It was my exam and I was meant to be the one speaking. I wanted to speak. I wanted to clear out my head, voice my tangled ideas regarding the nature of man, and speak in such a way that there was no longer disparity between my thoughts and my words. I wanted to feel brilliant, a genius like Benedetti or Signorelli, to possess their unshakable faith in academic knowledge. But I just couldn’t. These were not questions to answer but a flood of words in which I struggled to stay afloat.
It was only when Benedetti came out with the term “thirdness” that I managed to get a word in edgewise. Although it was clear that it took a concerted effort on my professor’s part to not interrupt me, he didn’t. From thirdness, I shifted easily into the concepts of secondness and firstness, adding that I’d read somewhere that philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce had extended his idea of the triad to the first, second, and third personal pronouns: I, thou, and it.
“Are we still drawn to proper linguistics, signorina?” he said with malicious pleasure, his eyes protruding.
“Well, pronouns are simply fascinating. There’s no power game quite like dialogue.”
Benedetti dove into another convoluted speech, cutting it short only when he caught a glimpse of the clock—he commuted from Milan and no doubt had a train to catch. He simply asked me if I’d thought about what subject I wanted to do my thesis in. “I’d imagine you have an inclination toward the field of semiotics. Why don’t you think about it over the summer and get back to me?” I stood to take my professor’s outstretched hand, and he pumped mine with indelicate vigor. Only then did he remember my blue exam booklet, signing it with a mad flourish. “Ah, so many formalities! But one must still follow procedure even while preparing the revolution!”
No, I wasn’t a genius, but I had just received a full score. I walked in a happy daze back home, where I found the icing on the cake: a letter from America. Barbara was suggesting we meet at the end of the summer in the Cyclades, but before booking their flights she and my dad wanted to know what dates best suited me—actually, best suited the two of us.
14
STRAIGHT AFTER my semiotics exam, I began preparing for my history of the theater exam. One thing was becoming increasingly clear: the importance of getting a degree. I realized that a degree wasn’t the castle in the sky I’d always imagined it to be but, as Luca had so unexpectedly described it that time in the study hall, a very real parchment of great value to society. Once again Luca had proven himself right. That degree was the key to all our dreams. And I was becoming aware of just how sound and gratifying the steps required to achieve it might be—collecting signatures in my exam booklet, choosing a professor and a topic for my thesis, writing it, presenting it—basically, the procedure that Benedetti had referred to.
So then why was it that the city seemed to thwart my efforts to follow procedure? The more peace and quiet I needed, the more fits my neighborhood threw, and these weren’t limited to the lewd daily arguments in the courtyard, which appeared to have something to do with water. For the residents of the Spanish Quarter, shouting was speaking. The auditory intimacy was constant. Even in that little death of the siesta, you could hear forks pecking at plates and soap opera actors divulging to all the neighbors the awful truth about a will, a gun, an identical twin—melodramatic laments that could hardly be distinguished from the real ones coming from Madeleine’s room, whenever she locked herself in there to cry.
The garbage collectors went on strike yet again. The piled-up bags were promptly disemboweled and our neighbors’ deepest secrets dragged across the cobblestones. Sanitary pads, chicken bones, overdue bills. The alleyways of the Quartieri were clogged with trash and the streets of the city center with cars. The traffic lights were often out of order, but even when they were working, people would drive through red lights all the same. It was as if Naples were spitting on my semiological studies, as if it had grasped well before Peirce and de Saussure, perhaps way back in ancient times, that the rules of the game were essentially arbitrary and therefore entirely unworthy of respect.
In stark contrast to all that chaos was the quiet, dignified homeless man on Via Roma. Once when I came by to bring him breakfast, I didn’t see him but a crowd gathered around. Squeezing through, I could see what the attraction was. Two puppies, probably only days old, were wriggling on the soiled blanket spread out on the ground. I hadn’t even realized his mutt was a female, let alone pregnant.
A little girl grabbed one of the puppies, who squirmed in her arms, showing its swollen, hairless belly. “This one got a name?”
