listen to him. It’s not that terrible.”
“No, it’s not that terrible,” said Gabriele theatrically. “How should we call it then, bucolic? Elegiac? Evocative and thought-provoking?”
“I have to apologize for Gabriele. He doesn’t appreciate fresh air. He prefers smog.”
Gabriele lit a cigarette and appeared to draw life-giving oxygen from it. “My baby brother is a bit blind. It’s not his fault: he’s the favorite. And he deserves it.” Then he looked at Pietro with a kind of love I’d never seen before, a furious adoration that made me lower my eyes. “Now, I’d love to ask you a zillion questions, but I’m sure my brother here would rather ask you himself, and anyway I have a design to finish by the end of the week. So I’ll be out of your hair now.” He downed his coffee.
“Are you an artist?” I asked, because suddenly I couldn’t bear for Gabriele to go off and leave us alone.
“I study architecture.”
“My brother’s an architect too.”
“Lucky him. I’m afraid for me it’s only a dream. Farewell for now, Eddie, but I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
With a heavy gait, Gabriele disappeared up that staircase. What had he meant by see you again soon? I had the distinct feeling that Pietro had told his brother about me. And yet, what was there to tell?
Espressos take such a painfully short time to drink. After a difficult pause Pietro asked me if I liked rocks. The question was hopelessly generic but I clung to it nonetheless. I told him about how when I was little my father would sometimes take me to the beach to search for fossils, and about his many film canisters of sands, treasures collected around the world. He too had studied geology before having to change majors, something that secretly made me feel I had a privileged, almost genetic, relationship to rocks. “On the beach my dad used one of those, what’s it called, a kind of hammer . . .”
“A prospecting pick,” Pietro said excitedly. “Yes, I have one.”
“Really?”
“All geology students have to own one. It’s a tool of the trade, like a sword to a knight.” He was laughing but looking intently now into his empty cup, like he was reading his fortune in the swirl of sugar crystals. All of a sudden he leveled his eyes with mine. “Would you like to see it? It’s upstairs.”
It wasn’t just a coffee. Despite my wild heartbeat, there was a certain relief in giving in to that knowledge. As I followed him up the staircase, I had to restrain a smile. Wasn’t it just like fourth grade, inviting a girl into your room to see a rock pick or a butterfly collection? Couldn’t he have come up with something better? But it was in fact the childishness of that fib that made the invitation acceptable. And the comfort brought on by that lovely little lie, of which we were both willing participants, wiped away all doubt, there wasn’t even a shadow of it now, that, on the third occasion that we’d ever spoken, once upstairs we would kiss.
Pietro’s room was the size of a closet, or at best a cabin on a ship, with the port mounted like a jewel in the window. There was hardly enough space for a single bed, a makeshift bookshelf, and a Jimi Hendrix poster. Pietro lifted his prospecting pick off the shelf and offered it to me as if it were made of the most translucent porcelain. He showed me how his name was carved into the handle, by his own hand. As I listened to him, I stole glances at his fleshy lower lip, wondering how on earth we were going to shift from a pick to a kiss.
“Sorry it’s such a small room,” he said. “If you want to sit down, you can use the bed.”<
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So this was how it was going to happen. I sat down, surrendering to that little twist and turn of fate. But I was out of my depth. I couldn’t comprehend how I’d ended up there, in a stranger’s room, on his bed. A slippery dip in blood pressure made my head go light and my body heavy like a bag of stones I suddenly had to bear. But at this point I was committed to seeing it through. I was already imagining being back in the safety of my own room, retasting the kiss that hadn’t happened yet—or, it now occurred to me, trying to erase the memory of it.
Pietro sat next to me, saying simply, “I might lie down.” He lowered the prospecting pick to the floor and stretched out comfortably, his legs pointing toward the sea.
I lay down, too, and this somewhat eased my light-headedness. We stayed there on our backs on that tiny bed, the kind children sleep in, while each and every pretense rose like steam up to the ceiling. For a long while we looked at the slanting ceiling, a mirror in which I could see reflected back to me a dizzying array of possibilities.
I asked, “Are you a Jimi Hendrix fan?”
“Not really. I just thought the poster looked cool.” His voice was as close to me as it had ever been, and at such low volume it sounded deeper still. I wanted him to say more, and more. Instead he asked me what kind of music I liked.
“I don’t know, quite a range.” I shrugged at the ceiling. “I liked the songs you taped for me.”
He laughed uneasily. “I thought a lot about what I was going to put on that tape. It took me hours.”
“But you didn’t even know me.”
“It was like a sixth sense, Heddi.”
There was a grave silence. I couldn’t possibly turn my face toward him now, with his breath so close I could taste it. All at once, the ceiling went dark and there was a collision of sandpaper with my mouth. Startled, I pulled away. Oh god, it had gone horribly wrong, it had all turned out very high school . . . very liceo.
“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“You just surprised me, that’s all.”
“You mean you didn’t think I was going to kiss you?” And he fell dejectedly back on the bed.
Part of me wanted to walk out then and there and forget all about it. But a voice deep inside—and perhaps it was nothing but my familiar thirst for knowledge—told me I had to stay, to push through the awkwardness and the shame. I had to know. So I leaned over him, a rush of blood to my head instantly curing my low blood pressure, and I brushed his lips with mine as if to shush him. Pietro craned his neck to reach me with his mouth, like he was passing me a Halloween apple with his hands tied. I pulled back, burned by his stubble. Was this how they kissed in the province of Avellino?
I was still looking at his plump lower lip and without thinking I gently bit it. He let me. He just lay there, eyelids shut and breathing heavily, perhaps afraid of what I might do next. I didn’t know myself.
