Lost in the Spanish Quarter

The dampness of the cave began to pinch my bones, an arthritic sort of feeling I knew well from years of living in unheated rooms where the paint peeled from the walls like bandages and the plaster still bore earthquake wounds that refused to heal over. I lingered in front of a coffin, built from wood that looked just as salvaged as the firewood the boys collected. I peered inside. Finding it empty filled me with gratitude mixed with an unspeakable disappointment. But just behind it was a much smaller coffin in a more advanced state of rot, only big enough for a baby.

I didn’t belong there, that was clear to me now. But I didn’t stop, for my eyes were too hungry, and eventually I came to a stack of skulls. They shone like varnished wood, as if caressed daily over the years; some were housed individually in crude wooden boxes with crosses gouged into them. I kneeled before one.

The face, the only earthly access to the soul. Big black eyes looked at me, astonished by their fate, the mouth releasing one long scream that I couldn’t hear. This was no longer an excursion and I no longer felt excited or even curious. I wanted to stay there with that person and find the courage to run my hand over their skull, like putting a baby to sleep, to watch over them as they slept. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t afraid of death because fate knew what it was doing. Didn’t it?

“Everything all right?” The churchwoman’s voice punched through the stillness. She’d obviously come to check on me, and perhaps I wasn’t even really allowed there on my own. “Each of these skulls is the responsibility of a parishioner,” she explained with a slowness that I now understood was not mourning at all but simply the effort to speak in Italian. “They take one or two in their care. It’s like they become part of the family. They clean the skull, build an altar. Every day they pray for that person to get out of purgatory.”

I listened without saying a word. I’d always pictured purgatory as something of a waiting room, and in my life I’d never known hell … or heaven, for that matter.

“Everybody needs somebody to look after them,” the woman went on, letting out a bit of Neapolitan this time. “Someone to hassle the heavens for them.” Some truths could only be spoken in dialect. If I’d been a Catholic I might have said amen. From my anthropological studies, I knew she was right—we are social creatures after all—yet I only grasped that her words were meant not for all of humanity but for me personally when she added in the raspy whisper of a smoker, “You got a boyfriend?”

“Me? No.”

It was the only possible answer, and yet at the same moment my heart leaped inside my chest. Because along with that no, which came out more like a protest than a fact, an image of Pietro had appeared before me with a clarity I didn’t think my memory was capable of. His lean body and solid gaze, his distinguished and slightly crooked nose, his mouth sealing a mysterious pleasure.

“Pretty little thing like you. There’s gotta be someone,” answered the woman, slipping into the dialect now like into a pair of old clogs and cradling my hand in hers, which were coarse and warm. “Someone’s waitin’ for you, I’d bet my bottom lira.”

A man waiting for me? I met the old woman’s eyes. There was something in them, a warmth easily tapped into with true-born Neapolitans that made me almost want to trust this stranger, in the middle of a mass grave, with the story of how someone had given me a gift that I couldn’t get out of my head. A young man whom I didn’t know and would probably never see again but who must have seen something—in me, in us—that I simply couldn’t see.

Instead I said, “I like being on my own.”

“On your own, huh?” She patted my hand—too hard, almost a slap—before letting it go. The moment was gone. And yet hadn’t she just read my mind—and maybe even my future?

Outside the cemetery, the sun was unbearably bright and the neighborhood unbearably alive despite the premature siesta, the closed shutters, the lazy graffiti. Did the streets even have names here? A shield of tears—of discomfort or emotion, it was hard to tell—welled up in my eyes, turning the neighborhood into a molten, unreal landscape. Was the world bending to my vision or was it my own very atoms whirling like a dervish and fusing with the world around me? For an excruciating and beautiful instant there were no boundaries. Anything was possible.

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

Sent: January 3

Dear Heddi,

I should have written back earlier. I’m trying again now, for the hundredth time, unsure of whether I have mustered enough courage over the years to tell you the truth about my life.

I dislike the life I lead. For the past two years I’ve been working on an oil platform in the middle of the Adriatic Sea. I’m a laborer. I work fifteen days a month and then the other fifteen I’m free (so to speak). The work doesn’t give me any form of gratification. I’m afraid of being the same person day in and day out.

