LOST IN THE SPANISH QUARTER
Heddi Goodrich

Copyright

HarperVia

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2019

Originally published as Perduti nei Quartieri Spagnoli in Italy in 2019 by Giunti Editore

Copyright © Heddi Goodrich 2019

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Heddi Goodrich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008359966

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008359980

Version: 2019-09-19

Dedication

To my father, in memory

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Acknowledgments

A Note from the Translator and Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

From: tectonic@tin.it

To: heddi@yahoo.com

Sent: November 22

I know you’d rather I was dead. I’m barely alive. I don’t expect an answer to this email, and I won’t write you again. I’ve been trying to write you for the past four years. I should write a hundred-page letter to try and explain. I would never be able to, so I won’t try to explain myself now.

I’m a fool. I’ve always trusted my instinct but my instinct is a fake, a traitor, an idiot. A few years back I made the worst mistake of my life—unrecoverable, inexplicable, unimaginable. I lied to myself for a while (I can be quite good at that sometimes) that I did what my head, or my gut, was telling me to do. Maybe it was the right thing but it ruined my life. I just wanted to tell you that. Because you deserve to know that my life isn’t worth a cent. You deserve to know that every time I sit down to eat with utensils in my hand for a moment I have the desire to gouge an eye out with my knife.

I hope with all my strength that these words will twist a little smile of satisfaction from your lips, just as I hope that for you I was just a bad dream, not your cross to bear. My other hope is that my life goes by quickly so that I can be reincarnated into someone or something better than my current self. Then perhaps I’ll run into you in an airport in Stockholm or Buenos Aires.

Don’t forgive me, don’t answer, don’t be sad. Be happy, have babies, write books, make mixed tapes, take pictures … it’s how I always love to think of you. And now and then, if you can and if you want to, remember me.

p.

1

HEDDI.”

I heard my name pronounced as no one had said it in years, like a person might say the name of an exotic species. Rising into a question but mastered—subtle aspiration, short vowels, and all—as if it had been breathed in private again and again until it could roll off the tongue with startling casualness. No other sound in all the Spanish Quarter, not a woman screaming bloody cheater or a gun popping with the thrill of vendetta, could have made me turn away from the murmuring fireplace on such a cold night.

There stood a boy, a man, his mouth tightened like he’d said his bit and now it was my turn. His shirt was tucked in at the waist, rolled up at the arms, and strained at the heart, a handy breast pocket barely managing a pack of cigarettes. Nothing like the other guests, who with their face piercings and dreadlocks and pasty skin tried to cover up the wholesomeness of their childhoods spent frolicking at the beach and eating potato gnocchi. Despite the hour, their sweet scent, of patchouli and thrift shops and hashish, still hung in the kitchen, fusing with wafts of flat beer and saffron risotto. Clearly, he wasn’t from our tribe of linguists, the centuries-old Istituto Universitario Orientale, so easy to get into and so much harder to graduate from. Yet there he was, as still as the water of a deep lake.

“Here, I made this for you,” he said, fishing something out of his jeans pocket. Definitely a southern Italian accent, if not Neapolitan. His hand quivered, a slight ruffle, as he handed me a cassette tape in its homemade case. Per Heddi, it read, beginning with a capital H and ending with an inky splash, the dot on my long-forgotten i.

This threw me. It was actually the spelling of my name that derailed its pronunciation, for then it was easy to take it to its literal extreme, with a melodramatically elongated e and the d duly hardened by consonant doubling, which southern Italians took so very much to heart. That the H was ignored was entirely forgivable, for in Naples breathiness was reserved exclusively for laughter. “As in Eddie Murphy?” people would ask and I would simply nod. I didn’t mind really. Heddi was before and Eddie was now.

“Music?” I asked, and he merely nodded awkwardly, his knuckles taut over an empty beer bottle.

My back was warmed by the erratic dance of the flames and by the oblivious laughter of the friends I affectionately called “the boys,” i ragazzi. That I belonged there too and could turn back toward them at any time made me feel undeniably safe, a privilege that all of a sudden I perceived as unfair.

Downstairs the front door shook with a thud, probably the last of the guests staggering out, and my gift bearer looked jolted by the awareness that the party that had been whirling around him earlier was now gone. He tried to hide his embarrassment but I felt it all the same, a painful pinch followed by my own regret at being, once again, the only one sober.

“It’s probably getting late,” he said.

“I guess so, but there’s only one clock in the whole house.”

Abruptly, he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and unintentionally I mirrored his asymmetry by tilting my head to one side. The better to see him with, at least, though his face was hidden every time he found solace in his shoes—comfortable, practical shoes—by a dark mane. I could honestly say I’d never seen him before, I could have sworn by it, because if we’d ever locked eyes I surely would have remembered that determined look, a willingness to bide his time.

“I should probably get going.” He set his bottle down as if afraid to break the glass, despite the fact that the kitchen counter was an invitation to make a mess, with its knocked-over bottles, greasy pans, and mugs stained with wine like old teeth.

“I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“Pietro.” It was a rock of a name, straitlaced and somewhat hard, and he lifted his eyebrows apologetically.

“Thanks for the tape …” I said, but his name died in my throat. “So you’re leaving?”

“Yeah, I have to get up early. I’m off to the farm for a few weeks. My family’s farmland, in the province of Avellino. I go every Easter. Well, not just Easter, but you know …”

I didn’t know but I nodded anyway, grateful for the string of phrases. I still held out hope that in those last seconds before his departure (and I would probably never see him again) I could solve the mystery of how he’d come to be on such intimate terms with my name and why he’d gone to such trouble to make me something.

“OK, bye.”

“Bye, enjoy your farmstay. I mean, your stay at the farm.”

I wished he would just go now, this outsider who was now a chance witness to my slip of the tongue. It was exasperating how my Italian, my favorite disguise, could still come apart at the seams whenever I was taken by surprise.

A round of goodbyes and he was gone. I reclaimed my seat by the fireplace, slipping the tape into the pocket of my vintage suede miniskirt. The flames felt their way boldly up the scavenged firewood, fondling what had once been the leg of a proper chair or the headboard of a single bed. Within seconds the blazing fire swept any trace of unease from my face.

“What was that guy’s name again?” asked Luca beside me, tossing a cigarette butt into the fire and slipping a white ribbon of smoke from his mouth.

“Pietro, I think,” I said, tasting just how solid the name was.

“Oh, yeah. He’s a friend of Davide’s.”

“Davide who?”

“The short one with curly hair,” said Sonia, the only other girl in our innermost circle.

Davide, now I remembered. Luca sometimes played in his band. Davide, Pietro, did it matter? The truth was we didn’t need anyone else in our clan. We were fine just as we were.

