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“I’ve seen you a bunch of times in Russian class. What’s your name?”
“Eddie, and yours?”
“Are you the foreigner?” My classmate leaned in close, too close, like I had something magical that could rub off on her. I didn’t know her but I recognized that hunger, so widespread in the Department of European Languages, that yearning to be beamed up to a galaxy far, far away. She fired breathless questions at me: “Where are you from? Are you German? Why did you come to Naples, of all places?”
“I’m from … the Spanish Quarter.”
I Quartieri Spagnoli. I knew how to lop off the final vowels and palatalize the sp in the Neapolitan manner and I’d learned to tame the awe in my eyes when I roamed the city, but there was no hiding my un-Italian features. In fact, the girl didn’t fall for it, but at least she steered her attention off me and back to my professor, who deserved it far more.
“… a distinction between bright white and dull, plain white. In Greek, melas is a radiant black, a concept that was completely lost in the shift from ancient to modern languages. And it’s not clear why. In antiquity there was a particular focus on luminosity …”
“That’s all I can take; I’ll just read the book at home.” The girl closed her notebook, murmuring with palpable joy, “In Sala Consilina, that is. I’m catching the train tomorrow morning.”
“Sala Consilina …”
“It’s in the province of Salerno. You wouldn’t know it, it’s just a nothing town …”
I could see she was embarrassed. I wanted to tell her not to worry because if anyone was provincial it was me, having grown up in one characterless suburb after another. But she wouldn’t have understood. It would have been an unthinkable concept for an Italian: hailing from the provinces was such a historical and deeply ingrained humiliation, but mine was a modern shame—tangled up with that typical American uneasiness of knowing that I was, on some fundamental level, one of the privileged.
“Have a safe trip then.”
“Happy Easter.”
I turned again to look at my professor. Excluding the bald head, I thought, one day that will be me. Signorelli truly was a brilliant man, endowed with the ability not only to convey fascinating tidbits on the evolution of language but also to trigger surprising insights into humanity itself. These nonverbal, or perhaps preverbal, inspirations would come to me during class or even in the most unlikely of settings, sparks of knowledge I could never catch hold of and write down before they were gone like fireflies.
But once in a while something amazing would happen. Several of those wordless sparks, which I’d been unable to capture but apparently hadn’t left me for good, would start to gather on their own and whisper to one another. Secrets in a foreign language, maybe an animal language, that all together made a low, humming sound. Within seconds that buzzing would grow in intensity, a strange and exciting cacophony like instruments warming up before a concert. Gradually those unintelligible sounds would begin to slide into place and consolidate into one overriding idea that would explain everything. And it wouldn’t be just a simple statement but a roar, something so unheard of, so astonishing, it might even be deafening. The truth.
If only I could hold my breath that long, I thought, for that crescendo of notes to meld into one whole and boom their mysterious message, then I would know. I would understand the primeval urges of man, the true reasons why people do what they do and are who they are, since the dawn of time. Art, war, religion … love.
I started humming “Wild Horses” to myself. All at once I felt trapped by my seat, by that windowless cinema. I wanted to break free, run home, and listen once more to the tape. To listen between the lines.
I got up and left. University students streamed out of cafés and used bookstores, forcing the cars to slow and bend to their will. Here the city was ours. From our tribe I spotted Costantino, a Japanese major, and Rina, who studied French, but unable to stop in the crowds we simply waved excitedly to each other. I was going against the current. It seemed almost as though all the other students were heading away from the center, toward the train station. By the end of tomorrow they would all be back in their hometowns. People brushed past me, even pushed me, but it was never done with malice, only familiarity. Yet I kept to my path, the street known as Spaccanapoli, a long and deliberate cut through the heart of Naples that would lead me back to the Spanish Quarter.
