Lost in the Spanish Quarter

I really would like it if one day you dropped by for a chat, but I think it’s unlikely. I’m not living in Washington, as you may believe, but in New Zealand. Maybe the constellations really are upside down here, on the other side of the world …

h.

6

THAT KISS, THAT KISS … Was this what tasting the forbidden fruit was like? Only one last moment of hesitation and then the immediate reward for throwing your better judgment to the wind: an explosion of god almighty on your tongue and a surge of the most perfect, unstoppable pleasure, so much so that you can’t distinguish the juice of the fruit trickling down your chin from the saliva from your own mouth, nor do you care.

I didn’t know much about Bible stories, but it did seem to me that there was something in that kiss that was so good it had to be against the law, maybe even against nature. And now that I’d tasted it, now that I knew, there was no going back. I couldn’t undo what I’d done, I couldn’t unknow what I now knew. And yet I didn’t even remotely want to go back. I was only shocked, incensed even. How had this been hidden from me my entire life?

I replayed that kiss over and over in my mind. Unlike with a cassette tape, there was no wearing or warping: the more I played it, the more it deepened in detail and emotion. By reliving it, I could slow it down and thus savor its many little components, some of which I’d very nearly missed the first time around: the salinity in the folds of his neck, his eyes, a tender yet vibrant shade of brown like a branch that has just shed its bark, his graceful yet broad hand spanning the back of my head as he pulled me in. That kiss was something that deserved to be relived, for I’d gone twenty-three years without it only to be granted half an hour.

If that. Besides, I didn’t know if I would taste it ever again. A kiss like that, I reasoned, couldn’t repeat itself, just as the forbidden fruit couldn’t be tasted but once. In fact, in my head it did not automatically equate that in order to experience it once more all I had to do was be alone with Pietro again. That kiss was not specifically connected to the person. It was much greater than him, than us. And we couldn’t re-create it because the kiss had created us.

“Leaving for Guangzhou soon?” I heard beside me.

“Sorry?”

Luca nodded up at the colossal ancient map of China flattened behind glass, the pride of the Department of Oriental Studies. Who knows how long I’d been sitting in that study hall, staring with unfocused eyes at that map and not my semiotics book.

“I was just studying.”

“I know my Cancerians.” Luca tossed his tattered bookbag on the table and scraped the floor noisily as he pulled out a chair. A few students looked up from their books. “Roberta is like that too.”

“Like what?”

“A shell that’s never empty.”

Being compared in any way to Roberta was a huge compliment. Luca and Roberta had been together so long, long before my arrival in the Spanish Quarter, that it seemed out of the question that they would ever part. But then, some time ago now, Roberta had left for a Greek mountain village to translate ancient Greek poetry into Italian for her thesis. I wondered if Luca missed her, if he still loved her. Yet such topics were not part of our shared vocabulary.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Of course.”

Luca pulled a cassette tape from his bag. He wanted help deciphering the English lyrics to a song that his heavy metal band was hoping to perform. As he scooted his chair closer and uncoiled some earphones, I was deeply flattered that Luca Falcone needed me, even if just for a moment. He always had some creative project on the go—Arabic calligraphy, astrological charts, ancient runes, restoration of samurai swords—but in the cultivation of his crafts he devoted an almost meditative focus that carried him far, far away from me, the boys, the university, Naples.

Through the earphones, the tape barked unintelligibly. It was a terrible song, but because Luca liked it there had to be something sublime in it that I just couldn’t grasp. Once Luca had shown me how to cook saffron risotto. The saffron, like fragile branches of red coral protected from the world by a tiny glass capsule, didn’t seem even vaguely edible, especially with that odd, musty smell. Carefully he broke off a miniature twig and blew it like a kiss into the pot. As if by magic, the simmering rice—and, I could almost swear, even the steam above it—exploded with yellow. Luca was an alchemist, so there had to be gold in this song too.

I jotted down the words as best I could. All the while Luca followed my handwriting, sitting so close that I could smell the lavender of his soap and hear the scrunching of his leather jacket. At the end he said, “What would I do without you, Heddi.”

