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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.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Is it true you speak five languages?”
“Four, actually. My Russian’s terrible,” I said, putting the dishes beside his on the kitchen counter. I never counted Neapolitan—no one did—though it, too, was technically a language, Vulgar Latin steeped in Oscan, Greek, and even Arabic.
“Russian, I’m impressed. And a whole other alphabet too.”
“It’s actually not that hard to learn. I could teach you to read Cyrillic in five minutes.”
“I’d like that.”
Had I been so bold as to offer him a private lesson? I hadn’t meant it that way. But I had asked him to follow me inside, away from all the others, when surely I could have cleared the table myself. All I knew was that out of the restless wind talking seemed easier. I beckoned him over to the sooty, cold fireplace. Up close I could smell his cologne. A breath of fresh air, a pine forest.
I pointed to the brown flowers on the tiled floor. “What do you make of this crack?”
“I see,” he said. “How far does it go?”
“All the way to the terrace.” I watched him as he stepped along the crack, cautiously as if on the edge of a crevasse. “I think it’s getting wider,” I added. “But the boys don’t seem to pay any attention to it, not even Angelo, who has a crack in the ceiling in his bedroom.”
“I’m not sure. But it doesn’t look good, the way it follows the outer wall like this.” He paused above it, squatting now.
I followed suit. I didn’t know what I wanted from Pietro, who was neither an engineer nor an architect but a scientist of the Earth, but all I knew was that it was good to be able to crouch beside him, not looking at each other, in such a domestic stance.
I caught a glance of Sonia outside on the terrace. She was so goodhearted, and from a good family. Despite her cranelike frame, she retained that wholesome baby fat in her cheeks that I’d lost abruptly, overnight it seemed, some years back, unveiling a raw pair of cheekbones like rocks after the tide has pulled away, a vestige perhaps of the Cherokee blood that coursed through my veins and that, even in a small dose, could one day reawaken the nomad in me.
I thought about Sonia’s solemn confession on the roof that night, but I didn’t know how much weight to give it. Was it like in that card game where the first person to play their cards has the implied right to win the hand? Somehow it seemed so and that, according to these rules, it didn’t matter that Pietro had given me a gift, and that the old churchwoman in the cemetery mysteriously seemed to have known about him, and that the memory of his gentle nature was a music that wouldn’t give me rest, and that now his far-fetched face, with that nose appearing oddly delicate up close, was looking back at me with a rather serious expression. Was he worried about the crack in the floor or was he having the same thoughts as I was?
5 (#uae156491-0e93-5f67-8ca1-52ed6548b734)
I RAN INTO PIETRO two days later near my university. Without much small talk, he invited me for a coffee that afternoon at the house he shared with his brother. Around four o’clock, he suggested, scribbling on a scrap of paper “Via De Deo, 33. Iannace.” Their place was in the Spanish Quarter, apparently only four or five blocks from mine.
Yet on the way there I got lost, just as the neighborhood had hoped I would. Its grid pattern of streets had been designed for just that since their conception as Spanish military barracks. Nearly identical cafés, fruit vendors, and makeshift stalls with eggs or contraband cigarettes on every corner heightened the mirror effect of that grid, which was ideal for keeping the outsider out and the insider in.
To overcome this problem, I’d memorized paths through the quarter. For example, from my building to the Orientale it was left, left again, then right at the street shrine, then straight, sidestepping the puddles under the trays of octopus and mussels, until the street exhaled me out of the quarter and onto the main boulevard, Via Roma. Guided by a sort of muscle memory, I could walk through it all unscathed, even untouched, as if balancing on a tightrope drawn past the antennae and the hanging laundry, through the smog and the hollering. The Spanish Quarter couldn’t be conquered, yet by following such routes I maintained the necessary control to navigate it practically with my eyes closed. But Via De Deo wasn’t on any path I knew. I held on tight to my book bag, occasionally letting my eyes dart up to the street plaques.
“Hey, toothpick!”
