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Lost in the Spanish Quarter
Heddi Goodrich
Told with intimacy and ferocity and set in the passionate and crumbling Spanish Quarter of Naples, comes a poignant tale of first love – of a place, of a person – where languages and cultures collide while dreams soar and crash in spectacular ways. ‘Don’t forgive me, don’t answer, don’t be sad. Be happy, have babies, make mixed tapes, take pictures … it’s how I always love to think of you. And now and then, if you can and if you want to, remember me. ’ Several years after leaving Naples, Heddi receives an email from Pietro, her first love, admitting that he was wrong. Immediately, Heddi is transported back to her college days in that heartbreakingly beautiful city built on ruins and set against the cliffs of a sleeping volcano. Just the thought of the Spanish Quarter, the crumbling apartment she shared with friends and where she first met Pietro, still spark the pain of longing and a desire to belong. For Heddi’s tribe of university friends, Naples was the first taste of freedom and an escape from their familial obligations. But for Heddi it is the place where she searched for the roots she never had, while Pietro tried to escape his. For all of them Naples is a place that they’ll never forget: the setting of their unrestrained youth.
LOST IN THE SPANISH QUARTER
Heddi Goodrich
Copyright (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
HarperVia
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2019
Originally published as Perduti nei Quartieri Spagnoli in Italy in 2019 by Giunti Editore
Copyright © Heddi Goodrich 2019
Cover design by Anna Morrison
Heddi Goodrich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008359966
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008359980
Version: 2019-09-19
Dedication (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
To my father, in memory
Contents
Cover (#uefe25785-e8a5-5ddf-a1e1-1b2b5ec97517)
Title Page (#ud17b8ae7-9dfc-50ea-b4eb-f9e01446cf65)
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
A Note from the Translator and Author
About the Author
About the Publisher
From: tectonic@tin.it
To: heddi@yahoo.com
Sent: November 22
I know you’d rather I was dead. I’m barely alive. I don’t expect an answer to this email, and I won’t write you again. I’ve been trying to write you for the past four years. I should write a hundred-page letter to try and explain. I would never be able to, so I won’t try to explain myself now.
I’m a fool. I’ve always trusted my instinct but my instinct is a fake, a traitor, an idiot. A few years back I made the worst mistake of my life—unrecoverable, inexplicable, unimaginable. I lied to myself for a while (I can be quite good at that sometimes) that I did what my head, or my gut, was telling me to do. Maybe it was the right thing but it ruined my life. I just wanted to tell you that. Because you deserve to know that my life isn’t worth a cent. You deserve to know that every time I sit down to eat with utensils in my hand for a moment I have the desire to gouge an eye out with my knife.
I hope with all my strength that these words will twist a little smile of satisfaction from your lips, just as I hope that for you I was just a bad dream, not your cross to bear. My other hope is that my life goes by quickly so that I can be reincarnated into someone or something better than my current self. Then perhaps I’ll run into you in an airport in Stockholm or Buenos Aires.
Don’t forgive me, don’t answer, don’t be sad. Be happy, have babies, write books, make mixed tapes, take pictures … it’s how I always love to think of you. And now and then, if you can and if you want to, remember me.
p.
1 (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
HEDDI.”
I heard my name pronounced as no one had said it in years, like a person might say the name of an exotic species. Rising into a question but mastered—subtle aspiration, short vowels, and all—as if it had been breathed in private again and again until it could roll off the tongue with startling casualness. No other sound in all the Spanish Quarter, not a woman screaming bloody cheater or a gun popping with the thrill of vendetta, could have made me turn away from the murmuring fireplace on such a cold night.
There stood a boy, a man, his mouth tightened like he’d said his bit and now it was my turn. His shirt was tucked in at the waist, rolled up at the arms, and strained at the heart, a handy breast pocket barely managing a pack of cigarettes. Nothing like the other guests, who with their face piercings and dreadlocks and pasty skin tried to cover up the wholesomeness of their childhoods spent frolicking at the beach and eating potato gnocchi. Despite the hour, their sweet scent, of patchouli and thrift shops and hashish, still hung in the kitchen, fusing with wafts of flat beer and saffron risotto. Clearly, he wasn’t from our tribe of linguists, the centuries-old Istituto Universitario Orientale, so easy to get into and so much harder to graduate from. Yet there he was, as still as the water of a deep lake.
