Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  On first impression, New Zealand is the epitome of the New World: it’s a peaceful, convenient, and modern country with just a brief colonial history. And maybe this is the case in Auckland, where I live in a wooden house with a German doctor, a postal worker, and a Maori girl who teaches English like me. But as soon as you get out of the city, as I do at every chance I get, to visit the volcanoes and beaches and walk beneath those primordial fern trees, you realize that New Zealand does in fact have a history, one that’s much more ancient than us little human beings.

  It’s impossible to capture with a camera all the stunning views that are around every corner. I almost always shoot with my macro lens: the veins in leaves, a white feather on a black beach, you know me. Recently I had a photographic exhibit (nothing special, it was just in a café in the city), but they’re not digital so I can’t attach any of them. But I’ll attach this snapshot of me on the shores of Lake Taupo.

  I’ll write more later, I promise. In the meantime, please take care of yourself.

  h.

  11

  TO GET TO MONTE SAN ROCCO, we took a bus from Naples to the town of Borgo Alto, where we picked up his uncle’s car parked in front of a bakery, the keys hidden under a seat. We drove past the shops and houses until there was nothing left, just a naked undulation of land in a muted shade of green. Pietro said his hometown was only ten minutes away, but the road dragged us uphill and downhill, clockwise and counterclockwise, like in a spin cycle, and we never seemed to be gaining ground.

  “Nervous?” asked Pietro, changing back into third gear before sliding his long, tapered fingers around my thigh. “There’s nothing to worry about. My folks are old and completely harmless. Just offer to wash the dishes and my mother will love you.”

  Wasn’t I just supposed to be myself? I turned to look out the window. With all those dark clouds, rain seemed certain. There was just one small piece of clear sky in the middle.

  “What is that, the eye of the storm?”

  “Don’t worry, baby. It’s just a bit of rain.” Pietro looked in his element, with one hand loosely cupping the gear stick and an elbow sticking out the window. Soon the bare land became speckled with houses, and without warning the houses thickened into a village. “Welcome to Monte San Rocco, in all its rustic splendor.”

  The car ached up the steep road, passing in front of a butcher’s, a café, a piazza. I suddenly longed for that endless, aimless road. We turned into a backstreet. An old woman peered at us through her window. A dog barked. The car grunted up a rocky driveway until the hand brake jerked it to a stop in front of a two-story stone house.

  “Here we are.”

  Stepping out of the car, I was hit by the cool, damp air. It smelled of burning firewood and wet rocks, a promise of rain. Pietro grabbed our bags from the back as a chicken ran in a panic behind the house.

  We walked in through the door to find Pietro’s parents in the kitchen, his father bent over the fireplace unloading an armful of wood. Twigs and dried leaves clung to his sweater, but he didn’t appear to take notice of them or of our arrival. His mother, however, who wore a kerchief knotted behind her neck, was on her feet ready to receive us but without saying a word.

  “Ah, you’re back, boy,” Pietro’s father said. “And you’ve brought a friend.” At least, I was fairly certain that’s what he said. Though related to Neapolitan, their dialect had thrown me.

  “Papà, this is Eddie,” Pietro nearly shouted, putting our bags down like there were champagne glasses inside. That balancing act he’d just performed, maintaining such delicateness in his gestures while simultaneously injecting such power into his voice, was deceptively tricky. Or maybe the power was an intrinsic part of the dialect. I also noticed he’d purposely simplified my name for his elderly father’s benefit, undoubtedly a show of good manners and respect.

  “It’s a pleasure,” said his father in Italian and at full volume. Was he partially deaf, or did it have something to do with the extraordinary amount of hair growing out of his ears? His father grabbed my hand to squeeze it between his own, which were large and rough like bark. He said something, a mesh of dialect in which I clearly heard “pretty girl” as I looked into his smiling eyes, made larger than life by thick lenses and framed by wrinkles that branched out like an old oak tree.

