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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.
All I saw next were the sparse hairs on Pietro’s chest rising and falling with his breath. The room was still ignited with sunlight; it seemed I’d only been asleep for a moment. I reached over to touch his jagged silver sun.
“Hi there,” he said, his voice heavy with sleep.
“I had a bad dream.”
“Are you scared?”
“Not anymore.”
He turned to kiss me, a whirlpool pulling us in deeper and deeper until it ejected us, breathless. “One day …” he said in a hard whisper as though he didn’t have enough air in his lungs. “One day I’m going to marry you.”
8 (#ulink_eaccd3f0-6da3-54f6-8322-0673f0a54271)
THE NEXT FEW NIGHTS we were inseparable. During the day—in class, the library, or the study room—I did my best to study but I felt as though I were suffering from a mild fever. I was underfocused and overheated, and I counted the hours until I could finally quench my thirst in Pietro’s arms, and yet it still wasn’t enough. I didn’t quite know what was happening to me. Still, I managed to pass my cultural anthropology exam, though with a score I wasn’t eager to advertise.
“It might not be a thirty, gorgeous,” said Tonino as I came upstairs into the kitchen. “But it’s twenty-eight more points than I got in Sanskrit.”
“You do know that you actually have to take the exam, Tonino, in order to pass it,” said Angelo, congratulating me with a full, fleshy kiss on the cheek.
“But even if I pass it, wiseass, what the hell is it for anyway?”
“It’s knowledge, Tonino,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be for anything.” With all the commotion, I couldn’t tell if the boys were even aware that I had Pietro in tow, or whether they made anything of the two of us showing up there on our own or paid any notice to his silver pendant now hanging so conspicuously around my neck. I could only tell that Pietro, now standing in the exact same spot where he’d handed me that trembling cassette not so long ago, was greeted by the boys with a mere nod and without a glint of surprise. I took their lack of astonishment as acceptance and their silence on the matter as the ultimate sign of brotherly love.
I’d actually come by only to get some clean clothes and was, for some reason I couldn’t grasp, relieved that Luca was out. But the boys, still in their pajamas with cigarette ashes as thick as snowflakes on their splayed books, weren’t in any hurry to let us go. They pulled out a few chairs and a bottle of whiskey, like they’d been waiting all day for no better distraction from linguistic philosophy or the history of calligraphy than a discussion about rocks. Rocks, sand, dust: now these were real things. At one point, Angelo asked Pietro how oil was found.
“Well, you have to study the sedimentology and the stratigraphy of the area first,” he answered. “Then if it looks like there could be hydrocarbons under the surface, you have to drill these exploration wells.”
Tonino asked, “Any chance that while I’m out in my wheat field I could stick my pitchfork into some black gold?”
“What, in Puglia?”
“You’re a communist,” shot Angelo. “What the hell do you need the money for?”
We all cracked up, some whiskey spilled. Pietro had effortlessly slipped right in with the boys, who began calling him all sorts of names, which for them (and particularly for Tonino) was the greatest sign of affection. It was more than I could have hoped for. As usual when he laughed, Pietro cupped his mouth in a movement I now saw as well-mannered, even graceful. I had the sudden awareness that in Pietro I’d found something of dazzling beauty—a precious, and maybe priceless, stone among all the other gray, drab ones on my path—and I could hardly believe that in that treasure chest of a bedroom he was mine.
Pietro, more talkative than ever, went on to say that there were plenty of opportunities in oil, if you were willing to travel, and that he had a good rapport with his petroleum geology professor. He wanted to do his thesis with her, and she, being well connected in Italy and abroad, had already mentioned the possibility of landing him a job with an oil company. Pietro added that there were lots of countries to work in, some places you wouldn’t even know had oil. “Like the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana,” he said, looking over at me just then in what seemed like more than a pronunciation check. “It doesn’t matter to me. I’d go anywhere.”
“Anywhere but this shithole,” said Tonino.
Everyone nodded in agreement. And I knew that feeling, the need to pack my bags and discover the world, but at some point out of love for Naples I’d set aside my gypsy spirit. Yet now, while everyone was going on about all the things the city was notorious for, its unlivability and backwardness, my love for Naples, my need for it, struck me as childish and indulgent.
“My parents have no idea,” Pietro said. “They think getting a degree in geology is like taking a course in the mineral components of fertilizer or something, that afterward I’ll just go back to the village and run the whole farm.”
“Oh yeah? How many hectares do you have?” asked Tonino, an unlit cigarette between his lips.
Pietro lit Tonino’s cigarette before his own. Puffing symbiotically, they talked in complex measurements of land. Angelo and I shrugged at each other across the table.
“It’s tough living on the land, though,” Pietro said. “Eight months of the year you’re cold to the bone.”
“And you’re always worrying about the damn weather. Is it fucking going to rain or not?”
“Let’s be honest, the work is backbreaking. The landscapes are pretty, it’s a nice place to go for a visit once in a while. But go back and live there? No way in hell. I’ve already done my time.”
The window beside us cooed with nosy pigeons. Under the table Pietro’s hand landed warm on my thigh, a private signal. I finally got up to get my clothes, and when the two of us left together, there was again no amazement on the boys’ faces, only disappointment that now they would have to get back to staring at the pages in their books.