It was a young girl who’d checked me out and summed me up and was now staring me down, raring for a catfight; she may have only been nine years old, but in Neapolitan years that was something like nineteen. It was always hard to tell what the locals thought of us university lodgers. It was said that they tried to shield us from their criminal dealings, but who knows. Sometimes they appeared curious, at other times violated. But mostly they looked at us the same way they looked at the neighborhood’s stray dogs, with annoyance but not without tenderness, and kept us at arm’s length.
The girl gave up and moved on. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something black and white run up a side street and into a vascio. A goat, I was almost sure. And I thought I’d seen everything there was to see in the Quartieri, including a white rabbit living in the woodpile under a pizza maker’s oven. The goat seemed like a good sign and I dived into the alleyway after it. There was a farm smell but no trace of the animal. Locals were glaring at me from their doorways. I kept my eyes glued to the volcanic street stones, but I could already feel panic digging into my bewildered feet with its small, desperate claws.
I recoiled into the first right-hand alley. A deli, thank goodness. I took cover under the dangling meat and stole a glimpse at the street sign. Via De Deo. So much like Dio, it occurred to me. Real or not, the goat had shown me the way. Naples always came through for me in the end.
My thighs tensed up as I made my way up the steep incline. It gave the motorbikes a good workout too: men drove up it with their heads down in concentration, fat widows rode on the back, sidesaddle as their skirts and their years required. Women heaved uphill the burden of their shopping and of their children. Twenty-three. Twenty-five. Twenty-seven. My heart was racing. I blamed it on that ridiculous street, which, if it didn’t ease soon, would take me all the way to San Martino, the monastery just beyond the Spanish Quarter that appeared to hover above it like the very gates of heaven.
Thirty-three. Through the gate I could see a courtyard sunken in darkness but positively thriving with potted plants. My gaze slid up the dizzying face of the building. Above was a blue rectangle, a hint of vastness that made me feel I was about to burst.
I tried to remind myself that it was just a coffee. And yet, as I pressed the button and heard the instructions to go to the top floor, the ensuing click at the gate sounded like the nonnegotiable voice of fate.
Pietro looked up from a table. The buttery smell of coffee was already permeating the house and a cigarette smoldered next to several others that were doubled over in the ashtray. He stood to greet me with a tight-lipped grin, his shirt tucked in hard. He seemed poised to shake my hand: he didn’t, but neither did he kiss me on the cheeks.
“It’s very … sunny up here,” I said, out of breath.
“It’s our Monte Carlo.” He let out a short laugh. “Have a seat. Wherever you like. The coffee’s ready. How do you like it?” He was firing words at me as he made his way to the adjoining kitchen.
“With a splash of milk, if there is any. Otherwise don’t worry.”
I took a seat at the table and looked around the spacious living room. Other than the size and the similarity of being on the last (and likely illegal) floor, the apartment was nothing like ours. As if it had just been moved into, there were no pictures or posters, just a sigh of white space interrupted only by the metal of a desk and a line of books. Above a vinyl sofa was a modern staircase that led to a second floor. Windows and still more windows allowed the sun into the deepest recesses of the room, even under the stairs, cottoning everything in a soft glow.
“Sugar?”
“Yes, please.”
“Gabriele, coffee!” Pietro’s call reverberated in the uncluttered house. “My older brother,” he added as he put a cup before me. His hand was shaking slightly: Was it too many cigarettes or the fact that we were now truly alone together for the first time?
“I never asked you,” I said, stirring my sugar with undue care. “How was your stay on the farm?”
“Same old same old.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hellish as always!”
This clarification came not from Pietro but from an equally deep voice. A man with thinning black hair and a familiarly sharp, if slightly subtler, nose came toward me. Still standing, he said, “Gabriele, pleased to meet you. Let me tell you now, if you ever get invited to the farm, just say no. It’ll save you a lot of grief.”
“Don’t listen to him. It’s not that terrible.”
“No, it’s not that terrible,” said Gabriele theatrically. “How should we call it then, bucolic? Elegiac? Evocative and thought-provoking?”
“I have to apologize for Gabriele. He doesn’t appreciate fresh air. He prefers smog.”
