Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  “You need to come home now, Eddie. There’s no time to explain.”

  I rushed down the stairs. Even with those short legs, Tonino was practically speed-walking through the neighborhood, which had gone into hibernation after the midday meal; I struggled to keep up with him. All the while the sun pendant under my shirt jingled more and more persistently as I pressed Tonino for an explanation, but all he said was, “We couldn’t find your camera.”

  “What do you need my camera for?”

  “You’ll see with your own eyes. But you’re going to think you’re tripping.”

  We summited the stairs and stepped inside the house. Immediately I noticed, through Angelo’s wide-open door, that inside his room was a thick haze like when a movie cuts to a dream sequence. And yet it was all very real: the air tasted like lime, and I could make out Angelo himself standing by the window in a rather pensive pose but dusted ridiculously in flour like a pizza maker. Sonia, too, was covered in powder; seated on the bed leaning against the wall, she was as white as a geisha. Both were frozen in position like actors waiting for the curtain to lift.

  “What’s going on here?”

  From the hallway came Luca’s voice. “Look up.”

  Above Angelo’s bed, the ceiling was gouged with a large, deep wound fringed with inlets like Sardinia. Below it, right on top on Angelo’s now virtually unrecognizable cow rug, was a massive slab—of plaster or stone, I couldn’t have said—and everywhere chunks, shards, dust. I should have understood, but the scene as a whole was one of such devastation that I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  “Sonia and Angelo were just sitting there on the bed watching the usual crap on TV,” said Tonino, “when out of nowhere a piece of ceiling came down on them.”

  “It could have broken our necks,” added Angelo, trying hard to contain his enthusiasm. “It was a close call. It grazed my leg.”

  “Are you OK?” I made to step over the rubble toward them, but Tonino stopped me.

  “Don’t move anything, gorgeous. We need to take pictures first, to show the landlords, or the insurance company, or whoever the hell needs to see them. Otherwise no one will believe us.”

  “I’m all right, Eddie,” said Sonia. “It just scratched my arm. We could have cleaned ourselves up a bit but we were waiting for you to take pictures.”

  “The camera’s in the drawer . . . the one below the dictionaries,” I said distractedly to Tonino. “But it has a roll of black and white in it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s all white in there anyway.”

  I focused my Minolta and only then did I begin to make sense of the scene before me. Click, and I captured the rebel stone that on its trajectory from the ceiling had broken its edges against the bed. Angelo with bits of plaster in his hair. The bedspread covered in debris. Sonia’s combat boots that were no longer black but white. If she had been a few centimeters farther from Angelo, it probably would have broken her leg. And if Angelo in that moment had leaned over to change channels . . . Angelo was right: they had both narrowly escaped serious injury—or worse. So then why did it hurt so bad to be safely behind the lens instead of right there with my friends, in that room I knew so well, covered from head to toe in dust? It was an absurd envy.

  No sooner had I finished than Angelo was already making his way around the slab in the direction of the kitchen for a well-deserved coffee, while Sonia was heading to the bathroom for a shower.

  “No,” said Luca, “we need to get out of here. This house is no longer safe.”

  “The damage is already done, Falcone,” protested Tonino. “It’s not like the ceiling’s gonna fall again.”

  “The crack upstairs is only getting bigger. It’s obviously connected. This place is falling apart.”

  And with that, he sent us out to the corner café so that he could go talk to the landlady. Only Luca knew which vascio in the Spanish Quarter was hers, since he was the one who had rented the apartment in the first place, before any of us had come along.

  He joined us half an hour later. He told us that the landlady had followed him all the way back to our place in her bathrobe and slippers, looking around and listening poker-faced to Luca’s account. Goodness knows what cards she had up her sleeve, but what she ended up pulling out was a pricey cell phone, with which she called her nephew, shouting through it in a rapid-fire, rabid form of dialect that not even Luca, whose father was Neapolitan, could penetrate. She hung up with a saccharine smile, passing on to Luca the results of what was not a heated dispute after all but an off-site building assessment. She trusted her nephew like her own son, and anyway he was the best engineer in the Quartieri, or at least he would be once he finished his degree. Her nephew had recommended that a series of steel beams be installed to brace the floor to the outer wall, which was in effect detaching itself from the house. The reconstruction would take about six months, in Neapolitan time: until then, the place was uninhabitable.