“This one boy,” replied the man. “This one girl.”
His face had gone scrunched like paper from all the smiling. People were handing him money, and plenty of it, which he simply clutched between his grimy fingers as though not sure what to do with it. I crouched to stroke the other pup, picking up its sweet-and-sour smell of milk and urine. I gave the proud owner my last few coins before leaving him to his adoring crowd.
We had just turned off the lights one night in bed when I asked Pietro if he wanted to adopt a dog. Perhaps more than a dog, I longed for another being on which to unload some of the emotion overflowing from the two of us, to distribute it more equally and thus make bearable a love that at times seemed unbearable in its intensity.
“I already have a dog,” answered Pietro. “In Monte San Rocco.” Apparently, Gesualdo slept in the tractor shed and was often gone, sometimes for days at a time: that’s why I’d missed him. “But I’d like a real dog,” he confessed. “One we can let sleep on the bed, take for walks in the forest. Or in the rain forest in Costa Rica.”
“Or on a beach in Thailand.” I let out a resigned sigh. “I know, I know. It would be too hard to have a dog in Naples.”
“Not hard, baby. Impossible. Everything about Naples is impossible.”
We were running the risk of slipping into that same old discussion about the lawlessness of the city, with the same old adjectives. And yet that night, as the neighbors yelled themselves hoarse even in the dark, I couldn’t muster the will to side with Naples, to jump to its defense and save it yet again. Let them sling mud at it, I thought for an instant.
“Anyway, I have to go back to Monte San Rocco soon. For almost a month this time.”
“For the olives, for the harvest?” I questioned him anxiously. “You harvest crops in the summer, right?”
But that wasn’t it, not exactly. He explained to me that, in order to pass his hydrogeology exam, he had to carry out surveys of the underground water sources—and the best place to do it was his hometown because he could get easy access to the locals’ land. “I know practically every man, woman, and donkey in the place. And I’m distantly related to half of them. Not the donkeys, though.”
I was heartbroken but I tried to laugh—and to be reasonable. Summer took away all my friends. Tonino had already left, without attempting a single exam. Usually I would leave too, for DC, to work in a coffee shop or restaurant and save up for my ticket back to Naples. An open ticket, a ticket of unknown return. But this time my dad and Barbara had already booked their flights to Athens for the end of July: all Pietro and I had to do was book our own passage. I had no doubt that we’d find room on the ferry as soon as Pietro raised the subject with his parents.
My apprehension, however, only eased when Pietro slid farther under the covers to tell me in a gravelly voice, “It’s only a month separating us . . . and it’s only a few little hills. But for you I would cross mountains, on foot if I had to. I’d cross them barefoot in the snow; I’d eat jackrabbits and crows to survive.”
“Don’t stop,” I whispered.
“I’d cross oceans for you, even clinging to a raft. I’d use my T-shirt as a sail; I’d eat mussels and other shit like that.” We started laughing. “Seriously . . . I’d happily do it, even if it took me five years, as long as I knew you’d be waiting for me on the other side.”
Before he left, we were able to fit in an excursion, starting from Mamma Rita’s hou
se. She treated Pietro just as I’d expected, like another stray to feed. She didn’t give us the usual parental advice—her own turbulent love life offered a roller coaster of emotions but no pearls of wisdom—yet I could tell that it gave her peace of mind to see me finally settled with a nice young man. Besides, Rita had already advised me so wisely in most other areas of life. She’d taught me as a teenager how to iron a man’s shirt, how to clean a boiled octopus, how to fake the samba in a Sorrento piano bar. She was used to my disappearing acts, tolerating them philosophically like my mom did, so she didn’t appear disappointed that we stayed only one night, continuing farther down the Sorrento peninsula the next morning.
