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Mesmerized by the flames, we let the night slide into a moonless, hourless limbo. We talked about Hinduism, the Phoenician alphabet, the Mani Pulite judicial investigation that was cleansing a corrupt government and making a killing at the newsstands. Now and then a chunk of wood caved into the embers, triggering a showy display of sparks and a few oohs and aahs for that little moment of drama. When the fire started to nod off, Luca rummaged through the stack of makeshift firewood. Beside it was an acoustic guitar, which Tonino’s hairy hand reached for.
“You’re not throwing that in,” said Angelo, another of the boys.
“No, Tonino, please!” said Sonia.
“Party’s over, children,” Tonino announced with a heavy Pugliese drawl as he propped the guitar on his knee. “About fucking time for your lullaby.”
This was the part I loved the most. Tonino’s foul language drawing us in closer, his glasses turning to golden rings in the firelight as he began playing a tune that sounded like Lucio Dalla’s “Attenti al lupo,” “Watch Out for the Wolf.” He strummed with those small chunky hands covered in dark fleece, the hands of a garden gnome come to life. And he was hairy all over. Once Tonino had asked me to shave his back to deal the final blow to some crab lice, incontrovertible evidence that he really had managed to get someone into his bed—a Spanish girl, or so he said. Underneath it all, shorn like a spring lamb, Tonino possessed almost fine features that made him look, in a certain light, like my own brother.
Tonino sang that ballad like a heavy metal front man, with death growls and all, managing all the while to tweak the lyrics to his needs. “There’s this tiny little house … with a tiny little grapevine … and inside there’s a tiny little professor … who won’t fucking shift the deadline … And there’s this tiny little student … with a brain the size of Einstein’s …”
“Fuck me, that’s a hit song,” said Angelo. “You know what? Forget your studies. You should start a punk band.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll ask my Sanskrit professor if she wants to be the drummer, what do you say? That way she can beat the shit out of something else besides me.”
“Play us one of those traditional Neapolitan songs instead,” said Luca.
Tonino handed over the guitar. “I’m not the fucking Neapolitan,” he said. It was a compliment.
“I’m only half.”
“The bottom half, naturally,” said Angelo.
His shoulder-length hair falling over his face, Luca cradled the instrument and offered them an off-center laugh, but his eyes were on me. That half smile was in itself a compliment, for Luca was as selective with his smiles as he was with his words, as if he’d spent his last incarnation seeing all the irony in the world and in this lifetime had achieved Zen. Although technically he too was one of the boys, I had always thought of him as distinct from the other two. He was simply Luca Falcone.
“This one’s for you.”
It took only the first few notes for me to figure out that he’d chosen Carosone’s old classic “Tu vuo’ fa’ l’americano.” It was like I’d been caught out, the American incognito, and in fact Luca was looking my way, waiting.
I didn’t feel like singing, and if I did from the second verse onward, it was only because I realized the others genuinely didn’t know the words and that it was up to me to fill the silence. Perhaps I did it for Luca too. To show him that, if nothing else, I could put on an impeccable Neapolitan accent, a low-class growl rising from even lower in the gut than his. To see if I could make him smile. For his benefit, I crooned comically and gesticulated like a fishmonger, magically transformed into one of those poor women standing in the doorway of a typical inner-city vascio, a street-level, one-room hovel that some called a storeroom, others a store, and yet others unfortunately called home. I was every bit her, that mother or sister or girlfriend waiting for that good-for-nothing to return, her eyes narrowed and ready to snap … or burst out laughing. Oh, he thinks he’s a hotshot, all loose in the tongue from whiskey and soda and loose in the hips from rock ’n’ roll, but I’ll show him as soon as he gets home, you bet I will, and I’ll slap him good, or maybe I’ll stroke his cheek, before cutting him down to size in front of the whole slum: “Look at you! You’re nothing but a Neapolitan! Tu si napulitan’!” and if he so much as dared to come back at me with a lame “Ailoviu” I would really lose it.