  For a while the deafening coffee grinder pleasantly filled our silence. Slumped in his chair, Angelo was the first to speak. “Damn, I love that house.”

  I freed a clump of plaster from his hair. “So do I,” I said, but at the same time I felt something quite different pulling at me, something willful and irresistible like a rip current, and part of me knew the worst thing to do was to fight it.

  “There’s got to be a bright side here,” said Sonia.

  “Yes, you’re right!” Angelo nearly jumped out of his chair. “Summer’s coming and most of us are going home anyway. So I say we pack up the necessary items and just be homeless for a few months.”

  “Yeah right, blondie, I’d love to see you, all prim and proper, squatting with those real street punks,” said Tonino.

  “What the hell would you know? No, I was thinking I could stay with Davide, and you could stay with whoever will put up with you. C’mon, guys, we’d save a ton of rent, and then the place should be ready to go by the time classes start again in October.” And with that, he sat back with a triumphant smile.

  For once Tonino agreed with Angelo. From across the table Luca gave me one of those stares, powerful enough to put me under a spell, and this time I was sure that he was trying to tell me, in his infinite wisdom, to just let them talk—and to just let go.

  I moved into Pietro’s place. There was a naturalness, a predictability, in that decision that I didn’t want to read into. In the heat of the moment I didn’t stop to consider that we might be rushing into things, or to analyze the possible consequences. The future wasn’t an issue, it never really had been, but the past was even less of one. Once I’d let go of that decrepit old palace that I’d so loved, I could suddenly see it for what it was and what it had been from the very beginning: a stop along the way.

  Pietro pulled his mattress to the floor, dragged away the frame, and brought in a second single mattress. The already cramped room seemed to shrink even further. I stood in the doorway, unsure of how to help him in that block puzzle of sliding furniture and preoccupied with thoughts of the boys, of where and how often we’d see each other now.

  “I think they’ll fit best over here,” Pietro said, before heaving the mattresses one by one into the corner under the window. Now there was only enough space left to open and close the door.

  “Are you sure . . . ?” I began again.

  “Without a doubt.”

  “I can pay—”

  “Out of the question.”

  “It’s just for the summer . . .”

  “We’ll see.”

  I stood there in awe of his one-man strength and his absolute certainty on the matter, as though all he’d ever dreamed of was to share a room the size of a wardrobe with another human being. He was wearing an expression of humble satisfaction, perhaps for having solved a geometrical puzzle, and standing heavily on that leg he preferred, hands at his hips. All at once I remembered him as he was that first night he came to dinner at our place: awkward and breathless from the stairs, he stood there under the cei
ling medallion as if waiting for something to drop from the sky.

  That image of Pietro as a stranger sent a chill through me. Wasn’t that less than two months ago? But it seemed more that I was a stranger to myself, for how rashly I’d gone to stay with him when I still knew so little about him; for how easily his touch transported me, maybe even transformed me; for how gladly I’d skipped lessons and conferences to be with him; and for all the ways in which I’d proven myself to be impulsive, irresponsible, and maybe even foolhardy.

  Together the mattresses formed a queen-size bed slit down the middle. “It’s too bad about that crack, though,” he said.

  “It’ll be fine.”

  The crack did grow larger throughout the course of the night. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I saw was the long blue pencil of the sea. From that new angle, the Spanish Quarter seemed to have vanished into thin air. Pietro was still asleep when I got up.

  I used the downstairs bathroom, which housed the boiler Madeleine had beaten to a pulp as well as a bathtub that had no difficulty filling up with hot water for when no such assistance was available. I put the coffee maker on the stove and stepped out onto the terrace. Two more steps and I was on the tar-sealed roof.

