Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  But then finally Pietro took his hand off the steering wheel to wave to an old man, and I recognized the spot: the road leading up to the center of Monte San Rocco. A defiant lump rose up in my throat. I wasn’t at all ready to face his mother; I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to say or do. The only thing I’d done to prepare for the encounter had been getting her a gift: a silk shawl, in subtle creams fading into brown, as delicate as a moth’s wing, which I’d bought on impulse in a street market in Naples. Pietro had suggested giving it to her nonchalantly, so as not to embarrass her. But now it seemed so absurd to give his mother something I knew she would never wear.

  Pietro, so good at reading my mind, placed a reassuring hand on my thigh. “Don’t worry, we’re not going home yet. I want to take you to the town café. Are you up for it?”

  I nodded vigorously.

  “To be honest,” he said, parking the car, “I can’t wait to walk in there with you looking so tan and gorgeous in that dress, and show them once and for all what losers they are. I hope they die of envy.”

  Pietro nodded at the pudgy man at the entrance to the café, a secret code that slipped us into its cavelike interior. I felt the man’s sweaty gaze trail over me with approval as Pietro ordered us coffees in dialect, gripping hands with the barista. All around, men were scrummed over tables, smoking, drinking, playing scopa. Other than the Virgin Mary, I was the only female. As we drank our coffee, black eyes pierced the veil of smoke to grope me, making no effort to turn away, no attempt to behave, no comment. Those men not only wanted me, they wanted to be Pietro. More tangibly than ever I grasped the abyss there was between him and his fellow villagers. Philosophically, emotionally, mentally—in every way, Pietro didn’t belong. He wasn’t even born there.

  It was obvious from Pietro’s expression that we’d achieved the desired result, and I shared in his satisfaction. Setting his cup down on the bar, he turned to me to say, “It’s getting late. We should get going.”

  “Already?” The place was a wolf lair but still my heart sank.

  “Otherwise my mother will think we’ve gone to Las Vegas to elope.”

  Elope? His parents still didn’t even know we were living together.

  16

  AS WE PULLED UP to Pietro’s house, I tried to hold on to the lightness of being our afternoon had given me. But it was like holding on to a new spiritual resolve once you’ve exited a church: it trickled out of me with every step I took toward the house, until at the front door there was nothing left.

  “Gabriele,” I almost sang out. He was standing there in the doorway like a copy and paste in the middle of nowhere, and I could have fallen into his arms with gratitude.

  “Hey, Gabrie’,” Pietro said, stepping inside, with a voice as flat as the TV in the background. “Where’s Mamma?”

  She materialized from the dark of the corridor, wiping her hands on her apron. I kissed her. “Buonasera, signora.” Her first name was Lidia.

  “Was your bus late?”

  Fortunately Pietro answered for me. “Mamma, after picking her up I ran a few errands.” I had to suppress a smile thinking of our errand in the passenger seat of her car. It was a memory I jealously guarded in the rawness under my dress.

  When Pietro’s father, Ernesto, called him outside, I fished into my bag for the shawl. Lidia took the gift listlessly, mumbling, “What, for your head?”

  Gabriele rolled his eyes. She’s just depressed, I tried to remind myself. Through the window I spotted Pietro maneuvering the tractor to park it in the shed. Overlapping the thunder of the machine was the growl of a dog, dressed in an old brown coat like a hermit. It had to be Gesualdo, the dog who wasn’t a real dog.

  Turning back around, I noticed that I’d been left on my own in the kitchen. I felt at a loss, no longer capable of relishing my solitude. I didn’t know what to do with myself: wait for Pietro or join Gabriele, who had withdrawn into the darkest room of the house, his stark yet refined profile sketched by the light of the TV. He was right there, only a few steps away, but I didn’t go to him.

  However, at dinner that evening everything felt different, despite the television forever switched on. The sun was a candle that refused to burn out. It was almost warm. But the most remarkable difference was the presence of a conversation—a political debate no less, initiated by Gabriele.