I was fine.

Mesmerized by the flames, we let the night slide into a moonless, hourless limbo. We talked about Hinduism, the Phoenician alphabet, the Mani Pulite judicial investigation that was cleansing a corrupt government and making a killing at the newsstands. Now and then a chunk of wood caved into the embers, triggering a showy display of sparks and a few oohs and aahs for that little moment of drama. When the fire started to nod off, Luca rummaged through the stack of makeshift firewood. Beside it was an acoustic guitar, which Tonino’s hairy hand reached for.

“You’re not throwing that in,” said Angelo, another of the boys.

“No, Tonino, please!” said Sonia.

“Party’s over, children,” Tonino announced with a heavy Pugliese drawl as he propped the guitar on his knee. “About fucking time for your lullaby.”

This was the part I loved the most. Tonino’s foul language drawing us in closer, his glasses turning to golden rings in the firelight as he began playing a tune that sounded like Lucio Dalla’s “Attenti al lupo,” “Watch Out for the Wolf.” He strummed with those small chunky hands covered in dark fleece, the hands of a garden gnome come to life. And he was hairy all over. Once Tonino had asked me to shave his back to deal the final blow to some crab lice, incontrovertible evidence that he really had managed to get someone into his bed—a Spanish girl, or so he said. Underneath it all, shorn like a spring lamb, Tonino possessed almost fine features that made him look, in a certain light, like my own brother.

Tonino sang that ballad like a heavy metal front man, with death growls and all, managing all the while to tweak the lyrics to his needs. “There’s this tiny little house … with a tiny little grapevine … and inside there’s a tiny little professor … who won’t fucking shift the deadline … And there’s this tiny little student … with a brain the size of Einstein’s …”

“Fuck me, that’s a hit song,” said Angelo. “You know what? Forget your studies. You should start a punk band.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll ask my Sanskrit professor if she wants to be the drummer, what do you say? That way she can beat the shit out of something else besides me.”

“Play us one of those traditional Neapolitan songs instead,” said Luca.

Tonino handed over the guitar. “I’m not the fucking Neapolitan,” he said. It was a compliment.

“I’m only half.”

“The bottom half, naturally,” said Angelo.

His shoulder-length hair falling over his face, Luca cradled the instrument and offered them an off-center laugh, but his eyes were on me. That half smile was in itself a compliment, for Luca was as selective with his smiles as he was with his words, as if he’d spent his last incarnation seeing all the irony in the world and in this lifetime had achieved Zen. Although technically he too was one of the boys, I had always thought of him as distinct from the other two. He was simply Luca Falcone.

“This one’s for you.”

It took only the first few notes for me to figure out that he’d chosen Carosone’s old classic “Tu vuo’ fa’ l’americano.” It was like I’d been caught out, the American incognito, and in fact Luca was looking my way, waiting.

I didn’t feel like singing, and if I did from the second verse onward, it was only because I realized the others genuinely didn’t know the words and that it was up to me to fill the silence. Perhaps I did it for Luca too. To show him that, if nothing else, I could put on an impeccable Neapolitan accent, a low-class growl rising from even lower in the gut than his. To see if I could make him smile. For his benefit, I crooned comically and gesticulated like a fishmonger, magically transformed into one of those poor women standing in the doorway of a typical inner-city vascio, a street-level, one-room hovel that some called a storeroom, others a store, and yet others unfortunately called home. I was every bit her, that mother or sister or girlfriend waiting for that good-for-nothing to return, her eyes narrowed and ready to snap … or burst out laughing. Oh, he thinks he’s a hotshot, all loose in the tongue from whiskey and soda and loose in the hips from rock ’n’ roll, but I’ll show him as soon as he gets home, you bet I will, and I’ll slap him good, or maybe I’ll stroke his cheek, before cutting him down to size in front of the whole slum: “Look at you! You’re nothing but a Neapolitan! Tu si napulitan’!” and if he so much as dared to come back at me with a lame “Ailoviu” I would really lose it.

Apart from the last expression that was supposedly in English, the lyrics were in dialect so I wouldn’t have been able to spell them—nor was there any academic standardization for, or even interest in, faithfully capturing those sawn-off endings and tight-lipped sounds that disfigured Italians’ famously operatic vowels. I wouldn’t even have dared utter the lyrics without music. They were vulgar and truthful and sharp with that satire that Neapolitans were so skilled at turning inward upon themselves since the fall of their city. And it was the words themselves that were directing me, assigning me the part, to the point where, as I channeled the character through the dialect, I wasn’t an American at all but a vasciaiola who could see through the Americanness and expose it for nothing more than an act.

The others tapped a foot and chimed in for the chorus. Finally Luca raked his fingers over the strings. “I can’t remember how it ends.”

I leaned back in my chair, sweating and giddy, almost tipsy. There was always a mimic in me, or maybe even a gambler, waiting to burst out. No sooner had the fire popped lethargically than I was already on my feet. “We need bigger pieces of wood. I’ll go up on the roof.”

“I’ll come up with you, Eddie,” said Sonia. “I could use the fresh air.”

Luca and the boys shifted effortlessly into a Pearl Jam song. English rolled much more readily off their tongues than Neapolitan, but they butchered it, slurring the diphthongs and crumbling consonant clusters. Sonia and I climbed the spiral staircase beside the fireplace. The space was so tight and Sonia so tall that she had to duck, the black sheet of her hair dipping forward, her combat boots ringing the metal all the way up to the flat rooftop.

“My god, it’s cold,” I said, my words little clouds in the night.

“Freezing.” Sonia hugged herself, adding in that Sardinian accent that was as crisp as the air, “So I guess you know Pietro.”

“Pietro? From tonight?”

“Yeah, Pietro.”

The name had rolled extraordinarily lightly off her tongue. It occurred to me, for an instant of folly, that we must be talking about two entirely different people.

“What do you think of him?”

“I don’t really know him.” I crouched to pick through the loose wood, a bookshelf dismembered and lumped against the protective wall of the roof. “Why do you ask?”

“Don’t tell the boys.” As Sonia sank to the spongy ground, her face as bare as a full moon, I grasped that it wasn’t a breath of fresh air at all but a confession. Kneeling like that and looking considerably less tall, she reminded me of how young she really was, just in her second year at the Orientale. Although only the stars could have heard us, she fell into a whisper. “We’ve barely exchanged a handful of words. But there’s just something about him, I don’t know …”

“He seems nice enough.” Instinctively I patted my pocket that held the cassette tape, as if to smooth out its conspicuous bulge.

“I really do like him. Next time I see him, I’m going to go up to him.”

