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“But I’m OK without it,” I said, taking a sip anyway. “Life is enough of a high for me.”
“I know. And it’s infectious,” Gabriele said, downing all his wine at once. “Aaah. All that walking in circles made me thirsty.”
“In squares, actually.”
I would have gladly given Gabriele my wine even without that pretext. His eyes lit up as he emptied the contents of my cup into his, a gesture that was an admission both of fastidiousness in matters of hygiene and of an emerging intimacy between us. This made me want to open up to him in some way, and for some reason I decided to tell him about my visit to the Fontanelle Cemetery.
As I spoke, Gabriele leaned in toward me, ever closer, so as to hear me better in the midst of all the noise. I found the closeness pleasant. I could see every detail of his face: his unshaven jaw, his lips already a shade darker from the wine. Despite his excessive attention to cleanliness, Gabriele paid little mind to his appearance. His hair was always a mess, his eyebrows, too, and he dressed shabbily, with missing buttons and baggy pants that dragged on the ground. And now, having him right up next to me, so close I could smell the spicy complexity of his wine as though I’d drunk it myself, I felt a tipsy sort of desire to straighten the strands of his hair and the cords of his corduroy jacket.
“Unfortunately, Eddie, I have little time for outings myself. However, I do know it’s not the only area in the city with caves like that,” he said. “There are many, many more. Underneath our feet, Naples is almost completely empty.”
“What do you mean by empty?”
A flicker of fire passed over Gabriele’s eyes, as though he’d concentrated in them the light of all the candles in the room. I could see he was relishing my confusion at his words, and I let him have that desired effect in the same way I’d let him have my wine.
“Look around you. This building, all the other old buildings around it: they’re all made of stone. They go on as far as the eye can see, with hardly a patch of green. But where do you think they get this construction material from?”
“I’ve never thought about it before.”
Holding that flimsy plastic cup as if it were a fluted wineglass, Gabriele explained that while other cities had risen with the help of material shipped in from the countryside, Naples had not. From Greek times it had been known that the land was almost entirely made of yellow tuff, a stone of volcanic origin that is excellent for construction purposes due to its high workability. So they simply began dragging it up from underground, as well as from the surrounding hills. And as they dug and emptied the land invisibly beneath their feet, the city aboveground grew noticeably. Yellow tuff was so easily accessible that the practice continued beyond the late 1800s. Hence, added Gabriele, the Spanish Quarter was built in the same manner, even though the masonry walls weren’t up to the standard of thickness used in the stately palaces, located elsewhere in the city. Perhaps in order to cut building costs even further, the thickness of the walls diminished on the upper floors.
“Upper floors like your place,” I said, not to mention my place.
“Well, keep in mind that the structures in the Spanish Quarter rose to no more than four or five floors. The others are all raised floors.”
“Raised?”
“Illegal floors, dear Eddie, without any building supervision. Just think about it for a minute. You’ve already got the thinnest load-bearing walls they could get away with: add to that the compression caused by the weight of the extra floors, and what you’ve got is major structural fragility. Neapolitan tuff is particularly soft and brittle. Have you ever noticed that, when you touch it in spots where the plaster has come off, it crumbles between your fingers?”
Gabriele extracted a cigarette and, as he fumbled for his lighter, I suddenly grasped the true meaning of the adjective illegal, so commonly and nonjudgmentally used in Naples. Illegal didn’t mean unwelcome so much as precarious.
He lit up and took a puff. “For this and other reasons, Naples is incomparable. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.”
An explosion of laughter and clapping came from another room, and all at once I felt overwhelmed by the facts I’d just learned, alluring and at once disconcerting details like a bunch of Lego pieces that I just couldn’t put together and were thus running through my hands with a clatter as deafening as that laughter. I didn’t get Naples, not really. I was missing the bigger picture, a true map. The Spanish Quarter, then, wasn’t on the outskirts of society but the very quintessence of Naples. A place that on the surface appeared simple to unravel but that in reality followed its own mysterious logic that twisted it into a knot you couldn’t untie. My knowledge of my adoptive city was so full of holes that I knew for sure I would never be like Luca, wise and at ease in the city. Because despite all the years I’d been there, despite the liceo and the excursions, despite all the passion I’d poured into it and my desire to surrender to it and lose myself in it, there was something about it that managed to elude me. Love wasn’t enough.
