Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  “All the comforts you could wish for.”

  “It’s very comfortable.”

  The sensation didn’t last but a few seconds. For some reason I suddenly felt uneasy and patted my pocket. I started. I’d left the Roman effigy on top of the bedspread in Pietro’s bedroom. I felt like a liar, incapable of keeping the most basic lover’s promise. I apologized to Francesco, asking him if he minded turning around; he obliged with a “No problem, Fräulein.” Actually, he seemed quite happy to demonstrate a U-turn with power steering.

  The car was a whisper along the road back, until the tires began grinding the gravel in front of the house. The driveway had been emptied of humanity and poultry. I jumped out and sprinted toward the front door. It was open and I went in. No one was in the kitchen. I pushed on, calling, “Pietro? Gabriele?”

  The television jabbered on without an audience. I kept going down the hallway. Still nobody. At this point I thought I would simply run upstairs, take the sculpture, and sneak off. Like a thief. At least that way I would avoid Lidia and another round of goodbyes, I would avoid any drama. But still, my heart was hammering inside my chest as I made my way up the first few steps. All at once voices from the basement stopped me in my tracks.

  “Mamma, what’s the big deal anyway? It’s not like we’re in 1962.” It was Pietro, his voice low and tense.

  “You’re right,” came his mother’s voice, but with an assertiveness I didn’t think she had in her. “Go on, go! Go back to Naples with that girl. Go get on a ferry to Greece or wherever. I don’t care. You’re my worst son.”

  I grabbed the Roman figure and lurched out of that house like a moth blinded by the daylight. No one had seen me.

  From: tectonic@tin.it

  To: heddi@yahoo.com

  Sent: May 16

  Dear Heddi,

  Again I find myself writing to you not sure where to start. After rereading your last email three, four, five times, I’ve had thousands of things to tell you, fragments of thoughts.

  I won’t deny that I’m building castles in the air. I think about myself. I think about the moment in which I’ll be so sick and tired of it all that I won’t be able to put up with anything around me. Then I will be free. Free to leave without a destination, without a time limit. Then maybe I’ll have the courage to call you and get your address and maybe come and see you, even just for a day, to look into your eyes again, to hear your voice again . . .

  I would like to be the boy I was five years ago. Or at least something like that. Now I’m a grown-up (at least I try to convince myself that I am); I don’t have any money problems, though I’m no Bill Gates, but everything else is missing from my life. I still dream of working in my field. I’ve sent my résumé to an Australian firm, you never know.

  Every now and then I try to fall in love but I soon realize I’m just lying to myself. I read Coelho but it didn’t change my life, I used drugs with the same result. Then I decided to just tough it out, trying to convince myself that everything I did, all my actions, were dictated by my free will, by an instantaneous desire that came over me. The real problem is my loss of historical memory: I can’t remember what it was that I desired in the instant I acted, though I’m sure I wanted something. Now I find it hard to trust any gut feeling, even the one telling me to give up my job or hop on a plane. Will I find the courage? And even if I do, will you still be there?

  A hug,

  p.

  17

  WAS I DREAMING? Were Pietro and I really traveling together to Athens? Athens, Greece, and not Athens, Ohio? The ferry was rocking north to south, south to north, causing the open-air swimming pool to slosh its salt water out onto the deck. And circling that little square sea were twentysomething Norwegians, Spaniards, and Germans in Birkenstocks and pastel bandannas, drinking and strumming guitars as they settled in for the long night that awaited us. This was just the setting that befitted Luca, I thought to myself, if it was indeed like this when he crossed the Adriatic. I wanted us to blend in, and at least we did look the part. Like the others, our skin was already kissed by the sun and our backpacks-cum-pillows already blotted with vessel grease and weighed down by our provisions bought at a supermarket in Brindisi: a whole salami, two French loaves, water, and wine. And like the others, we resisted sleep, drinking straight from the bottle and chatting in English with our bedfellows.