“You definitely should. You have nothing to lose.”

Sonia had a way of biting her bottom lip when she was restless. She breathed out hard as if preparing for a sprint.

“Chin up, Sonia. You’re beautiful, smart. This Pietro guy would be a fool not to give you a chance.”

I loved Sonia’s sweet doodle of a grin, but the word fool used in connection with this stranger named Pietro somehow felt like an insult to my own sensibility and filled me with remorse. Sonia offered to help, grabbing a broken plank and letting out a brrr.

“You’re cold,” I said. “Take those and I’ll finish up here.”

“OK.”

But as soon as I was alone, I lowered the wood to the ground and leaned my elbows on the wall, the only barrier preventing a seven-story free fall to the street. “Tonight …” I whispered to myself in English, but I was unable to finish my own sentence.

A cold breeze pressed the smell of the gulf against my face, that unique infusion of fish and diesel and salt. Below me, the city shimmered its way down to the water, strings of yellow streetlights beaded here and there with the pearly glow of kitchens. Naples never really slept. Even in the dead of night, fluorescent lightbulbs shed their cheap, unforgiving light onto family members who were up and about and slapping the kitchen table in god knows what argument or joke or confession. But, like a moth, I was drawn to those white lights. If I could, I wished now as always, I would flutter toward them and slip in through a window. I would sit there soundlessly and seamlessly blending in with the wallpaper, trying to piece together the shards of their sentences into a narrative that made sense.

A foghorn blared. I couldn’t tell which of the many ships it could have come from, vessels invisible but for their connect-the-dot lights suspended in the utter blackness of the bay. It was a rare clear night, and without a moon I couldn’t even see the volcano. The only trace of it were the homes on its flanks sketching its silhouette as far up as they dared. Vesuvius hadn’t made a peep in half a century, but I stared at it through the curtain of the night and tried to imagine what it might look like breathing fire as in so many of those eighteenth-century oil paintings. I stared so hard I almost believed I could will it back to life with my eyes.

My hands had turned to cool marble, yet I hadn’t had my fill of Naples; I could have stayed there all night drinking in its scent and feasting my eyes. Still it would have been in vain. The city was water seeping through my hands, and my very love for it filled me with sadness, especially at night. It was a sadness I could never fend off or even put my finger on. I’d given myself over to the city, maybe even betraying myself to do so, but even after all these years it still held me at a distance.

Vir’ Napule e po’ muor’, they say: “See Naples and die.” A city so magnificent that once you’ve seen it there is nothing left in the world to see. The saying had become such a cliché that I would never have used it in conversation, but right then I whispered it to the night as the truest of truths. Then I collected the firewood before heading back downstairs.

From: heddi@yahoo.com

To: tectonic@tin.it

Sent: November 30

Pietro,

I don’t know what to say. It’s been four long years since I last heard from you. Time makes everything bearable, even waiting. Or maybe I simply forgot what I was waiting for.

I still don’t know why you did what you did. Sometimes at night I look at the stars hoping for some kind of explanation from them. It’s crazy, I know, to think that the constellations could read like a sort of story with a beginning, middle, and maybe even a happy ending. But to be honest, I can’t make any sense of them. I can’t even recognize the simplest of constellations: the sky seems jumbled, upside down, unfamiliar. And yet I like looking at the stars anyway. Every single one of them is, after all, a trace of a luminous object that is unique and perfect and no longer exists. A luminous memory?

I’ve worked hard at forgetting everything to do with you. A kind of self-induced amnesia, which has been quite successful. Of course it helps not having people, places, or things around me that could remind me of you. Except the Roman figurine. But that’s not something I could regift or throw away. Maybe it would make more sense to one day give it back to the land …

My cat’s on my knee, she’s digging her claws in. She has beautiful gray fur. I rescued her from an animal shelter, so in a way I saved her life. But I think it’s more accurate to say that she saved mine.

Things are good. I’ve found a place where I fit in, I have a great job and new friends that only know as much about me and my past as I’d like them to know. It’s good to hear from you. It’s good to hear you say you’re sorry. Or have I put words in your mouth?

h.

2

THE DAY AFTER, the day of the hangover, I was sitting on my creaky bed turning the pages of my textbook when I heard Luca coming down the hallway toward me. I could tell it was him even before his voice broke through the mournful Bulgarian folk songs and the humming rain. It was the smell of his tobacco that gave him away. His smoke meandered in through my open door and danced before me as elusively as a wish.

For as long as I’d known him, Luca Falcone had always smoked those hand-rolled cigarettes: he was puffing on one when I was first introduced to him. Leaned against the dejected plaster outside the café across from my department, he was holding something very alcoholic and wearing out-of-fashion leather pants, seemingly oblivious to the historical era or the geographical location he’d wound up in. Luca was already in his third or fourth year and he was pockmarked, weathered like a traveler who had crossed the desert to get to that bar, that bourbon, that stopover.

That moment marked the beginning of my university life as I knew it now, for most unexpectedly Luca took a shine to me and slipped me into his inner circle—the alternative crowd majoring in Urdu or Swahili or Korean at the Department of Arabic-Islamic and Mediterranean Studies and the Department of Oriental Studies, whose remote Italian origins (Puglia, Basilicata, Sicily, Sardinia) branded them as outsiders too.

“The movie’s starting,” said Luca with the lilt of his native Varese, in the Lakes region.

“I’ll be right there. I’m just finishing the page.”

Up close, Luca smelled of lavender soap. He stamped a kiss on my forehead, a big one like he was farewelling me at the train station. Yet he didn’t leave. He lingered in the doorway to bore his eyes into me, as he sometimes did, as if to hypnotize me. That prolonged gaze always threw me into confusion while at the same time giving me the strange certainty, at least for as long as it lasted, that our friendship was not limited to this moment or these circumstances, that we had a bond which would outlast the rest. I knew it was ridiculous, and that I was no exception: everyone wanted a piece of Luca Falcone.

On either side of the now empty doorframe were some of my black-and-white photographs, taken with a macro lens, hand-printed and taped to the wall. They were good shots, though somewhat abstract. Through the window, sandwiched up against another building and transformed by the rain into a game board of Chutes and Ladders, I couldn’t even see my neighborhood being beaten down by the weather and by the passage of time. But it was Sunday and I knew that at that hour all the shops would be closed and the markets packed up, and every last soul would be back home for a marathon meal, followed by the compulsory nap. Sunday lunchtime was the only time when people felt sorry for me. Poor stray, so far from home.