Once, instead of spooning in that tiny bed, we slept in Gabriele’s queen-size bed while he was away in Monte San Rocco for a few days. Despite how comfortable that futon was, set directly onto the floor under the sloping roof, I awoke with a start. I could hear hollering in the thickest form of dialect—insults, I was sure, but they didn’t belong to a human language. It may well have been rabid dogs tearing each other to pieces or violent coughing fits spewing possibly infectious matter from the lungs. Whatever those sounds were, they came from the lower, darker floors of the building, becoming amplified as they made their way up the chimney-shoot courtyard. One final blast and the storm blew over.
“God, you look beautiful, baby,” mumbled Pietro, awake now too. “My grandmother always said you should judge a woman’s beauty by looking at her first thing in the morning.”
I had to laugh because it was only technically morning, because I’d skipped a conference on the history of theater, and because I lay naked between the sheets belonging to my lover’s brother. Behind the bed, right at our eye level, was a little window overlooking the neighborhood. On the windowsill Gabriele had placed an aquatic plant inside a wine bottle. On that threshold the plant seemed in great peril. It was so very moist and delicate, enclosed in its green refuge, yet it teetered on the edge of a sheer drop over a jumble of treeless, sunbaked houses, like a Tunisian medina. All it would have taken was to open the window.
I zoomed out to take in Gabriele’s large, book-lined room with its drafting table in the corner. In addition to his countless volumes, the shelves housed so many small inviting objects—etched pencil cases, inlaid boxes, swirly marbles, amphorae, feathers, pine cones—that, had Pietro not been there, I would have likely given in to the temptation to snoop.
I sat up, pulling the sheet over my breasts. “Are you sure it’s OK to be in here?”
“I told you, Gabriele won’t be back till six tonight. Besides, he’ll be so psyched about the job my folks have given him that he won’t even notice we’ve slept in his bed.”
“What, is he tilling or plowing or something?”
“Are you serious? Gabriele wouldn’t be able to steal an egg from a chicken. No, he’s just designing something for my mother.” At my puzzled look, Pietro added, “Ask him about it sometime. I’m sure he’d be deeply honored to tell you all about his avant-garde design. But right now what I really want is a shower. Let me see if Madeleine’s here.”
Madeleine was their roommate, who’d come to Naples on an Erasmus scholarship, but so far we hadn’t crossed paths. Halfway down the stairs, Pietro whispered, “I should warn you: she’s a bit nuts. Though Gabriele prefers the term ‘architectural genius.’”
“What does she have to do with the shower?”
“Just wait, you’ll see.” He called out her name once, twice, and was about to give up when a door at the foot of the stairs opened and out came a girl.
She was like a small, perfectly formed tornado, with an unsettling allure that came from her stormy too-short hair, her crumpled too-short T-shirt, and flirtatious navel. From the way she was rubbing her eyes with her fists and cursing the neighbors for disturbing her sleep again, from her husky voice with an unmistakable French accent. From her Japanese flip-flops and white socks, her tiny frame and big exasperated eyes.
Madeleine’s gaze crawled up the staircase and came to rest on me. Looking suddenly awake, she gleamed with a strange voraciousness, as if she could smell our lovemaking. After we introduced ourselves, I stared at her almost to the point of rudeness. Madeleine was devastatingly beautiful. And she was the only other foreign student I’d ever met in Naples.
Madeleine frowned comically at Pietro. “You want my help with the shower, no? OK, but what about me?”
“I’ll owe you one.”
“And a handmade coffee?”
“Sure. As soon as I’m done.”
“You do have a way with the ladies,” she said with an even huskier voice, making Pietro go red in the face as he made his way back up the stairs.
Madeleine didn’t seem crazy at all, I thought as the shower quickly steamed up. Rivulets of hot water took jagged paths down Pietro’s chest, some puddling in the little dip where his chest caved in slightly. I observed him openly, as if looking at a photograph of him: the slender body, the long runner’s legs, the pitch-black hairs between them. He was almost too gorgeous to touch.
Then there came a thundering from downstairs.
“What’s that?”
Pietro laughed. “It’s a water pressure thing, which pretty much sucks up here on the seventh floor. So when the flame in the hot water cylinder goes out, it has to be kicked back to life. But that French girl, man, she whacks it like she’s practicing for a kickboxing match. Anger management issues, I’d say.”
“Sounds like you need a plumber.”
“I just need you.”
We kissed, and as the warm water trickled into the cave of our mouths, Madeleine started pounding again. Laughing, we resisted the desire to linger in the heat, and the growing desire to make love standing up, and hurriedly shampooed each other’s hair.
Gabriele returned from the village weighed down with almond biscotti, stuffed peppers, and red wine. Before closing the door behind us, he grabbed one of the bottles for the party he’d invited us along to.