Apart from the last expression that was supposedly in English, the lyrics were in dialect so I wouldn’t have been able to spell them—nor was there any academic standardization for, or even interest in, faithfully capturing those sawn-off endings and tight-lipped sounds that disfigured Italians’ famously operatic vowels. I wouldn’t even have dared utter the lyrics without music. They were vulgar and truthful and sharp with that satire that Neapolitans were so skilled at turning inward upon themselves since the fall of their city. And it was the words themselves that were directing me, assigning me the part, to the point where, as I channeled the character through the dialect, I wasn’t an American at all but a vasciaiola who could see through the Americanness and expose it for nothing more than an act.
The others tapped a foot and chimed in for the chorus. Finally Luca raked his fingers over the strings. “I can’t remember how it ends.”
I leaned back in my chair, sweating and giddy, almost tipsy. There was always a mimic in me, or maybe even a gambler, waiting to burst out. No sooner had the fire popped lethargically than I was already on my feet. “We need bigger pieces of wood. I’ll go up on the roof.”
“I’ll come up with you, Eddie,” said Sonia. “I could use the fresh air.”
Luca and the boys shifted effortlessly into a Pearl Jam song. English rolled much more readily off their tongues than Neapolitan, but they butchered it, slurring the diphthongs and crumbling consonant clusters. Sonia and I climbed the spiral staircase beside the fireplace. The space was so tight and Sonia so tall that she had to duck, the black sheet of her hair dipping forward, her combat boots ringing the metal all the way up to the flat rooftop.
“My god, it’s cold,” I said, my words little clouds in the night.
“Freezing.” Sonia hugged herself, adding in that Sardinian accent that was as crisp as the air, “So I guess you know Pietro.”
“Pietro? From tonight?”
“Yeah, Pietro.”
The name had rolled extraordinarily lightly off her tongue. It occurred to me, for an instant of folly, that we must be talking about two entirely different people.
“What do you think of him?”
“I don’t really know him.” I crouched to pick through the loose wood, a bookshelf dismembered and lumped against the protective wall of the roof. “Why do you ask?”
“Don’t tell the boys.” As Sonia sank to the spongy ground, her face as bare as a full moon, I grasped that it wasn’t a breath of fresh air at all but a confession. Kneeling like that and looking considerably less tall, she reminded me of how young she really was, just in her second year at the Orientale. Although only the stars could have heard us, she fell into a whisper. “We’ve barely exchanged a handful of words. But there’s just something about him, I don’t know …”
“He seems nice enough.” Instinctively I patted my pocket that held the cassette tape, as if to smooth out its conspicuous bulge.
“I really do like him. Next time I see him, I’m going to go up to him.”
“You definitely should. You have nothing to lose.”
Sonia had a way of biting her bottom lip when she was restless. She breathed out hard as if preparing for a sprint.
“Chin up, Sonia. You’re beautiful, smart. This Pietro guy would be a fool not to give you a chance.”
I loved Sonia’s sweet doodle of a grin, but the word fool used in connection with this stranger named Pietro somehow felt like an insult to my own sensibility and filled me with remorse. Sonia offered to help, grabbing a broken plank and letting out a brrr.
“You’re cold,” I said. “Take those and I’ll finish up here.”
“OK.”
But as soon as I was alone, I lowered the wood to the ground and leaned my elbows on the wall, the only barrier preventing a seven-story free fall to the street. “Tonight …” I whispered to myself in English, but I was unable to finish my own sentence.
A cold breeze pressed the smell of the gulf against my face, that unique infusion of fish and diesel and salt. Below me, the city shimmered its way down to the water, strings of yellow streetlights beaded here and there with the pearly glow of kitchens. Naples never really slept. Even in the dead of night, fluorescent lightbulbs shed their cheap, unforgiving light onto family members who were up and about and slapping the kitchen table in god knows what argument or joke or confession. But, like a moth, I was drawn to those white lights. If I could, I wished now as always, I would flutter toward them and slip in through a window. I would sit there soundlessly and seamlessly blending in with the wallpaper, trying to piece together the shards of their sentences into a narrative that made sense.