Home. The word itself puzzled me. Didn’t home mean my dad grilling steaks or my psychotherapist stepmom doing her on-the-spot dream analysis? Wasn’t it my mom’s shiatsu foot rubs, her chilly but soft hands, or my brother plucking the bass? The cats? Apparently not, because for all the other out-of-town students home was a place. Colle Alto in the province of Benevento, Adelfia in the province of Bari. Home was a red dot on the map, a reference point that was so very small and yet able to contain, it seemed, everything. People appeared to take it for granted, as if it were just another basic human emotion—happy, sad, angry, home—and yet their eyes lit up when they said the word. Casa. I struggled to grasp that extraplanetary sensation but in the end I couldn’t really feel it. I had to resort to logical analysis to get my head around it.

I was from everywhere and from nowhere. Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia Beach, the outskirts of Boston, Athens in Ohio, and a few other forgettable stop-offs. That was until, at sixteen, I was assigned a dot on the map by an international exchange program that landed me in the nation of Italy, the province of Naples, the town of Castellammare di Stabia, the apartment of a divorcée with two grown sons who told me to call her Mamma Rita. It was Rita, and not AFSAI, who begged me to stay on after the first year and who had the foresight to advise her “American daughter” to graduate from a liceo linguistico.

I became convinced that nothing in this world is random. It was that diploma, in fact, that got me into the Orientale. The admissions lady had narrowed her eyes. I wasn’t Italian, but with that piece of paper I couldn’t not be Italian. When she thumped my admission form with four glorious official stamps, she turned me into a university student like any other. And among Luca’s friends, who were now mine too, the camouflage was almost perfect.

The boys and I had a fun little game, which would start with a request for a cold beer and usually end with a cup of hot tea.

“Ah, c’mon, gorgeous,” pleaded Tonino that afternoon lying starfish on Luca’s bed. In the spastic light of the TV, I could see that Tonino looked as miserable as the old wallpaper behind him, covered only partially by Luca’s Arabic calligraphy. “If I don’t inject more alcohol into my bloodstream, I’ll never get rid of this bastard headache.”

“You did ask for it,” said Angelo.

“Like you asking for that bong …”

“Listen, boys,” I said, putting on my sternest voice, in no way meant for Luca, who was rolling a cigarette. “You have class tomorrow, bright and early. C’mon, boys, it’s the last week before the break. You can do it! Honey or sugar?”

Tonino cursed half-heartedly in three dialects (Neapolitan, Sicilian, and his own), but they both gave in straightaway. I smiled to myself on my way to the kitchen, knowing full well that what those two really craved was not a drink at all but a bit of mothering. I paused in front of Angelo’s cracked door, catching a peek at his black-and-white cowhide rug we often lay across sipping green tea from Japanese cups while deciphering our respective codes, kanji and Cyrillic. I climbed the staircase, which had lost its railing, swerving at the top to avoid stepping on the crack in the floor, just in case there was some reality to that childhood truth. The fracture started at the fireplace in the kitchen, half a meter out from the wall, and shot through to the end of the living room, dissecting the tiles to where they met the terrace. I wondered, as brazen as that crack was, why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d moved in with the boys. I’d probably been too distracted by the aging beauty of the once luxurious apartment, by all its fireplaces, frescoes, and bas-reliefs flaking and fading in the shadows.

I carried back beer mugs of tea and a pack of cookies; the bed sagged in the middle under our weight. I’d missed the opening scenes, but then again it was a movie we’d watched over and over, a New Zealand film I knew only by the name Una volta erano guerrieri, and I was very familiar with the plot. Tattooed Maori thugs bashing each other at night in parking lots and bars and on green lawns, spattered with blood and foul language dubbed in proper Italian with a northern accent.

“Man, what an awesome place New Zealand must be …” said Angelo dreamily.

“Awesome my ass,” Tonino spat back.

“It can’t be all that dangerous. Look at those wide-open spaces, they can do whatever the hell they want. I’d love to go there one day.”

“Sure, blondie, better to get an ass whipping from a Maori gang than a kneecapping from the Mafia.”

Angelo frowned, defiantly pulling up the plaid blanket. He had a nose ring and a proud Sicilian accent that should have lent him an air of toughness. But, whatever the situation, Angelo was like a kid in a candy shop and this was something Tonino just couldn’t let him get away with. It certainly didn’t help matters that Angelo had the complexion of a Swede, a washed-out color that didn’t stop at his face and hair. I only knew this because I’d nursed him back to health once when he was suffering from excruciating neck pain. Angelo had turned facedown onto that cow rug and pulled down his pants; quickly, before I lost the nerve, I jabbed the syringe of anti-inflammatory into his right buttock.

“Well, one day I’m gonna go there,” Angelo reiterated through a mouthful.

“You’re as baked as that cookie,” said Tonino.

“You should go. The world is a book …”

That last enigmatic sentence emerged from Luca’s smoke. I hadn’t even realized he’d been listening. Yet another night scene plunged the room into darkness, but Luca’s Arabic pendant, carved out of what looked like bone, shone as if reflecting light from an unknown source.

“New Zealand’s too far,” I said, and in fact I preferred destinations like Sardinia, Umbria, the Netherlands, Kiev, Vienna—with or without my family. Or better yet, Capri, Procida, the Phlegraean Fields, the streets of Naples. “Who wants to come with me to the Maria Santissima del Carmine Church during the break?” I suggested. Another one of my “field trips,” as the boys called them.

“A church over Easter?” said Angelo. “I’ll pass. I’d rather be sitting around a table stuffing my face with cassata.”

“It’s also known as the Fontanelle Cemetery,” said Luca. “Definitely worth a visit.”

Hope swelled up inside me. Maybe, just maybe, this time Luca would set aside his band practice or research for his thesis to wander with me through the city that was his by right of blood. But he said nothing more and slipped definitively back into the darkness.

“Well, I wouldn’t be able to go for all the pussy in the world,” Tonino said. “March is when we prune our olive trees … Oh, that’s right, you intellectuals wouldn’t want your hands getting dirty, now would you? But it would actually do you some good. Check out these muscles. You think they’re just for show?”

The boys burst out laughing and I sat up with a jolt. Pietro. I hadn’t even looked at the tape since he’d given it to me the night before. I had a habit of doing that, setting aside letters and packages from home, sometimes for days on end, savoring the anticipation of opening them. Or maybe I’d just wanted to forget all about it after Sonia’s confession. But now I was beset by a sense of urgency. Where had I put it?

“Hey, where are you going?” Angelo called out behind me. “This is the part where Nig gets initiated into the gang!”

My suede skirt hadn’t forgotten last night: it smelled like a bonfire and was still holding on to the fragile little package I’d entrusted it with. In good lighting I could now see that the neatly written song list was framed by cartoonish drawings of ladybugs and fish in rust-colored ink, a detail of such playfulness, kindness, and undeniable intimacy as to make my head spin.

