Sometimes (often) I fantasize for the briefest of moments about the day when I’ll be on my own, for good, that is, when my folks will no longer be here. Then it seems that I can glimpse some brighter opportunities for myself. But it’s a thought that repulses me and so I shake it off like one of those flashes you have while sitting on the bus in the middle of traffic, your eyes are wide open and as soon as you blink the image is gone . . .
Heddi, what can I say, how can I say it? I think of you all the time, even if I keep it to myself . . . but how can I break away from everything and everyone? That’s the problem, because I’ve always been certain I would succeed in achieving anything I wanted, but in this case, no matter how I look at it, I see nothing but obstacles. Every day I think about New Zealand and you and the summer while here it’s cold. But I haven’t paid for my ticket yet and I can’t promise you anything. I can only hope in a lucky roll of the dice in February and hope that you’re still there waiting for me . . . I’m even thinking of coming over there and taking you away with me. Will it work?
It would be totally different if you and I belonged to the same world, or at least if our focal points—our roots, our origins—were a bit closer together . . . because where I’m from people are not accustomed to moving around. Maybe you still carry the blood of some of your Cherokee ancestors who were used to packing up and moving from prairie to prairie, without a specific destination in mind . . .
I think of you often. I know this doesn’t help you. But I can’t help anyone.
A chilly kiss,
p.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: January 17
Dear Pietro,
Thanks again for opening up your heart to me. I understand that your situation is complicated, though not entirely new . . . Sometimes I think it would be easier if you had nothing to your name, if you lost everything. Then you could start all over.
I haven’t told you about something that happened to me when I first went traveling with those three adrenaline junkies. They made me do a pretty extreme climb, a cliff over the sea with very few holds: I clung to the rock face literally by my fingertips. I was scared as hell and grasped that I might have a life worth saving.
Once I’d come down from the cliff, I sat on a boulder. The sea was sparkling. I hadn’t noticed it before but it was a beautiful spot. I pulled out my Minolta to take a picture, but in doing so I knocked it into the sea. I fished it out of the salty water and unscrewed the lens to open it up: it was like emptying a full cup. It was brutal. I’d finally lost everything. I hardly had any clothes or any money, I had no job, no love, no future. And now I had no means of capturing all the small and beautiful things in the world, so in a way I’d lost my sight too. I knew I had to start all over, there was no going back. I grieved for that camera for months and months, even after my new friends generously pitched in to buy me a new one. For over two years I kept its salty, rusty corpse in a shoebox because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
I know, I’m probably trying to impose my life choices on you, and it’s not fair. It’s just that I would really love to see you again.
h.
32
THE QUARTIERI had come back to life. The locals had returned in hoards, and there was an electricity in the air similar to the preacademic excitement that arrived like clockwork at the end of every summer. It was the beginning of a promising and productive new season, an almost biological reawakening that my body still hadn’t quite kicked the habit of. But it failed to truly stir me.
Actually, now that the neighborhood was reanimated, it felt more surreal than ever. Theatrical even. Shop owners advertised their goods with oratorical tones and sweeping gestures. Children cried, on cue it seemed; housewives fanned themselves. The residents, increasingly distrusting of the intercom, lowered their breadbaskets and fired dialect at each other between the balconies and the street and the vasci—cryptic and often angry messages that, had they been visually tracked, would have created a grid of infrared lasers worthy of Mission Impossible. I thought I recognized a few criminals from the newspapers, beefed-up guys strutting around with gold chains and puffed-out chests. Everyone was moving like stage actors with utter disregard for their audience, like a flash mob of people carrying out the most unthinkable choreography in a public place for the pure pleasure of performing. The place was so bustling that I could walk right through it practically alone with my thoughts.
I thought often about that moment; it had, in fact, come back to haunt me. That moment I’d stood by the town wall in Monte Porzio and Pietro had said, My god, are you leaving me? That instant had been a turning point, a tiny breach in the laws of time and space that had made everything come to a standstill: the cicadas had stopped singing, my feet had stopped walking away. In that moment the power was in my hands, the power to change our destinies. But in the end I’d chosen the easy way, the way back to him. And here I was now, by myself, standing before our gate at 33 Via De Deo.
I started up the stairs. I’d only reached the first-floor landing when I heard a woman’s screams in a murderous form of dialect reverberate through the funnel-like courtyard. They were followed by plaintive excuses delivered by a male voice that was meek now but might just blow up any second . . . they were the three dots before the exclamation mark. I recognized the voices: it was the same old bickering over water. I climbed the stairs softly, as if to get to my place I first had to walk past not a woman at all but a pit bull come off its leash. My heart was in my throat; every step brought me closer to that alarm that was raping my eardrums. And on the third-floor landing I found myself for the first time face-to-face with its source.
The woman looked so small, though less so in girth, as she stood there shouting at the air and brandishing a tomato-coated spoon. I had a violent flashback of a scolding I once got when I was eight or nine—an elderly immigrant all red in the face who was yelling god knows what in Italian from her doorway in our otherwise dead suburb—and only now did I realize she had to have been Neapolitan. The woman before me now, armed with a spoon, was ageless: she could have been just as easily in her fifties as in her twenties. The fluorescent light, a must in that dark kitchen even at noon, highlighted every groove of discontent on her face. Her fury was such that smoke was rising off her—no, it was just a pot steaming away behind her on the stove.