  What a beautiful morning. All around me, TV antennae were trying to pierce a sky white with sun. I wondered how many of those decaying towers were balanced on hollow ground, as Gabriele had said. I wondered if this one was. Who cares, I thought. Up there I felt tall as never before, in a world without a ceiling. It was early and the neighborhood was making only muffled little noises as soft as slippers. The air too was half-asleep, smelling of newly lit cigarettes and freshly melted tar, hot bread and cool sea. I could have gorged myself on those scents, drunk it all in with my eyes, covered myself in the glitter of the gulf. On its calm surface, the container ships looked unreal: they quivered like mirages and were of a dusty, rusty brown, the same fragile color as the volcano behind them.

  When the coffee gurgled, I stepped back into the kitchen. I was surprised to find Madeleine standing there with turbulent hair and minimalist clothing, but what surprised me even more was that she smiled generously and kissed me. She seemed so unlike the grumpy girl who had helped us with the shower. Clearly, with a solid eight hours she was positively charming. Pietro came downstairs, too, and all three of us sat down at the slanted table to have our coffee.

  Any doubts about Pietro had melted away. I felt at home, and I loved him.

  I could only imagine how shaken Sonia and the boys must have been after having experienced the collapse of the ceiling firsthand, but my reaction was to go in search of proof that Naples itself wasn’t falling to pieces. One Sunday morning I took Pietro with me on an outing to Capodimonte Park, on one of the city’s tallest hills. We might as well have been in Bali. Tunnels of trees trembled with exotic chirping, the grass was moist and freshly cut, and there were palm trees. To me, every palm tree in Naples was a vital sign, a symbol of its innate and indestructible beauty, and there were plenty up there.

  “Now this is a sight for sore eyes,” said Pietro. “Why have I never been here before?”

  “There’s no shame in it,” I teased him. “Being shown around your own country by a foreigner.”

  He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, squinting as he lit up. “I love that you’re from somewhere else. That you’re not stuck in the same old mindset as everybody else.”

  “Everybody who?”

  “Most people, especially the people where I come from.”

  We wandered around the grounds, hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder, past reassuring traces of civilization like lampposts and iron benches. Now and then we crossed paths with normal-looking people: elderly couples stopping for a rest, parents pushing strollers, people enjoying healthy pastimes like biking or jogging. I looked at all of them barely suppressing a smile, hoping they couldn’t read on my face the unchecked pride I felt walking beside Pietro. It seemed rude to flaunt it, to flash them with my wild joy over something I had and they didn’t.

  We walked for a long time, until one of the pebble pathways opened up onto a panorama of the urban sprawl that stopped only at the volcano, and the ever-present, ever-changing gulf.

  Pietro nodded with approval. “I only wish I could have driven you up here in my own car. Treated you like a real lady.”

  We’d made our way back to the Capodimonte Museum, the city’s second royal palace. It was painted in a fickle red, which, between sunrise and sunset when the park gates were open, would sometimes look the color of a sun-faded beach umbrella, or fresh blood, or old spilled wine. The huge lawn before it was spectacularly green.

  I unbuckled my sandals and stepped onto that color-saturated carpet. It was something I hadn’t done in years. I lay on my back, feeling Pietro sink into the grass beside me. The grass was so cool that I was reminded of the snow angels I used to make when I was little, and I wondered if there was such a thing as grass angels. The clear sky was an infinity rolling over us.

  There came a low rumbling. “Thunder?” I joked.

  “I swear it’s not my stomach.”

  Within seconds, the rumbling grew into a sound so unnatural that it was like the very air was being sucked back up into the sky. Then from behind the palm trees came an enormous black plane. Flying at shockingly low altitude, it passed over us as if in slow motion; I could see its wheels locked into place, the silvery scratches on its black underbelly. Instinctively I pressed myself deeper into the lawn so as not to be grazed.

  “Holy crap!” cried Pietro. “What the hell was that?”

  Excitedly we went through a few hypotheses, finally agreeing it had to be a military plane.