I sat on the bed and put the cassette into the tape deck. The first song was Aretha Franklin’s version of “Son of a Preacher Man.” I let out a sigh. My love life up until then had been a series of melodramas and misunderstandings.

In Castellammare di Stabia I met Franco, a rookie in the Camorra, the local Mafia. At the time it felt a lot like love. Or a movie about love, with scenes of gripping his thick waist on the back of a Vespa that snaked through the ruins of his ghostly neighborhood, which over the centuries had taken one too many punches from earthquakes and landslides. Watching his mother in their poorly lit vascio wail with chronic pain in legs as swollen as tree trunks. Listening to the story of how his friend had been shot dead by a rival gang. Holding Franco in my arms as he broke every code of honor to cry and cry against the backdrop of a friend’s uninhabited apartment that didn’t even have electricity. I was sixteen and I wanted to save him. One day without an explanation he broke it off. The ending was unsurprising, even desirable. After that, those adolescent sunsets over the polluted sea became even more beautiful and raw, like blood oranges.

Cesare was an error in judgment I paid dearly for. In hindsight, I could have guessed that his brilliance and eccentricity were the early symptoms of schizophrenia. But at the time I was enamored with how enamored he was with me, his searing gaze, his crooked teeth. He was disheveled, possibly even ugly, but he possessed a blinding confidence and wrote terse, dense poetry that read like haiku. Cesare quickly betrayed signs of obsession: only later did I learn he’d given me the cheap, useless gift of his virginity. Long after he left the university to be hospitalized back in his hometown of Catanzaro, he continued to send me packages, even to my dad and Barbara’s house in DC, containing self-published volumes of love poems or top-secret instructions for building a bomb. Those declarations of undying passion, which became more and more grandiose, intensified my bouts of cold sores and also my shame, verging on disgust, for how I’d played the part of the carefree girl and used sex as an intellectual experiment in carnality, for how careless I’d been and how easily my instinct for self-preservation had won out over my compassion.

And then there was Luca. Or rather, there wasn’t. Late one night while watching a movie on his bed we’d drifted into sleep and he tangled himself around me. I woke up. The movie was over and Luca’s torso was rising and falling in a faraway, untroubled rhythm that seemed extraordinary in itself. His hair had come loose from his ponytail and his lips were slightly parted, but even in his sleep Luca was still ruggedly handsome. I was only pretending to sleep. Paralyzed with pleasure and awe, I let the night tick away with the flashing green of Luca’s digital clock as his pendant pressed its cryptic script onto my skin. I was afraid to wake him. I wanted to lie next to him for as long as the universe had miraculously granted me, to absorb everything about him. His esoteric knowledge, his composure, his patience and faith in himself. During that long magical night, I gained an important insight: what I felt for Luca was not a crush, it was far more than that. I didn’t want Luca Falcone, I wanted to be him.

I dropped back on my pillow and listened. There was a certain euphoria, and an unmistakable sensuality, to the song that I’d never noticed although I’d heard it a thousand times. I wondered if Pietro could fully understand the lyrics, if he was aware he’d given me a love song.

3

I COULDN’T QUITE picture Pietro’s face. Our encounter had been so very brief and I’d even rushed it to a premature conclusion. The harder I tried to conjure up his image, the more it slipped away, until it was no more than a collection of indistinct features blending with the many eyes, noses, and mouths all around me, like those in the audience at my glottology lecture in the Astra Cinema. Fearing I would lose it forever in the crowd, I told myself not to dwell on it and to focus on my lesson instead.

The theater was warm and dark, womblike, the comfy seats upholstered in red velvet, my professor’s voice a low frequency. I couldn’t be dragged away from here even by wild horses, I thought to myself before realizing it was not a thought at all but a line from the second song, by the Rolling Stones, on Pietro’s mixed tape.

I refocused on my notebook, where I was attempting to transcribe every word coming from the stage. “All the world’s languages vary according to what we call taxa, or language families,” I jotted down in tidy, compact letters. “Colors are a type of significant taxonomy: in fact, we might even say there is such a thing as ethnic chromatism …”

“Please shoot me now.” The dark-haired girl next to me widened her made-up eyes, adding in a low whisper, “Signorelli’s head looks like an Easter egg, don’t you think?”

“He’s really good, though.” Actually, to me he seemed like a rock star.

“Sure, but he can’t teach. He just reads straight from the textbook.”

It wasn’t entirely true, but I found myself once more trying to shake the familiar fear that I’d enrolled in a university in shambles.

“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

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.

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

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.”

There was a grave silence. I couldn’t possibly turn my face toward him now, with his breath so close I could taste it. All at once, the ceiling went dark and there was a collision of sandpaper with my mouth. Startled, I pulled away. Oh god, it had gone horribly wrong, it had all turned out very high school … very liceo.

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

“You just surprised me, that’s all.”

“You mean you didn’t think I was going to kiss you?” And he fell dejectedly back on the bed.

Part of me wanted to walk out then and there and forget all about it. But a voice deep inside—and perhaps it was nothing but my familiar thirst for knowledge—told me I had to stay, to push through the awkwardness and the shame. I had to know. So I leaned over him, a rush of blood to my head instantly curing my low blood pressure, and I brushed his lips with mine as if to shush him. Pietro craned his neck to reach me with his mouth, like he was passing me a Halloween apple with his hands tied. I pulled back, burned by his stubble. Was this how they kissed in the province of Avellino?

I was still looking at his plump lower lip and without thinking I gently bit it. He let me. He just lay there, eyelids shut and breathing heavily, perhaps afraid of what I might do next. I didn’t know myself.

In a show of goodwill, again I pressed my lips against his. And this time his mouth opened soft and sweet like a fresh fig. It was warmed by the sun and ripe, just right, and I wanted more. Another kiss, and yet another, and soon our mouths were feeding off each other, one taste leading inevitably to the next but never satisfying. Before long we were scrambling for them, greedily, individually, as they disappeared one by one like cherries from a bowl. In the end there might even be a winner and a loser.

I was not in any way transported: I was almost too present, a purely physical being hyperaware of every movement, every sensation. There was my upper lip becoming raw from Pietro’s stubble, the balm of his tongue, the porcelain of his teeth. His belt buckle pressing into my hipbone, the stubborn buttons of his shirt, his long fingers getting caught in my hair. His scent of cologne and coffee, tomatoes and sweat. I had to keep my eyes shut: that was the only way I could limit the number of senses flooding me with information I couldn’t reconcile.