A foghorn blared. I couldn’t tell which of the many ships it could have come from, vessels invisible but for their connect-the-dot lights suspended in the utter blackness of the bay. It was a rare clear night, and without a moon I couldn’t even see the volcano. The only trace of it were the homes on its flanks sketching its silhouette as far up as they dared. Vesuvius hadn’t made a peep in half a century, but I stared at it through the curtain of the night and tried to imagine what it might look like breathing fire as in so many of those eighteenth-century oil paintings. I stared so hard I almost believed I could will it back to life with my eyes.
My hands had turned to cool marble, yet I hadn’t had my fill of Naples; I could have stayed there all night drinking in its scent and feasting my eyes. Still it would have been in vain. The city was water seeping through my hands, and my very love for it filled me with sadness, especially at night. It was a sadness I could never fend off or even put my finger on. I’d given myself over to the city, maybe even betraying myself to do so, but even after all these years it still held me at a distance.
Vir’ Napule e po’ muor’, they say: “See Naples and die.” A city so magnificent that once you’ve seen it there is nothing left in the world to see. The saying had become such a cliché that I would never have used it in conversation, but right then I whispered it to the night as the truest of truths. Then I collected the firewood before heading back downstairs.
From: heddi@yahoo.com
To: tectonic@tin.it
Sent: November 30
Pietro,
I don’t know what to say. It’s been four long years since I last heard from you. Time makes everything bearable, even waiting. Or maybe I simply forgot what I was waiting for.
I still don’t know why you did what you did. Sometimes at night I look at the stars hoping for some kind of explanation from them. It’s crazy, I know, to think that the constellations could read like a sort of story with a beginning, middle, and maybe even a happy ending. But to be honest, I can’t make any sense of them. I can’t even recognize the simplest of constellations: the sky seems jumbled, upside down, unfamiliar. And yet I like looking at the stars anyway. Every single one of them is, after all, a trace of a luminous object that is unique and perfect and no longer exists. A luminous memory?
I’ve worked hard at forgetting everything to do with you. A kind of self-induced amnesia, which has been quite successful. Of course it helps not having people, places, or things around me that could remind me of you. Except the Roman figurine. But that’s not something I could regift or throw away. Maybe it would make more sense to one day give it back to the land …
My cat’s on my knee, she’s digging her claws in. She has beautiful gray fur. I rescued her from an animal shelter, so in a way I saved her life. But I think it’s more accurate to say that she saved mine.
Things are good. I’ve found a place where I fit in, I have a great job and new friends that only know as much about me and my past as I’d like them to know. It’s good to hear from you. It’s good to hear you say you’re sorry. Or have I put words in your mouth?
h.
2 (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
THE DAY AFTER, the day of the hangover, I was sitting on my creaky bed turning the pages of my textbook when I heard Luca coming down the hallway toward me. I could tell it was him even before his voice broke through the mournful Bulgarian folk songs and the humming rain. It was the smell of his tobacco that gave him away. His smoke meandered in through my open door and danced before me as elusively as a wish.
For as long as I’d known him, Luca Falcone had always smoked those hand-rolled cigarettes: he was puffing on one when I was first introduced to him. Leaned against the dejected plaster outside the café across from my department, he was holding something very alcoholic and wearing out-of-fashion leather pants, seemingly oblivious to the historical era or the geographical location he’d wound up in. Luca was already in his third or fourth year and he was pockmarked, weathered like a traveler who had crossed the desert to get to that bar, that bourbon, that stopover.
That moment marked the beginning of my university life as I knew it now, for most unexpectedly Luca took a shine to me and slipped me into his inner circle—the alternative crowd majoring in Urdu or Swahili or Korean at the Department of Arabic-Islamic and Mediterranean Studies and the Department of Oriental Studies, whose remote Italian origins (Puglia, Basilicata, Sicily, Sardinia) branded them as outsiders too.
“The movie’s starting,” said Luca with the lilt of his native Varese, in the Lakes region.
“I’ll be right there. I’m just finishing the page.”
