I pondered the existence of yet another man who looked like Pietro, and it occurred to me that he could be repeated infinitely like in a house of mirrors. A delirious thought that was probably just an effect of having gone so long without food.
In fact, Pietro said, “I’m starving, baby. Let’s go home.”
Let’s go home. Andiamo a casa. I loved the sound of that. I would have asked him to say it to me again and again in my ear. Andiamo a casa. A casa. But Pietro was already on his feet, holding out my sandals enticingly as if to remind me that if I didn’t put them on soon I’d lose the last weight anchoring me to the ground and float away.
Yet Luca was always one step ahead of us, for once we were back in the Spanish Quarter we found out that he’d hopped on a ferry. He’d gone to Greece.
10
I COULDN’T MAKE SENSE of Luca’s abrupt departure. Surely he had gone to Greece to see Roberta, but if he’d done so to coax her back to Naples, why now and not six months or a year ago? All Angelo said was, “A lot of stuff can change when a ceiling falls on you.” The boys possessed pitiful information about his departure and they had no clue as to how long he’d be gone. I wanted to be that person, the one Luca most trusted, but I knew it was far from the truth.
Far more foreseeable was that Pietro would be taken from me. On his parents’ land there was work to be done: trees to prune, farm equipment to fix. He was only going for a few days, but the prospect was alarming nonetheless. At the door Pietro kissed me goodbye and said, “When I’m missing you, you know what I’ll do? I’ll send you a little sign. So if you hear a fly buzzing around you, or a window whacking shut, or a car slamming on its brakes . . . that’s me reminding you that I’m here, and I always will be.”
Because Pietro was gone and I was still puttering around the apartment, my presence there became more solidified. Every day I came down the staircase still in my pajamas; I mopped the tiles, exchanged a few words with Madeleine, and studied at Pietro’s metal desk right in the living room. But the pages of whatever book I was reading never seemed to turn.
The neighbors fought like cats. Once or twice a day a woman would start pleading with the Madonna, sweet mother of Jesus, only to turn up her voice like a drill and curse to eternal damnation another neighbor’s dead relatives going back several generations. Any retorts shot back at her in the courtyard just fueled her fire; sometimes her screams intensified to the point where I’d have to get up from the desk and peer over the balcony. Was the end of the world nigh? In the depths of the courtyard, residents in dressing gowns and clogs threw themselves against the balcony railings, shaking revolutionary fists at each other in an explosive and vulgar uproar that was meaningless to me. All I could ever catch of their dispute, delivered in the densest dialect, were a few words: scurnacchiato, son of a bitch; tutta chella fatica, all that work; tutte strunzat’, load of crap; ommo e’ merd, piece of shit; janara, witch. Patched together like that, it didn’t amount to much of a story.
I realized that my whole life I’d never truly known what it was like to miss someone. When the sun burned through my dreams in the morning, I’d open my eyes to find his crinkled half of our bed brutally empty. At first I spent as many hours as I could away from that room: I’d have my coffee on the roof or head out to the university, or to the deli to ask for a hundred and fifty grams (sorry, just a hundred this time) of prosciutto. Still, the emptiness followed me around like the moon chases you through the streets at night, staring at you around every corner with an unreadable expression—perhaps concerned, or perhaps quietly pleased, about your anguish. I soon realized that I couldn’t outrun it because the emptiness was inside me, a perfect hole as round as the moon, a wound in my gut that had a weight all its own. It was not unlike the visceral pain I’d have just before getting my period or whenever I lay in a too-hot bath. A sickening wave of heat would rise up, making me feel at once overly full and ravenously hungry, brimming over with passion and starving for more. Eventually I chose not to push the sensation away. With Pietro gone, all I had left was that emptiness, and I would happily accept it if I could not have him. Missing him, I grasped, was as much of a privilege as loving him.