Gabriele lit a cigarette and appeared to draw life-giving oxygen from it. “My baby brother is a bit blind. It’s not his fault: he’s the favorite. And he deserves it.” Then he looked at Pietro with a kind of love I’d never seen before, a furious adoration that made me lower my eyes. “Now, I’d love to ask you a zillion questions, but I’m sure my brother here would rather ask you himself, and anyway I have a design to finish by the end of the week. So I’ll be out of your hair now.” He downed his coffee.
“Are you an artist?” I asked, because suddenly I couldn’t bear for Gabriele to go off and leave us alone.
“I study architecture.”
“My brother’s an architect too.”
“Lucky him. I’m afraid for me it’s only a dream. Farewell for now, Eddie, but I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
With a heavy gait, Gabriele disappeared up that staircase. What had he meant by see you again soon? I had the distinct feeling that Pietro had told his brother about me. And yet, what was there to tell?
Espressos take such a painfully short time to drink. After a difficult pause Pietro asked me if I liked rocks. The question was hopelessly generic but I clung to it nonetheless. I told him about how when I was little my father would sometimes take me to the beach to search for fossils, and about his many film canisters of sands, treasures collected around the world. He too had studied geology before having to change majors, something that secretly made me feel I had a privileged, almost genetic, relationship to rocks. “On the beach my dad used one of those, what’s it called, a kind of hammer …”
“A prospecting pick,” Pietro said excitedly. “Yes, I have one.”
“Really?”
“All geology students have to own one. It’s a tool of the trade, like a sword to a knight.” He was laughing but looking intently now into his empty cup, like he was reading his fortune in the swirl of sugar crystals. All of a sudden he leveled his eyes with mine. “Would you like to see it? It’s upstairs.”
It wasn’t just a coffee. Despite my wild heartbeat, there was a certain relief in giving in to that knowledge. As I followed him up the staircase, I had to restrain a smile. Wasn’t it just like fourth grade, inviting a girl into your room to see a rock pick or a butterfly collection? Couldn’t he have come up with something better? But it was in fact the childishness of that fib that made the invitation acceptable. And the comfort brought on by that lovely little lie, of which we were both willing participants, wiped away all doubt, there wasn’t even a shadow of it now, that, on the third occasion that we’d ever spoken, once upstairs we would kiss.
Pietro’s room was the size of a closet, or at best a cabin on a ship, with the port mounted like a jewel in the window. There was hardly enough space for a single bed, a makeshift bookshelf, and a Jimi Hendrix poster. Pietro lifted his prospecting pick off the shelf and offered it to me as if it were made of the most translucent porcelain. He showed me how his name was carved into the handle, by his own hand. As I listened to him, I stole glances at his fleshy lower lip, wondering how on earth we were going to shift from a pick to a kiss.
“Sorry it’s such a small room,” he said. “If you want to sit down, you can use the bed.”
So this was how it was going to happen. I sat down, surrendering to that little twist and turn of fate. But I was out of my depth. I couldn’t comprehend how I’d ended up there, in a stranger’s room, on his bed. A slippery dip in blood pressure made my head go light and my body heavy like a bag of stones I suddenly had to bear. But at this point I was committed to seeing it through. I was already imagining being back in the safety of my own room, retasting the kiss that hadn’t happened yet—or, it now occurred to me, trying to erase the memory of it.
Pietro sat next to me, saying simply, “I might lie down.” He lowered the prospecting pick to the floor and stretched out comfortably, his legs pointing toward the sea.
I lay down, too, and this somewhat eased my light-headedness. We stayed there on our backs on that tiny bed, the kind children sleep in, while each and every pretense rose like steam up to the ceiling. For a long while we looked at the slanting ceiling, a mirror in which I could see reflected back to me a dizzying array of possibilities.
I asked, “Are you a Jimi Hendrix fan?”
“Not really. I just thought the poster looked cool.” His voice was as close to me as it had ever been, and at such low volume it sounded deeper still. I wanted him to say more, and more. Instead he asked me what kind of music I liked.
“I don’t know, quite a range.” I shrugged at the ceiling. “I liked the songs you taped for me.”
He laughed uneasily. “I thought a lot about what I was going to put on that tape. It took me hours.”
“But you didn’t even know me.”
“It was like a sixth sense, Heddi.”