  Pietro’s mother was a matryoshka standing there, her hands one on top of the other and her face reddened by too much wind and sun. She unfolded a limp hand toward me. As I took it and leaned in to kiss her cheeks, I caught a glimpse of her dangling gold earrings, a vestige of girlhood decorating a face deeply marked by time.

  “So happy to meet you,” I said, still holding on to that hand as rough and flaccid as a gardening glove. “You live in a beautiful spot, signora.”

  “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she answered in a slow, deliberate Italian. She rested her eyes on me with a somewhat concerned expression before rolling up her sleeves and turning back to her chores.

  “Come with me. I’ll show you around the house,” said Pietro.

  Was that it? After all the anticipation, the worst was over. I followed Pietro’s willowy figure through the house. The rooms were prematurely dark. Lowered blinds let in only droplets of light that bounced off the facets of the whiskey glasses on display in the dining room, a formal lounge with 1970s-style furniture facing a darkened television set. An even darker hallway led upstairs. The landing was bare except for a window overlooking the now gray countryside and a telephone, whose cord Pietro had stretched every last curl out of to reach his bedroom and call me all those nights in Naples.

  His bedroom was painted a frosty blue, with old posters, a wardrobe, a small bed, and a desk with a shelf above it groaning with rocks. I wanted to linger in that room of the boy I loved but at an age that I couldn’t picture, yet he was already leading me down to the basement.

  “It’s not really an apartment yet, but it will be someday.” More precisely, it was a cellar with concrete floors, some sacks, and a wooden chair. “You see this? This is where my mother prefers to cook.” Pietro was pointing to a sort of coal range. I thought I ought to know what his mother needed two stoves for, so I didn’t ask as we walked back upstairs, past the kitchen and out the front door to the terrace.

  I took in that sweet fusion of black earth and cow dung. “The air here is heavenly!”

  “Every time I go back to Naples my eyes sting the first day because of the smog,” said Pietro, leaning his elbows on the railing. “You know, Heddi, my father likes you.”

  “Does he?” I reached for him and he grabbed my hand, burrowing it in the secret warmth of his jacket.

  “Definitely. I can tell.” He looked out in the distance. “You see that house over there?” My gaze followed Pietro’s finger over the chickens in the driveway to a dirt road. Behind a splash of freshly budded trees were a few houses.

  “You mean the brick one?”

  “The brick one is my Aunt Libertà’s house. They haven’t finished rebuilding it yet, after the earthquake. No, the one behind it, the gray one with the terra-cotta roof.”

  They all looked like that. Those orange roofs stood out in brilliant contrast against the dark clouds, and I suddenly regretted leaving my camera behind. Pietro released my hand to pull his cigarettes from his breast pocket, explaining that that house was owned by his uncle Stefano, with whom his father had had a falling-out fifteen years ago over an unpaid debt. Since then the entire family was forbidden to even speak to him. I struggled to imagine Pietro’s father, with those substantial lenses magnifying the kindness in his eyes, getting that pissed off and ranting and raving, maybe like they did in the Quartieri.

  “It’s insane. My parents are so hung up on money. Everything else is worthless to them.” He talked while squeezing the cigarette between his lips, which now curled up at the corners. “And you see that house right next door to it, the one with the pine tree in the yard? That belongs to the girl my mother thinks I ought to marry.”
And he let out a soundless laugh, of unease perhaps, and yet his face went red.

  I acted blasé. “What, like some kind of arranged marriage?”

  “A bit like my parents’? Not on your life! No, this girl and I have known each other since we were eight years old. My brother and I used to go over and climb up their pine tree. A totally stupid idea, let me tell you, because we’d get scratched all over from the needles.” He was still looking straight ahead, watching the footage of his memories.

  “Your mother doesn’t honestly think you’re going to marry her, does she?”

  “Who knows what goes through that woman’s head. The only reason she wants us to get married anyway is because the girl’s family owns land that borders ours.”

  Where was all this land that Pietro’s family owned, anyway? I had to quickly come to terms with the fact that living in a town and having land beside your house were two irreconcilable concepts.