I lost my grasp of time, or perhaps time had lost its linearity. When had we started kissing: two minutes ago, two hours ago? I didn’t have the faintest idea. The beginning had slipped into oblivion and the end was no longer inevitable. One kiss led to another and the only certainty was that we couldn’t stop.

Then out of nowhere, something came over me—an inspiration, though not a flash of light but rather a flash of darkness, like a power cut. I was blinded, plunged into the deepest night. I was suspended there, stolen out of my own body, stripped of my sense of self, and yet it was such an incredible feeling that I could have stayed there forever, floating in the universe. Was this why people took heroin? But if it was so, then it was also true that he and I had shot up with the same drug, the same needle, for in that very moment we both opened our eyes.

We looked at each other for an eternity, or maybe just a breath. A transparent and peaceful gaze that went beyond judgment or embarrassment, even beyond curiosity. Our mouths still attached, we watched each other as if someone else were doing the kissing, our bodies carrying on without us. We had nothing to do with it, we were merely witnessing the beauty of the world.

We closed our eyes, letting the kisses rock us like so many exploding stars. Decorum was gone. Lips wandered to the cheekbones, chin, neck. I rubbed my cheeks across his stubble, wishing now for rawness. He rolled on top of me, murmuring things that made no sense, a warm mist breathing into my hair and my ear, not words at all but a spirit moving me. My god, was this how they kissed in the province of Avellino? It was a divine, primordial chaos that seemed to be building up to a great upheaval of the elements. I became afraid, and as if to brace myself, to ground myself, I searched for his mouth so that I could take in his breath once more. I’d forgotten where I was and how I’d come to be there, I’d even forgotten his name or that he was like any of the other people on the planet who had names, pasts, and daily concerns. He was simply him, this man, whose mouth was mine to kiss, every warm and rich corner of it, and whose chest was pressed, sternum and ribs and heart and all, up against mine.

When the sun began staining the port soda-pop orange, we looked into each other’s eyes again and there was a renewed awareness that we were two separate individuals. We started laughing, at nothing, perhaps with relief. I leaned against Pietro’s chest. There it was, the pendant I shouldn’t have seen when his shirt had opened up on the terrace, a smiling silver sun. I asked him if it had any special meaning to him.

“I bought it in a market, just a couple of months ago. And I thought while I was buying it that I wished I had someone to give it to. It’s pathetic, I know.”

“Not at all.” I held the sun in my hands. Around a grin of fulfillment were rays with tips almost too sharp to touch. “I find it moving.”

“You’re such a good person, Heddi,” he said rather solemnly.

“How did you learn my name?”

“I asked around. It wasn’t that hard.” Brushing the hair off my face, he added, “You’re beautiful too. But I bet you’ve heard that many times before.”

The truth was that, like all girls, I’d heard it plenty. When it came to the female form, at least in the slums a Neapolitan man wasn’t a man unless he vomited his private thoughts in the streets. But hearing it from Pietro was another thing altogether.

“I don’t know what you see in me,” he said. “I’m just from a small village. You’re a big-city girl.”

“A big city?” As if American cities were ranked by their verticality, I cut Washington down to size by telling him there were no skyscrapers, and that my dad and stepmom’s neighborhood was full of undocumented Mexican immigrants in cowboy hats, out of work and far from home, some who were so drunk by midday they couldn’t even stand up. I didn’t mention the Polish and Ugandan embassies just down the road: I didn’t want the capital of the United States to steal my thunder. But neither did I mention the other half of my life spent in the suburbs with my mom and stepdad.

Pietro’s particular dot on the map went by the name of Monte San Rocco. His parents were farmers, he told me, and poor—or at least they acted like they were. His mother hadn’t finished elementary school, and it was Pietro who’d taught his father to sign his own name. “Before that he used to sign with an x.”

“You mean he’s illiterate?”

Pietro turned toward the wall. “I don’t think you’d have given me another glance if you saw me on a tractor.” He turned back to me. “And yet, Heddi, I can’t help but want to be with you, from the first time I saw you.”

I hoped he couldn’t feel the drum of my heart against his chest. “Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll get to see you ride a tractor … or is it drive a tractor?”

“Fly a tractor.” He wiped his laughter away with a hand. As for me, the joke had not just saved me from a linguistic slipup but also broken the tension, and I burst out in heartfelt laughter. He said, “I’d sure like to fly to Washington someday.”

“I’d rather be here.”

“Really?”

“I love living by the sea.”

I laid my head on his chest. I hardly knew him but his smell was familiar even in its exoticness—a new spice, but one as earthy as salt, one I might no longer be able to do without. It came from his now crinkled shirt, his dusty hair, and his fading cologne that was now on my face too.

The slippery, molten sunlight cast sharp, geometrical shadows against the surrounding rooftops. The insidious sand of the scirocco really seemed to have gone. Maybe it wouldn’t be back again until next year.

I bolted upright. “I have to get back home.”

“Now?”

“It’s late. The boys will be worried.” But I wasn’t really thinking about the boys. I was thinking about Sonia.

From: heddi@yahoo.com

To: tectonic@tin.it

Sent: January 14

Dear Pietro,

How strange to be writing to you after all this time. How strange to be writing, period. I exchange letters with only a handful of people, I don’t have a diary. Sometimes I think I haven’t really made my peace with words and I’m more comfortable in the woods listening to the chirping of birds. Can you believe it, me in the woods? I like to immerse myself in their world and listen to all those unintelligible and at times haunting languages that overlap like verses sung in a round. It’s like being inside a beating heart …

Funnily enough, my job consists of words. I teach English to foreigners, mostly Chinese, Korean, and Russian immigrants. Learning is a game; we even go on field trips together and become quite close. Then they get into the university or find the job they were aiming for, etc., and I don’t see them again. I’m happy at least to have helped them make their dreams come true. I remember the dreams you had. Where have they gone?

It’s true, at times I do think about my own aborted dreams and it makes me suffer. But you shouldn’t beat yourself up, Pietro. It’s not your fault: blame destiny. Or rather, blame the lack of destiny and order in the world, blame chaos. I too have to accept responsibility for what happened. Besides, over the past few years I’ve come to realize something important: it’s possible to live without having any answers. You survive, life goes on. The world, with its tides and natural rhythms, is beautiful anyway, stunningly beautiful, even though (or maybe precisely because) it’s indifferent to our ups and downs and broken hearts.

I really would like it if one day you dropped by for a chat, but I think it’s unlikely. I’m not living in Washington, as you may believe, but in New Zealand. Maybe the constellations really are upside down here, on the other side of the world …

h.