I looked over at Gabriele. Smoking in profile like that, he looked so much like Pietro—the long, hard lines of his nose, the gray curve of his stubble—and the flickering, uncertain light of that room further blurred the boundaries between the two brothers. I became pleasantly aware that Gabriele and I were developing a degree of closeness, maybe even affection for each other, and that seemed very important to me though I couldn’t yet figure out why. At the same time I didn’t trust myself to dose that affection because, even without alcohol in my system, even without the physical presence of Pietro, that night as always I could feel his words set my mind on fire, his caresses ignite my skin, his kisses intoxicate my mouth. What we were doing wasn’t having sex; it was like surrendering to an illness. And the most glaring side effect was that I released a sensuality I wasn’t sure if I wanted or didn’t want others to notice. A larger-than-life sensuality that was simply gushing from my pores and spilling sloppily around me, especially on Gabriele, who was genetically a part of Pietro and who was now sending a silky river of smoke to the ceiling, lost in who knows what thoughts.
“But isn’t it dangerous?” I asked.
“What?”
“I mean, all these buildings and streets built on top of what is effectively hollow land?”
“Quite the opposite.” Gabriele leaned in toward me excitedly, conspiratorially, as if about to reveal a secret. “Some people actually believe it has given Naples an advantage by making it more ‘elastic’ and saving it from more severe earthquake damage. Our village, the glamorous Monte San Rocco, was nearly razed to the ground in the 1980 earthquake and, as you know, all the other towns along the coast south of Naples were hit very hard. So why did Naples only suffer the collapse of a few structures here and there? Certainly, my brother would be able to give a more technical explanation. But basically, they say, the underground cavities absorbed the seismic waves. Actually, let’s go ahead and ask him now. Look, there he is.”
It was always the same when I caught sight of Pietro. First I would experience the thrill of vertigo—the world bending, even creating itself from nothing, and I was just an awed spectator. Then would come the fall as if from a great, great height, but giving in to that fall gave me the most intense, alarming happiness.
From: tectonic@tin.it
To: heddi@yahoo.com
Sent: February 23
Dearest Heddi,
I’ve just returned from the platform to find your email waiting for me, all the way from New Zealand! It’s truly amazing! Why New Zealand? How long have you been there? What season is it over there right now? Do you have a tattoo? How long has it been since you’ve seen your parents? So many questions. I’d love to see some of your pictures of the landscapes; you must be an even better photographer than before.
Here everything is the same: nothing is good but everything keeps moving along thanks to an unpleasant sense of inertia. Since receiving your email, all I do is reread it, in the hopes of finding something between the lines. But what? I don’t know. You’re a wonderful person. I don’t know if, actually I know perfectly well, that I would never be able to forgive or even have kind words for a coward like me.
I’m not even a shadow of the person I was a few years back. I’m more cynical, disillusioned, tired and—you’re right—maybe a little depressed. You were my adrenaline, my hot chocolate, my woolen scarf, my wine bank, my English teacher, my best friend.
Sometimes I reflect upon humanity, people’s behavior, their madness. When I’m feeling particularly kind, I can even find some plausible explanations for what I did to you, but when I’m feeling spiteful (that is, most of the time) I can only kick myself. I gave you up because I felt strong. Because I thought I could live without you. Nothing of the kind. You are and always will be, even if you don’t want to be, the only woman who has made me happy. I understood this too late, extremely late in the best Hollywood tradition.
I get by. I trick myself into believing (only when I’m feeling kind) that there will be some peace for me. But I’d really like to see you again. Recently I’ve had this recurring thought: I keep seeing myself as the owner of a farmhouse in Tuscany or Piedmont and imagining a couple of blond children and you writing at the computer. Very picturesque, don’t you think? Hallucinations like I had long ago? Will I see you one of these days?
p.
9 (#ulink_0ff9d5b5-8214-58e6-9c60-dd5acd540036)
THERE WAS A CERTAIN courtyard hierarchy in the Spanish Quarter. On the sixth or seventh floors, there was a surplus of light, sweeping views, sometimes even sea breezes. From those upper floors, the anarchy of the streets often seemed far away. Those one hundred and sixty-eight stairs were at once a test of the survival of the fittest and our Great Wall.