  Yet, although the scene wasn’t new to me, I realized Pietro and I didn’t really fit into it. For the others, Greece was merely a stop along an itinerary, one of the many knots on a long and well-secured rope with which they would dip down to Turkey, or Egypt at the farthest, before swinging back up to the long light of the north, to civilization, to normality. But we were not that free—or that normal. After Greece, we would be heading back to that tangle of streets known as Naples, for some of them another thrilling knot on their “third-world” itineraries but to us merely home. And each time a new travel companion asked us, flashing lovely white teeth, “So where do you come from?” I would feel at once pride and shame, a mixed-up emotion that Neapolitans had probably been experiencing for a thousand years and that succeeded in turning my stomach. Then again, it may just have been the strong smell of burning fuel mixed with the cold air and the rough sea that was becoming blacker and blacker.

  Still, I couldn’t contain my excitement. It was overflowing like the water from the pool, and if I could have, I would have clambered up that ship to shout it from the smokestacks. I was excited not just about the mind-blowing fact that Pietro had been allowed to leave flat in the midst of wheat threshing. And not just about the little adventure that awaited us and the beloved faces I would soon see. I was as excited as though I were about to receive an important recognition. Within a few hours, my mathematician dad and psychotherapist stepmom were going to have the chance to observe the two of us together and do what no one so far had been able to do—not our friends and certainly not his parents, but not even Pietro and I in an entire night spent pledging our love. The two of them, I was sure, would be able to identify that thing that was consuming us but that we could no longer live without; they would be able to find a name for it. “Love” and “passion” were mundane. And that name, whatever it was, would finally give our relationship a form, a concreteness of the likes of basalt, alexandrite, a black diamond. For otherwise who could have said for sure that it wasn’t all a dream, a star that goes out as soon as the sun hatches from the Ionian Sea?

  We arrived at the prearranged hotel before my folks, who still had to land, retrieve their luggage, and get through customs. Pietro and I could finally shower, and Pietro came out of the bathroom with his hair wet, a towel around his waist, and his bare chest traced by a thread of light allowed in by the closed shutters. We could have made love, too, for they had booked us a room all to ourselves.

  “But what if your parents turn up? I’d screw it up big-time. I can’t afford to be the worst son and the worst son-in-law.”

  I was too flattered by his semantics to be weighed down by his mother, not one but two seas away. As for my own family, Pietro needn’t have worried: they announced their arrival knocking tentatively at the door.

  Barbara enveloped me in an embrace jingling with earrings, sequins, auburn curls, and freckles. We laughed in amazement, as if we’d just happened to run into each other by chance in Athens. But hadn’t we done this last summer in Turkey? And the summer before that in Sardinia? We were collecting a succession of summers like charms on a bracelet, starting from the first in Jamaica when I was four.

  I had missed the very first exchange between Pietro and my father, who were now both looking around the room with their hands shoved into their pockets. My dad gave me a long hug that concluded, as he did with the cats, with a series of rhythmic pats on the back. I gathered my wits and introduced everybody. Barbara hugged Pietro like an old friend.

  “Do you guys want to go have a shower?” I asked, before translating for Pietro.

  “No, I got it,” he murmured
back without taking his eyes off them, like he was afraid to miss something.

  “First a coffee, please!” cried Barbara with intentional drama.

  “I’d like to pay for it but first I have to get some drachma,” Pietro said to me, but Barbara was already dangling her purse before us, stretched to capacity and half-gutted, showing us her many scrunched purple and red banknotes, not to mention a necklace with a broken clasp, their passports, a collection of poetry by Odysseas Elytis, and a single orange sock.

  Outside, the shop names and street signs were written in a pleasantly unfamiliar alphabet. A silky heat padded the little streets. I could sense Pietro’s tension but it was well buried, and in any case I was too happy to pay it much mind. We found a café dripping with ivy and outdoor tables wobbling on the street stones. As we sipped that grainy, sweet coffee, Barbara asked Pietro questions about him, his study, his brothers. Her questions were respectful but fueled by the caffeine and that insatiable curiosity typical of not only her profession but also her temperament.