Giving in to it ended up providing me some relief. In the morning I lay in bed no longer averting my gaze from the tortuous folds of the sheets. I sought out Gabriele, to study his profile, to lose myself in his voice. This made me suffer but at least it hinted at Pietro’s presence in the world. On the other hand, being in the city on my own only made my symptoms worse, maybe because out there were throngs of individuals busy shouting, kissing, laughing, and none of them was even remotely like Pietro. In the city center, that hot wave of nausea I harbored inside would completely take over and radiate out from my belly to every corner of my body, without ever finding a release. I felt feverish; my face was surely flushed. It was in plain sight of any passerby, like I was walking around engulfed in flames. I was obviously, painfully in love.
At the same time, it seemed, the Spanish Quarter felt for me, felt with me, shedding the tears that my pride made me swallow. Peddlers mournfully called out their wares—wicker baskets, roasted nuts—through streets as tight and clammy as hugs of condolence. Melancholy church bells rang off-key. One day a child inside a vascio cried and cried (over a broken toy, I think) and the adults, instead of telling her off as per tradition, were for once quietly respectful of her pain. Another time the steam from a pine-scented shower drifted down from a balcony, a cheap body-wash that managed nonetheless to move me like a real kiss smelling of Pietro’s fresh, bitter aftershave. Never in my life had I been so delusional. In my state of feverish delirium, I began to suspect in fact that what we had was so good, but so far away, that I might have dreamed it all up.
One morning on my way to my Bulgarian class with Iskra, just as I’d slipped out of our neighborhood onto Via Roma, I noticed a homeless man. Washington was ashamedly bursting at the seams with homeless people (many of whom were suffering from mental illness), but not Naples. True, the streets in the central city were littered with gypsies, who begged for money with tragedy in their eyes, and with heroin junkies lost in their selfish pleasure, but the gypsies had trailer camps to go back to and the junkies didn’t appear to be living on the streets. But this man was neither a gypsy nor a drug addict nor a lunatic.
He was seated in a wheelchair outside a café; with sun-bleached hair and a leathered face, he had no legs from the knees down. On an untouchable piece of fabric beside him was a mutt with canines protruding from its mouth in all the cardinal directions. It was actually that unattractive dog that made me approach its man.
“Is he yours?”
“Good dog,” he answered.
The man had an unwavering gaze, with eyes the slippery blue of a glacier. And hadn’t I heard, in that unrolled r in bravo, a slight accent? Like his dog, the man had a disastrous mouth. It was hard to tell how old he might be. There was no alms cup or sign asking for anything.
I bent down to stroke the poor dog’s matted, oily fur. “Would you like some money, to care for your dog?”
“Yes, please. Thank you.”
Definitely a foreign accent, I thought, probably German. I gave the man some change before plowing onward toward the university. The next day I made a point of passing by the same spot during the morning rush. The hollowness in my stomach had nothing to do with hunger, so when I entered the café to order a cappuccino and an apricot croissant to go, it wasn’t for me.
“Careful. It’s hot,” I said to the man.
His blackened hands grazed mine in the exchange, but I felt neither fear nor disgust. Then, instead of digging eagerly into the food, he looked up at me from his wheelchair with a rather mournful expression. I was flooded with shame for offending him by assuming he was poor and hungry when maybe he wasn’t. Yet in those eyes all I really saw was compassion for me, as if his solitude and disability didn’t bother him a great deal and the only pain he felt was mine, the pain that had been sapping my strength
since the day Pietro left.
That look disarmed me and all I could do was mumble an excuse before handing him some coins and heading off. Maybe he really was an eccentric with a home to go back to, a mad artist or someone’s visiting German uncle. Whoever he was, I knew that by giving him breakfast I’d started something I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, put a stop to.
It was hard to believe that Luca could return from Greece, crossing the Adriatic Sea and the entire girth of Italy, before Pietro could bus back from the hinterland of Naples. But it was most definitely Luca Falcone that I saw before me, pieces of him filtered through the usual stampede outside Palazzo Corigliano and through a light veil of rain. There was no need to call out to him: he’d already seen me and was making his way toward me, parting the mass of students and motorbikes and pigeons with the unhurried gait of a drifter, his backpack over one shoulder and beads of rain in his hair.
