We kissed, and as the warm water trickled into the cave of our mouths, Madeleine started pounding again. Laughing, we resisted the desire to linger in the heat, and the growing desire to make love standing up, and hurriedly shampooed each other’s hair.
Gabriele returned from the village weighed down with almond biscotti, stuffed peppers, and red wine. Before closing the door behind us, he grabbed one of the bottles for the party he’d invited us along to.
Night was a watercolor bleeding down onto the Quartieri, but nonetheless the timid warmth of that spring afternoon remained trapped in the streets, caught in the webs of forgotten laundry and in the clouds of frying squid and sickeningly sweet trash. We heard a thud behind us and spun around. Enormous rats (referred to by the locals as zoccole, a name they shared with hookers and other man-eaters) scattered out, their nails scratching across the cobblestones, just as a bag of garbage, still trembling from its fall, was starting to leak its sharp, greasy secrets onto the street. Whichever wise guy threw it from above, just to avoid the stairs, was already closing the balcony doors behind him. Did it really matter? By morning the trash truck would have swept it all away.
“Would you two mind terribly if I stopped for some cigarettes on our way?” asked Gabriele.
“I’m out, too,” said Pietro.
A fluorescent light drew us in, a beacon in the dark. With all the shops closed for the night, ground-floor homes could now open for business. This vascio was particularly lavish. Just outside the door was a small table displaying candies; dangling above them were bunches of potato chips. They were inviting signs that helped dissolve the boundary between street and home, between public and private, in the same way that the swampy night air melted the distinction between the warmth I felt outside my skin and the heat I was nurturing inside.
In the vascio an elderly man eating his cutlet at the table looked straight through us, like we were invisible. There was no need to go to any trouble for any old customers, and the night was young. His wife rose from the bed behind a partition, shuffling out in her slippers. I didn’t want to look at that bed with its cougar blanket, its disheveled and still warm sheets, its sloppy intimacy, but the pull was irresistible. In the end I gave in and looked at the couple’s bed with the fascinated horror with which one might watch a TV screen flashing scenes of passion or bloodshed. The woman, however, was relaxed, perhaps indifferent. Wearing a pink dressing gown, she nimbly walked the razor’s edge between business and pleasure, selling and sleeping, day and night. She squeezed in behind her husband, who was still busy chewing, to rummage through a utensil drawer and hand over her black-market cigarettes. The cash did a magic trick, vanishing into the pocket of her gown.
“They taste nasty but they’re cheap,” said Pietro, slipping the Marlboro Lights into his breast pocket.
We kept walking, the tapping of our shoes muffled by television sets turned on in people’s homes. Suddenly Gabriele stopped in his tracks. “Oh god, now what?”
Pietro and I also stopped. Before us was a massive dog, so black he might have been just a figment of the dark. Under the feeble glow of the streetlight, the dog lay across a bed of cardboard, looking straight at us with mirrory eyes that reflected splinters of artificial light. Pigeons fat as chickens circumambulated his body, a map scribbled in scars from who knows what battles. He was breathing through his nose like a wild horse and rolling his eyes with us, now left, now right, following our every tentative movement. I gripped Pietro’s arm.
“Now that’s a beast if I ever saw one,” he said.
The dog lay there with, it seemed, a sense of purpose, and it took me a few moments to understand that he was standing guard. Behind him was a series of low cement walls that trailed behind him like large graffitied dominoes, barricading the road before us for the length of the entire block. In that space, the flow of the city was cut off and, as if to build a haphazard dam, lawn chairs had been laid out, Vespas parked, undershirts hung out to dry. Above it all, scaffolding crossed out the sky, making a metal cage of this corner of the neighborhood. The dog let out a low rumble, or maybe it was a motorbike in the distance.
“Are you sure this is the right direction?” Pietro said to his brother in a low voice.
“I do believe so.” Gabriele pulled out a limp piece of paper, the invitation.
“We’ll just have to scoot past him then.”
