Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  At the same time, in a sort of cynical and mean way, I’ve come to believe that much of my grief and anguish stems from my parents, who have plotted with the idiotic part of me to make me monstrously similar to them.

  On the one hand, I could never wish them ill: they’re old and can’t live forever. On the other hand, I can’t help but experience the unmentionable feeling that I’m waiting. With some shame, actually quite a lot, I feel that the only purpose of my life here is to prepare for a funeral. When I project my desires onto the future, I start to see some possibilities . . . and it doesn’t look too bad . . .

  Though it may be hard for you to believe, I often think of you . . . with shame, believe me. Maybe I’m ashamed of my fate. I often think of how my life could have been different. I had my big chance. But it came too soon (even though deep down I wanted it). It was that ill combination of youth and lack of experience, too much too soon . . . and too soon even to feel an immediate regret . . .

  As usual, I feel like I’m raving, but I’m sure you’ll read these lines carefully, because that’s what you’re like. And that’s enough for me, I couldn’t ask for anything more. I feel superior to those around me because I met you. Because I hold inside me the memory of your immense love. Because I was privileged. Because you’re my touchstone and I’m doomed to never be satisfied . . .

  I hope these words go some way toward describing the affection I have for you. For me it’s enough to know that you won’t throw them in the trash.

  With affection,

  p.

  13

  WHENEVER I RETURNED to the Spanish Quarter, my senses would become so overloaded with data that my nervous system had to urgently reacclimatize. Despite the oppressive, stormy sky, Monte San Rocco had landscapes like wide-angle photographs and an air so sweet you could eat it. But our neighborhood, thrown into perennial shadow by its very being, required a certain myopia, a nearsightedness that allowed you to focus only on the street slabs laid out one by one under your feet, thus blurring any peripheral distractions. Your ears had to relearn to discern different sounds, isolating the useful ones and blocking out others that were nothing but background noise. You had to remember how to breathe, shallowly so as not to be overwhelmed by the clashing odors that brought the air to life while spoiling it at the same time. However, the warmth of those streets, especially this time, I did find welcoming: it was like sinking back into an old armchair.

  We threw together a dinner. With our decrepit palace now gone, Pietro’s was the only rooftop. Our steps and the feet of the table left short-lived impressions in the tar like footprints in black sand. It was a lovely evening and the salty air made the ship lights flicker in the bay. Vesuvius was still there, a black abstraction against the unnaturally bright sky, but I tried not to look at it because, depending on the night, the volcano could make me feel uneasy, or euphoric, or simply insignificant and alone in the universe. It had done so, I realized, since I was sixteen years old.

  Angelo and Tonino came; Davide too. When Sonia turned up, she wasn’t alone. A tall young man was holding the small of her back and with the other hand gripping a store-bought bottle of wine. His honey-colored hair was swept rather dramatically to one side, as if he’d just come from a stroll along the waterfront. He wore a stylish corduroy jacket, the same color as his hair but a size too small. His smile revealed slightly crooked teeth, a flaw that only drew attention to his overall attractiveness.

  “This is Carlo.”

  “Ah, so you’re the ‘boys’ I’ve heard so much about?”

  Sonia was beaming. I watched her move around him, measuring how relaxed her gestures were, how broad her smile, in an effort to figure out how long they’d been together. My disappointment that she hadn’t said a word to me about Carlo was dulled by the selfish relief that I hadn’t left her to the wolves after all.

  I observed Carlo closely, wanting to like him. He quickly mingled, holding his glass of wine loosely, as though it were a cocktail, an attractive accessory that he could have done without. I overheard his exchanges with the others enough to tell that he had that clear and airy accent, with its warm and rounded vowels, that placed him in the upper reaches of the city—and of society.

  Soon we served dinner, which included an often-requested potato dish that frankly I’d made up. The wine broke everyone loose like the hours off a clockface, until once more it seemed, in spite of Luca’s glaring absence, that tomorrow would never come.

