Afterward I thought I was dying. I wanted to die: not to take my life but just disappear so that I no longer had a body capable of such physical suffering. The pain in my stomach was excruciating; I got my period for the second time in the same month and two cold sores around my mouth. My tears were so hot they burned, and they never ran dry. In fact, they carved grooves to create a free flow for all the tears I’d saved up over those many years of happiness in my life.
My dad thought I was going to starve to death, so one afternoon he knocked on the door holding one of those fruit shakes he used to make me when I was little: “tiger milk” he called it. I took a sip only because I was afraid to disappoint him. I hadn’t wanted to tell you till now, but my dad no longer even wants to hear your name mentioned.
I was ashamed of the state I was in, and the compassion of my family and old friends only made things worse. So I did what I’ve always been so good at: I packed my bags. I made a list of three countries I could escape to—far from you, but also far from me. The first two were Korea and Japan, places where I knew I could find a job as a native English speaker. Number three was New Zealand. (Maybe I didn’t tell you that Snežana’s brother, Ivan, had moved to Auckland some time back.) This time I didn’t need Snežana’s advice to cross off my first two choices and go with the least sensible of them all.
Other than Ivan, I didn’t know anyone here. All the better, because that way I didn’t have to talk about myself or about what was ultimately, in this great wide world, just a minor personal tragedy. Plus, every word required great effort: I’d used up my last strength just to make the never-ending flight, get to Ivan’s house, and put my meager suitcase in a corner. From then on I just let things happen to me, without putting up the least resistance. That’s how I found myself being shipped off, only two days later, on a trip around the North Island with three perfect strangers (just one of them was a friend of Ivan’s), who had planned a road trip complete with bungee jumping, white-water rafting, and rock climbing, the real kind with ropes and carabiners.
Among them, I felt like a complete klutz, but these three weren’t just extreme sport enthusiasts but instructors, so they were used to people not knowing what to do and lacking confidence. They made me do all their insane activities and they taught me, of all things, wilderness survival skills. How to dry your wet clothes in the bottom of your sleeping bag. How to cook, in a single tin cup over a little gas stove, a complete and nutritious meal. I discovered that hiking makes you hungry, ravenously hungry, and that the body wants to live even if the soul doesn’t. It was the beginning of a passion for camping and the wilderness that I’ve since been able to share with my parents and brother when they’ve come to visit me (twice now, the second time with my brother’s girlfriend, a girl from Trieste). It was also the moment in which I began rediscovering some of life’s small pleasures (or rather, small satisfactions). I’ll always be grateful to those three crackpots.
I don’t know why I’m going on like this at this hour of the night. I guess maybe I’m just talking to you like I used to. But I realize you’re on the other side of the world and I’m even in a different hemisphere, a different season.
Is it night there as you read these lines? Is Gabriele there with you? I’d love to hear from him again. I’ve lost touch with almost everyone. The only one I’ve been in contact with over the years is Luca, right after his mother died. I could write to him now, just to say hi. I’m not sure why I haven’t.
h.
15
THAT MORNING when the bus pulled into Borgo Alto with an exhalation of relief, Pietro was already waiting for me with his hands shoved into his pockets, trying to bury a smile. Neither of us could speak, and all we could do as we made our way to the car was clutch each other’s hands, making a single tight fist to contain the surge of emotion. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him as he carried my bag over his shoulder, but when I finally managed to look away, I could feel him stealing glances at me, his eyes boring into me.
“Hop in, baby. Today I’m going to take you to see everything.”
I remembered that car, whose door he was now opening for me, the white car he’d swapped with the tractor the day of the Great Flood. As soon as he started it up, I reached out to stroke the back of his neck: it was on the verge of sweating. We followed the creases of the land until they flattened into a highway.
“I don’t remember going this way.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” was all he said.
There was a factory up ahead. We took the exit and turned off into a parking lot in the shadow of three or four chimney stacks. He turned off the engine. There wasn’t a soul, only weeds breaking through the concrete. Pietro told me that at one time the factory had produced steel; it used to provide a lot of jobs but it had been abandoned some time ago now.
We got out and followed a path lined with dry grass that prickled my ankles. When we reached a thicket, Pietro stopped and held my face like a cup to drink from. He kissed me gently, with the confident patience of a classic first kiss that was so unlike our own. How sweet it was to finally be alone with him. In the lacy shade, the smell of fir trees blended with his aftershave, the lattice of branches with his dark curls.
“You’re the air I breathe,” he whispered, “the water I drink.”
He led me by the hand to a clearing. The cicadas were wound up by the heat; every now and then a bird let out a frantic little cry. I hadn’t left the narrow streets of Naples in weeks so I didn’t mind that this strip of parched land that passed itself off as wilderness bordered a derelict factory.
“Watch out for the vipers.” I came to a sudden stop and spun around, to Pietro’s great amusement. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. I know every boulder and tussock in this area.” It was here, he explained, that he’d been coming to carry out his surveys. He would dig, observe, measure, and then sit down with a cigarette to sketch the data onto a map. “That tree over there gives particularly good shade. Come on.”