I took Pietro to a beach I’d been introduced to, way back when by the Castellammare gang, a gem known by the locals as la Regina Giovanna. Sonia and Carlo met us at the local train station in Sorrento. From there we walked a long distance before passing through an olive grove, which later in the season would turn into an unsightly parking lot. But for now our only companions were the birds. Now and then out of the corner of my eye I would look over at Naples. A brown layer of smog rose off it, as though seeing us in such a faraway and idyllic spot made it choke with envy. This gave me an unanticipated twinge of remorse.
“Once I ate an olive straight off a tree,” I said. “It was so bitter I had to spit it out.”
“I bet you did,” said Pietro, giving my ponytail a tug.
A dirt path began our descent toward the beach. The shade ended, the air became laced with salt. We walked in single file under the high sun until we came to the ruins of the Roman villa the beach was named after.
“There’s hardly anything left of it,” said Carlo. “It looks like just a pile of rocks. I have my doubts about the whole Roman claim . . .”
“Well, if you don’t know, Carlo,” said Pietro, “and you’re supposed to be the engineer.”
Pietro enjoyed taking little stabs at Carlo. He took offense at his upper-crust, know-it-all attitude. He would say, “All that guy’s missing is the French r.” And even I had to admit that when Carlo teased Sonia about her origins, as he was doing now by saying that Sardinia’s entire cultural patrimony was a few megalithic mounds of boulders, it wasn’t done with the same light touch as Angelo’s.
“Nuraghi and sheep. Is that all you have?”
Sonia’s reaction was to hit him with her rolled-up towel. “Watch out, mister, or I won’t be taking you there this summer.”
“Actually, the ferry will be taking me there, not you.”
“Very funny!”
She hit him again and they both ran ahead of us, laughing. Pietro and I looked at each other in shock. Obviously I wasn’t the only one putting myself through the rite of “going to the village.” However, it seemed that for Sonia and Carlo it was no big deal. I didn’t know whether to envy their flippant attitude because I would have liked to have it myself, or frown upon it because it made light of my difficult experience or suggested that their relationship came close to ours in intensity or commitment. Either way, I became suddenly afraid of how we might stack up against them.
Soon we were at the beach, a layered cake of dark rock tipping into the sea. Avoiding the cracks, we chose a smooth spot and changed into our bathing suits under our clothes. The stone, having gorged on sun all morning, quickly warmed up our flattened towels. Carlo was dressed first and dove into the sea with a showy splash. Resurfacing, he howled. The water was freezing, he warned us, shaking the hair off his forehead with a flick of the head. Sonia, on the other hand, sat down on the edge of the rock gingerly dipping her feet in.
“Should we go in too?”
“Let me have a smoke first,” Pietro answered. “You know, warm up a bit.”
There was something about the solemn way Pietro lit up, cradling his pale knees and staring skeptically at the sea, that made me think I’d made a mistake to drag him there. What was the point of making this trek? But he immediately settled my fears, stroking my tanned feet (he called me his Cherokee princess) and telling me it was a beautiful spot. Then he turned back to the water, squinting into the sun.
“Look at the two of them playing,” he said.
Sonia was in the water now, squealing joyfully as she swam away from Carlo the great white, who was splashing and frothing the water all around them.
“They look happy.”
“I’m telling you, Heddi, it’s not going to last.”
“How can you tell if a relationship is going to last?”
“You and me, baby. That’s the standard I go by.”
In the end he’d been the one to make the comparison, and they hadn’t stood a chance. I pulled out my Minolta and focused in on the salt crystals, remnants of a stormier season, threading through the black grooves all the way down to the sea. I took a picture of Pietro in profile with a cigarette pressed between his lips, the Marlboro man in the flesh. It was a face I could never really get used to. As I looked at him, though, a doubt began to nag me. Wasn’t that tone of voice, which I’d thought sounded so reassuring—it won’t last—actually one of paternal sternness? He’d used an authoritative and contemptuous tone that was ill-suited to him and that now, combined with that somber smoker’s expression, all at once unsettled me.
Sonia came back toward us, breathless. “It’s so cold, but it’s lovely and clean.”