The Easter break freed me to visit the Carmine Church. I didn’t know the way there, so for once I’d taken the bus. The Sanità neighborhood felt run down, almost unwell. A knife struck a cutting board a few stories up, a motorbike stirred lethargically in the distance. Certainly not the kind of place to use my camera, the Minolta my dad had passed down to me. Instead I pulled out my well-worn map, waking it from its comfortable folds. Then I veered left.
The streets tightened around me like vises and had a mind of their own. With every step my shoes gave me away, clapping on those typical Neapolitan cobblestones—volcanic basoli, large flat slabs with chisel marks that turned the streets into giant, moth-eaten quilts. My footsteps were regular, almost a musical rhythm. I realized that I had, in fact, yet another of Pietro’s songs in my head, a U2 song that was dictating my pace: “Where the Streets Have No Name.”
I came to a stop before sheer yellow cliffs of volcanic tuff. It was like being inside a desert canyon. Everything there was the color of sand, but the sun had no business here. Oozing from natural caves were houses, very poor dwellings without windows that appeared pinned down by the weight of the rock. A pregnant woman in her pajamas stood in a doorway. Sometimes, thinking myself invisible, I gave in to the luxury of staring. When she saw me coming, she shut the door.
I walked along that far edge of the neighborhood until I came to a church. Although it too was half inside a cave and as yellow as the cliff above it, the church seemed not so much a product of the rock as an ornate statement of uprising against circumstance.
I went in seeking refuge more than anything; I doubted this was the right church. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the place: just the usual tinted marble and frankincense, a few old women sitting in the pews fingering rosaries. One of the women got up and made a beeline for me.
“You’re here for the dead, aren’t you, my dear?”
“Actually, I am.” How could she tell? From my breathless entrance, or the fact that I’d neglected to puncture the surface of the holy water with my fingers?
“I’ll take you down.” She talked in a manner typical of Neapolitan widows, drawing out the syllables as if to mourn each and every one of them, yet she was smiling generously. As I followed the woman toward the altar, she turned to say, “You’re not from here.”
“No.”
At the far end she took me down a stairwell. It was musty and so dark that my feet had to make tentative guesses until, at the bottom of the steps, they hit packed earth. As I got used to the dim light, the space grew before me. A dirt path carved through piles of what my eyes could only see as kindling, unstable mounds pushed hard against the sandy walls of the cave. Above was a single hole of sunlight, a square choked with weeds. In that swampy light the mounds gradually, horrifically, began to take their true shape.
“Whose are they?”
“Only the good Lord knows,” said the churchwoman, her voice echoing. “They’re the unnamed dead. Folks who died in earthquakes. Or the plague. People used to drop like flies back then.”
Among all those random pieces of people, I could make out thighbones, vertebra, and smaller bones that might have been fingers. Only once had I looked death in the eyes, at my step-grandmother’s funeral, and it had stared back at me blankly, like a mannequin. I wasn’t afraid of death but only of saying the wrong thing, of taking the wrong step.
“Our women here dedicate their prayers to these people,” the woman added, “in the hopes they’ll see them in a dream.”
I went up to a particularly slender, curved bone. What had she meant by see them in a dream? But when I turned around to ask her, she was gone.
Finally alone, I stepped deferentially through the cave. So the real church was down here. The path narrowed, the bones thickened. It was not scary but simply quiet, a stroll through a forest of felled pines, my trail scattered with branches, twigs, needles. But my imagination ran wild. Maybe one of Naples’s many cholera epidemics had killed a woman, perhaps married with two or three children, who then in the dead of night was thrown like a rag doll into that cave. Or maybe the volcano had sputtered during a Sunday market and a boy selling persimmons, hard new-season ones that make paper of your tongue, had suffocated in the poisonous gases. No, that was impossible: Mount Vesuvius had long been dormant; it was just a backdrop on the other side of the bay. Maybe an earthquake had toppled a wall on top of him, flicking the fruit like orange marbles across the street stones.
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: tectonic@tin.it
To: heddi@yahoo.com
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 (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
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.