  “I’ve never been on a plane before,” Pietro said.

  “Not even once?”

  “No.”

  I ran my palm over the little swords of grass. “Do you think there’ll be another one?”

  “I hope so. Let’s wait a little.”

  We were gripped with suspense. It was like waiting for the next set of fireworks on the Fourth of July; it was the desire to play with fire. Our patience was rewarded when shortly afterward another airplane appeared. The air was ripped apart, the earth shook. I thought our luck had run out and this time there might very well be a collision, maybe with the roof of the museum itself, and I let out a silent scream. And then it was over.

  We let the park settle back into place. The birds eventually got back to their chirping.

  “You could take me away with you,” Pietro said. “Hide me in your suitcase.”

  “Where would you want to go?”

  “How about America?”

  America was many things, but what came to mind to me right then was suburban America. I’d fled from it not because something bad had happened to me there: in the suburbs nothing ever happened at all. It was a slow painless death. I turned on my side, leaning on my elbow. “You know where I’d rather go, Pietro?”

  “Where?”

  “Norway.”

  I told him about how, when I was filling out the application form to be an exchange student so many years earlier, I’d written down Norway as my first of three choices. Italy was my last. I’d seen a photograph in the brochure of a Norwegian house nestled in a blue snowy landscape, its windows invitingly orange: that was my fifteen-year-old rationale. But just before putting the application in the envelope, I showed it to my best friend, Snežana, the daughter of a dissident writer from Bulgaria. She scoffed at Norway and told me to swap it with Italy. I wasn’t convinced, but Snežana had dark circles under her eyes and had been to the Black Sea, so I followed her advice. It had seemed like such a haphazard and insignificant choice at the time, crossing out Norway and writing Italy. But it wasn’t.

  Pietro too had turned toward me, his hair tousled and looking so handsome that I wished with all my strength that he would just forget his usual public composure and kiss me. “Let’s go to Norway then. Did you know they have oil there, in the North Sea?”
>
  I let out a brrr. “Or maybe Iceland. At least they have volcanoes there to warm us up.”

  “Mexico. They have volcanoes and beaches. You and me, we could sit by the sea sipping giant margaritas.”

  “And Fiji! I’ve always wanted to go there, even though I don’t know where it is.”

  We were joking, of course. Or maybe not. Pietro said, “Wherever it is, I’ll take you there.” And despite all the passersby, he leaned over to kiss me, though with guarded passion, right then and there on the damp lawn.

  We made ourselves into grass angels again, clutching hands, surrendering to happiness. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There was just a layer of blue, a layer of green, and the two of us in between like fallen angels. It seemed I could suddenly, finally, see the world—and love too—in its underlying simplicity. And I had the sensation that, instead of being flattened against the earth, we had uprooted ourselves and even shaken off gravity. Like feathers.

  Pietro sighed. “And to think I got rid of my Swiss passport, like an idiot.” He explained that he’d had to give up his Swiss citizenship when he was eighteen, in order to avoid the military service. “If it weren’t for my brother, I wouldn’t have any ties to the place at all.”

  “But I’ve never once heard him mention Switzerland.”

  “In fact, Gabriele’s always talking about Posillipo,” he said with a laugh, referring to the lofty part of the city with its double-barreled inhabitants. “Giampiero from Posillipo says this, Pierluigi from Posillipo says that . . .” He sat up to put his shoes back on. “No, not Gabriele. I was talking about my older brother Vittorio.”

  “You have another brother?”

  “He’s the eldest. No one really talks about him.” Vittorio, he said, was married to a Swiss girl and had a couple of kids. He used to work in the same dairy plant as their parents: he had the night shift, and when he’d come home at five in the morning, he’d wake up their father so he could take his turn using the bed. Vittorio was seventeen when their mother started packing up to return to Monte San Rocco. “My folks argued with him but it was no use. He didn’t want to go back to Italy. Anyway, my father was staying on in Schaffhausen, too, so that he could keep sending money home. So what could my mother say?”