Up close, Luca smelled of lavender soap. He stamped a kiss on my forehead, a big one like he was farewelling me at the train station. Yet he didn’t leave. He lingered in the doorway to bore his eyes into me, as he sometimes did, as if to hypnotize me. That prolonged gaze always threw me into confusion while at the same time giving me the strange certainty, at least for as long as it lasted, that our friendship was not limited to this moment or these circumstances, that we had a bond which would outlast the rest. I knew it was ridiculous, and that I was no exception: everyone wanted a piece of Luca Falcone.
On either side of the now empty doorframe were some of my black-and-white photographs, taken with a macro lens, hand-printed and taped to the wall. They were good shots, though somewhat abstract. Through the window, sandwiched up against another building and transformed by the rain into a game board of Chutes and Ladders, I couldn’t even see my neighborhood being beaten down by the weather and by the passage of time. But it was Sunday and I knew that at that hour all the shops would be closed and the markets packed up, and every last soul would be back home for a marathon meal, followed by the compulsory nap. Sunday lunchtime was the only time when people felt sorry for me. Poor stray, so far from home.
Home. The word itself puzzled me. Didn’t home mean my dad grilling steaks or my psychotherapist stepmom doing her on-the-spot dream analysis? Wasn’t it my mom’s shiatsu foot rubs, her chilly but soft hands, or my brother plucking the bass? The cats? Apparently not, because for all the other out-of-town students home was a place. Colle Alto in the province of Benevento, Adelfia in the province of Bari. Home was a red dot on the map, a reference point that was so very small and yet able to contain, it seemed, everything. People appeared to take it for granted, as if it were just another basic human emotion—happy, sad, angry, home—and yet their eyes lit up when they said the word. Casa. I struggled to grasp that extraplanetary sensation but in the end I couldn’t really feel it. I had to resort to logical analysis to get my head around it.
I was from everywhere and from nowhere. Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia Beach, the outskirts of Boston, Athens in Ohio, and a few other forgettable stop-offs. That was until, at sixteen, I was assigned a dot on the map by an international exchange program that landed me in the nation of Italy, the province of Naples, the town of Castellammare di Stabia, the apartment of a divorcée with two grown sons who told me to call her Mamma Rita. It was Rita, and not AFSAI, who begged me to stay on after the first year and who had the foresight to advise her “American daughter” to graduate from a liceo linguistico.
I became convinced that nothing in this world is random. It was that diploma, in fact, that got me into the Orientale. The admissions lady had narrowed her eyes. I wasn’t Italian, but with that piece of paper I couldn’t not be Italian. When she thumped my admission form with four glorious official stamps, she turned me into a university student like any other. And among Luca’s friends, who were now mine too, the camouflage was almost perfect.
The boys and I had a fun little game, which would start with a request for a cold beer and usually end with a cup of hot tea.
“Ah, c’mon, gorgeous,” pleaded Tonino that afternoon lying starfish on Luca’s bed. In the spastic light of the TV, I could see that Tonino looked as miserable as the old wallpaper behind him, covered only partially by Luca’s Arabic calligraphy. “If I don’t inject more alcohol into my bloodstream, I’ll never get rid of this bastard headache.”
“You did ask for it,” said Angelo.
“Like you asking for that bong …”
“Listen, boys,” I said, putting on my sternest voice, in no way meant for Luca, who was rolling a cigarette. “You have class tomorrow, bright and early. C’mon, boys, it’s the last week before the break. You can do it! Honey or sugar?”
Tonino cursed half-heartedly in three dialects (Neapolitan, Sicilian, and his own), but they both gave in straightaway. I smiled to myself on my way to the kitchen, knowing full well that what those two really craved was not a drink at all but a bit of mothering. I paused in front of Angelo’s cracked door, catching a peek at his black-and-white cowhide rug we often lay across sipping green tea from Japanese cups while deciphering our respective codes, kanji and Cyrillic. I climbed the staircase, which had lost its railing, swerving at the top to avoid stepping on the crack in the floor, just in case there was some reality to that childhood truth. The fracture started at the fireplace in the kitchen, half a meter out from the wall, and shot through to the end of the living room, dissecting the tiles to where they met the terrace. I wondered, as brazen as that crack was, why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d moved in with the boys. I’d probably been too distracted by the aging beauty of the once luxurious apartment, by all its fireplaces, frescoes, and bas-reliefs flaking and fading in the shadows.