As soon as she saw me, she broke into an ingratiating smile. “Buongiorno, signori’,” she said in a sugary voice before collapsing her smile and knitting her thick black eyebrows. “You wanna see what that no-good excuse of a man has done? Come with me so you can see with your own eyes!”
There was no resisting her invitation, for the lady of the house had already curled her chunky, cracked fingers around my wrist and was pulling me through her kitchen. On my way through, I saw a baby girl in a high chair and the meat sauce cooking down on the burner for so many hours the oil had gone black. With that padded handcuff she dragged me farther, through the hallway lined with pictures of grandfathers and other saints, all the way to the bathroom. There she let go of my hand but not her spoon, which threatened to spatter red all over those sparkling white tiles.
“This bathroom is brand new, miss.”
“It’s . . . lovely.”
It was the wrong thing to say. She went ballistic, painfully yelling in that tight space, “Lovely? Is that what you reckon? Look up!” She pointed her bloody spoon at the ceiling. There were black moisture stains and white paint bubbling and peeling off. “It’s disgusting, mold everywhere, it’s a mess. We just had it done up real nice. Cost us an arm and a leg. Now look how he’s wrecked it!”
“Who’s he?”
“Who do you think? That asshole that lives on the fourth floor! Every time he takes a shower, all the water comes down into our apartment. But he doesn’t give a shit!”
“Maybe the pipes need replacing,” I suggested.
My humble advice enraged her even more. She sai
d that they’d put in a few pipes during the remodeling, thus the responsibility landed on her neighbor. But she and her husband couldn’t afford to do the repairs. All at once she pulled out a mournful Pulcinella face to make a desperate confession. “We got nothing left, all our savings is gone. And we got these little ones to feed, but my husband is the only one bringing home the bacon. What are we gonna do?” Her voice broke, rising to an alarming falsetto. “I’ll make him pay, swear to God I will!”
With the necessary solemnity, I took one last look at the ruined ceiling. “Very sorry, signora,” I said, somehow managing to slip out of the bathroom and down the hallway. In that run for the landing, I made an effort not to laugh at the tragicomic side to Naples that I seemed only to have noticed now, after all these years. At the amount of rage, the amount of passion, wasted on what were actually surmountable, if not petty, obstacles. At the jarring contrast—not unlike the fluorescent light exaggerating my neighbor’s coarse features—between sounding so very fierce and actually being so very small and so terribly, terribly human.
On the doorstep, wooden spoon still in hand, the woman smiled at me again, genuinely this time, as though she was seeing me for the first time. “You the American?”
I was already heading up the stairs when she asked me. I should have denied it, but then I changed my mind. “Yes, I’m American.”
She looked me up and down with an expression that was at once tender and wary, before turning her back to me to go stir the sauce.
The bizarre encounter with our neighbor served as material for storytime on the phone that night with Pietro. He burst out laughing and said, “Unbelievable. Every single day for the last year or so, they got that pissed off over something that stupid? All they had to do was call a plumber . . .” He told me that he didn’t miss Naples at all but that he missed me terribly. He said Gabriele would be coming back next week. Then he started telling me about the wheat they’d sold, for a good profit, and about the other farmwork and hoops he’d jumped through for his parents. This time he didn’t complain much. He gave me the news that the application for the land in Puglia had been filed on time. “Thank god. Now all we have to do is wait.”
Wait. Now that we were apart again, I had fallen back into a state of anticipation. And this time the distance made itself felt. I could physically feel each and every one of the one hundred and two kilometers between us: every step along Via Roma and the Rettifilo all the way to the central train station; every jerk of the bus as it passed through the netherworld of the industrial area before ducking behind the volcano; every grunt of effort for it to get over the first few hills. And I felt every plain and every crease of that vast velvet land separating us. We loved each other, I could no longer doubt that. Then why weren’t we together?
“Pietro, when is your recovery going to be over?”
“I don’t know. I’m doing pretty good for now, but who knows what might happen . . .”
There was a long pause in which I was certain I heard the crackling of cigarette ashes. “You’re smoking in the house?”
“Yeah, but my folks don’t know that.”
“But I do. And I worry about you, Pietro . . . about your health. You should keep looking for those nicotine patches. Maybe they sell them in Avellino.”
“Would you just stop it?” he said, but without anger. He was almost beseeching me.
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to change what can’t be changed.”
Dinner sounds came rising up from the courtyard. How could anyone be enjoying a fatty, hearty meal at this late hour? I could hear Pietro’s cigarette burning in the receiver and forks and knives clinking on plates, the heedless smoking and eating and the smug absence of dialogue; I could hear him and the city distancing themselves, detaching from me and sliding into the background, becoming the backdrop of my life. And what was left in the darkness was me, a still hazy and porous identity but one with a well-defined voice, that unique blend of Anglo-Saxon exactitude and southern Italian mellowness, which was now saying through the receiver, “I think I’ll go back to Washington.”
