I recognized that my pride was the very reason why I would never win that confusing chess game with Madeleine, whose moves were glances and double entendres. She was rubbing in the fact that after that first exchange year I’d decided to stay on in Naples, this shithole that made people lose their bearings and overwhelmed them with conflicting emotions. For her Naples was an unlucky roll of the dice, an unsuccessful spin of the roulette wheel. She was thus forcing me to defend my choice, to justify my entire adolescence and young adulthood spent there, a third of my life, and the fact that I couldn’t give her a good answer made me resentful. Because now, from above, I could see Naples for how the rest of the world saw it. Not dangerous, inappropriate, or maddeningly beautiful, but simply fallen behind, left in the dust. Gone. Forgotten.
I opened my eyes with a start. I’d been teetering on the razor’s edge between wakefulness and the daily delirium of sleep. Pietro asked me if I was still awake: he wanted to know if I felt like making another trip to Monte San Rocco. The cold weather had arrived and soon it would be time to kill the pig.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: June 21
Dear Pietro,
Sorry to hear about your knee (although I enjoyed your colorful descriptions of the characters in your story). I hope you’ll have more or less recovered by August, physically but also to some degree psychologically. I don’t know what to expect when I see you, I don’t want to have expectations: maybe it’s a good thing that lately I’ve been too busy to think about it . . .
I leave for the States on July 22nd and then I fly to Milan on August 6th. I’ve already been in touch with Luca and we’ve arranged to meet at Lago Maggiore, where he’s restoring an old farmhouse he bought. After the wedding, I’m meeting up with a Kiwi friend of mine who moved to London a year ago: we’ll do some traveling around Italy together. I should be in Naples by August 18th. So you and I can see each other on the 20th, if that works for you. Could you come pick me up at Rita’s house, maybe in the morning? That way we could have the whole day together. In case you don’t remember it, here’s the address: 47 Traversa Fondo D’Orto, at the far end of Castellammare, near Pompeii.
I hope the date won’t mess things up for you at work, but it would be good to see you. In all honesty, I’ll be terribly disappointed if we don’t manage to catch up. Would you mind telling Gabriele, too, wherever he is? Or maybe you could just give him my email address. It would be good to see him again if possible.
Sorry for the short email. I’m juggling a lot of things these days; plus, it’s late and I still have homework to check . . .
Hugs,
h.
22
WHEN WE ARRIVED, the pig had already been slaughtered. It was the quiet after the storm. As we pulled our bags out of Francesco’s car and waved him goodbye, the animal came into sight, cut in half lengthwise and hanging from its foot on the terrace. More than a pig, it was a cross section, a sawn-off slice for a biology class, not a real pig but an abstract one. Nevertheless, I felt ashamed for that animal that I had never known alive but that now hung before me in such an immodest position, legs spread wide and its most intimate details on display.
The sun came through the skeletal trees, dappling and striping the exterior of the house in a colorless, but not joyless, light. Standing around a worktable was a gathering of elderly men and women dressed in burly sweaters, sleeves rolled up. They were chopping. Their hands were huge and reddened, with cracked nails and calluses, the hands of the giant who chased Jack back down his beanstalk. As the old folks talked and laughed in the cold, steam came out of their toothless mouths and off the flesh of the animal still warm on the table. It was the picture of village life that I had always imagined, the place that Monte San Rocco should have been and might still be, as hectic and picturesque as one of those miniature nativity scenes you could purchase in Naples.
They spotted Pietro and called him to them, big smiles making apples of their cheeks. As we passed them on our way to the front door, Pietro nodded respectfully several times. I had the impression that he knew each and every one of them; he was probably even related to a few. Then they went back to work, lowering their large butcher knives and tossing filaments of fat like socks into a laundry pile.
Inside, the house smelled of burnt wood. Goose bumps traveled along my arms and over my breasts, not only from the damp and chalky cold seeping out of the walls, but also from the gall of showing up uninvited in Lidia’s kitchen. But no one was there to greet us: the kitchen was for once empty. The fireplace was a box of ashes; two coffee cups sat discarded in the sink. His parents were most likely somewhere outside, also, too busy butchering to have even noticed us arrive.