But already on the third floor, not to mention the second—or, heaven forbid, the first—it was like being inside a house of cards. Balconies were stacked upon balconies, sheets were hung upon sheets, and the buildings themselves, as if they weren’t already close enough together, were shackled to each other by electrical wires, from which streetlights dangled, as though to keep them from drifting apart. Until death do you part. On those lower floors, sunshine could be measured in centimeters. A bar of gold would appear once a day on the kitchen table, like something left behind by a guest, but before you could slip it into your pocket it would warp into a rhombus, its edges nibbled away by the dark, until there was nothing left but a nugget—and then it was gone. As for living on the ground floor, that was a concept we couldn’t even contemplate.
The locals made ample use of that wicker or plastic breadbasket called il paniere (’o panaro in dialect). I liked watching the paniere forced to bungee-jump from the higher floors down to the street, where it would pick up bread or drop off forgotten keys or money. It reminded me of a spider dropping fearlessly down its silky strand, accompanied by hollered, and often misunderstood, instructions. But the paniere was too ghetto for us university students. The rope we used to make contact with the noisy and often unruly world below us was much subtler and far more modern: the intercom.
“Hey, Pie’, is Eddie there?” crackled a voice one day.
“Tonino. For you.”
I ran to press the speaker button with a pang of guilt. I’d hardly been at home with the boys of late, thus jeopardizing that undisciplined daily routine on which our entire relationship was founded, not to mention leaving them at the mercy of their upcoming exams. As if to confirm my fears, Tonino’s tone was harsh.
“You need to come home now, Eddie. There’s no time to explain.”
I rushed down the stairs. Even with those short legs, Tonino was practically speed-walking through the neighborhood, which had gone into hibernation after the midday meal; I struggled to keep up with him. All the while the sun pendant under my shirt jingled more and more persistently as I pressed Tonino for an explanation, but all he said was, “We couldn’t find your camera.”
“What do you need my camera for?”
“You’ll see with your own eyes. But you’re going to think you’re tripping.”
We summited the stairs and stepped inside the house. Immediately I noticed, through Angelo’s wide-open door, that inside his room was a thick haze like when a movie cuts to a dream sequence. And yet it was all very real: the air tasted like lime, and I could make out Angelo himself standing by the window in a rather pensive pose but dusted ridiculously in flour like a pizza maker. Sonia, too, was covered in powder; seated on the bed leaning against the wall, she was as white as a geisha. Both were frozen in position like actors waiting for the curtain to lift.
“What’s going on here?”
From the hallway came Luca’s voice. “Look up.”
Above Angelo’s bed, the ceiling was gouged with a large, deep wound fringed with inlets like Sardinia. Below it, right on top on Angelo’s now virtually unrecognizable cow rug, was a massive slab—of plaster or stone, I couldn’t have said—and everywhere chunks, shards, dust. I should have understood, but the scene as a whole was one of such devastation that I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“Sonia and Angelo were just sitting there on the bed watching the usual crap on TV,” said Tonino, “when out of nowhere a piece of ceiling came down on them.”
“It could have broken our necks,” added Angelo, trying hard to contain his enthusiasm. “It was a close call. It grazed my leg.”
“Are you OK?” I made to step over the rubble toward them, but Tonino stopped me.
“Don’t move anything, gorgeous. We need to take pictures first, to show the landlords, or the insurance company, or whoever the hell needs to see them. Otherwise no one will believe us.”
“I’m all right, Eddie,” said Sonia. “It just scratched my arm. We could have cleaned ourselves up a bit but we were waiting for you to take pictures.”
“The camera’s in the drawer … the one below the dictionaries,” I said distractedly to Tonino. “But it has a roll of black and white in it.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s all white in there anyway.”
I focused my Minolta and only then did I begin to make sense of the scene before me. Click, and I captured the rebel stone that on its trajectory from the ceiling had broken its edges against the bed. Angelo with bits of plaster in his hair. The bedspread covered in debris. Sonia’s combat boots that were no longer black but white. If she had been a few centimeters farther from Angelo, it probably would have broken her leg. And if Angelo in that moment had leaned over to change channels … Angelo was right: they had both narrowly escaped serious injury—or worse. So then why did it hurt so bad to be safely behind the lens instead of right there with my friends, in that room I knew so well, covered from head to toe in dust? It was an absurd envy.