  “Besides, just between you and me, she’s as ugly as a mussel,” he added, burying his half-smoked cigarette in a potted plant.

  Brutta come una cozza. Not at all unpleased about the neighbor girl’s genetic misfortune, I pointed out lightheartedly that it wasn’t like him to give up a good Marlboro Light. But he’d had to put it out, he said, because his parents didn’t know that he smoked. I couldn’t help laughing at this explanation, given the rectangle so blatantly embossed into the plaid of his shirt pocket.

  “Let’s put it this way, baby. They pretend not to know that I smoke. So out of respect for them turning a blind eye, I smoke outside.”

  “That’s complicated.”

  “Don’t you have something like that that you want to hide from your family? Or are you always this honest?” he said without a hint of malice: if anything, with awe.

  “Well, when I was little and my dad fed us meat, I’d brush my teeth before going back home so that my mom couldn’t smell it on me.”

  “A Texan and a vegetarian,” he said. “Now that’s a match made in heaven.”

  “In fact, it ended in divorce.”

  “You and me, we’re never going to get divorced.” Pietro winked at me, saying he was popping into the kitchen to grab me a wool hat. He wanted to take me to a place he loved.

  The village dissolved back into countryside. Pietro drove leisurely. The hills settled down and for some stretches the road straightened out into tunnels of mathematically spaced trees, behind which I saw flashes of unimpressed cows and unidentifiable crops. The clouds still hadn’t burst: maybe the storm was just in my head after all. The sun even made an appearance, so bright as to turn those tree tunnels into fire hoops that we sped through unharmed. But the sun didn’t last, and neither did the plain, and again the hills made it harder to drive and stole Pietro’s warm hand from my thigh so that he could change gears. Soon we were up so high that the hood of the car was cutting through fog.

  Pietro pulled over onto the grass. We sat there in the trembling car; we could feel the wind, as strong as anything, but we couldn’t see it. “From up here there’s a terrific view of the valley. But, damn it, the visibility sucks today. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s like being inside the clouds, at the top of the world.”

  “I love how you see the good in everything. You make me feel good about my life, about my future.” And we kissed with passion, and a touch of despair, as though over the last few hours it had been forbidden.

  When we got out of the car, the rough weather overwhelmed us, tossing about our hair. “I knew you were going to need that hat,” he said and we quickly retreated into the car. The engine started up with a gurgle.

  It was true that we were both still young students financially dependent on our parents. But for a moment in time in the falling darkness, as we rode over the folds of the land in his uncle’s car that we might never have to give back, just the two of us, with my hand stroking the nape of his neck and his squeezing my inner thigh, we could have been married and this might have been our car as we drove back home together after a day trip to the countryside. Pietro was smiling with his eyes glued to the road before him, trying hard not to show me, it seemed, how brightly they shone with pride. Perhaps he was having the same fantasy too.

  That evening we ate dinner around the kitchen table mostly in silence, save the Italian voiceover coming from the television in the adjoining room. It was a bad Hollywood movie and I tried not to feel personally responsible for it. Nonetheless, Pietro’s parents seemed so involved in the plot that my compliments to the chef went unacknowledged. I decided to wait for the ads to start a conversation. But Pietro’s mother took advantage of every commercial break to get up—to slice more bread or turn the sausages in the pan—and so did his father, to tend the fire. With dinner nearly over, my last chance to speak was lost when, during a particularly zealous laundry detergent ad, Pietro’s father burst into dialect, a series of sentences fired at Pietro from which I could only catch “land” and “tomorrow morning.”

  With that accent, it was clear that the affinity between their dialect and Neapolitan was of little use to me. As I listened to his father, I allowed my mind to wander to phonological considerations. Their Irpinia dialect melted the distinction between the liquid consonants, l and r, almost like Mandarin. Compared to Neapolitan, it was less drawn out, less visceral, resulting in speech patterns that were truncated, hurried, practically breathless. But what struck me the most was the way in which, when Pietro answered back, the dialect dropped his voice lower than I’d thought it could go; it sounded like someone else’s voice. I had a flash of him as that little boy who, on his first day of school, didn’t speak a word of Italian.