“This is great,” I said. “Everybody working together like one big family.”
“You see?” Pietro broke an edge off a block of hard cheese on the table and ate it. “They’ll be working till evening to finish making the capocollo, the sausages, all that stuff. It all has to be done in one day, otherwise the meat will go bad.”
I sat down and rested my feet, almost comfortably, on the slate of that fireplace I’d gotten to know so well. I let out a sigh of gratitude. The volunteer butchers would be there till sundown, drowning out the silence and making it easier to say what we needed to say to Lidia. Besides, there would now be an entire driveway of witnesses to the fact that Pietro and I were a couple. It would become public throughout the whole town and his mother wouldn’t be able to deny it anymore. She would be defeated by all the life going on around her, in spite of her.
Settling down beside me, Pietro peeled off his jacket. “I hope it wasn’t too bad for you, seeing the pig like that.”
“I didn’t even know his name.”
“It didn’t have a name. It was just Pig.”
He broke off another piece of cheese and fed it to me. I was hungry, and eating that aged cheese, which tasted of a quiet patience that gradually intensified until it burst with flavor, was almost as enjoyable as Pietro’s loving gesture. He told me we were lucky to have arrived after they’d killed the beast, not because of the bloody mess it made but rather because of the noise. The pig, he explained, knows when it’s about to be killed, even before any axes or shotguns have been readied, and it starts to yelp, to cry like a child, and it doesn’t stop until the very end. Many locals slaughtered their pigs on the same day, so all throughout the village bloodcurdling screams could be heard from dawn. “You wake up to that, you never forget it,” he concluded, visibly amused by the effect his story was having on me. Again he brought a piece of cheese to my lips.
How could a pig know when it was going to die? It was a true mystery. Maybe all pigs of all times carried that knowledge, like some kind of ancestral memory, in their blood.
“Buongiorno,” came a feeble voice behind us.
We stood to attention. Pietro’s mother forged a smile as she held out her hand, a lackluster invitation for me to come closer. It found this odd: I’d expected Lidia to greet me with open hostility. After what had happened at Christmas, what point was there in continuing to pretend? Yet there she was, extending a hand with the same polite ceremony as always. I took it and drew in close, hoping that my barefaced, flesh-and-blood presence there in Monte San Rocco would catch her off guard and that my kiss would be brazen enough to mark her exterior with an x, like you do with chestnuts in order to shell them.
That forced smile sank as she turned to Pietro. “Boy, go get some more wood, it’s cold in here for her,” she said in their dialect, adding that lunch would be ready in an hour. I acknowledged her dogged use of the third person singular, but this time it was merely a semiological observation that might come in handy for my thesis.
His mother left. Pietro went to the woodpile outside the front door and returned cradling logs and small branches. I gave him a hand with the kindling. Silently absorbed in that domestic chore, now and then Pietro and I exchanged a smile of complicity. We lit the fire and I lea
ned in close to the newborn flames, their little but energetic heat spreading pleasantly over my face. Pietro had stood up but not gone far: I could feel the warmth of his tall body standing behind my chair, an olive tree watching over me.
After a while he asked if I wanted to go outside to see how the meat was prepared. The fire had warmed me to the bone, and outside I couldn’t feel the cold. Now at the head of the long wooden table pink with blood was Pietro’s father, who was laughing at full volume and inspecting through thick lenses the various slabs of flesh arranged into puzzling piles. The air was rich with the creamy smell of raw meat and the dull thuds of knives, which the old folks seemed to have a longtime friendship with. They lowered the blades with blind faith, moving their fingers away just in the nick of time.
I followed Pietro as he made his way around the table. He was gregarious and courteous with everyone. At one point he stopped to talk with an elderly woman whose hair was still jet-black. He asked her questions I couldn’t understand, about bones and entrails, before introducing us. I liked her straightaway for her name alone: Aunt Libertà.