Luca told me he’d come back the night before and had stayed over at his aunt’s house in Barra, in the industrial area outside the city. He asked me to walk him back to the old house, and less than ever was I able to say no to him. As I followed him along his own unique route through the Quartieri, we frequently bumped shoulders, every collision unleashing the smell of wet linen. With a rattle of keys we stepped into the house. There was the stench of damp basement, of abandonment. I remarked without astonishment that the renovations hadn’t started yet.
“It doesn’t matter, Heddi. Neither you nor I are coming back to live in this place. But I think you already knew that.”
I solemnly followed Luca into his bedroom. The disheveled bed was crystallized in the state it was in when the ceiling had fallen. An espresso cup still sat on the bedside table, but the books were gone and so was the Arabic calligraphy, unpleasantly highlighting the old-fashioned wallpaper, a floral pattern stained with moisture. I tried not to linger on the memories of all of us lying on that bed watching the same old videotapes.
“You look tan.”
Luca didn’t reply, pulling out instead a bottle of Greek ouzo and releasing its complex scent of anise and cardamom into the stale air. Sitting down on the bed, he poured some ouzo into the espresso cup and offered it to me, surely a rhetorical gesture, and in fact when I waved it away he downed it himself. I was just standing there feeling, perhaps unreasonably, left out—from him, his motives, his intimate relationship with those forces greater than us.
But the ouzo was a fast-acting potion that soon coaxed the words from his lips. “I went to Greece for Roberta. Not to be with her, not exactly. I just wanted to see her again, find out what was left of us. And now we can put it behind us.”
He stood, planting a kiss on my forehead with a smack, followed by a barely audible hum. I took it as my cue not to comment, out of respect. He opened the wardrobe, whose mirror as it swung captured a piece of daylight from somewhere and smuggled it into that dark room. “But now I have to leave again,” he said. “For Varese this time.” His mother wasn’t well and he was an only child, he explained, laying a couple of shirts out on the bed. I realized he was packing.
“Of course you should go,” I said, stumbling over my tongue, which had gone numb despite not having touched the ouzo. “And when you come back, we can find a new place.”
“I’m not coming back to Naples, Heddi.”
I might have guessed that myself if only my head had had time to catch up with my heart. The last thread attaching Luca to Naples was the presentation of his thesis; after that he would be sent away to complete his civilian service. Without warning, Luca pulled me toward him and wrapped his arms hard around me.
My knees felt weak. Was this it then? The end of a period of friendship I’d thought was immune to the laws of time or to erosion? I’d been lying to myself. And yet all my actions of late had hastened its end. I squeezed my eyes shut, letting myself dissolve into Luca’s coarse shirt, his wild hair, his calm heartbeat.
We stayed like that for a long time, until the sprinkle deepened into rain. When I opened my eyes, I caught our reflection in the wardrobe mirror holding each other so unguarded. We did look like best friends. But there was still so much I hadn’t told him.
Pietro called me every night. In the dark, even darker behind my closed lids, his voice enfolded me in a universe of its own. Was this what my professor had meant by the ancient Greek melas, radiant black? Pietro told me about the jobs he was getting done, the pig who ate like an emperor until the fateful day, the Roman coins he’d dug up in the fields, the childhood room he now sat in whispering into the receiver so as not to wake anyone.
“I’d love to take you here,” he said to me one night, “to show you around these parts.”
Wonderful scenes flashed before my eyes. His family calling us to lunch, a joyous note carried off by the wind. I could just see the house between the wheat stalks—the wide terrace, the plentiful table—coming more and more into focus as Pietro and I waded toward it through a golden field as soft and tickly as cats’ tails. Then all of us sitting around the big wooden table, scarred with age and woodworms, under a filigree of olive branches, everyone looking tanned and pleasantly drained from the sun and from a good day’s work. The images were so rich, in colors and sounds, that I could almost taste the bite of freshly cut lemons and smell the heat of freshly baked bread. I had a shiver of belonging like I’d never experienced before.