I’m still looking for a job abroad, but every time I send off my résumé I spend entire days fantasizing about finding work somewhere not far from you and maybe popping over to your house for a cup of coffee and a chat.

I constantly think of the mistakes I’ve made, which all converge into a sort of large basin of failure. You’re probably wondering what it is I want from you. I don’t know. But you’re the only woman I’ve ever really loved. I hurt you, and even after all these years I’m unable to find an explanation as to why I ran away from you. I can only find excuses with myself. I’m well aware that I threw away my only chance of a peaceful and happy life, with you. It’s an awareness that grows deeper over the years, that I ferociously walked all over the feelings, respect, and love of the most beautiful person I’ve ever met and will ever meet. It’s the certainty that I folded my cards at a time when I could have walked away with the whole pot.

This makes me come back to the question: What do I want from you? I want you to know that my self-esteem is reduced to a few scraps; I want you to know that there will never be another woman like you in my life. I’ve had a few flings, which I’ve come out of feeling more aware, more certain than ever, of the amount of shit I’ve buried myself under. I want you to see what a useless existence I have; I want to be sure I’ve shown you that you were right.

It’s good to know you haven’t completely buried my name, it’s good to hear a bit about you and your cat. It’s a gift I don’t deserve. I hope you’ll want to tell me more. I’d love to be able to imagine you, what you do every day, where you buy your groceries, what you cook, how you spend your weekends. Please write soon. And in the meantime, say hello to those Mexican cowboys for me and, if you think it’s not too inappropriate, to Barbara and your father.

p.

4

GUESS WHO’S COMING TONIGHT,” said Sonia as we set the table, which had been carried out to the terrace for the occasion. “Angelo invited him,” she whispered. A crescent of a smile lit up her beautiful Mediterranean face as warm blasts of wind made strands of her hair go suddenly weightless like black seaweed in the water.

The scirocco had started to blow a few days earlier, creeping up on us without a sound. The Saharan wind always turned up around that time of year, and yet somehow it continually took us by surprise. Like a tropical mudslide it rolled down the streets of the Spanish Quarter, pressing itself indecently against everything in its path: the thighs of married women, the fur of stray dogs, cabbages sliced in half. Once inside the quarter, it strayed down the side streets, now left and now right, north and south, for it had no real aim there other than to blow the finest desert sand through the lace of panties hung out to dry and the engines of scooters parked for too long, and to blanket every last soul in a twisting, grating warmth.

Still, there was a raw pleasure in the scirocco: in its temporary lawlessness, in the sense of powerlessness and the heat it brought with it. It was finally warm enough to eat outside. The desert wind was a sign that summer was on its way, shepherded slowly up from Africa, and now more than any other year it made me yearn for that long, laid-back season. A desire that, upon hearing Sonia’s words, became a dull ache in my gut. I heard a murmuring in my ear. It was the wind: Hurry up, it was saying.

“I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to talk to him tonight.”

“Great, Sonia. You really should.”

“Oh, the pasta!”

“I’ll go.”

At least in the kitchen there was no one around, not even the wind. I stirred the bucatini, the clumsiest of all pastas, long pasty limbs that went all awry and refused to be tamed, especially tonight, by my big wooden spoon. Before long I heard voices rising up from the front door. Then footsteps on the stairs.

Angelo was squealing, “Wicked, this stuff is the bomb!”

Then a vaguely familiar male voice. “Yeah, my grandparents make it too.”

Finally, a deep, soulful voice. “It’s not as good as last year’s. I hope you like it anyway.”

How had I not been moved, the night of the party, by the power of his voice? Pietro came up the stairs first, holding an unlabeled bottle of wine. I didn’t look at him but at the curly-haired boy behind him, whom I recognized as Davide, followed by Angelo carrying something wrapped in butcher paper.

“Look what Pietro’s brought from the farm,” chirped Angelo, opening the brown paper for me to see. “Homemade soppressata, how about that?”

“Great,” I said, stealing a glance at Pietro as he waited in the living room under the ceiling medallion. He just stood there awkwardly, leaning heavily on one leg as if the other was lame.