6

THAT KISS, THAT KISS … Was this what tasting the forbidden fruit was like? Only one last moment of hesitation and then the immediate reward for throwing your better judgment to the wind: an explosion of god almighty on your tongue and a surge of the most perfect, unstoppable pleasure, so much so that you can’t distinguish the juice of the fruit trickling down your chin from the saliva from your own mouth, nor do you care.

I didn’t know much about Bible stories, but it did seem to me that there was something in that kiss that was so good it had to be against the law, maybe even against nature. And now that I’d tasted it, now that I knew, there was no going back. I couldn’t undo what I’d done, I couldn’t unknow what I now knew. And yet I didn’t even remotely want to go back. I was only shocked, incensed even. How had this been hidden from me my entire life?

I replayed that kiss over and over in my mind. Unlike with a cassette tape, there was no wearing or warping: the more I played it, the more it deepened in detail and emotion. By reliving it, I could slow it down and thus savor its many little components, some of which I’d very nearly missed the first time around: the salinity in the folds of his neck, his eyes, a tender yet vibrant shade of brown like a branch that has just shed its bark, his graceful yet broad hand spanning the back of my head as he pulled me in. That kiss was something that deserved to be relived, for I’d gone twenty-three years without it only to be granted half an hour.

If that. Besides, I didn’t know if I would taste it ever again. A kiss like that, I reasoned, couldn’t repeat itself, just as the forbidden fruit couldn’t be tasted but once. In fact, in my head it did not automatically equate that in order to experience it once more all I had to do was be alone with Pietro again. That kiss was not specifically connected to the person. It was much greater than him, than us. And we couldn’t re-create it because the kiss had created us.

“Leaving for Guangzhou soon?” I heard beside me.

“Sorry?”

Luca nodded up at the colossal ancient map of China flattened behind glass, the pride of the Department of Oriental Studies. Who knows how long I’d been sitting in that study hall, staring with unfocused eyes at that map and not my semiotics book.

“I was just studying.”

“I know my Cancerians.” Luca tossed his tattered bookbag on the table and scraped the floor noisily as he pulled out a chair. A few students looked up from their books. “Roberta is like that too.”

“Like what?”

“A shell that’s never empty.”

Being compared in any way to Roberta was a huge compliment. Luca and Roberta had been together so long, long before my arrival in the Spanish Quarter, that it seemed out of the question that they would ever part. But then, some time ago now, Roberta had left for a Greek mountain village to translate ancient Greek poetry into Italian for her thesis. I wondered if Luca missed her, if he still loved her. Yet such topics were not part of our shared vocabulary.

“Do you have a minute?”

“Of course.”

Luca pulled a cassette tape from his bag. He wanted help deciphering the English lyrics to a song that his heavy metal band was hoping to perform. As he scooted his chair closer and uncoiled some earphones, I was deeply flattered that Luca Falcone needed me, even if just for a moment. He always had some creative project on the go—Arabic calligraphy, astrological charts, ancient runes, restoration of samurai swords—but in the cultivation of his crafts he devoted an almost meditative focus that carried him far, far away from me, the boys, the university, Naples.

Through the earphones, the tape barked unintelligibly. It was a terrible song, but because Luca liked it there had to be something sublime in it that I just couldn’t grasp. Once Luca had shown me how to cook saffron risotto. The saffron, like fragile branches of red coral protected from the world by a tiny glass capsule, didn’t seem even vaguely edible, especially with that odd, musty smell. Carefully he broke off a miniature twig and blew it like a kiss into the pot. As if by magic, the simmering rice—and, I could almost swear, even the steam above it—exploded with yellow. Luca was an alchemist, so there had to be gold in this song too.

I jotted down the words as best I could. All the while Luca followed my handwriting, sitting so close that I could smell the lavender of his soap and hear the scrunching of his leather jacket. At the end he said, “What would I do without you, Heddi.”

My name was Nordic and outmoded, but I loved it on Luca’s lips. He was an exacting linguistic who was fluent in Arabic, French, and English, and he didn’t merely pronounce my name: he pulled it out from somewhere deep within, like a sigh. I had the sudden urge to tell him about Pietro, but I held back. I was afraid of killing the magic of that afternoon, which still tingled in my head like a secret whispered against my ear. Besides, what if Sonia had confessed her feelings for Pietro to Luca as well? I didn’t want to have any flaw, moral or otherwise, in Luca’s eyes.

The window of opportunity closed when he started buckling up his bag. “You keep on studying. At this pace you’ll get your degree before any of us.”

“Who cares about a degree?” I said. “In the end it’s just a piece of paper.”

“True, but to almost everyone else that piece of paper is worth far more than a precious Islamic scroll. Especially to my father.” Luca had thrown his bag across his shoulder but remained seated at my side. Dropping into a confidential and somewhat aggrieved tone, he added, “And anyway, whether I like it or not, at some point this chapter has to come to an end.”

“What chapter?”

Luca gave me a crooked smile. “Have you ever been to Tunisia? It’s a fascinating place, I’d love to go back there. My friends in Japan are always inviting me over too. But first, graduation … and the military.”

The military was a profanity that was never uttered among our group of friends, and hearing it now felt like an insult. But he explained in a peaceful (or perhaps resigned) voice, that he’d chosen not to fulfill the yearlong compulsory military service straight after high school, unlike most of his classmates. Perhaps this had been a mistake, though, because at this age life in the barracks would be unbearable. Therefore, he’d made the decision instead to complete the civilian service as a conscientious objector.

“Either way, a year is too long, Luca!” Unthinkably long, just as it was unthinkable that after that year Luca wouldn’t simply return to Naples.

“A year and a half,” he clarified. “Otherwise it would be the easy way out.”

“There’s nothing easy about it …”

I wanted him to pull out one of his magic tricks to make it go away, or at least to find a loophole. But Luca simply laid his eyes on me in that way he had of trying to communicate on another plane of existence. I was stumped as to what it meant, deciding instead that it was best to not make a big deal out of something that was still far off in the hazy future.

He stood to go, asking me to walk him back to the Quartieri. Without a moment’s hesitation I shut my book and grabbed my bag. That we’d just had one of the most personal conversations Luca and I had ever had somewhat alleviated its heaviness. And as we walked down Spaccanapoli in a sweet cloud of tobacco, our arms tightly locked and walking very nearly in step with each other, I felt sure everyone would think we, little old me and Luca Falcone, were best friends.

“Luca, what did you mean by The world is a book?”

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

“Your words?”

“You overestimate me. Saint Augustine. But to me it also means that the things that are truly worth learning can’t be found in books.”