  “Whoever goes to live abroad soon realizes that the rest of the world sees us as such,” he said in a big voice, his face flushed as he neglected his plate of fusilli. “We’re all just doggone Italians. Those subtle cultural differences that we debate within the country mean nothing to everybody else, yet still we carry on about Padania, Sicily, Sardinia . . . Have we forgotten that Italy has been unified since 1871?”

  “Gabrie’, you’re always going on about culture and history. But what does that have to do with anything here?” replied Pietro. “There’s only one factor: money. It’s a purely economic issue. In the north they don’t want to cough up the cash if Rome is just going to pocket it. Period.”

  “Up there in Switzerland I once met this Friulian,” interjected their father through a mouthful, adding something that sounded like, “I couldn’t understand a darn thing.”

  “Papà, he probably didn’t understand a word in your dialect either,” said Gabriele in slow motion before turning back to Pietro. “I’m not much of a nationalist, as you are well aware. But how can we sit by and watch a harebrained secessionist like Bossi become no less than a senator claiming to be a spokesperson for the entire northern population?”

  Their mother got up from the table. “Who wants more pasta?”

  It was more of an accusation than an offer, but it was just the breach in the discussion I was looking for to say—given my exasperating tendency toward decorum—that the pasta was delicious. Gabriele waved his mother’s ladle away with irritation, while Pietro and his father let her refill their plates without even looking up. Upon seeing mine, still full with the inhuman portion I’d been given, his mother knit her brow and sat back down with a flicker of impatience. How long was this initiation meant to last?

  “But, etymologically speaking, Padania is a very recent term,” Gabriele began again. “Invented, I dare say.”

  I watched as Lidia, with that hankie on her head, ate her own pasta joylessly, staring into her plate as though to block out all that carrying-on of the men. Of the youth. I stole a glance at her as she wiped her lips with the shriveled skin on the back of her hand. There was something in that gesture that triggered a wave of compassion in me. Were we really about to take away much of the land she’d grown old for?

  I nudged my nearly intact glass of wine toward Pietro and he gave me a private wink for being his wine bank. I could tell he was starting to lose patience with his brother, who was displaying a moral indignance modeled on the high-brow parlance of Posillipo and intensified by the alcohol. In fact, Pietro’s replies had dwindled to a series of snorts and terse phrases in a mixture of Italian and dialect, perhaps out of respect for their father, who, however, hadn’t put forward any further comment and was now picking food out of his teeth with a finger.

  And yet, how good it was to be in that house when Gabriele was around. Not only with him did the young outnumber the old, but Gabriele behaved just as he did with Madeleine and their other architect friends around our sloping table at Via De Deo. I loved how he got worked up over a political issue that had little to do with us, that he enunciated every word and became argumentative. I loved how he pulled opinions out of Pietro that I’d never heard and forced him to fervently take sides. Even with the curse words watered down out of politeness, Gabriele not only filled the silence of that country house, he spat at it. And every time I met his eyes, I thought I could see the glint of our secret, condensed like a tiny diamond under a pleasant sort of pressure, that all three of us lived together in Naples.

  I felt even more confident when, after dinner, Pietro spared me the disgrace of yet another attempt to help in the kitc
hen with one of his irresistible propositions: “Would you like to come meet my cousin Francesco?”

  Aunt Gina’s sitting room, where we settled into a soft couch, resembled a trinket shop, with all its knickknacks and porcelain milkmaids, windmills and chickens, each to its own doily. His aunt placed a box of assorted butter cookies on the inlaid coffee table before us. In that frilly space, her son Francesco, standing beside the fireplace, looked like an intruder with his patchy facial hair that struggled to form a beard, his buttoned-down shirt, and the beginnings of a potbelly. He might have been a decade older than us: his eyes, framed by crow’s-feet even when he wasn’t smiling, lent him a permanent expression of mild amusement.