“Hello, darling,” she said, “I’d kiss you but I’m a mess.” There was indeed a streak of pig blood across her temple. Nonetheless, she was a very attractive woman with that impossibly black hair, lily-white skin, and rosebud mouth. “Bring her with you to my house tomorrow, you hear, Pie’?” she added to Pietro in dialect, while looking at me with eyes that shone with an instinctive hospitality.
“We’ll see if there’s time, zia. We’ll see,” he said continuing around the table.
I spotted Lidia alone in the ground-floor apartment, which opened up onto the driveway. She was stirring something inside a huge pot placed directly on top of sticks burning away on the concrete floor. I found it baffling that she would choose to cook in such a makeshift way when she had not only an old range beside her but also a perfectly functional gas stove upstairs. She didn’t seem to be cooking so much as punishing herself. Surrounded by jars of pickled vegetables, sacks of potatoes, sticks and ashes, she wore a gloomy expression as she carried out the work she’d probably had to do her whole life.
Feeling bold after Libertà’s kind words, I stepped a few feet over the gravel until I was standing in the open doorway. “Hello, signora. What are you making?”
“A dish we make when we kill the pig,” replied Lidia without looking up from the simmering pot.
“What’s in it?” I asked. It was a hard habit to break, trying to ingratiate myself, to show her I was capable and eager to learn, to prove to her in that old-school way that I deserved her son.
“It’s nothing much. Pork, potatoes, peppers. It’s made with a part of the pig that people today don’t like so much.”
“What part is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, surely meaning she didn’t know the word for it in Italian but didn’t wish to say it in dialect. “We eat it because we don’t waste anything. It’s not that nice meat you find in the butcher shops in Naples.”
“Well, it smells great.”
“It’s nothing special.” As if to signal it was time for me to go, she set down her wooden spoon and dried her hands in the worn folds of her apron. I heard a couple of branches snap underneath the pot as I walked away.
It wasn’t long before lunch was served. The old folks came inside, into the formal dining room I’d never eaten in. The television was off. Heading the table was Pietro’s father, and on one side sat the men, caps still on, and on the other side sat the women in their kerchiefs. Everybody was starving, so without further ado Lidia’s stew was dished out. The women’s gold earrings swung to the rhythm of their jaws as they chewed their way through the mysterious meat. The men, too, ate with gusto and noise, eagerly accepting another helping and, with just as much gusto and noise, discussing farm equipment and money. That cheerful ruckus, exclusively in dialect, was loud enough to shake the crystal glasses in the display cabinets, and the butchers’ thirst great enough to empty four or five bottles of wine in no time.
Pietro’s mother sat across from me, ostensibly focused on passing bread or wine around the table but with a watchful eye on my bowl, measuring my progress. It was the same sour look as always, only now amid the merrymaking it seemed to lose its strength, and in fact it reminded me of the weary supervision of a card dealer during a long and rowdy poker game. Despite not having worked alongside the others, I felt a part of something. Now and then Pietro’s ebony-haired aunt would smile my way, while his father was nearly in stitches with laughter. Incredibly, under the tablecloth Pietro’s hand came to rest on my leg. Just as I’d thought, the joy toned down the hostess’s discontent.
One of the men, with an unshaven white chin, asked Pietro a question that I didn’t catch. Pietro answered, something about his thesis, and then I distinctly heard him say that he would be graduating soon. A few of the others overheard those magic words and cheered: a son of their village was going to be a dottore! Someone asked about Gabriele, and Pietro filled him in in a few brief words, sighing with paternal disappointment and for some reason tightening his grip on my thigh.
“What about this pretty little thing here?” asked a heavyset woman, indicating me with a flick of the chin.
“She’s majoring in languages and I guarantee you she’ll finish before me,” replied Pietro, winking at me and adding, for my benefit in Italian, “She’s extraordinarily intelligent.”