“But even if he lets us through,” I said, “how are we supposed to get past the walls?” It would have been an obstacle course: the only visible opening, in the first wall, was obstructed by a parked scooter.
“Indeed. Unstable buildings in need of reinforcement,” said Gabriele contemplatively. “Hence the barricade.”
Pietro mouthed the words Hence the barricade, lifting his eyebrows mockingly. I frowned at him, hoping Gabriele hadn’t noticed. Couldn’t Pietro tell how much, how hard, his brother loved him?
We looked down the left-hand street, but another series of low walls blocked that too.
“Unfortunately, according to this map,” said Gabriele, “to get to Anna’s house we must get to the other side.” Glancing at the dog, he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “But I fear the direct route is not an option tonight.”
We had no choice but to backtrack and try another path, and that’s when we became lost. Pietro wove his fingers through mine as we tried to chisel some sense into those indistinguishable streets. At one point, recognizing a distinctive pair of purple pants hanging from a balcony, we realized we’d gone full circle. Pietro suggested we ditch the whole thing, saying he wouldn’t know anyone at the party anyway, but then, entirely by accident, we found the right building.
We followed the laughter and music to one of the upper floors. In the entranceway Gabriele kissed the hostess, a classmate of his who was delighted with the home brew; then he disappeared. Loose tiles creaked under our feet as Pietro and I inched our way through the guests. The apartment was a series of candlelit rooms without a corridor that simply flowed from one into the next. It was loud with voices and bittersweet with pot. Cats moved soundlessly between rooms, letting themselves be caught momentarily, only to slither out of my hands. I followed one of them into a less crowded room, losing Pietro in the process. Before me were chairs lined up awkwardly against the wall. Moved by their solitude, I sat down.
Soon enough Gabriele had settled into a chair beside me and was handing me a plastic cup of red wine. “Here, this will help you relax.”
“But I’m OK without it,” I said, taking a sip anyway. “Life is enough of a high for me.”
“I know. And it’s infectious,” Gabriele said, downing all his wine at once. “Aaah. All that walking in circles made me thirsty.”
“In squares, actually.”
I would have gladly given Gabriele my wine even without that pretext. His eyes lit up as he emptied the contents of my cup into his, a gesture that was an admission both of fastidiousness in matters of hygiene and of an emerging intimacy between us. This made me want to open up to him in some way, and for some reason I decided to tell him about my visit to the Fontanelle Cemetery.
As I spoke, Gabriele leaned in toward me, ever closer, so as to hear me better in the midst of all the noise. I found the closeness pleasant. I could see every detail of his face: his unshaven jaw, his lips already a shade darker from the wine. Despite his excessive attention to cleanliness, Gabriele paid little mind to his appearance. His hair was always a mess, his eyebrows, too, and he dressed shabbily, with missing buttons and baggy pants that dragged on the ground. And now, having him right up next to me, so close I could smell the spicy complexity of his wine as though I’d drunk it myself, I felt a tipsy sort of desire to straighten the strands of his hair and the cords of his corduroy jacket.
“Unfortunately, Eddie, I have little time for outings myself. However, I do know it’s not the only area in the city with caves like that,” he said. “There are many, many more. Underneath our feet, Naples is almost completely empty.”
“What do you mean by empty?”
A flicker of fire passed over Gabriele’s eyes, as though he’d concentrated in them the light of all the candles in the room. I could see he was relishing my confusion at his words, and I let him have that desired effect in the same way I’d let him have my wine.
“Look around you. This building, all the other old buildings around it: they’re all made of stone. They go on as far as the eye can see, with hardly a patch of green. But where do you think they get this construction material from?”
“I’ve never thought about it before.”