  I translated back and forth, but the more he got used to Barbara’s speech, the less he needed my help. It must have been hard work: his brow furrowed and his eyes sparkled like when he was studying his sedimentology textbook, but I was astonished how well he could manipulate the language, how he could handle it like a snake charmer. I’d never heard him speak in English for such a long stretch and with such risk-taking, and I listened to him utterly entranced.

  “OK if I smoke?” he asked at one point.

  Barbara nodded, saying that she and my dad had smoked for half their lives. “Camels,” she said, venturing, too, the Italian for “twenty-five years” and checking with Pietro that she’d pronounced it correctly: she had a real gift for making anyone feel relaxed enough to pour out their secrets. Pietro was too much of a gentleman to correct her; he lit a cigarette with a tightly sealed but visibly pleased grin.

  All the while, my dad sat there before his empty coffee cup, nodding at times at us and other times at the passersby, with the same rhythm tapping his foot as though counting the beats of his favorite Bach composition. He was already deeply tanned: the American Indian blood was on his side of the family. He’d hardly spoken, not even to pass judgment on the coffee, but he had that contented look of a man who, with an entire vacation still ahead of him and his family reunited, is soaking up the sultry air so like Longview, Texas. What part Pietro’s presence may or may not have played in that peaceful equation was still an unknown.

  It was Pietro who managed to get him to speak. He pointed to the street stones under our table and asked if he thought they were volcanic. My dad’s foot stopped beating its fugue and his gaze dropped to the ground, but he didn’t answer right away. Barbara’s approval was a given at this point, and now all three of us were on the edge of our seats waiting for my father, as if his answer wasn’t going to be a simple reply to a question but the final sentence of a judge. Knitting his brow, he said with the utmost gravity, “Marble, I reckon.”

  Now that a geological discussion was on the table, with all the Latin names, there was truly no longer need for my interpreting services. They fell deep into conversation, like colleagues. Pietro never ceased to amaze me: he’d instinctively known, without any suggestion on my part, what the key to my dad’s heart was. And it had immediately unlocked something.

  Barbara rested her chin on her hand and let out a satisfied sigh. “You know, Heddi, it’s obvious that you and Pietro have a special connection. It feels very deep to me, very honest . . .”

  “Oh really?” Here it comes, I thought to myself, the name—the noun—that would express the inexpressible. But she added nothing more, and I had to quickly come to grips with the fact that if Barbara, who lived off words and devoured books, couldn’t find a word for it, then maybe there wasn’t one.

  She asked if anybody wanted another Greek coffee. “’Na ciofeca,” Pietro said in Neapolitan, though he almost never spoke to me in dialect. A terrible brew, he’d ruled, and my dad too wore the very same expression of disgust and dread.

  I settled my dad’s fears with the news that we’d brought him a big bag of his favorite coffee, purchased just before leaving from the café tucked behind the Piazza Garibaldi train station. The place was unpopular and seedy: it had no windows and a single bare lightbulb, a fake-wood bar that was chipped, and a barista that had only one eye, but they roasted coffee beans that would have been the envy even of Gambrinus.

  I’d ruined the surprise but my dad and stepmom were overjoyed nonetheless, letting out a little cheer for the city that had managed to save the day all the way in Athens. In fact, seeing Naples now through their eyes, I was willing to forgive it for everything. Removed from its context, even the grunty dialect of the Quartieri Spagnoli could be transformed into something delightful: a secret code, a lovers’ game. Still, from that geographical distance I understood that what I felt for the city wasn’t the love I once had but something akin to gratitude, for having given me Pietro. Naples was no longer a protagonist but a backdrop.

  We headed back toward the hotel like two couples on a Sunday stroll, Pietro and I holding hands and Barbara and my dad walking a bit ahead of us. She snuggled in close to him, draping herself over his shoulder as she often did, and I thought I could hear them, and indeed the entire world, sighing with relief.

  “So . . . ?” I asked Pietro. Undoubtedly he would be overwhelmed with impressions, but any one would do.

  “Jesus, Heddi, what a family you have,” he said with emotion. “And your dad . . . I’m just speechless.”