I put down the steaming spoon. “It’s this way,” I said under my breath and, whether he’d heard me or not, he followed me outside.

“Jesus Christ,” were his first words. “What is this place, the royal palace?” He was looking at the chipped stucco waterspout attached to the terrace wall. In better times, water would have poured from the mouth of the devilish face into the basin.

Tonino greeted Pietro with a manly pat on the shoulder, taking the wine from him. “Whoever built it was probably just some prick trying to look like King Ferdinand the Fourth. Have you seen the frescoes? Fucking cheesy.”

“In other words, the apartment’s an illegal addition,” said Luca, “built on top of the original building from the 1600s. It probably dates back to no earlier than the 1930s.”

“Well, whenever it was built,” Pietro replied, “the owners must have been rolling in cash.”

“Yeah, maybe years ago when this neighborhood might have been halfway decent,” said Angelo. “But the current owners are just a bunch of vasciaioli. They’re trashy as hell, and they’re crooks too. You should hear what fine Italian they speak when they call to put up the rent.”

“They spend the day in the vascio,” Luca clarified. “But their private rooms are on the next floor up.”

“Big fat difference …”

“How the fuck do you always know all this shit?” Tonino said.

“I couldn’t help noticing your delightful neighbor,” said Davide, and in fact no one ever missed the transvestite standing outside the ground-floor home across from our building, with legs like a horse’s. It wasn’t easy to walk past without slowing down and at the same time tear your eyes away from the innards of the room, which, with its blood-red couch, faux marble, and fake gold fittings, tried to suck you in like a Chinese brothel.

“Enough to make a straight guy turn gay,” said Tonino, his machismo perfectly intact.

Angelo was shaking his head. “Why anyone would choose to live down there instead of in an awesome place like this is beyond me.”

“To avoid the fucking stairs,” replied Tonino. “I swear, one day these six flights are going to be the death of me.”

“Or to be right in the action, in the heart of it all,” said Luca, extending a pack of tobacco to Pietro.

Pietro politely waved it away, pulling out a pack of Marlboros instead. He looked more relaxed as he took his first lungful. “They’re Lights,” he said, turning toward me. It was an apology.

Sonia came out carrying the pot of bucatini alla puttanesca, its bare-cupboard ingredients and uncertain origins—Sicily? Rome? Ischia?—the perfect dish for our motley crew. We all took a seat around the table, Pietro across from me. His red wine was served around. I hardly ever drank—alcohol only made me nauseated—but tonight I let my glass be filled, halfway … all right, three-quarters. I took a sip out of politeness and no sooner had I than liquid heat charged through my veins in the same pleasurable but invasive way that the scirocco was now furrowing its warm, fat fingers through my hair. I wrestled it back into an unsuccessful bun.

“Buon appetito.”

We ate in customary silence, as good food required; the chaotic wind, too, imposed a certain solitary focus. It was the best chance I had to study Pietro unnoticed, to see if my memory matched reality. I had remembered his features after all, but now I was struck by their singularity. Pietro had the huge, expressive eyes of a deer in the woods, yet his long, bony nose lent a Babylonian majesty to his profile. As for his mouth, my eyes wouldn’t go there.

I watched him as he topped up Davide’s wine (“It won’t win any awards,” he was saying, “but it’s better than water”), deciding that his attractiveness was well out of the ordinary, a kind of exaggerated beauty that bordered on ugliness. But although Pietro constantly toyed with the boundary between inaccessible beauty and easy vulgarity, he never crossed it. He was strange and magnificent. I studied his features so closely that, though separated by the table, I swore I could feel the warmth released through his nostrils, the tingling feather of his eyelashes. Again the wind went, Hurry up.

I took a big sip of wine and noticed that Sonia was clearly studying him too. She was watching his lips. Slightly reddened with tomato, they were moving, and it was only then I realized Pietro was speaking. Tonino had asked him a question.

“Hydrogeology,” Pietro was saying, “is useful if you want to find water; for example, if you need to figure out where to dig a well.”

“Do people still dig wells?” asked Sonia.

Tonino said, “Aren’t you supposed to be from Sardinia?”