In a show of goodwill, again I pressed my lips against his. And this time his mouth opened soft and sweet like a fresh fig. It was warmed by the sun and ripe, just right, and I wanted more. Another kiss, and yet another, and soon our mouths were feeding off each other, one taste leading inevitably to the next but never satisfying. Before long we were scrambling for them, greedily, individually, as they disappeared one by one like cherries from a bowl. In the end there might even be a winner and a loser.
I was not in any way transported: I was almost too present, a purely physical being hyperaware of every movement, every sensation. There was my upper lip becoming raw from Pietro’s stubble, the balm of his tongue, the porcelain of his teeth. His belt buckle pressing into my hipbone, the stubborn buttons of his shirt, his long fingers getting caught in my hair. His scent of cologne and coffee, tomatoes and sweat. I had to keep my eyes shut: that was the only way I could limit the number of senses flooding me with information I couldn’t reconcile.
I lost my grasp of time, or perhaps time had lost its linearity. When had we started kissing: two minutes ago, two hours ago? I didn’t have the faintest idea. The beginning had slipped into oblivion and the end was no longer inevitable. One kiss led to another and the only certainty was that we couldn’t stop.
Then out of nowhere, something came over me—an inspiration, though not a flash of light but rather a flash of darkness, like a power cut. I was blinded, plunged into the deepest night. I was suspended there, stolen out of my own body, stripped of my sense of self, and yet it was such an incredible feeling that I could have stayed there forever, floating in the universe. Was this why people took heroin? But if it was so, then it was also true that he and I had shot up with the same drug, the same needle, for in that very moment we both opened our eyes.
We looked at each other for an eternity, or maybe just a breath. A transparent and peaceful gaze that went beyond judgment or embarrassment, even beyond curiosity. Our mouths still attached, we watched each other as if someone else were doing the kissing, our bodies carrying on without us. We had nothing to do with it, we were merely witnessing the beauty of the world.
We closed our eyes, letting the kisses rock us like so many exploding stars. Decorum was gone. Lips wandered to the cheekbones, chin, neck. I rubbed my cheeks across his stubble, wishing now for rawness. He rolled on top of me, murmuring things that made no sense, a warm mist breathing into my hair and my ear, not words at all but a spirit moving me. My god, was this how they kissed in the province of Avellino? It was a divine, primordial chaos that seemed to be building up to a great upheaval of the elements. I became afraid, and as if to brace myself, to ground myself, I searched for his mouth so that I could take in his breath once more. I’d forgotten where I was and how I’d come to be there, I’d even forgotten his name or that he was like any of the other people on the planet who had names, pasts, and daily concerns. He was simply him, this man, whose mouth was mine to kiss, every warm and rich corner of it, and whose chest was pressed, sternum and ribs and heart and all, up against mine.
When the sun began staining the port soda-pop orange, we looked into each other’s eyes again and there was a renewed awareness that we were two separate individuals. We started laughing, at nothing, perhaps with relief. I leaned against Pietro’s chest. There it was, the pendant I shouldn’t have seen when his shirt had opened up on the terrace, a smiling silver sun. I asked him if it had any special meaning to him.
“I bought it in a market, just a couple of months ago. And I thought while I was buying it that I wished I had someone to give it to. It’s pathetic, I know.”
“Not at all.” I held the sun in my hands. Around a grin of fulfillment were rays with tips almost too sharp to touch. “I find it moving.”
“You’re such a good person, Heddi,” he said rather solemnly.
“How did you learn my name?”
“I asked around. It wasn’t that hard.” Brushing the hair off my face, he added, “You’re beautiful too. But I bet you’ve heard that many times before.”
The truth was that, like all girls, I’d heard it plenty. When it came to the female form, at least in the slums a Neapolitan man wasn’t a man unless he vomited his private thoughts in the streets. But hearing it from Pietro was another thing altogether.
“I don’t know what you see in me,” he said. “I’m just from a small village. You’re a big-city girl.”
“A big city?” As if American cities were ranked by their verticality, I cut Washington down to size by telling him there were no skyscrapers, and that my dad and stepmom’s neighborhood was full of undocumented Mexican immigrants in cowboy hats, out of work and far from home, some who were so drunk by midday they couldn’t even stand up. I didn’t mention the Polish and Ugandan embassies just down the road: I didn’t want the capital of the United States to steal my thunder. But neither did I mention the other half of my life spent in the suburbs with my mom and stepdad.
Pietro’s particular dot on the map went by the name of Monte San Rocco. His parents were farmers, he told me, and poor—or at least they acted like they were. Hi
s mother hadn’t finished elementary school, and it was Pietro who’d taught his father to sign his own name. “Before that he used to sign with an x.”
“You mean he’s illiterate?”
Pietro turned toward the wall. “I don’t think you’d have given me another glance if you saw me on a tractor.” He turned back to me. “And yet, Heddi, I can’t help but want to be with you, from the first time I saw you.”
I hoped he couldn’t feel the drum of my heart against his chest. “Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll get to see you ride a tractor . . . or is it drive a tractor?”
“Fly a tractor.” He wiped his laughter away with a hand. As for me, the joke had not just saved me from a linguistic slipup but also broken the tension, and I burst out in heartfelt laughter. He said, “I’d sure like to fly to Washington someday.”
“I’d rather be here.”
“Really?”
“I love living by the sea.”
I laid my head on his chest. I hardly knew him but his smell was familiar even in its exoticness—a new spice, but one as earthy as salt, one I might no longer be able to do without. It came from his now crinkled shirt, his dusty hair, and his fading cologne that was now on my face too.
The slippery, molten sunlight cast sharp, geometrical shadows against the surrounding rooftops. The insidious sand of the scirocco really seemed to have gone. Maybe it wouldn’t be back again until next year.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 5