  At one point Carlo, an engineering student, told us about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which I only vaguely remembered from junior high school. He wove a tale of ferry crashes and deaths from decompression sickness, and of the chief engineer himself, Washington Roebling, who ended up having to supervise the bridge’s construction from a wheelchair in his apartment overlooking the East River. It was a captivating story that he’d undoubtedly rehearsed many times, given the well-timed pauses, the overdone American pronunciation, the theatrical inflexion.

  “Incredible, it sounds like a film noir,” said Sonia.

  “Yes, well, it does make quite an impression . . .”

  “Roebling’s true passion, though, was for rocks and minerals,” said Pietro, not in the deferential and subtle way he’d added to Luca’s story some time back, but as if to contradict the storyteller, maybe even humiliate him. It surprised me even more when he added, “In fact, if you ever go to Washington you’ll see that almost an entire floor of the Natural History Museum is dedicated to his collection.”

  Carlo forged an amused smile before looking away.

  Angelo said, “How awesome would it be to go to Brooklyn one day and hang out with the Hells Angels.”

  “Hang out? Are you off your fucking rocker?” said Tonino. “Yeah sure, you go there and tell them your name is Angel, then you’ll see how they welcome you with open arms. And spread-open legs.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Tonino.”

  “Actually, I believe they’re based in Manhattan,” said Carlo, shaking the honey mop off his forehead with a skillful jerk of the head. “Right, Eddie?”

  “Me? I’m not sure.”

  I’d hoped to stay out of the discussion, which highlighted my ignorance of my own country whereas the others seemed to know it so very well. Especially Pietro. And it wasn’t just his historical knowledge that astonished me but the fierce pride he’d pulled out like a rabbit out of a hat.

  I felt him caress me under the table. Later in bed, we would lie awake exchanging impressions of Sonia’s new love interest. Charming, I would say, perhaps trying a bit too hard. I could hardly wait to hear what Pietro thought: he could pick apart any character better than a screenplay critic. Afterward, I hoped, we’d make love before falling asleep in the gap between the mattresses, which caved in so easily under our weight that Pietro had named it “the crevasse.”

  I noticed his glass was empty, as was the bottle, so I nudged my still full glass toward his. Pietro said, “Ah, thank god for you. You’re like my own private stock of wine. My wine bank.”

  “Wine bank?” echoed Davide. “Where can I get me one of those?” He pulled out two joints and gave one to Angelo.

  Just then came Gabriele up onto the roof, flushed in the face and mad as hell—he was cursing under his breath—about the aerobic workout that those six flights of stairs always forced on him. Even short of breath, he managed to cut through the sticky air of the night to say, “Now just look at you all dining under the stars! If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought you were enjoying the stuffed pepper festival in Monte San Rocco.”

  “Monte what?” asked Carlo.

  I slid onto Pietro’s lap to give my chair to Gabriele, who took it without a word, scissoring his legs and pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his brow. Only then did he seem to take notice of Carlo and remember his manners. He leaned across the table to shake his hand, though with a clumsy and over-the-top grip that made it clear that, despite his flawless use of the third conditional tense, he was comp
letely trashed.

  “It’s a pleasure. Gabriele. Despite having been born in Schaffhausen, I have the misfortune of hailing from a tribe of Neanderthals in a site known as San Rocco Mountain.”

  For Pietro’s sake, I rose in defense of the village, praising its beauty. But from the corner of my eye I saw Sonia looking at me perplexed. I should have told her earlier that I’d gone to meet Pietro’s parents, that things were getting that serious. For her to find out like that, in front of everyone, would only have proved to her that it was too late for sharing secrets, perhaps on both sides.

  Gabriele wasn’t looking at me at all but at his brother, with eyes like two red-hot needles. It was surely the alcohol, I thought. Through clenched teeth Gabriele said, “I told you not to take her to the farm.”

  “Your brother’s right, Pie’,” said Davide, who also was from the Avellino area. “Why would you want to take her there? It’s boring as hell.”

  “No, he means my mother can sometimes be hard work, that’s all,” Pietro spelled out in what sounded like a sincere admission. So then why had he told me his mother was harmless? He hadn’t warned me and thus I’d turned up there completely ill-equipped.