Night was a watercolor bleeding down onto the Quartieri, but nonetheless the timid warmth of that spring afternoon remained trapped in the streets, caught in the webs of forgotten laundry and in the clouds of frying squid and sickeningly sweet trash. We heard a thud behind us and spun around. Enormous rats (referred to by the locals as zoccole, a name they shared with hookers and other man-eaters) scattered out, their nails scratching across the cobblestones, just as a bag of garbage, still trembling from its fall, was starting to leak its sharp, greasy secrets onto the street. Whichever wise guy threw it from above, just to avoid the stairs, was already closing the balcony doors behind him. Did it really matter? By morning the trash truck would have swept it all away.
“Would you two mind terribly if I stopped for some cigarettes on our way?” asked Gabriele.
“I’m out, too,” said Pietro.
A fluorescent light drew us in, a beacon in the dark. With all the shops closed for the night, ground-floor homes could now open for business. This vascio was particularly lavish. Just outside the door was a small table displaying candies; dangling above them were bunches of potato chips. They were inviting signs that helped dissolve the boundary between street and home, between public and private, in the same way that the swampy night air melted the distinction between the warmth I felt outside my skin and the heat I was nurturing inside.
In the vascio an elderly man eating his cutlet at the table looked straight through us, like we were invisible. There was no need to go to any trouble for any old customers, and the night was young. His wife rose from the bed behind a partition, shuffling out in her slippers. I didn’t want to look at that bed with its cougar blanket, its disheveled and still warm sheets, its sloppy intimacy, but the pull was irresistible. In the end I gave in and looked at the couple’s bed with the fascinated horror with which one might watch a TV screen flashing scenes of passion or bloodshed. The woman, however, was relaxed, perhaps indifferent. Wearing a pink dressing gown, she nimbly walked the razor’s edge between business and pleasure, selling and sleeping, day and night. She squeezed in behind her husband, who was still busy chewing, to rummage through a utensil drawer and hand over her black-market cigarettes. The cash did a magic trick, vanishing into the pocket of her gown.
“They taste nasty but they’re cheap,” said Pietro, slipping the Marlboro Lights into his breast pocket.
We kept walking, the tapping of our shoes muffled by television sets turned on in people’s homes. Suddenly Gabriele stopped in his tracks. “Oh god, now what?”
Pietro and I also stopped. Before us was a massive dog, so black he might have been just a figment of the dark. Under the feeble glow of the streetlight, the dog lay across a bed of cardboard, looking straight at us with mirrory eyes that reflected splinters of artificial light. Pigeons fat as chickens circumambulated his body, a map scribbled in scars from who knows what battles. He was breathing through his nose like a wild horse and rolling his eyes with us, now left, now right, following our every tentative movement. I gripped Pietro’s arm.
“Now that’s a beast if I ever saw one,” he said.
The dog lay there with, it seemed, a sense of purpose, and it took me a few moments to understand that he was standing guard. Behind him was a series of low cement walls that trailed behind him like large graffitied dominoes, barricading the road before us for the length of the entire block. In that space, the flow of the city was cut off and, as if to build a haphazard dam, lawn chairs had been laid out, Vespas parked, undershirts hung out to dry. Above it all, scaffolding crossed out the sky, making a metal cage of this corner of the neighborhood. The dog let out a low rumble, or maybe it was a motorbike in the distance.
“Are you sure this is the right direction?” Pietro said to his brother in a low voice.
“I do believe so.” Gabriele pulled out a limp piece of paper, the invitation.
“We’ll just have to scoot past him then.”
“But even if he lets us through,” I said, “how are we supposed to get past the walls?” It would have been an obstacle course: the only visible opening, in the first wall, was obstructed by a parked scooter.
“Indeed. Unstable buildings in need of reinforcement,” said Gabriele contemplatively. “Hence the barricade.”
Pietro mouthed the words Hence the barricade, lifting his eyebrows mockingly. I frowned at him, hoping Gabriele hadn’t noticed. Couldn’t Pietro tell how much, how hard, his brother loved him?
We looked down the left-hand street, but another series of low walls blocked that too.
“Unfortunately, according to this map,” said Gabriele, “to get to Anna’s house we must get to the other side.” Glancing at the dog, he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “But I fear the direct route is not an option tonight.”
We had no choice but to backtrack and try another path, and that’s when we became lost. Pietro wove his fingers through mine as we tried to chisel some sense into those indistinguishable streets. At one point, recognizing a distinctive pair of purple pants hanging from a balcony, we realized we’d gone full circle. Pietro suggested we ditch the whole thing, saying he wouldn’t know anyone at the party anyway, but then, entirely by accident, we found the right building.
We followed the laughter and music to one of the upper floors. In the entranceway Gabriele kissed the hostess, a classmate of his who was delighted with the home brew; then he disappeared. Loose tiles creaked under our feet as Pietro and I inched our way through the guests. The apartment was a series of candlelit rooms without a corridor that simply flowed from one into the next. It was loud with voices and bittersweet with pot. Cats moved soundlessly between rooms, letting themselves be caught momentarily, only to slither out of my hands. I followed one of them into a less crowded room, losing Pietro in the process. Before me were chairs lined up awkwardly against the wall. Moved by their solitude, I sat down.
Soon enough Gabriele had settled into a chair beside me and was handing me a plastic cup of red wine. “Here, this will help you relax.”