Under the “good tree” I soon forgot about the snakes and let myself be carried away by Pietro’s enthusiasm. As he talked about the fractured aquifers of the Apennines, I studied his tanned face, sparkling eyes, and hair lightened by the sun just like in the childhood picture he’d given me. Seeing him in such good form was electrifying. I said, “Thank goodness your assignment hasn’t been a pain after all.”
“Well, maybe it has a little, but what I like is getting out in the countryside—on my own, away from our land, from my parents. Out here I feel like Tarzan.” He pounded his chest. “Actually, I’m thinking of doing my thesis in hydrogeology.”
“But you’re passionate about oil. Or have you changed your mind?”
“No way. I can still get into the oil industry later. Who’s to say I won’t be the next JR?” he said, laughing soundlessly. “But, unlike you linguists, to do our thesis we have to get out in the field, get our hands dirty. If I did a thesis in petroleum geology, it could take me anywhere. But if I do it in hydrogeology, I could easily do all the surveys in and around Monte San Rocco.”
With a pebble I began scratching the baked earth. How was it possible for a thesis in hydrogeology to lead to a career in petroleum geology, for water to turn into oil? And how could a little town in the middle of Irpinia be the springboard for the great wide world awaiting us? I scratched and scratched, and still it seemed as illogical as a math riddle.
“I just don’t know if I can stand being away from you any longer, Pietro. I’ll lose my mind.”
“And I won’t?” He missed me, he said, from the instant his mother woke him up in the morning barking his name, till the night when he fell bone-tired onto the bed. A couple of times he’d found a strand of my hair stuck on his clothes and saved it between the pages of a book or in an empty cigarette packet. As he told me this, I could tell the confession cost him some dignity. “That’s why I want to get my thesis over with as quickly as possible. Then all I’ll have left to figure out is what the hell to do about th
e military service.”
That statement was a slap that pushed me backward onto the brittle grass. More than ever, the military seemed criminal, an invention devised solely for human suffering. If a couple weeks of separation had been this painful, then what was a year meant to feel like? There had to be a way out. There just had to.
We discussed it at length; Pietro went through three straight cigarettes. We left no stone unturned, taking into consideration any solution. Applying for a passport and fleeing abroad before they drafted him. Pretending to be gay and therefore exempt. Faking a sickness, perhaps a mental illness. And, for a while, manic depression did seem like the answer to all our problems. But it didn’t take us long to realize that all our ideas would have serious consequences for future job opportunities, even legal consequences. We were both incurably law-abiding and grimly in the best of health, physically and psychologically.
“Or I could do the civilian service.”
“But what’s the point of that?” I objected. “You’d only be doing more time.”
“OK, but,” Pietro said, not in the least discouraged, “you could come visit me more easily than in the barracks. I could request to be stationed nearby, maybe in the province of Naples. That way it would only take a short drive or a train ride to see each other every weekend.” Without faltering, he’d come out with a plan that couldn’t be argued with, and in such detail that I could see it wasn’t the first time he’d entertained the idea. Perhaps it was that secretive scheming that wounded me more than the suggestion itself. He said with the same peppy resolve that in the meantime we could start getting organized properly: résumés, flights, job research, and so on. “Then, I swear, the very day I’m discharged, it’s sayonara, goodbye, fancul’!”
Again I took up my useless calculations in the dust. I was drained, my mouth was dry; I could practically taste the aridness of that vast land, which reduced us to two tiny dots in a clearing. Tucking my hair behind my ears, Pietro began kissing me and murmuring “baby, baby,” before singing the chorus from “Wild Horses,” with a touch of embarrassment.
I let out a sigh. He understood those lyrics perfectly well—and he was right. Nothing could keep us apart: not wild horses, not even time itself. What was a year and a half for us? Nothing. I felt his hand under my dress, a vine tightening around my bare thigh and climbing its way up. I said, “What are you waiting for?”
“What, here?”
“No one’s around.”
“We can’t . . . the vipers.” He pulled me up. “Come with me.”
We went back to the car, parked on the border between a wasteland and so-called civilization. We made love in the front passenger’s seat, the breathing and the creaking masked by the hum of the highway. We were a little afraid. Afraid of being seen, perhaps by a poor unemployed soul who’d decided to go for a tearful walk around his former workplace. Afraid of making a mess of his parents’ car, of breaking something. But we didn’t stop our lovemaking as we gripped each other in that tight space full of hard edges. In fact, our fears only increased our pleasure, for, though we were already adults, we were experiencing a moment of teenage desperation that soon we wouldn’t have to have—or get to have—ever again.
Pietro drove up and down hills that might have looked familiar had their greens not been repainted in duller, earthier tones, fields plagued by the sun and yanked this way and that way by the wind. Pietro was a man on a mission. He pulled up casually beside a fig tree, perhaps another good tree of his, and had me sit in its fat shade. From there we had a good view of the surrounding countryside.
Pietro was organized. He’d slipped two sandwiches into his backpack, evidently knowing all along that we weren’t going to make it to his parents’ by lunchtime. He handed me one before uncorking a bottle of his family’s wine. Pietro always said that real wine was red (and that it kept the doctor away), but in this heat even he admitted that white was the only thing to drink. Indeed, it was light and, paired with the spicy salami and tough bread, it tasted like rotten fruit and wood.