“Here, I made this for you,” he said, fishing something out of his jeans pocket. Definitely a southern Italian accent, if not Neapolitan. His hand quivered, a slight ruffle, as he handed me a cassette tape in its homemade case. Per Heddi, it read, beginning with a capital H and ending with an inky splash, the dot on my long-forgotten i.
This threw me. It was actually the spelling of my name that derailed its pronunciation, for then it was easy to take it to its literal extreme, with a melodramatically elongated e and the d duly hardened by consonant doubling, which southern Italians took so very much to heart. That the H was ignored was entirely forgivable, for in Naples breathiness was reserved exclusively for laughter. “As in Eddie Murphy?” people would ask and I would simply nod. I didn’t mind really. Heddi was before and Eddie was now.
“Music?” I asked, and he merely nodded awkwardly, his knuckles taut over an empty beer bottle.
My back was warmed by the erratic dance of the flames and by the oblivious laughter of the friends I affectionately called “the boys,” i ragazzi. That I belonged there too and could turn back toward them at any time made me feel undeniably safe, a privilege that all of a sudden I perceived as unfair.
Downstairs the front door shook with a thud, probably the last of the guests staggering out, and my gift bearer looked jolted by the awareness that the party that had been whirling around him earlier was now gone. He tried to hide his embarrassment but I felt it all the same, a painful pinch followed by my own regret at being, once again, the only one sober.
“It’s probably getting late,” he said.
“I guess so, but there’s only one clock in the whole house.”
Abruptly, he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and unintentionally I mirrored his asymmetry by tilting my head to one side. The better to see him with, at least, though his face was hidden every time he found solace in his shoes—comfortable, practical shoes—by a dark mane. I could honestly say I’d never seen him before, I could have sworn by it, because if we’d ever locked eyes I surely would have remembered that determined look, a willingness to bide his time.
“I should probably get going.” He set his bottle down as if afraid to break the glass, despite the fact that the kitchen counter was an invitation to make a mess, with its knocked-over bottles, greasy pans, and mugs stained with wine like old teeth.
“I’m sorry, what was your name?”
“Pietro.” It was a rock of a name, straitlaced and somewhat hard, and he lifted his eyebrows apologetically.
“Thanks for the tape …” I said, but his name died in my throat. “So you’re leaving?”
“Yeah, I have to get up early. I’m off to the farm for a few weeks. My family’s farmland, in the province of Avellino. I go every Easter. Well, not just Easter, but you know …”
I didn’t know but I nodded anyway, grateful for the string of phrases. I still held out hope that in those last seconds before his departure (and I would probably never see him again) I could solve the mystery of how he’d come to be on such intimate terms with my name and why he’d gone to such trouble to make me something.
“OK, bye.”
“Bye, enjoy your farmstay. I mean, your stay at the farm.”
I wished he would just go now, this outsider who was now a chance witness to my slip of the tongue. It was exasperating how my Italian, my favorite disguise, could still come apart at the seams whenever I was taken by surprise.
A round of goodbyes and he was gone. I reclaimed my seat by the fireplace, slipping the tape into the pocket of my vintage suede miniskirt. The flames felt their way boldly up the scavenged firewood, fondling what had once been the leg of a proper chair or the headboard of a single bed. Within seconds the blazing fire swept any trace of unease from my face.
“What was that guy’s name again?” asked Luca beside me, tossing a cigarette butt into the fire and slipping a white ribbon of smoke from his mouth.
“Pietro, I think,” I said, tasting just how solid the name was.
“Oh, yeah. He’s a friend of Davide’s.”
“Davide who?”
“The short one with curly hair,” said Sonia, the only other girl in our innermost circle.
Davide, now I remembered. Luca sometimes played in his band. Davide, Pietro, did it matter? The truth was we didn’t need anyone else in our clan. We were fine just as we were.
I was fine.