“Heddi, I’ve never had anyone to show around my hometown.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never brought a girl home.”
“There’s no one I’ve wanted to bring home. Besides, you know what southern Italian parents are like: you bring a girl home and they already start embroidering pillowcases.”
I paused. “Are you sure you want me to come?”
“Of course I am. There’s no need to be scared, baby. Just be yourself and they’ll love you.”
“You’re not nervous?”
“Not at all.” He breathed out hard and long, perhaps the end of his cigarette. “With you I feel invincible. Like Superman.”
After we hung up, I sat for a while on the vinyl couch in the stinging silence. Then, although I knew it was selfish, I walked upstairs and knocked on Gabriele’s door. He cleared his throat and called me in. He was sitting at his drawing table, unseasonably wrapped up in a cardigan and woolen scarf, his face illuminated unkindly by a single lamp.
“Are you all right?”
“It’s just a cold. Or maybe a flu. Or mad cow, I’m not too sure.”
“If you like, I have a homeopathic remedy that might help.”
“You’re too kind, Eddie, but for what I’m suffering from there’s only one cure,” he said pointing to his usual companions on the floor beside him: a bottle of wine and a glass.
I took the last few steps toward his drafting table, making an effort to hide the intimacy I already had with his bedroom and the curiosity I felt for all his little treasures scattered throughout. “What are you drawing?” “Nothing, a design for a building that will never be built.” Gabriele beckoned me closer, close enough to feel the intense heat from the lightbulb that lit up his sketch. He ran his fingers over the crisp paper, pointing to the roof that was “aerodynamic, ideally like a bird in flight,” the grand entrance and a cross section of the hallways that tapered toward the top “like inside the towers of the Sagrada Familia.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, at which he burst into a fit of laughter that turned into such a violent cough that even his ears went red. I waited for him to recover before asking him what kind of building he was designing for their mother.
“For our mother? Did Pietro say that?”
“I’m sorry, was he not supposed to tell me?”
“On the contrary. You’re his beloved; he should tell you everything.” He leaned over to rummage through a series of rolled-up sketches, pulled out one, and unfurled it. “But I’m not exactly designing a building for my mother.”
I knit my brow, tilting my head to one side. “Is it a piece of
furniture or something?”
“Well, it’s still in the early stages. I’ve told her over and over again that it’s a ludicrous thing to design. I’ve tried everything to dissuade her but she won’t take no for an answer.”
I still couldn’t tell what it was. Gabriele took a sip from that medicine of his and then searched my face attentively, combing it for the same mixture of painful irony and delicious amusement that was on his.
“It’s her gravestone.”
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: February 29
Dear Pietro,
Thanks for your last email. You write so well, from the heart. I only hope I’m able to do the same in my reply.
I’ve been in New Zealand for four years; it’s here that I welcomed the new millennium. Nothing like the New Year’s we experienced in the Spanish Quarter (do you remember?). In the period leading up to it everyone here was very excited, mostly because this tiny little nation was going to be the first to see the sun rise over the second millennium. And the closest you can possibly get to the dateline is a peninsula called East Cape. Hardly anyone lives there, and those that do are mostly Maori, and it’s covered in rain forest and endless beaches. It was on one of those beaches that I went with a friend to wait for that momentous sunrise so full of expectation. It was hard to get to sleep: once the sun went down, the fine white sand went cold and all I had was a sleeping bag and no tent. You can imagine how many stars there were . . . it was like a roof. The sound of the waves was deafening (and they call it the Pacific?!), but I was still afraid I wouldn’t wake up in time. I needn’t have worried: I ended up being one of the first witnesses to the first sunrise of the new millennium. In reality it was nothing monumental, just a little newborn light, a bit pink and a bit orange, popping out from behind the clouds on the horizon. But it did give me some comfort to see that light, so unaware of its value, come out and do what it needed to do, what it has to do every day. That’s what the future is to me now: just a new day, and I take it one day at a time.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 10