The man with the white stubble asked him, I think, when we were heading back to the city, and Pietro’s answer was “the day after tomorrow.” When an old woman then asked how many hours it took to drive to Naples, Pietro seemed ashamed to admit that we would be taking the bus.
“But it’s faster by car,” the lady insisted, clearly not understanding that Pietro didn’t own a car. When she finally figured it out, she said, “Doesn’t matter, Pie’, when you get that degree they’ll go give you one.”
For no apparent reason, the old folks all started laughing. I recalled how astonished and envious Pietro looked when he first saw that Francesco, who hadn’t even graduated yet, had been given a brand-new car. Was buying sons a car upon graduation, or close enough, some sort of modern-day village tradition?
One of the men asked him what kind of car he was eyeing up.
“A Ferrari!” replied another to the whole table, which was looking for any old reason to laugh and toast.
“No.”
The laughter stopped dead, even the wine in the glasses stopped rippling.
“No,” Lidia repeated, adding in Italian as if handing out a warning, “It’s obvious Pietro doesn’t want a car anymore.”
“What are you talking about, Ma’?” said Pietro. “Of course I want a car.”
“Don’t you worry,” bellowed his father. Whatever he said next, it did the trick, for the table reverted back to its natural state of hilarity. His father raised his glass, in a toast dedicated either to his unexpectedly academic son or to the successfully sacrificed pig, before skulling the contents.
It was back to work again. Pietro and I were left at the table sown with mandarin seeds. As I’d learned to do during my summers as a waitress in DC, I scrambled to clear the table. And I was not the only one desperate to wash the dishes before his mother came back: Pietro too seemed to have grasped that this was our one and only chance. Into the fire went the paper napkins, triggering a contagion of flames; tangerine peels wilted and blackened. Then we filled the sink and, encouraged by Lidia’s exceptionally long absence, I thrust my hands into the gratifyingly hot water.
I scrubbed while Pietro rinsed. We worked silently with the concentration of athletes in the zone, now and then looking across at each other in disbelief. Could it really be that, with Pietro’s help, I was washing the dishes in Lidia’s house? I dared to hope that leaving them had been not so much an oversight on her part as a concession. That all that loud, oblivious affection, openly shown toward me, too, may well have undermined her defense. That today she just might be starting
to cave.
Pietro rinsed the last plate. He stole a glance over his shoulder before kissing me then and there in the kitchen, topping if off by saying, “We did it, baby.”
Just then his mother came in hauling an enormous pot. Pietro lurched forward.
“Mamma, give it here.”
Lidia didn’t say a word, nor did she accept his help. She heaved the pot up onto the counter, its bottom black with soot. In the process, the lid went sliding off and steam came billowing out. It was boiled water. Without even glancing at the dishes drip-drying next to the sink, his mother said in an Italian devoid of emotion, “So I see no one will be needing this anymore.”
“We could use it to wash down the table,” said Pietro, undoubtedly referring to the butcher table outside.
His mother mumbled something in dialect, waved her hands as if lost for words, and shuffled out.
Pietro shrugged. “Never mind her.”
So Lidia had had every intention of doing the dishes herself but was simply waiting for the dishwater to come to a boil over the embers of her cooking fire. Pietro and I had managed to beat her to it thanks to nothing more than a hot-water heater. It was modernity that had won out over the old ways of her primitive kitchen, the old ways that couldn’t bear to waste the last heat off the day’s fire and insisted on doing things the slow, hard way.
Pietro led me out onto the front terrace. It wrapped around the house, allowing us to watch the butchers happily working away while at the same time to stay clear of the hanging carcass of the pig, which from that angle gave the kind illusion of still being whole. The faraway hills were spotted with old snow and the air was laced with sweet memories of hearths I’d never actually experienced.
Pietro lit a cigarette and exhaled with deep relief. His damp hand took mine to wedge it under his arm. As he smoked he touched my pruned fingertips one by one as though they were places on a topographical map of an unknown land. “We’re having pork again tonight. Can you handle it, baby?”
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 23