Holding that flimsy plastic cup as if it were a fluted wineglass, Gabriele explained that while other cities had risen with the help of material shipped in from the countryside, Naples had not. From Greek times it had been known that the land was almost entirely made of yellow tuff, a stone of volcanic origin that is excellent for construction purposes due to its high workability. So they simply began dragging it up from underground, as well as from the surrounding hills. And as they dug and emptied the land invisibly beneath their feet, the city aboveground grew noticeably. Yellow tuff was so easily accessible that the practice continued beyond the late 1800s. Hence, added Gabriele, the Spanish Quarter was built in the same manner, even though the masonry walls weren’t up to the standard of thickness used in the stately palaces, located elsewhere in the city. Perhaps in order to cut building costs even further, the thickness of the walls diminished on the upper floors.
“Upper floors like your place,” I said, not to mention my place.
“Well, keep in mind that the structures in the Spanish Quarter rose to no more than four or five floors. The others are all raised floors.”
“Raised?”
“Illegal floors, dear Eddie, without any building supervision. Just think about it for a minute. You’ve already got the thinnest load-bearing walls they could get away with: add to that the compression caused by the weight of the extra floors, and what you’ve got is major structural fragility. Neapolitan tuff is particularly soft and brittle. Have you ever noticed that, when you touch it in spots where the plaster has come off, it crumbles between your fingers?”
Gabriele extracted a cigarette and, as he fumbled for his lighter, I suddenly grasped the true meaning of the adjective illegal, so commonly and nonjudgmentally used in Naples. Illegal didn’t mean unwelcome so much as precarious.
He lit up and took a puff. “For this and other reasons, Naples is incomparable. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.”
An explosion of laughter and clapping came from another room, and all at once I felt overwhelmed by the facts I’d just learned, alluring and at once disconcerting details like a bunch of Lego pieces that I just couldn’t put together and were thus running through my hands with a clatter as deafening as that laughter. I didn’t get Naples, not really. I was missing the bigger picture, a true map. The Spanish Quarter, then, wasn’t on the outskirts of society but the very quintessence of Naples. A place that on the surface appeared simple to unravel but that in reality followed its own mysterious logic that twisted it into a knot you couldn’t untie. My knowledge of my adoptive city was so full of holes that I knew for sure I would never be like Luca, wise and at ease in the city. Because despite all the years I’d been there, despite the liceo and the excursions, despite all the passion I’d poured into it and my desire to surrender to it and lose myself in it, there was something about it that managed to elude me. Love wasn’t enough.
I looked over at Gabriele. Smoking in profile like that, he looked so much like Pietro—the long, hard lines of his nose, the gray curve of his stubble—and the flickering, uncertain light of that room further blurred the boundaries between the two brothers. I became pleasantly aware that Gabriele and I were developing a degree of closeness, maybe even affection for each other, and that seemed very important to me though I couldn’t yet figure out why. At the same time I didn’t trust myself to dose that affection because, even without alcohol in my system, even without the physical presence of Pietro, that night as always I could feel his words set my mind on fire, his caresses ignite my skin, his kisses intoxicate my mouth. What we were doing wasn’t having sex; it was like surrendering to an illness. And the most glaring side effect was that I released a sensuality I wasn’t sure if I wanted or didn’t want others to notice. A larger-than-life sensuality that was simply gushing from my pores and spilling sloppily around me, especially on Gabriele, who was genetically a part of Pietro and who was now sending a silky river of smoke to the ceiling, lost in who knows what thoughts.
“But isn’t it dangerous?” I asked.
“What?”
“I mean, all these buildings and streets built on top of what is effectively hollow land?”
“Quite the opposite.” Gabriele leaned in toward me excitedly, conspiratorially, as if about to reveal a secret. “Some people actually believe it has given Naples an advantage by making it more ‘elastic’ and saving it from more severe earthquake damage. Our village, the glamorous Monte San Rocco, was nearly razed to the ground in the 1980 earthquake and, as you know, all the other towns along the coast south of Naples were hit very hard. So why did Naples only suffer the collapse of a few structures here and there? Certainly, my brother would be able to give a more technical explanation. But basically, they say, the underground cavities absorbed the seismic waves. Actually, let’s go ahead and ask him now. Look, there he is.”