My name was Nordic and outmoded, but I loved it on Luca’s lips. He was an exacting linguistic who was fluent in Arabic, French, and English, and he didn’t merely pronounce my name: he pulled it out from somewhere deep within, like a sigh. I had the sudden urge to tell him about Pietro, but I held back. I was afraid of killing the magic of that afternoon, which still tingled in my head like a secret whispered against my ear. Besides, what if Sonia had confessed her feelings for Pietro to Luca as well? I didn’t want to have any flaw, moral or otherwise, in Luca’s eyes.

The window of opportunity closed when he started buckling up his bag. “You keep on studying. At this pace you’ll get your degree before any of us.”

“Who cares about a degree?” I said. “In the end it’s just a piece of paper.”

“True, but to almost everyone else that piece of paper is worth far more than a precious Islamic scroll. Especially to my father.” Luca had thrown his bag across his shoulder but remained seated at my side. Dropping into a confidential and somewhat aggrieved tone, he added, “And anyway, whether I like it or not, at some point this chapter has to come to an end.”

“What chapter?”

Luca gave me a crooked smile. “Have you ever been to Tunisia? It’s a fascinating place, I’d love to go back there. My friends in Japan are always inviting me over too. But first, graduation … and the military.”

The military was a profanity that was never uttered among our group of friends, and hearing it now felt like an insult. But he explained in a peaceful (or perhaps resigned) voice, that he’d chosen not to fulfill the yearlong compulsory military service straight after high school, unlike most of his classmates. Perhaps this had been a mistake, though, because at this age life in the barracks would be unbearable. Therefore, he’d made the decision instead to complete the civilian service as a conscientious objector.

“Either way, a year is too long, Luca!” Unthinkably long, just as it was unthinkable that after that year Luca wouldn’t simply return to Naples.

“A year and a half,” he clarified. “Otherwise it would be the easy way out.”

“There’s nothing easy about it …”

I wanted him to pull out one of his magic tricks to make it go away, or at least to find a loophole. But Luca simply laid his eyes on me in that way he had of trying to communicate on another plane of existence. I was stumped as to what it meant, deciding instead that it was best to not make a big deal out of something that was still far off in the hazy future.

He stood to go, asking me to walk him back to the Quartieri. Without a moment’s hesitation I shut my book and grabbed my bag. That we’d just had one of the most personal conversations Luca and I had ever had somewhat alleviated its heaviness. And as we walked down Spaccanapoli in a sweet cloud of tobacco, our arms tightly locked and walking very nearly in step with each other, I felt sure everyone would think we, little old me and Luca Falcone, were best friends.

“Luca, what did you mean by The world is a book?”

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

“Your words?”

“You overestimate me. Saint Augustine. But to me it also means that the things that are truly worth learning can’t be found in books.”

I was determined to be more prepared when I faced Sonia, but perhaps I overdid it by asking her to meet me at Caffè Gambrinus. Its gilded mirrors and their multiplying effect on the well-to-do only made me slouch further into the antique chair, velvety and reassuring like the gray-green underside of olive leaves. Yet that day I needed the pitiful comfort of my favorite refuge, where I could order a cappuccino after midday without so much as a flicker of disapproval on the face of the bow-tied waiter, and indulge my adolescent fantasies about what Italy was supposed to be. A literary hub in the 1800s, Gambrinus was one of the few last reminders that at one time Naples had been a major European capital. Gabriele D’Annunzio had lived in Naples (and was a frequent patron of Gambrinus), Degas and Goethe too. And hadn’t the Marquis de Sade himself called Naples an infernal heaven?

Sonia took a seat. I felt a few stares in our direction, at my shabby jacket, at Sonia’s black uniform. “Wow,” she said, “it’s so fancy in here.”

I remembered Pietro at our rooftop dinner saying something like that about our place. It wasn’t hard to imagine Sonia and Pietro as a couple. They spoke with the same candor; they came from the same world and had watched the same cartoons. As if I’d deprived her of her one true match, I was struck by the idea that I’d left Sonia to the wolves. And I didn’t like being that person.