“This land,” he said, “belongs to my family.”
I scanned the fields (wheat, I presumed), unsure how far to zoom out. And that wasn’t all, he said. There was another piece of land a half an hour’s drive from there, and then of course the land in Puglia, plus an olive grove, a vineyard, a pasture near the house . . . So it was true, I realized, that his family had hoarded random bits of land, but then why did he feel the need to list them all to me? I thought I understood why only when Pietro told me that one was in his name.
“Geologist, cook, and now landowner,” I joked, but he remained serious.
When he finished his degree, he explained, the fields before us too would be his. Eventually all the family land would go to him.
“What, doesn’t Gabriele count?”
“Don’t you worry, Gabriele will get a big pile of cash, when and if he decides to graduate. But he doesn’t want anything to do with the land.” As for Vittorio, he’d given up every claim years ago when he made his escape.
We both sat there looking out over the wheat, gnawing at the bread that may even have come from it. I began to ponder this puzzling new concept, inheritance, struggling to see the equity in how it would be shared out among the three sons. One would get a lump sum, another nothing, and the last a place.
“But what are you going to do with all this land?”
“Well, if I kept the farm running, it would be quite profitable. But obviously that’s not going to happen. There’s no chance in hell.” He took a swig, then a bite. “Do you know how much this land is worth altogether? Hundreds of millions of lire, maybe a billion.”
“So . . . I don’t get it, your parents are well off?”
“On paper they are. But in their heads they’re as poor as the day they came into this world. They’re still living the life of hardship they led fifty years ago. They grow their own vegetables, make their own pasta. Nothing’s wasted. When their clothes get old, heaven forbid they throw them away: no, they patch them up and keep on wearing them until they’re hanging off them like rags.” Though he’d said all this with contempt, he now turned to me with a mischievous smile. “No, you know what I’m going to do with the land?”
“No, what?”
“Sell it.”
I gazed at the squares of crops swelling and deflating in the wind, as endless and restless as a patchwork blanket tossed over a sleeping giant. “And what are your parents going to say?”
“What can they say?” According to Pietro, the land was never meant for them but for their children, to give them a better life. The world was a different place; these days there were many more ways to earn a living other than working the land. “What do they think Gabriele and I are getting an education for anyway?”
“For the heck of it,” I said dryly, handing him the rest of my sandwich. It was too hot to eat much.
“It’s peasant food, I know . . . One day I’ll be able to take you out to dinner as often as you like. I’ll order you Montepulciano wine, ostrich steaks, caviar—whatever the hell that is anyway. You won’t want for anything.”
“Don’t give me ostrich and caviar. Just give me you.”
Money had never made an impression on me. Growing up I’d proudly worn my brother’s hand-me-downs and gladly ridden in that rusty car of ours with the broken heater. Although we’d traveled to Jamaica and Mexico, it was always on a shoestring, sleeping not in hotel beds but on mattresses thrown on the floor in locals’ homes. And yet, upon discovering that my lover—a boy from the provinces who owned only five shirts and a prospecting pick—was, as it turns out, a rich man, a great burden was lifted off me, one that I wasn’t even aware I’d been carrying since I was a child. The burden of precariousness: the many new rental homes and new schools, the many failed businesses and failed marriages. Pietro and I, on the other hand, wouldn’t have to pay the price for all that freedom. We could have our cake and eat it too. Yes, I had to admit to myself, not without
shame, that I was happy that money had come into play. Incredibly happy.
“Well then, you can afford a trip to Greece,” I said with a smile that held nothing back.
Pietro smiled, too, a wide smile showing all his teeth. “My father has already agreed: we’ll have your parents as chaperones, after all. So it’s just a matter of time before my mother gives in.”
I was on cloud nine. I had the sensation of being so unencumbered, in fact, that I could glide across those fields roasting in the sun to the spot Pietro was pointing to in the distance, a little white building with a tile roof. That, he said, was the church his grandfather had built, along with the rest of the community, using stones from the river below that they hauled up the hill with wheelbarrows. And their bare hands.
“I’ll take you there now,” he said, standing up.
All afternoon we doodled the hills with that little car, taking the most roundabout route possible toward Monte San Rocco. Now and again I asked him to pull over so I could shoot close-ups of the stalks of wheat lit like flaming torches by the low sun. Pietro drove me to the town where, as a teenager, he’d hung out with the wrong crowd. He showed me the field where years before Gabriele had thrown a snowball at him. The snow had begun to melt in the center of that well-compressed sphere so that by the time the ball hit him it had become a chunk of ice—but as Pietro’s blood stained the snow like red wine christens a Sunday tablecloth, it was Gabriele who cried. Pietro pointed to a village teetering on a hilltop, a place thought to bring such misfortune that it couldn’t even be named. Just hearing the name would set off among the locals a superstitious sequence of ball-scratching and horn gestures. Once in the town, he told me, your footsteps echoed in the deserted streets, an unexpected pitter-patter that brought silent, ancient women to their doorways like the way rain brings out the worms.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 15