It was always the same when I caught sight of Pietro. First I would experience the thrill of vertigo—the world bending, even creating itself from nothing, and I was just an awed spectator. Then would come the fall as if from a great, great height, but giving in to that fall gave me the most intense, alarming happiness.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: February 23
Dearest Heddi,
I’ve just returned from the platform to find your email waiting for me, all the way from New Zealand! It’s truly amazing! Why New Zealand? How long have you been there? What season is it over there right now? Do you have a tattoo? How long has it been since you’ve seen your parents? So many questions. I’d love to see some of your pictures of the landscapes; you must be an even better photographer than before.
Here everything is the same: nothing is good but everything keeps moving along thanks to an unpleasant sense of inertia. Since receiving your email, all I do is reread it, in the hopes of finding something between the lines. But what? I don’t know. You’re a wonderful person. I don’t know if, actually I know perfectly well, that I would never be able to forgive or even have kind words for a coward like me.
I’m not even a shadow of the person I was a few years back. I’m more cynical, disillusioned, tired and—you’re right—maybe a little depressed. You were my adrenaline, my hot chocolate, my woolen scarf, my wine bank, my English teacher, my best friend.
Sometimes I reflect upon humanity, people’s behavior, their madness. When I’m feeling particularly kind, I can even find some plausible explanations for what I did to you, but when I’m feeling spiteful (that is, most of the time) I can only kick myself. I gave you up because I felt strong. Because I thought I could live without you. Nothing of the kind. You are and always will be, even if you don’t want to be, the only woman who has made me happy. I understood this too late, extremely late in the best Hollywood tradition.
I get by. I trick myself into believing (only when I’m feeling kind) that there will be some peace for me. But I’d really like to see you again. Recently I’ve had this recurring thought: I keep seeing myself as the owner of a farmhouse in Tuscany or Piedmont and imagining a couple of blond children and you writing at the computer. Very picturesque, don’t you think? Hallucinations like I had long ago? Will I see you one of these days?
p.
9
THERE WAS A CERTAIN courtyard hierarchy in the Spanish Quarter. On the sixth or seventh floors, there was a surplus of light, sweeping views, some
times even sea breezes. From those upper floors, the anarchy of the streets often seemed far away. Those one hundred and sixty-eight stairs were at once a test of the survival of the fittest and our Great Wall.
But already on the third floor, not to mention the second—or, heaven forbid, the first—it was like being inside a house of cards. Balconies were stacked upon balconies, sheets were hung upon sheets, and the buildings themselves, as if they weren’t already close enough together, were shackled to each other by electrical wires, from which streetlights dangled, as though to keep them from drifting apart. Until death do you part. On those lower floors, sunshine could be measured in centimeters. A bar of gold would appear once a day on the kitchen table, like something left behind by a guest, but before you could slip it into your pocket it would warp into a rhombus, its edges nibbled away by the dark, until there was nothing left but a nugget—and then it was gone. As for living on the ground floor, that was a concept we couldn’t even contemplate.
The locals made ample use of that wicker or plastic breadbasket called il paniere (’o panaro in dialect). I liked watching the paniere forced to bungee-jump from the higher floors down to the street, where it would pick up bread or drop off forgotten keys or money. It reminded me of a spider dropping fearlessly down its silky strand, accompanied by hollered, and often misunderstood, instructions. But the paniere was too ghetto for us university students. The rope we used to make contact with the noisy and often unruly world below us was much subtler and far more modern: the intercom.
“Hey, Pie’, is Eddie there?” crackled a voice one day.
“Tonino. For you.”
I ran to press the speaker button with a pang of guilt. I’d hardly been at home with the boys of late, thus jeopardizing that undisciplined daily routine on which our entire relationship was founded, not to mention leaving them at the mercy of their upcoming exams. As if to confirm my fears, Tonino’s tone was harsh.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 8