  For ten days we hopped from one island to the next, arid rocks plonked down in the middle of the sea and tortured by the wind but unbelievably inhabited by people—in houses all painted, as if by law, in white with blue doors and blue shutters. The summer wind in the Cyclades, the meltemi, was a tireless push from the north, apparently from the Eurasian steppe. It lifted the sand and frayed the waves; it upended umbrellas and overturned water bottles. We found the wind’s single-mindedness quite comical, like that of a dog ramming his head into your leg throughout your entire dinner, in the hopes that sooner or later you’ll give in. Ferries were often canceled, as should have probably been the ferry we took from Paros to Ios. The wind pushed hard against us for the entire journey, like it was trying to force-feed us to a sea that was already full. A little girl vomited. The benches, the floor, indeed everything, was turned on an angle, and we couldn’t walk on the deck without grabbing on to something. This too made us laugh. The wind actually whistled.

  I’m not sure how in all that wind at the highest point of Paros there was a valley of butterflies, so still in the trees they seemed asleep. We took a trip to Delos, the birthplace of Apollo, uninhabited except for the miniature dinosaurs, lizards scrambling across mosaics and over the faces of statues. Whenever I felt the urge, I’d pull out my Minolta. We ate plums and yogurt and (as a welcome break from the coffee) Milko chocolate milk, a local favorite served in every town café, where we’d sit leafing through Barbara’s guidebook. From there I would watch shriveled old women in black cross the squares, reminding me of Lidia. I wondered if they, too, despite looking so feeble on the outside, were churning inside with bitterness toward the life that had bent them in half. On Mykonos it was pelicans that crossed the squares. As the island’s mascot, those enormous birds had free rein to wobble through the streets like lame emperors, with Donald Duck feet and over-the-top beaks. When they walked past, the locals stroked them or even gave them a pretend kick for good luck. Although I was sure I didn’t need any more good fortune than I already had, I brushed my fingers against one as it walked by. Its neck was rubbery and pale pink like strawberry gum that has lost its flavor.

  Efharisto, petra. Thank you, pelican: that was the extent of my Greek. It turned out that we didn’t need it because the wind carried with it from the north not only cool air but also English. The Dutch and Australian tourists spoke it, we spoke it. We used it to ask for hotel rooms—always s
eparate, except on Mykonos. Pietro was collecting words like pebbles, lining them up in ever-new configurations, especially with my dad. The two of them examined all that exposed rock like it was a conundrum it was their job to solve. On those empty beaches, they inspected the sand with the same rigor. A few times I overheard my dad accidentally calling Pietro by my brother’s name.

  Such was the geological connection between my dad and Pietro that when one day on the beach Pietro pulled me up off my towel to show me something, I was sure it was going to be a rock. Instead he led me into the water until it was up to his waist, and then he lay on his back lifting his legs. In that bracing entrance into the sea, it took me a few seconds to understand what he was doing.

  “You’re floating, Pietro! You’re floating!”

  He grinned awkwardly and came back up. “Not so loud, baby. I don’t want them to know I can’t swim.”

  “Well, you nearly are. Anyway, hadn’t you noticed that my dad can’t swim either? That’s why he never goes in the water.”

  This appeared to have an exponential effect on the esteem Pietro held my father in, and he glanced back at the beach. “Do you think he likes me?”

  “Are you kidding? Yes.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s obvious.”

  “I sure hope you’re right.”

  I could tell from his tone that he craved the type of acceptance that up until not long ago I had hoped to earn from his mother. And yet I’d had the impression that Pietro, unlike me, had a handle on the situation.

  The water was a kaleidoscope of blues and greens that blossomed around our stirring hands, our swiveling bodies. Doing away with modesty, we pressed hard against each other, entangling our legs and sinking deeper and deeper into the sea. We gave ourselves over to it, letting the salt water relieve us of gravity and seep into the warm grotto of our mouths. There was the visceral taste of salt and the clean sea, free of flaws or secrets, the lightness of our bodies and the love like a wave carrying us, and on the horizon the knowledge that we had our whole lives ahead of us. All this came together to create such perfect, crystalline happiness that I didn’t think I could bear it, and in fact it was spoiled as soon as I became afraid it would end.