I carried back beer mugs of tea and a pack of cookies; the bed sagged in the middle under our weight. I’d missed the opening scenes, but then again it was a movie we’d watched over and over, a New Zealand film I knew only by the name Una volta erano guerrieri, and I was very familiar with the plot. Tattooed Maori thugs bashing each other at night in parking lots and bars and on green lawns, spattered with blood and foul language dubbed in proper Italian with a northern accent.
“Man, what an awesome place New Zealand must be …” said Angelo dreamily.
“Awesome my ass,” Tonino spat back.
“It can’t be all that dangerous. Look at those wide-open spaces, they can do whatever the hell they want. I’d love to go there one day.”
“Sure, blondie, better to get an ass whipping from a Maori gang than a kneecapping from the Mafia.”
Angelo frowned, defiantly pulling up the plaid blanket. He had a nose ring and a proud Sicilian accent that should have lent him an air of toughness. But, whatever the situation, Angelo was like a kid in a candy shop and this was something Tonino just couldn’t let him get away with. It certainly didn’t help matters that Angelo had the complexion of a Swede, a washed-out color that didn’t stop at his face and hair. I only knew this because I’d nursed him back to health once when he was suffering from excruciating neck pain. Angelo had turned facedown onto that cow rug and pulled down his pants; quickly, before I lost the nerve, I jabbed the syringe of anti-inflammatory into his right buttock.
“Well, one day I’m gonna go there,” Angelo reiterated through a mouthful.
“You’re as baked as that cookie,” said Tonino.
“You should go. The world is a book …”
That last enigmatic sentence emerged from Luca’s smoke. I hadn’t even realized he’d been listening. Yet another night scene plunged the room into darkness, but Luca’s Arabic pendant, carved out of what looked like bone, shone as if reflecting light from an unknown source.
“New Zealand’s too far,” I said, and in fact I preferred destinations like Sardinia, Umbria, the Netherlands, Kiev, Vienna—with or without my family. Or better yet, Capri, Procida, the Phlegraean Fields, the streets of Naples. “Who wants to come with me to the Maria Santissima del Carmine Church during the break?” I suggested. Another one of my “field trips,” as the boys called them.
“A church over Easter?” said Angelo. “I’ll pass. I’d rather be sitting around a table stuffing my face with cassata.”
“It’s also known as the Fontanelle Cemetery,” said Luca. “Definitely worth a visit.”
Hope swelled up inside me. Maybe, just maybe, this time Luca would set aside his band practice or research for his thesis to wander with me through the city that was his by right of blood. But he said nothing more and slipped definitively back into the darkness.
“Well, I wouldn’t be able to go for all the pussy in the world,” Tonino said. “March is when we prune our olive trees … Oh, that’s right, you intellectuals wouldn’t want your hands getting dirty, now would you? But it would actually do you some good. Check out these muscles. You think they’re just for show?”
The boys burst out laughing and I sat up with a jolt. Pietro. I hadn’t even looked at the tape since he’d given it to me the night before. I had a habit of doing that, setting aside letters and packages from home, sometimes for days on end, savoring the anticipation of opening them. Or maybe I’d just wanted to forget all about it after Sonia’s confession. But now I was beset by a sense of urgency. Where had I put it?
“Hey, where are you going?” Angelo called out behind me. “This is the part where Nig gets initiated into the gang!”
My suede skirt hadn’t forgotten last night: it smelled like a bonfire and was still holding on to the fragile little package I’d entrusted it with. In good lighting I could now see that the neatly written song list was framed by cartoonish drawings of ladybugs and fish in rust-colored ink, a detail of such playfulness, kindness, and undeniable intimacy as to make my head spin.
I sat on the bed and put the cassette into the tape deck. The first song was Aretha Franklin’s version of “Son of a Preacher Man.” I let out a sigh. My love life up until then had been a series of melodramas and misunderstandings.