“Ah, the urban youth of today …” said Angelo, feigning a resigned sigh. He enjoyed teasing Sonia good-naturedly for the fact that she too was born at the far reaches of Italy.

“Can’t you just use one of those sticks to find water?” asked Davide.

“The old folks in the village do,” Pietro answered.

“You mean those wife-beating sticks?” chimed in Tonino. “My dad has one of those.”

Everyone laughed so I did the convivial thing and joined in. Pietro was laughing, too, that is, until he wrapped his long fingers over his mouth in a rather contemplative gesture and rested his eyes on me. I could feel the weight of his gaze: it was as though he’d been waiting all evening for this racket, this rowdy opportunity when everyone was distracted, to unload it onto me. Any lightheartedness I might have had instantly abandoned me. I couldn’t even hear all the happy chatter because in reality I was no longer with my friends around the table but with Pietro in a deep and clear world, a seabed where silence throbbed in our ears to the slow, inevitable rhythm of the waves.

There the two of us were alone. Pietro was anything but a stranger. He was looking at me, inside me, with the spear of his gaze puncturing everything I held dear, and without having to utter a single word he was telling me, I came here tonight for you. Understanding this, the fork still poised between my fingers turned to lead—I could hardly hold on to it—and the blood drained violently from my face until all that was left of me was a wandering spirit. The scirocco was now having its way with me but I had no strength to fight it, or to hold Pietro’s gaze even a second longer.

I turned away. The laughter flooded back into my ears. Pietro looked away, too, and gone was the certainty, unassailable only a moment ago, that we’d had a dialogue without speaking. Clearly I was delirious, perhaps even drunk.

“Have you taken volcanology?” Luca was asking.

Pietro answered, without emotion and without addressing anyone in particular, that he’d taken it for a year only. “It’s not my field. But I do have great respect for volcanoes, let’s put it that way.”

So he was a geology major. That breast pocket, those shoes: it all made sense now. What could be intimidating about a geology student?

“What about Vesuvius,” I said, surprised to hear my own voice. “Have you studied it?”

“A little. It’s a perfect example of a stratovolcano.”

“What does that mean?” asked Sonia, and he explained that they were the cone-shaped volcanoes, built up over hundreds of thousands of years from all the lava flows, with basalt and rhyolite and other enigmas coming to the surface.

“Basically, a giant zit,” said Davide, chewing on a piece of soppressata.

Pietro smiled and again covered his mouth, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw. “You could say that. But it’s the most dangerous type of volcano on Earth.”

“Oh god, should we be worried?” asked Sonia.

“Maybe. Almost half of the world’s volcanoes that have erupted recently have been stratovolcanoes.”

“Define recently,” said Tonino.

“In the last ten thousand years.”

Davide and Angelo were now guffawing at something at the other end of the table. The noise drew my gaze to the edge of the terrace and out over the city all the way to the volcano, looking radiant in the orange light of the scirocco.

“But that doesn’t mean,” I found myself saying, “that Vesuvius is going to erupt now. It could be thousands of years away, right?”

“Who knows, but there’s no point worrying. It’s the law of chaos. There’s not much we can do about it.”

Pietro had spoken with a fatalism that poorly matched his baritone, which was firm yet reassuring like the voice of a news weatherman announcing the perfect storm. In fact, Sonia said, “Well, I’m not going to freak out about it then.”

Seeing her light up like that had a sobering effect on me. It was Sonia’s night. Maybe she’d even told her secret to Angelo, who was now conspiring to help her by inviting Pietro over. It also occurred to me that Pietro might not have understood a single word on that entire mixed tape of American songs, that for him it was merely a sharing of tunes with a native from the land of rock ’n’ roll. Now I was doubly convinced that what I’d earlier perceived as a silent exchange across the table was nothing more than a glance in my direction, and like most glances it had in fact lasted only a few seconds. It was even possible that Pietro, on his own accord, had come here tonight for Sonia, or for no one at all. I vowed to avoid any future dramatization—and to not take even one more sip of his wine.

Pietro sliced more soppressata for the table. “But anyway, we’d get some warning, in the form of earthquakes.”