No sooner had I finished than Angelo was already making his way around the slab in the direction of the kitchen for a well-deserved coffee, while Sonia was heading to the bathroom for a shower.
“No,” said Luca, “we need to get out of here. This house is no longer safe.”
“The damage is already done, Falcone,” protested Tonino. “It’s not like the ceiling’s gonna fall again.”
“The crack upstairs is only getting bigger. It’s obviously connected. This place is falling apart.”
And with that, he sent us out to the corner café so that he could go talk to the landlady. Only Luca knew which vascio in the Spanish Quarter was hers, since he was the one who had rented the apartment in the first place, before any of us had come along.
He joined us half an hour later. He told us that the landlady had followed him all the way back to our place in her bathrobe and slippers, looking around and listening poker-faced to Luca’s account. Goodness knows what cards she had up her sleeve, but what she ended up pulling out was a pricey cell phone, with which she called her nephew, shouting through it in a rapid-fire, rabid form of dialect that not even Luca, whose father was Neapolitan, could penetrate. She hung up with a saccharine smile, passing on to Luca the results of what was not a heated dispute after all but an off-site building assessment. She trusted her nephew like her own son, and anyway he was the best engineer in the Quartieri, or at least he would be once he finished his degree. Her nephew had recommended that a series of steel beams be installed to brace the floor to the outer wall, which was in effect detaching itself from the house. The reconstruction would take about six months, in Neapolitan time: until then, the place was uninhabitable.
For a while the deafening coffee grinder pleasantly filled our silence. Slumped in his chair, Angelo was the first to speak. “Damn, I love that house.”
I freed a clump of plaster from his hair. “So do I,” I said, but at the same time I felt something quite different pulling at me, something willful and irresistible like a rip current, and part of me knew the worst thing to do was to fight it.
“There’s got to be a bright side here,” said Sonia.
“Yes, you’re right!” Angelo nearly jumped out of his chair. “Summer’s coming and most of us are going home anyway. So I say we pack up the necessary items and just be homeless for a few months.”
“Yeah right, blondie, I’d love to see you, all prim and proper, squatting with those real street punks,” said Tonino.
“What the hell would you know? No, I was thinking I could stay with Davide, and you could stay with whoever will put up with you. C’mon, guys, we’d save a ton of rent, and then the place should be ready to go by the time classes start again in October.” And with that, he sat back with a triumphant smile.
For once Tonino agreed with Angelo. From across the table Luca gave me one of those stares, powerful enough to put me under a spell, and this time I was sure that he was trying to tell me, in his infinite wisdom, to just let them talk—and to just let go.
I moved into Pietro’s place. There was a naturalness, a predictability, in that decision that I didn’t want to read into. In the heat of the moment I didn’t stop to consider that we might be rushing into things, or to analyze the possible consequences. The future wasn’t an issue, it never really had been, but the past was even less of one. Once I’d let go of that decrepit old palace that I’d so loved, I could suddenly see it for what it was and what it had been from the very beginning: a stop along the way.
Pietro pulled his mattress to the floor, dragged away the frame, and brought in a second single mattress. The already cramped room seemed to shrink even further. I stood in the doorway, unsure of how to help him in that block puzzle of sliding furniture and preoccupied with thoughts of the boys, of where and how often we’d see each other now.
“I think they’ll fit best over here,” Pietro said, before heaving the mattresses one by one into the corner under the window. Now there was only enough space left to open and close the door.
“Are you sure …?” I began again.
“Without a doubt.”
“I can pay—”
“Out of the question.”
“It’s just for the summer …”
“We’ll see.”
I stood there in awe of his one-man strength and his absolute certainty on the matter, as though all he’d ever dreamed of was to share a room the size of a wardrobe with another human being. He was wearing an expression of humble satisfaction, perhaps for having solved a geometrical puzzle, and standing heavily on that leg he preferred, hands at his hips. All at once I remembered him as he was that first night he came to dinner at our place: awkward and breathless from the stairs, he stood there under the ceiling medallion as if waiting for something to drop from the sky.