We sipped our coffees and talked about our strictest lecturers. Hers was a Portuguese grammar zealot and mine an elegant Bulgarian native who from day one had banned our class of two from uttering a single word of Italian, but who soon had us calling her by her first name, Iskra, and visiting her grown daughter while on a scholarship to Bulgaria. As Sonia and I chatted away, through the window I stole glimpses of Piazza Plebiscito, which up until my first year there had been a massive inner-city parking lot. The recent urban renewal had rid it of cars, revealing, in addition to lewd graffiti and peeling posters, an unexpected spaciousness, a place open to a thousand possibilities.

Sonia’s empty cup came down on her saucer with a final, devasting clank. It was now or never. But I didn’t know where to begin. I hadn’t spoken to a soul about Pietro. Now I could either trivialize what had happened between us or tell the shocking truth that since that kiss I could hardly read a line in a book—or sleep.

“You look so serious. You’re not in some sort of trouble, are you?”

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine … Remember when you told me about Pietro, up there on the roof?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s so gorgeous.” Sonia rolled her eyes upward as though recalling something heavenly, before adding, “I mean, gorgeous in a kind of unusual way, don’t you think? And he has such beautiful hands, the hands of a gentleman …”

The observation shook my resolve, and I started a string of sentences without finishing a single one. I felt like a rambling fool, a circus clown rummaging through a rickety suitcase and tossing out item after useless item—a shoe, an umbrella, a banana—until he finds what he needs. And what I needed was vagueness. “I have feelings for him,” I said finally.

Sonia’s smile dropped ever so slightly. “And I would imagine he has feelings for you too.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

Sonia stopped me midsentence, conveying in her fast, almost urgent, Sardinian way how happy she was for me and wrapping me in a hug that smelled of watermelon shampoo.

It was like a puzzle piece gloriously clicking into place. Outside the café, the midday sunshine ricocheted off the shop windows as I walked the short distance back to the Spanish Quarter. I turned into its alleyways, where I was welcomed back by the call of fish sellers, the purr of motorbikes, and the canopies of laundry. My legs effortlessly drove me up the incline of Via De Deo. Aromas of roasted peppers and seared steak came steaming out over the balconies, enveloping me in a mouthwatering mist. I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything all day and my stomach reawakened. This only accentuated the lightness in my head, and in every fiber of my being, as I slid through the gate left ajar and sprinted up the stairs two at a time. I hadn’t called, I hadn’t even buzzed. I was going to show up at lunchtime, uninvited, without even the courtesy of a loaf of bread. But still I rushed there as if I were running late.

7

PIETRO SET ABOUT cooking for me, chopping the onions like he was afraid to cause them pain and gently adjusting the flame under the frying pan. He sure knew how to maneuver in that tiny kitchen and how to make do with the few ingredients he had, as though he were used to having guests turn up unannounced for lunch. He didn’t want any help; he was simply glad that I’d come back, he insisted, sitting me down on the terrace step with a cape of sunlight on my back. He also put a glass of wine in my hand, and what harm could it do? The wine was in fact a medicine that cleared my head instead of clouding it. I understood that my concern over talking to Sonia had been blown out of proportion, and now all the drama fizzled into a sweet pulp like those onions sautéing with pancetta.

“You’re a man of many talents. Geologist, cook …”

“I’m not a geologist yet. And anyway, wait until you try this amatriciana before you say I can cook.” He let out a hoarse laugh.

The wine on an empty stomach made me uncharacteristically bold, and I said, “You didn’t cover your mouth this time when you laughed.”

“You have an eye like a hawk’s.”

“You have a nice smile. Why hide it?”

Pietro took a while to answer. He emptied a jar of home-bottled tomatoes into the pan and stirred them thoughtfully. “Can’t you tell? It’s my teeth.”

I beckoned him over, and reluctantly he kneeled before me, that silver sun jingling. When he parted his lips slightly, all the wine I’d drunk slipped its long red tentacles around me, wrapping me in a hot, stinging pleasure.

“Let’s have a look.” I tried to focus on his teeth. They were straight and somewhat boxy, pearly white corn that I felt an overwhelming desire to run my tongue over right then and there. He smiled. I hadn’t noticed it before, but in fact on one of his front teeth there was a faint gray shadow. “It’s hardly noticeable,” I said, and we kissed, an intimate mixture of wine and smoke and hunger that made a commotion of my heart.