  “Ah, southern Italian mothers,” cut in Carlo as if remembering the organoleptic qualities of a fine wine. “They’re just hopeless.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  Carlo explained, as engagingly as before, that the vice, or perhaps the duty, of any good southern Italian mamma was to put her son’s girlfriend to the test. He compared it to a rite of passage. But in the end, she was genetically programmed to be a mother hen and would inevitably take the girl under her wing as if she were her own daughter.

  “Mother hens?” said Sonia, laughing joyfully. “Is that what you’re calling women now?”

  “And how about for us dudes?” Tonino chimed in. “The test is even tougher with your girlfriend’s dad. He drills you so bad—do you have a job, what intentions do you have with my daughter?—that you hardly even feel like screwing anymore. And then he bores into you with that look, like he’s got x-ray vision and he’s trying to see how much money you have in your pocket or how big your balls are.”

  “You’re better off not having any balls at all,” said Davide.

  “Who do you think you’re kidding, Tonino?” Angelo shot back. “As if a girl had ever taken you home!”

  There was a peal of laughter as I leaned back against Pietro’s warm body. A rite of passage, so that’s all it had been. Not genuine dislike on his mother’s part (she barely even knew me) but a necessary trial, a time-honored tradition, which, now seen within the context of my anthropological studies, seemed simply a matter of course.

  “Meeting the parents already? Well, you guys don’t waste any time, do you?” said Angelo.

  They all began good-naturedly making a fuss over us, demanding to be shown engagement rings, urging us not to have babies out of wedlock, and insisting they be given a date for the wedding so that they could start thinking about the most seasonably appropriate suit and tie to wear.

  Every now and then Pietro’s leg lifted affectionately underneath me. He was unexpectedly submitting to the public banter, and even apparently enjoying it, something that gave me such intense pleasure that I had to lower my gaze. I hoped to avoid making eye contact just then not only with Sonia but with any of our friends, who were celebrating our love with as much noise and profanity as possible. I was afraid they would read in my eyes how happy I was about the turn my life had taken, wildly happy to the point of seeming ridiculous, and how fulfilled I was, so deeply fulfilled that our status as poor students and the uncertainty of our living situations just washed over me. My happiness was a betrayal and thus advertising it, I believed, would cause them pain, for if they looked at it for too long, if they saw it for what it truly was, in all its dazzling light, it would blind them. That’s how in love I was.

  “And for you, comrade, a nice army-green suit,” Angelo suggested, at which Tonino sneered.

  Gabriele said, “For all I know, our beloved parents would probably turn up in black.”

  “Gabrie’,” Pietro warned him under his breath. “Go make yourself a coffee.”

  “C’mon, let’s be honest, weddings are such pains in the ass,” said Davide. “Listening to cheesy music and pigging out all day long—”

  A loud popping stopped Davide from finishing his sentence; the rest of us stopped breathing. For a moment, the only thing moving in the air was the smoke of several cigarettes and joints uncoiling like charmed cobras toward the sky. Then there was another pop, followed by a scream.

  “It’s a shooting!” Angelo yelled.

  We sprang into action at the call of the Sicilian, who had to know a thing or two, shoving aside our chairs in a mad dash for the roof’s edge. Far below, the streets encircled our building like a moat. Jaundiced in the streetlights, they appeared empty and even uneventful, for once. Yet we could hear a swarm of motorbikes, the roar of their urgent departure, their skidding tires fading into the distance—surely a getaway. Maybe it had been a hit on a Camorra boss, or a kneecapping done to someone who’d overstepped his boundaries. Like the news journalists, we’d probably never find out. But, whatever the truth was, there was an undeniable thrill in being so very close to violence yet so safely removed from it at the same time.

  “Let them kill each other,” said Tonino. “It’s the best form of natural selection.”

  It seemed the drama was done and gone. For a while the boys stayed leaning over the wall chatting, with Carlo beside Pietro, who was pointing at something across the gulf. I turned back to the table to sit beside Sonia, who was watching them with a somewhat forlorn look.