  “Go on, they’re good,” Francesco said to me, adding without even looking her way, “Mamma, maybe she’d like a chocolate instead.” I tried to object but his mother had already leaped up, her slippers flapping away into the kitchen. As soon as she was gone, he said, “Thank goodness, Eddie, that you made it out to Monte San Rocco. I’d had enough of this boy here pining for you. He was moaning like a whipped dog.” He winked at Pietro, then changed tone. “But I know what it’s like, the long-distance thing. I was once with a girl from Germany, a few years back. Karin.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it didn’t . . . I didn’t—”

  Aunt Gina came back into the room, apologizing for having run out of praline. The coffee table became so crowded with sweets that there was barely room left for the coffee tray. She asked me how much sugar I took.

  “One sugar for her and a big splash of milk too. Otherwise it’s too hard on her stomach,” replied Pietro, letting it be known just how habitual our relationship was, and perhaps inviting his aunt to dig further.

  I watched Francesco as he sipped his coffee with an elbow leaning on the mantelpiece. All his mannerisms and the tone of voice he used with his mother seemed to underline the fact that he was no intruder at all, but perhaps the true master of the house. It was he, in fact, and not Aunt Gina, who began asking me questions about Washington, DC. I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind anything about that environment: the whimsical porcelain creatures watching over me, the chocolate melting in my mouth, Pietro’s leg pressing meaningfully against mine. His aunt leaned in to listen to every platitude I offered about the capital, every now and then widening her eyes with genuine amazement or nudging the box of chocolates toward me, yet without once telling me I was skinny and ought to put on weight. In the end, Aunt Gina congratulated Pietro on having found “such a pretty girl, and smart too,” but that compliment, instead of flattering me, gave me the sneaking suspicion there was something in Lidia’s behavior that was culturally inappropriate—and deeply wrong.

  Francesco placed his empty coffee cup on the mantelpiece. “Come on outside, you two. I have something I want to show you.”

  By now darkness had submerged the town: crickets were scratching the cool air, stars were piercing the sky. Without a sidewalk, the street was one long wall: almost all new homes, probably replacements for those destroyed in the 1980 earthquake. Few old buildings remained standing but they drew attention to themselves with their abject plaster, darkened windows, and weeds sprouting from the gutters. Francesco led us to one of these, a kind of a storeroom at street level. He removed the lock and spread open the wooden doors like opening a stage curtain onto an unlit stage.

  Pietro exclaimed, “Wow, you finally got it!”

  “She’s a beauty,” said his cousin, stepping inside the garage. “Turbo engine, dark blue body, built-in CD stacker with removable face.”

  “When the hell were you going to tell me? You haven’t even started your thesis yet, you lucky bastard.”

  The two men discussed horsepower and transmission, running their fingers over the station wagon like it was a time machine. Francesco unlocked it with a remote and lifted the rear door for us to admire its capaciousness. That simple gesture reawakened in me a long-lost memory of my brother and me lying across the many bags in our station wagon. What a great view from back there: the white asphalt of the highway stretching out behind us like the wake of a boat, the big fat cars tailing us, America finding it hard to let us go. Who knows where our mom was taking us that time; it may well have been the move from Boston to Washington because on our right the sun was setting over New York City, melting the sky like one of those orange Popsicles full of artificial colors and preservatives that we weren’t allowed to eat. And I felt no resentment about not having made a stop there, no sorrow in saying goodbye, just the pleasure of moving on.

  Back at Pietro’s parents’ house, I found out what had happened with Francesco’s German girlfriend. Things went sour, he told me in a whisper, when Francesco had left her in Hamburg to take care of his ailing father, and for one reason or another—his mother’s state of mind, exams for his law degree, his father’s death—he never seemed to be able to return. But that wasn’t all. Francesco had a dark secret that not a soul in the village, other than Pietro, knew: in Germany he now had a daughter. He went to visit her, without telling his mother or the extended family . . . but only occasionally, when work and circumstance permitted. I promised Pietro, crossing my heart and hoping to die, that I wouldn’t say a word about it the day after next when Francesco picked me up to take me back to Borgo Alto.

  On the morning of my departure, I packed my things with a swirl of melancholy and relief that refused to amalgamate into a feeling I could name. Pietro poked his head in, going straight to his childhood desk tattooed in blue ink, a little museum of rocks. He grabbed something before turning back to me. “Since we haven’t had time yet to look for Roman coins . . . Here.”