  Everyone stood up, leaving the tablecloth scattered with breadcrumbs and balled-up paper napkins. Pietro looked as anxious as I was to turn in for the night, to carve out a space of our own. But first, I remembered, I would help his mother with the dishes. I stacked the plates and copied Pietro in throwing the napkins into the insatiable fire. All the while his mother stood over the steaming sink. I went up to her. It turned out that she was the petite one, not me.

  “Let me do these, signora.”

  “Don’t go to such trouble,” she replied with palpable tiredness but in clear and formal Italian.

  “You’ve cooked a wonderful meal and I’m sure you’ve been on your feet all day. The least I can do is wash the dishes.”

  But his mother was a tiny statue in front of the sink as she said with a surprising amount of energy, “No. You two go to sleep now.”

  Pietro shrugged. I hoped that, despite her refusal, my offer had still fulfilled the magic formula he’d recommended. He guided me to the dining room sofa. We sat there for some time bathed in the colorful lights of the TV: the movie was over and an inane variety show had taken over. I squeezed my chilled hands between my knees as the dishes clanked and rattled in the kitchen. It seemed like an eternity before Pietro said it was time for bed.

  No sooner were we alone in his room than Pietro told me that during dinner his father had asked him to help out the next day. “I need to go with him to drive the tractor to one of our plots of land. We’ll need to head off early in the morning.”

  “Can I come?” He was already shaking his head so I quickly added, “You won’t even notice me. I’ll just sit there quietly and watch the scenery, I promise.”

  “Sorry, baby, it’s too far away. About an hour’s drive. And, anyway, where would you sit? Here’s my idea: you can hang out with my mother in the morning, or just relax and read your book. Make yourself at home. And when I come back, we’ll have the whole rest of the day together.” As if we were being watched, Pietro kissed my forehead.

  I didn’t like the idea of spending an entire morning alone with his mother; on the other hand, I figured it might be the perfect opportunity to get to know her. I said I’d do my best. Pietro looked satisfied and pulled a pair of flannel pajamas from his wardrobe, for me.

  “What do I need these for? I have you to keep me
warm.”

  “But I’m sleeping in Gabriele’s room,” he said, but the disappointment must have been written all over my face, for he added, “It’s a bit like the smoking thing. They pretend not to know we’re together. For them, only old married couples can sleep in the same room without arousing suspicion. Don’t forget, my parents were born in the last ice age.”

  I changed into the pajamas, saying, “Of course I get it, but it’s just ignoring the obvious, isn’t it? I mean, we sleep in the same bed in Naples.”

  “Heddi, my parents don’t know we live together.”

  A smile escaped my lips. Living together? Is that what we were doing, not me just staying with him for a while? I’d never loved him more than in that moment. My immense joy was spoiled only by the growing awareness that we were up to our necks in trouble.

  “Pietro, please . . .”

  “Look, I will tell them. Just not right now, the first time they meet you. They’d judge you for it.” A dog barked somewhere outside, and Pietro gave me a lopsided smile, leaning hard on his favored leg. “All right, love of my life?”

  Yes, it was all right, more than all right, wonderful actually, with that term of endearment that, at just hearing it, had tipped over my heart like a cup that runneth over. I was already missing him, I could feel the first symptoms coming on, and in that moment he could have asked me for anything and I would have said all right; I would have lied for him, cheated for him. But fortunately he didn’t ask me to: all I had to do was avoid bringing up our living situation in his parents’ presence.

  I loosened the tightly tucked covers to slip into bed, and Pietro tucked me in, running his hand over the dated but freshly laundered comforter, which seemed to blossom under his touch with yellow and green flowers. Then there came a soothing hum from outside. The rain was finally here.