In Castellammare di Stabia I met Franco, a rookie in the Camorra, the local Mafia. At the time it felt a lot like love. Or a movie about love, with scenes of gripping his thick waist on the back of a Vespa that snaked through the ruins of his ghostly neighborhood, which over the centuries had taken one too many punches from earthquakes and landslides. Watching his mother in their poorly lit vascio wail with chronic pain in legs as swollen as tree trunks. Listening to the story of how his friend had been shot dead by a rival gang. Holding Franco in my arms as he broke every code of honor to cry and cry against the backdrop of a friend’s uninhabited apartment that didn’t even have electricity. I was sixteen and I wanted to save him. One day without an explanation he broke it off. The ending was unsurprising, even desirable. After that, those adolescent sunsets over the polluted sea became even more beautiful and raw, like blood oranges.
Cesare was an error in judgment I paid dearly for. In hindsight, I could have guessed that his brilliance and eccentricity were the early symptoms of schizophrenia. But at the time I was enamored with how enamored he was with me, his searing gaze, his crooked teeth. He was disheveled, possibly even ugly, but he possessed a blinding confidence and wrote terse, dense poetry that read like haiku. Cesare quickly betrayed signs of obsession: only later did I learn he’d given me the cheap, useless gift of his virginity. Long after he left the university to be hospitalized back in his hometown of Catanzaro, he continued to send me packages, even to my dad and Barbara’s house in DC, containing self-published volumes of love poems or top-secret instructions for building a bomb. Those declarations of undying passion, which became more and more grandiose, intensified my bouts of cold sores and also my shame, verging on disgust, for how I’d played the part of the carefree girl and used sex as an intellectual experiment in carnality, for how careless I’d been and how easily my instinct for self-preservation had won out over my compassion.
And then there was Luca. Or rather, there wasn’t. Late one night while watching a movie on his bed we’d drifted into sleep and he tangled himself around me. I woke up. The movie was over and Luca’s torso was rising and falling in a faraway, untroubled rhythm that seemed extraordinary in itself. His hair had come loose from his ponytail and his lips were slightly parted, but even in his sleep Luca was still ruggedly handsome. I was only pretending to sleep. Paralyzed with pleasure and awe, I let the night tick away with the flashing green of Luca’s digital clock as his pendant pressed its cryptic script onto my skin. I was afraid to wake him. I wanted to lie next to him for as long as the universe had miraculously granted me, to absorb everything about him. His esoteric knowledge, his composure, his patience and faith in himself. During that long magical night, I gained an important insight: what I felt for Luca was not a crush, it was far more than that. I didn’t want Luca Falcone, I wanted to be him.
I dropped back on my pillow and listened. There was a certain euphoria, and an unmistakable sensuality, to the song that I’d never noticed although I’d heard it a thousand times. I wondered if Pietro could fully understand the lyrics, if he was aware he’d given me a love song.
3 (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
I COULDN’T QUITE picture Pietro’s face. Our encounter had been so very brief and I’d even rushed it to a premature conclusion. The harder I tried to conjure up his image, the more it slipped away, until it was no more than a collection of indistinct features blending with the many eyes, noses, and mouths all around me, like those in the audience at my glottology lecture in the Astra Cinema. Fearing I would lose it forever in the crowd, I told myself not to dwell on it and to focus on my lesson instead.
The theater was warm and dark, womblike, the comfy seats upholstered in red velvet, my professor’s voice a low frequency. I couldn’t be dragged away from here even by wild horses, I thought to myself before realizing it was not a thought at all but a line from the second song, by the Rolling Stones, on Pietro’s mixed tape.
I refocused on my notebook, where I was attempting to transcribe every word coming from the stage. “All the world’s languages vary according to what we call taxa, or language families,” I jotted down in tidy, compact letters. “Colors are a type of significant taxonomy: in fact, we might even say there is such a thing as ethnic chromatism …”
“Please shoot me now.” The dark-haired girl next to me widened her made-up eyes, adding in a low whisper, “Signorelli’s head looks like an Easter egg, don’t you think?”
“He’s really good, though.” Actually, to me he seemed like a rock star.
“Sure, but he can’t teach. He just reads straight from the textbook.”
It wasn’t entirely true, but I found myself once more trying to shake the familiar fear that I’d enrolled in a university in shambles.