  His palm blossomed, revealing a sculpture in dark metal. The head and arms were gone, leaving an inflated, athletic chest. A cloth curled around the torso and knotted at the waist before draping between the legs. Muscular, slightly parted and bent at the knees, they appeared frozen in the act of running, as in a race . . . or an escape. The figure was small enough to be a child’s toy but too anatomically proportional, and far too heavy—probably lead. Perhaps it was a god or an effigy that once sat on a family altar, a reminder of a loved one who was no longer there.

  “I can’t, Pietro. It’s too precious.” But he’d already put it in my hand; I could feel its cold weight sink into my palm.

  “It’s just a bit of ancient litter. I found it lying in the pasture. Besides, what’s mine is yours, right? Unless you change your mind.”

  “About what?”

  “That you want to be with someone else.”

  “Seriously, Pietro? I’ll keep this with me every moment we’re apart. I promise.”

  As Pietro left the room, I placed the Roman sculpture on the bed. Before leaving I would slip it into my pocket: out of a long-standing and healthy fear of bag snatchers, I didn’t trust my bag to safeguard the treasure all the way to the Spanish Quarter.

  When Francesco arrived, with time to spare, Pietro leaped at the chance to examine the station wagon in the light of day. A spin would have to wait, though, since his cousin, who was already positioning my bag in the trunk, was scheduled to stay all day in Borgo Alto, where he worked on and off in a law firm. Now all that was left to do was to say my goodbyes. Their father wasn’t around, but Gabriele was. Standing at the front door, coffee in hand, he shouted, “Mamma! Eddie’s leaving.”

  Lidia appeared on the terrace. I went up to her, reached for her hands, still moist from her chores, and brushed my lips against those permanently chapped cheeks. “Thank you for everything, signora.”

  “It was nothing,” she said woefully.

  I kissed Gabriele goodbye. He was demonstrative as always, then headed back inside. The car was already whirring, fumigating the chickens. I got in next to Francesco. Pietro leaned through my rolled-down window and, with his mother right behind us, gave me a peck on the lips, a brief but no less extravagant kiss. “Have a safe trip, baby,” he called out as the car backed down the driveway. “See you at home!”
>
  For a moment I didn’t pay much mind to those natural, rather ordinary words. See you at home. It took me a few seconds to truly assimilate them. If the tension between our three gazes could have been etched with a knife, it would have formed a triangle. I had my eyes on Lidia on the terrace wearing the usual mask; she, on the other hand, was staring at Pietro, who had brought a hand to his lips as if hoping to suck back his words; he in turn was looking at me with big speechless eyes. I could see him less and less from the moving car: he was getting smaller, or maybe it was the driveway that was stretching like a rubber band, so taut as to snap at any moment. It was clear that Pietro hadn’t said it on purpose, that this was no act of heroism. Had his mother heard? If so, then the truth was out, as were the lies and deceit which I only now became aware of, and it was in plain sight of everyone, with the exception of Francesco, who hadn’t noticed a thing so focused was he on looking at the rearview mirror to avoid running over the rooster.

  I saw Lidia turn toward the front door, hunching over and wiping her hands on her apron as if begrudgingly going back to her chores. Maybe she hadn’t heard, or maybe she had heard but hadn’t put two and two together. The chickens were all alive. The tires were now treading asphalt and Pietro disappeared behind the corner.

  I could finally breathe again. Francesco’s car was a well-oiled bullet that slipped fat and slick through those tight streets, practically filling them up but without making a sound—windows up, air-conditioning on. Viewed like that, the town seemed unreal.

  “Isn’t she quiet?” Francesco asked.

  “She is.”

  But what was so bad, I reasoned, about letting the truth slip out? It wasn’t as if we’d committed a crime. Besides, Pietro was going to tell her anyway, sooner or later. And sooner or later his mother was going to have to acknowledge my presence. It was about time. Maybe in the end Pietro’s lapse was a good thing. With that moment of distraction, fate had been trying to lend us a hand, hustle us along. I felt rather refreshed now, but it wasn’t the air-conditioning.