“That’s what Pliny the Younger described too,” offered Luca, and, as was the case whenever he decided to speak, everyone went quiet. “The residents of Pompeii felt the earthquakes in the days leading up to the eruption. But they made no connection at all to Vesuvius.”

“And the water tasted like sulfur before the wells suddenly dried up,” added Pietro, “but they made nothing of it. They didn’t have the science. The people didn’t even know it was a volcano. For them it was just a mountain that gave them good grapes to make wine with …” As if to restrain inappropriate laughter, or for having said too much, his hand was back over his mouth.

His knowledge must have impressed Luca, for after that he collegially, almost gentlemanly, deferred to Pietro for every geological detail of his historical tale. Perhaps Luca’s greatest wisdom was knowing what it was that he did not know, and Pietro added or corrected with the very same humility. One day around one in the afternoon, as the story went, came the blast, along with an eruption column about thirty kilometers high. When it hit the top of the sky, the column spread out like an umbrella pine, according to the eighteen-year-old Pliny watching the disaster from Misenum. Eventually though, the earth took back what rightfully belonged to it and all the erupted matter came back down—ash, pumice, rocks. Darkness fell like a sudden midnight. All afternoon and all night, rocks hammered the city, a malicious rain that made roofs cave in and filled up bedrooms and the streets of Pompeii and Stabiae, all the while sparing Herculaneum so as to leave it to the mercy of mudslides. Clouds of suffocating ash caught any who had survived. Just as the sea had pulled away from the coastline, leaving fish and shellfish on dry sand, so too were the gods deserting man.

As Luca spoke, the scirocco brushed his cigarette smoke east and then west before blurring it into the yellow night. “On top of that, there were toxic gases.”

“And intense heat,” added Pietro. “Pyroclastic surges.”

Luca nodded gratefully before concluding, “That day over ten thousand people lost their lives.”

I listened as if strapped to my seat. For years when I’d lived right there, in what was ancient Stabiae, where Pliny the Elder himself had died suffocated by the ash, like everybody else I gave little thought to the stories beneath my feet. Now, for some reason, that familiar truth filled me with an electrifying fear that bordered on euphoria: maybe it was the shimmering threads Luca had woven into the story, or maybe something else entirely.

I glanced over at Pietro, whose eyes, too, were on Luca as he drank from his cup, unperturbed by the Saharan wind teasing strands of hair from his ponytail. It was the way I often looked at Luca myself, with an admiration I was desperate to hide, all the more in moments like this when his tongue was loosened—by the wine or by the wind, I couldn’t tell. Everyone else, though, was craning their necks to catch a glimpse at the volcano beyond the city lights, as though they’d only just now noticed it was there.

“Not to mention the devastating eruption of 1631,” Luca said finally.

No one dared to ask about 1631. Someone shouted in the streets below, a motorbike skidded: it all seemed so far away. Pietro reached for his shirt pocket swollen with the perfect rectangle of his Marlboro Lights. As he did so, his shirt stretched opened a little, giving me a peek at a silver pendant. A sun?

Quickly I turned away. It wasn’t my gift to unwrap. And yet the wind was fiddling with the collar of my moth-eaten jacket, breathing onto my neck, breathing my name. Hurry up, Heddi, hurry up.

The wine was gone, the soppressata, too, but the evening wasn’t over. The mismatched chairs had moved like checker pieces away from the table; Davide sat on the edge of the fountain talking thick as thieves with Luca. The conversation shifted to lighter topics. At one point, Angelo took a breadcrust and balanced it on his upper lip. “How do I look with a mustache?”

“You look like Signor Rossi,” Tonino said drolly.

“Oh yeah, Signor Rossi, that cute little cartoon guy,” said Sonia. “I loved him when I was little.”

“So people in Sardinia already had television then?” Angelo teased her.

Again laughter. I didn’t look Pietro’s way to see if he was laughing or not. Surely he, like everyone else, knew who this childhood hero Signor Rossi was. I stood to clear the table.

“I’ll give you a hand.” Pietro was already at my side piling the dirty dishes. I thanked him, gesturing him to follow me toward the kitchen. Behind me he said, “I hear you’re a talented linguist.”