That image of Pietro as a stranger sent a chill through me. Wasn’t that less than two months ago? But it seemed more that I was a stranger to myself, for how rashly I’d gone to stay with him when I still knew so little about him; for how easily his touch transported me, maybe even transformed me; for how gladly I’d skipped lessons and conferences to be with him; and for all the ways in which I’d proven myself to be impulsive, irresponsible, and maybe even foolhardy.
Together the mattresses formed a queen-size bed slit down the middle. “It’s too bad about that crack, though,” he said.
“It’ll be fine.”
The crack did grow larger throughout the course of the night. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I saw was the long blue pencil of the sea. From that new angle, the Spanish Quarter seemed to have vanished into thin air. Pietro was still asleep when I got up.
I used the downstairs bathroom, which housed the boiler Madeleine had beaten to a pulp as well as a bathtub that had no difficulty filling up with hot water for when no such assistance was available. I put the coffee maker on the stove and stepped out onto the terrace. Two more steps and I was on the tar-sealed roof.
What a beautiful morning. All around me, TV antennae were trying to pierce a sky white with sun. I wondered how many of those decaying towers were balanced on hollow ground, as Gabriele had said. I wondered if this one was. Who cares, I thought. Up there I felt tall as never before, in a world without a ceiling. It was early and the neighborhood was making only muffled little noises as soft as slippers. The air too was half-asleep, smelling of newly lit cigarettes and freshly melted tar, hot bread and cool sea. I could have gorged myself on those scents, drunk it all in with my eyes, covered myself in the glitter of the gulf. On its calm surface, the container ships looked unreal: they quivered like mirages and were of a dusty, rusty brown, the same fragile color as the volcano behind them.
When the coffee gurgled, I stepped back into the kitchen. I was surprised to find Madeleine standing there with turbulent hair and minimalist clothing, but what surprised me even more was that she smiled generously and kissed me. She seemed so unlike the grumpy girl who had helped us with the shower. Clearly, with a solid eight hours she was positively charming. Pietro came downstairs, too, and all three of us sat down at the slanted table to have our coffee.
Any doubts about Pietro had melted away. I felt at home, and I loved him.
I could only imagine how shaken Sonia and the boys must have been after having experienced the collapse of the ceiling firsthand, but my reaction was to go in search of proof that Naples itself wasn’t falling to pieces. One Sunday morning I took Pietro with me on an outing to Capodimonte Park, on one of the city’s tallest hills. We might as well have been in Bali. Tunnels of trees trembled with exotic chirping, the grass was moist and freshly cut, and there were palm trees. To me, every palm tree in Naples was a vital sign, a symbol of its innate and indestructible beauty, and there were plenty up there.
“Now this is a sight for sore eyes,” said Pietro. “Why have I never been here before?”
“There’s no shame in it,” I teased him. “Being shown around your own country by a foreigner.”
He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, squinting as he lit up. “I love that you’re from somewhere else. That you’re not stuck in the same old mindset as everybody else.”
“Everybody who?”
“Most people, especially the people where I come from.”
We wandered around the grounds, hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder, past reassuring traces of civilization like lampposts and iron benches. Now and then we crossed paths with normal-looking people: elderly couples stopping for a rest, parents pushing strollers, people enjoying healthy pastimes like biking or jogging. I looked at all of them barely suppressing a smile, hoping they couldn’t read on my face the unchecked pride I felt walking beside Pietro. It seemed rude to flaunt it, to flash them with my wild joy over something I had and they didn’t.
We walked for a long time, until one of the pebble pathways opened up onto a panorama of the urban sprawl that stopped only at the volcano, and the ever-present, ever-changing gulf.
Pietro nodded with approval. “I only wish I could have driven you up here in my own car. Treated you like a real lady.”
We’d made our way back to the Capodimonte Museum, the city’s second royal palace. It was painted in a fickle red, which, between sunrise and sunset when the park gates were open, would sometimes look the color of a sun-faded beach umbrella, or fresh blood, or old spilled wine. The huge lawn before it was spectacularly green.
I unbuckled my sandals and stepped onto that color-saturated carpet. It was something I hadn’t done in years. I lay on my back, feeling Pietro sink into the grass beside me. The grass was so cool that I was reminded of the snow angels I used to make when I was little, and I wondered if there was such a thing as grass angels. The clear sky was an infinity rolling over us.
There came a low rumbling. “Thunder?” I joked.