  I said, “Well, Carlo is quite a catch. He’s friendly, outgoing.”

  “Yeah,” she replied with a sigh, “he’s really something.”

  It was strange, but at that angle I wasn’t so sure that Sonia was looking at Carlo and not at the lean silhouette that Pietro cut against the glow of the city. But it was a thought destined to remain formless, for in that very moment the divine lights of police helicopters came sweeping over us and the surrounding rooftops, but somewhat randomly and half-heartedly, as if they, too, knew there was going to be nothing to see.

  I was increasingly fascinated and perturbed by Madeleine, who, not unlike my adoptive city, eluded my every attempt to pin her down, to put her in a box. She didn’t spend much time at home, but sometimes walking in through the door she would join the rest of us, laughing and smoking merrily, while other times she would slam the door behind her and go straight to her room without so much as a hello. She was always willing to discuss architecture or politics with Gabriele, and in fact she could get quite fired up, whereas with me she would only engage in meaningless chitchat, looking at me all the while with an expression that was either curious, hostile, or maternal. With the summer finally here, Madeleine seemed to overheat easily, dressing more and more provocatively: however, some mornings, complaining of an imaginary cold spell, she’d put on a man’s oversize sweater and furiously ruffle her hair that was already disheveled from sleep, as if attempting to scribble all over her own image and make herself ugly. But she never managed to: no one in the world would have been able to resist Madeleine’s beauty and allure. Soon I learned to prepare for her mood swings according to the presence or absence of her boyfriend’s crash helmet. If Saverio’s helmet was sitting on the couch in the morning, that meant he’d slept over. If it was missing, that meant they’d had a fight and Madeleine would be sure to wake up in a foul mood.

  One morning when the helmet wasn’t there, I found Madeleine alert, her cigarette a straw to suck life through, her legs crossed skin on skin, a Japanese flip-flop kicking the void under the table. “Well, well, what do we have here?” she said in a voice that was at once mocking and seductive. “Miss America with her long hair so good-looking even in the morning. Or should we call you Miss Napoli?”

  That day she seemed consumed by a disconten
t that went beyond Saverio’s absence. I offered to make her a coffee. She accepted, becoming suddenly generous. She promised me that one day in return she would make me French liver and onions.

  “I look forward to it.” There was something about Madeleine that made you want to lie to her, even lie for her.

  I busied myself in the kitchen, but by the time I came back to the table with the steaming coffee, the tic of her flip-flop had stopped and Madeleine was covering her eyes with one hand, as though struck by a migraine.

  “Are you not feeling well?”

  “I’m fine. Really fine,” she said, but her voice had shattered into a thousand pieces.

  I stepped toward her the way one might approach an injured animal. Instinctively she lifted her hand to wave me away, and as she did so I could see that her eyes were bloodshot with the effort not to cry. That wild look on the brink of tears terrified me. I feared that behind it lay something deeply disturbing and unstoppable, a chaos I couldn’t handle. I tried to distract her, with coffee, with idle chatter. It worked.

  I wanted to understand Madeleine, perhaps even help her, but honestly I didn’t have the time. I needed to study. The summer session had just started and the first exam I had scheduled was in semiotics. Semiotics, the science of how we make meaning, was my favorite class; I’d even made it my minor. There was only a handful of us devoted to the subject, and in fact on the day of my final exam there were only two of us: me and my professor.

  It was obvious at first sight that Professor Benedetti was a genius—not from his politically inspired uniform of blue sneakers, blue jeans, and blue sweatshirt, but from his eyes, of the kind found only in comic books, two huge and possibly mad orbs that bulged dangerously and were held at bay only by thick lenses reinforced with black frames. Not only that, but he would often go off on a tangent, in a staccato Milanese accent, saying things like, “And it is in the number three that we find the magical power of human cognition, the audacity to put forward ideas that revolutionize our way of seeing the world!” This is more or less what he said during my exam, an instant before slapping the desk with rapture, making the pens jump and bursting into resounding laughter that made his two front teeth stick out.