Her long braids dripping with seawater, she lay down on her towel, followed shortly by Carlo, who flopped himself down beside her. I called them by name. The moment they spun around, I snapped their picture, their faces glowing with the pleasurable shock of being captured. Lying again on her back, Sonia gladly subjected herself to Carlo’s tickles, though he did go a bit overboard. Surely Pietro was wrong about them.
“What are you guys waiting for?” said Carlo. “Scared of the cold? If it’s not cold, it’s not the first swim of the summer.”
“And probably my last, with my luck,” Pietro muttered as he put out his cigarette on the rock. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
I looked at him, puzzled. What did he mean by his last swim?
“Well, there are no beaches in Monte San Rocco,” he said and, as if to make amends, he kissed me almost passionately, in a place that was almost public, behind the back of a couple that was almost—but nothing—like us.
“What, you’re not going to go to the beach later on, in Greece?” I asked him.
“I sure am. In my mind, it’s a done deal.” His parents’ consent, he believed, was a given.
I jumped to my feet from joy. Greece would most certainly justify our three long weeks apart; Greece would remedy everything. The black slab burned my feet as I dragged Pietro toward the sea.
“The water’s fantastic . . . if you don’t have a heart condition!” shouted Carlo behind us.
I did have a heart condition, I thought to myself, but if there was a cure I didn’t want it. Just as Sonia had, I sat on the rock to test my feet, white and foreign in the icy water, so cold in fact it took all my courage to jump in.
“Can you touch the bottom?” Pietro called out to me from the edge.
I was so breathless from the thermal shock that I could only shake my head in response.
“Looks like the Arctic Sea. No, thanks, I’ll stay right here.”
I dived under the water and came up near him. “It feels warmer now.”
“Don’t insist, please. I’m not coming in.” He didn’t say anything more until I clambered up the rocks and, back on my towel, the molten lava of my blood spread all through my veins. “Listen, baby,” he said in a whisper that could barely be heard over the gently lapping waves. “I’ve lived my whole life landlocked. I was born in the mountains. I grew up in the hills. A couple of times me and Gabriele splashed around in a creek when we were little. That’s all.”
“Very picturesque.”
“You don’t get it.” His voice was so faint against the sucking sound of the retreating sea that I almost had to lip-read when he finally said, “I can’t swim, Heddi.
If I jump in there, I’ll sink to the bottom. Like a rock.”
After Pietro left, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was standing on the very top of the island of Ischia, a peak as pointy as the ones in cartoons and just as risk-free. The view of the Gulf of Naples wrapped itself around me, a silk scarf textured in sunlight and ruffled by the wind. There were boats off shore and, farther in the distance, the islands of Capri and Procida.
I lifted my camera to trap all that beauty into a square. It was through the viewfinder that I saw the volcano. How had I not seen it before? Maybe I’d forgotten it was there. I lowered my camera to see the sky boiling with clouds. No, not clouds. Vesuvius was spewing out billows of charcoal that were rubbing out the sky, in the rough way that an eraser smudged in lead smears, rips, and ruins a masterpiece.
I realized the spot I was in was far too exposed. I had to get down, but my feet wouldn’t move. I could do nothing but rationalize my inertia: I told myself that I was in a safe place, on the other side of the bay, with a camera shielding me from reality. But deep down I knew that staying up there, frozen in awe, was the worst thing I could do, and that watching that destruction was neither safe nor smart nor logical but driven only by a lack of willpower. Because that act of the volcano, cruel but also undeniably fascinating, was a spectacle my eyes wanted so badly to watch, and I just couldn’t say no.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: April 12
Dear Pietro,
I haven’t thrown your words in the trash. Actually, I’ve reread them again and again: they move me, confuse me, intrigue me. Now, if you feel like it, I’ll tell you a story too . . .
Do you really want to know why I came to New Zealand? It was because of you, because of that phone call. The reception was poor and your voice sounded metallic, almost robotic, as you said those unthinkable, unbearable words. It was like something out of a nightmare. I don’t remember how I answered. Did I plead with you? No, I don’t want to know.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 14