I was determined to be more prepared when I faced Sonia, but perhaps I overdid it by asking her to meet me at Caffè Gambrinus. Its gilded mirrors and their multiplying effect on the well-to-do only made me slouch further into the antique chair, velvety and reassuring like the gray-green underside of olive leaves. Yet that day I needed the pitiful comfort of my favorite refuge, where I could order a cappuccino after midday without so much as a flicker of disapproval on the face of the bow-tied waiter, and indulge my adolescent fantasies about what Italy was supposed to be. A literary hub in the 1800s, Gambrinus was one of the few last reminders that at one time Naples had been a major European capital. Gabriele D’Annunzio had lived in Naples (and was a frequent patron of Gambrinus), Degas and Goethe too. And hadn’t the Marquis de Sade himself called Naples an infernal heaven?

Sonia took a seat. I felt a few stares in our direction, at my shabby jacket, at Sonia’s black uniform. “Wow,” she said, “it’s so fancy in here.”

I remembered Pietro at our rooftop dinner saying something like that about our place. It wasn’t hard to imagine Sonia and Pietro as a couple. They spoke with the same candor; they came from the same world and had watched the same cartoons. As if I’d deprived her of her one true match, I was struck by the idea that I’d left Sonia to the wolves. And I didn’t like being that person.

We sipped our coffees and talked about our strictest lecturers. Hers was a Portuguese grammar zealot and mine an elegant Bulgarian native who from day one had banned our class of two from uttering a single word of Italian, but who soon had us calling her by her first name, Iskra, and visiting her grown daughter while on a scholarship to Bulgaria. As Sonia and I chatted away, through the window I stole glimpses of Piazza Plebiscito, which up until my first year there had been a massive inner-city parking lot. The recent urban renewal had rid it of cars, revealing, in addition to lewd graffiti and peeling posters, an unexpected spaciousness, a place open to a thousand possibilities.

Sonia’s empty cup came down on her saucer with a final, devasting clank. It was now or never. But I didn’t know where to begin. I hadn’t spoken to a soul about Pietro. Now I could either trivialize what had happened between us or tell the shocking truth that since that kiss I could hardly read a line in a book—or sleep.

“You look so serious. You’re not in some sort of trouble, are you?”

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine … Remember when you told me about Pietro, up there on the roof?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s so gorgeous.” Sonia rolled her eyes upward as though recalling something heavenly, before adding, “I mean, gorgeous in a kind of unusual way, don’t you think? And he has such beautiful hands, the hands of a gentleman …”

The observation shook my resolve, and I started a string of sentences without finishing a single one. I felt like a rambling fool, a circus clown rummaging through a rickety suitcase and tossing out item after useless item—a shoe, an umbrella, a banana—until he finds what he needs. And what I needed was vagueness. “I have feelings for him,” I said finally.

Sonia’s smile dropped ever so slightly. “And I would imagine he has feelings for you too.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

Sonia stopped me midsentence, conveying in her fast, almost urgent, Sardinian way how happy she was for me and wrapping me in a hug that smelled of watermelon shampoo.

It was like a puzzle piece gloriously clicking into place. Outside the café, the midday sunshine ricocheted off the shop windows as I walked the short distance back to the Spanish Quarter. I turned into its alleyways, where I was welcomed back by the call of fish sellers, the purr of motorbikes, and the canopies of laundry. My legs effortlessly drove me up the incline of Via De Deo. Aromas of roasted peppers and seared steak came steaming out over the balconies, enveloping me in a mouthwatering mist. I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything all day and my stomach reawakened. This only accentuated the lightness in my head, and in every fiber of my being, as I slid through the gate left ajar and sprinted up the stairs two at a time. I hadn’t called, I hadn’t even buzzed. I was going to show up at lunchtime, uninvited, without even the courtesy of a loaf of bread. But still I rushed there as if I were running late.

7

PIETRO SET ABOUT cooking for me, chopping the onions like he was afraid to cause them pain and gently adjusting the flame under the frying pan. He sure knew how to maneuver in that tiny kitchen and how to make do with the few ingredients he had, as though he were used to having guests turn up unannounced for lunch. He didn’t want any help; he was simply glad that I’d come back, he insisted, sitting me down on the terrace step with a cape of sunlight on my back. He also put a glass of wine in my hand, and what harm could it do? The wine was in fact a medicine that cleared my head instead of clouding it. I understood that my concern over talking to Sonia had been blown out of proportion, and now all the drama fizzled into a sweet pulp like those onions sautéing with pancetta.

“You’re a man of many talents. Geologist, cook …”

“I’m not a geologist yet. And anyway, wait until you try this amatriciana before you say I can cook.” He let out a hoarse laugh.

The wine on an empty stomach made me uncharacteristically bold, and I said, “You didn’t cover your mouth this time when you laughed.”

“You have an eye like a hawk’s.”

“You have a nice smile. Why hide it?”

Pietro took a while to answer. He emptied a jar of home-bottled tomatoes into the pan and stirred them thoughtfully. “Can’t you tell? It’s my teeth.”

I beckoned him over, and reluctantly he kneeled before me, that silver sun jingling. When he parted his lips slightly, all the wine I’d drunk slipped its long red tentacles around me, wrapping me in a hot, stinging pleasure.

“Let’s have a look.” I tried to focus on his teeth. They were straight and somewhat boxy, pearly white corn that I felt an overwhelming desire to run my tongue over right then and there. He smiled. I hadn’t noticed it before, but in fact on one of his front teeth there was a faint gray shadow. “It’s hardly noticeable,” I said, and we kissed, an intimate mixture of wine and smoke and hunger that made a commotion of my heart.

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

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.”

“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

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.

“I swear it’s not my stomach.”

Within seconds, the rumbling grew into a sound so unnatural that it was like the very air was being sucked back up into the sky. Then from behind the palm trees came an enormous black plane. Flying at shockingly low altitude, it passed over us as if in slow motion; I could see its wheels locked into place, the silvery scratches on its black underbelly. Instinctively I pressed myself deeper into the lawn so as not to be grazed.

“Holy crap!” cried Pietro. “What the hell was that?”

Excitedly we went through a few hypotheses, finally agreeing it had to be a military plane.

“I’ve never been on a plane before,” Pietro said.

“Not even once?”

“No.”

I ran my palm over the little swords of grass. “Do you think there’ll be another one?”

“I hope so. Let’s wait a little.”

We were gripped with suspense. It was like waiting for the next set of fireworks on the Fourth of July; it was the desire to play with fire. Our patience was rewarded when shortly afterward another airplane appeared. The air was ripped apart, the earth shook. I thought our luck had run out and this time there might very well be a collision, maybe with the roof of the museum itself, and I let out a silent scream. And then it was over.

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