He stood up. As we waited for the water to come to a boil, out of the blue he said, “Did you know I used to live in Rome?”

My eyes went involuntarily big. “Then why did you come to Naples?”

I knew it was hypocritical of me to ask him the very question that had been put to me countless times, as if my answer might justify why any of us were there. But it was true: Naples was never a choice. It was a gift that had to be forced on you, by birth or by fate.

Pietro told me that his brother was the one who’d chosen to go to Naples, to study architecture. Their parents had readily given Gabriele their blessing. School was all he was good at. But Gabriele didn’t stop there: he told them he wouldn’t leave without Pietro. His younger brother, too, he argued, had the right to fulfill his own dream of studying geology. This time they refused, unwilling to let go of their only son who knew how to turn olives into emerald liquid and wheat into golden powder. But Gabriele was headstrong, and eventually the old folks gave in.

Pietro didn’t stop there either. He told them he wanted to study not in Naples but in Rome. It was as far away as he could imagine going. And perhaps it made no difference to his mother and father, as they were losing him anyway, to one city or another. The farthest they had ever been was Schaffhausen, where both he and Gabriele were born, but all any of them ever saw of Switzerland was a dairy factory and a toy-strewn hallway of a rental apartment. More than a hallway, it was a babysitter: with the doors securely shut, it was a safe place to keep the little boys when shifts overlapped. Sometimes when their mom got home, she’d bring them ice cream from the factory. Once they were tall enough to reach the doorknobs, she took them back to Italy to start their first day of school in the same class, as though they were twins.

Pietro had great expectations of Rome. But the reality of it was that the only accommodation he could afford was a one-room unit bordering a highway. It took over an hour by bus to reach La Sapienza University. To solve this problem he bought a secondhand moped, thus spending much of his monthly allowance on gas. Not wanting to prove his parents right, he didn’t ask them for more funds. There was no one to go out with anyway for a coffee or a pizza: his classmates were too cliquey; some openly snubbed him. The only friend he had there was Giuliano, a fellow geology student who shared his origins, the mountainous Irpinia district around Avellino, but unfortunately Giuliano lived on the other side of the city.

Pietro studied and studied. He excelled in geophysics, did well in mineralogy but failed mathematics twice. He became plagued with doubt. What the hell was he doing there, in the capital? Did he really think that someone like him, who’d come from nothing, was going to become a geologist? Looking back on it now, he was probably depressed. If it hadn’t been for Giuliano, who knows how far he might have spiraled …

That’s when he called his brother, who didn’t hesitate to say, “Come to Naples then.” University life was a blast, Gabriele said. They all lived in the center of the city and walked everywhere discussing politics, literature, art. They drank wine at lunch, studied at night, slept all day. In Naples it was possible to live like kings on very little money. Students were given discounts to see plays and movies, and vouchers for three-course restaurant meals at only two thousand lire. Not to mention the dirt-cheap rent in the Spanish Quarter.

Pietro’s story took only as long as the penne took to become al dente. We sat at the table. “Another day, another meal,” he said. “And who knows what tomorrow will bring.” Then he laughed without emitting a sound.

I loved the way he played with the language, like no one else I knew, but it was never affected. And I had been right: he could really cook. Yet after only a few bites I was no longer hungry. Maybe I’d had too much to drink, though my full glass was proof to the contrary. And I was sober enough to tell that the surface of the wine was skewed, due certainly to the table itself, which dipped significantly at the center. Not only, but the liquid itself was quivering: Was it the ripple caused by his neighbor’s television turned up too loud or was it the stirring I felt inside?

I put my fork down. “You fought for what you believed in, Pietro.” For the first time I’d addressed him by name, a slip of the tongue that startled me and moved me as much as if I’d made a love confession. “And now here you are.”

“Here I am, with you. Amazing.” Pietro too lowered his fork. “Thank goodness I left Rome. Best move I ever made.”

We looked at each other and I could see he’d lost his appetite too. Who needed food now, or ever again?