Pietro stopped blowing smoke; he may even have stopped breathing. He asked me to say it again, he asked me why. I didn’t know myself, but I infused my voice with common sense to tell him that tomorrow morning I would call United to see about availability. I went overboard, becoming chatty and inappropriately cheerful. I told him that my open ticket would expire if I didn’t use it soon. That I wanted to see my family. That I’d nearly run out of money and needed to get a job, a legal one this time. That I wanted to rewrite my thesis in case there was really a chance of getting it published. All these things were true but meaningless to me. Yet the more I talked about them, the more my impulse became a plan, and the plan became reality.
“I get that you need to see your family. I mean, it’s the right thing to do. But do you have to leave right now? I’ll go crazy without you.”
“You could always leave with me, you know.”
“Just like that, with a hole in my lung? With an unresolved legal issue?”
“I don’t know what to tell you . . .”
Only then did I grasp what I was really doing. I was trying to re-create that moment in Monte Porzio Catone: I was walking away from him, backing away blindly, not to leave him but simply to shake him out of it, to make him reexamine his priorities. Love and money, freedom and responsibility . . . life and death. But this time the ending would be different.
There were dogs howling, or maybe it was just Gesualdo, and Pietro had to raise his voice to tell me what I already knew: that he didn’t have a passport or the money to pay for his airfare, and that his parents would never give it to him. “But maybe I could rob a bank,” he said with a laugh. “Or pinch some old lady’s purse in front of the post office, or steal some chickens. Whatever it takes to join you over there, love of my life.”
I switched off the lamp and lay down on the couch with the phone to my ear. Outside I heard the tires of a motorbike screeching and someone calling Gennaro home: it was the Old World, lit by a perpetual yellow sunset, that was turning in for the night.
I had a dream. Under my rowboat the sea was gulping softly, glassy and so blue it looked fake. What a gorgeous day. Rays of sunlight were being drawn toward the bottom like golden feathers. For a while I just watched them mesmerized.
But where was I? I lifted my gaze. Judging from the hillside to my left, a froth of olive trees that seemed to emerge straight from the seawater, I had to be somewhere near Sorrento. To my right were islands—Ischia and Procida, I was sure, although they looked oddly more like barren boulders than resort spots. That meant that just to the right of Procida I would see Naples. It was my compass.
But Naples wasn’t there. With mounting fear, I took a better look at my surroundings. That steep land wasn’t covered in olive trees, after all, but shrubs, Mediterranean scrub that not much farther ahead gave way to cliffs, rocky faces like fresh wounds made by a sea that perhaps wasn’t always this innocuous. And those islands weren’t actually Ischia and Procida but Capri’s sea stacks, the Faraglioni, monoliths rising from the waves to block out the sun and make a labyrinth of the sea.
Now I understood. I’d gone much farther out in my boat than I’d thought: I was at Punta Campanella, the tip of the Amalfi Coast, the furthermost edge of the Gulf of Naples, the point of no return. And beyond, the open sea.
Only meters from there, in fact, the water went dark like squid ink all the way to the horizon, that line without a beginning or an end where sky and sea could finally unite. It was the very seam of the world and it terrified me. I couldn’t fathom how I could have drifted this far from shore. Had I gone fishing and fallen asleep to the soothing rhythm of the water going plop, plop beneath my boat?
Maybe I did know the reason I’d gone this far out. Vesuvius, barely visible behind the ever-present haze over the bay, was erupting but without making a sound. The sky above the volcano was blooming in shades of gray li
ke a black-and-white image revealing itself in the developing tray. I watched that silent film without emotion. I didn’t dare look behind me at the void my boat was carrying me toward even though it gave the illusion of being suspended in the same spot. Yes, there was no doubt, the current was taking me out to sea, but ever so slowly so as to make the separation painless.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: January 30
Dear Heddi,
I love reading your emails. It’s like you’re in the room with me; I can smell your scent of yogurt, the salt on your skin. I miss you so much. No matter what I’m doing, my thoughts always drift to you. I can’t help it.
My health has improved. I thought that once I felt physically better the confusion in my head would clear up too. But now it seems that I can only see with greater clarity just how very complex my problem is.
It’s the same old multilayered issue. The outer layer is my parents. Obviously, leaving for a completely different world without a return ticket wouldn’t make them happy or leave them indifferent. The heart of the problem, though, is the land. Maybe it’s the way I was brought up, or rather the way I was conditioned, but I just can’t imagine being the owner of my books and CDs alone. They gave me a house, the one I live in, and they gave me some land, which provides me with a small annual income: with constant care and management it gives me the security of knowing I could survive even in a nuclear war. The land is where my roots are. It belonged to my ancestors as far back as anyone can remember. And I can’t leave it for good or, even worse, sell it. I would have to live a stone’s throw away or at least not as far away as New Zealand. So I’ve come to the conclusion that to crack the outer layer of my worries (my family) all I have to do is resolve the core of the matter (the land). But how?
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 36