Pietro led me up the staircase but this time there was no fourth-grade awkwardness. We were giants in his little room. He cupped my face and kissed me like a long-lost lover, with both pleasure and heartbreak. Then his hands curled around my ribs, drawing me hard against him.

I surprised myself by pushing him backward onto his tiny bed. He surrendered easily, taking me down with him. The full pressure of my body against his—the crushing weight, the complete closeness—gave me a brief moment of relief, until I felt him go hard underneath me, a pressing heat, and I grasped that nothing in me, absolutely nothing, was at peace or under control.

Again we kissed, not like we had the other day but like we were simply picking up from where we’d left off—straight into the most perfect darkness where we could exist once more, where maybe we had always existed—and yet we kissed as if we couldn’t wait a second longer, like travelers so thirsty from wandering through a vast wasteland that, now with water finally before them, drink without stopping for breath. When I moved my lips down to his now perspiring neck, he tried to undo my hair tie but could only get halfway before the kissing overpowered us again, and we couldn’t stop, we just couldn’t, even if a landslide had begun rolling down the Spanish Quarter to swallow us whole. It was only this that mattered, only him and me, and we were trying to devour each other with our mouths, our hands making fists of the other’s hair, and soon we were begging each other, begging God, whom I didn’t even believe in, and I grasped that it might actually be possible to die of pleasure.

We were breaking more than a few rules: shoes on the bed, girl on top, window wide open in broad daylight. But it was the siesta, and the only one watching was the volcano.

The afternoon sun lit our clothes thrown like laundry on the floor. We looked at each other and laughed, a hearty laugh, teeth and all, like we’d both suddenly gotten a brilliant joke. Through the window, the ships waited under the sun on the silver platter of the gulf. It really did seem that the heat the scirocco had promised was finally inching along in its wake.

“Summer’s coming,” I said. “I can smell it in the air.”

“I want to spend every day of it with you, if you’ll let me.” I nestled into the crook of his arm and felt his lips moisten my forehead. “Come closer,” he said in a raspy whisper. “Sleep with me.”

The last thing I wanted was to sleep, but there was something about the late sun spreading across us like a second bedspread, the wine having gone lukewarm like a forgotten bath, and the tempo of Pietro’s breathing that eventually lulled my racing mind.

I was standing outside a lone house: perhaps I lived there. It was a beach house, maybe somewhere near Castellammare; behind it was a slope of olive trees as pilly and gray as a much-loved wool blanket. Yet on closer inspection, I realized that towering behind the olive grove and the house was a breathtaking wall of rock, something not from our world but from the world of giants. Vesuvius. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? It seemed to grow before my eyes, so I dared not lose sight of it as I backed away toward the sea, but the more I watched the volcano, the more I became mesmerized by it.

Out of nowhere came clouds, gray and laden like fieldstones being nested one on top of the other. The sun vanished. I was getting trapped in by the very sky, and when the ground rumbled beneath my feet, I no longer had any doubt as to what was happening.

I turned my back to the volcano and staggered toward the sea. There was a rowboat resting on the beach. I pushed it out into the water with a single shove, grinding the beach pebbles underneath. I rowed out far, disconcerted as to how the sea could be so very glassy and calm when disaster was imminent. The sea and the sky now mirrored each other, of the same ashen color that was neither day nor night, the color of the end of time. All at once, in a fit of fury or passion or folly, Vesuvius unleashed molten rock down its sides like hot wax from a candle, maybe even destroying itself in that unstoppable act. I watched as the lava, dazzling even in its apathy, rolled toward the olive trees and the house. Why hadn’t there been any warning, not even the slightest sign? But none of that mattered now; I had to keep going. Keep rowing, rowing, away from there.

All of a sudden, I heard screams as people began pouring out from the olive grove, most of them women and children. Where had they come from? I had the only rowboat, the only salvation. I had to go back and save them, as many as I could. And yet now the volcano was spitting rocks, too, and the rocks were pelting the water all around me. Go back for them and you’ll die, I heard a voice in my head. I sat in the rowboat rigid with terror as I understood what I was about to do.