Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  We got goose bumps and got out. My wet feet wore slippers of sand as I took a seat on the towel beside my dad. Like Pietro, he was an excellent judge of character, and I was so confident that he liked my boyfriend that I would have wagered everything on it. But still there was a trace of doubt.

  Without prompting, he said, “Pietro’s a real nice boy.”

  “You think so?”

  My dad nodded toward the sea, his lips making a little line of satisfaction.

  “What if we wanted to get married?”

  My dad put his sun-warmed hand on my wet knee. “Then we’ll have everyone around for a big barbecue.”

  I burst into giddy laughter. I glanced over at Pietro, who was sitting next to Barbara asking about her novel, and I tried to catch hold of his gaze. I wanted to communicate to him with my eyes that there was nothing to worry about anymore, that the moral support I’d enjoyed since I was a child, in my every wise and every foolish undertaking, was now his too.

  From: heddi@yahoo.com

  To: tectonic@tin.it

  Sent: May 27

  Dearest Pietro,

  Again I find myself worrying about you, about your state of mind. You were born to accomplish great things, to climb and study the world’s mountains. But instead you’re still there, surrounded by material goods that don’t give you any form of happiness.

  I’ve often wondered what this fleeting thing is that people call “happiness.” I don’t know. I’ve meditated, done yoga, listened to CDs on Buddhism, and all these things teach you that true happiness is balance. Maybe it is. But I have to say that I don’t remember the happiest moments of my life being like that.

  I’ve tried falling in love too. The relationship started not long after I got here, and it lasted as long as it needed to. Ivan introduced me to him, perhaps thinking that a romance would be just the thing to bring me to my senses, and I just let it happen to me. And, objectively speaking, he was gorgeous. A half-Samoan surfer with browned skin, tall and muscly, a real head-turner that no one (man or woman) could help take notice of on the streets, but on me his beauty was wasted. He was very good to me. He took me out on the sea to kayak, to the mountains to snowboard; he even took me to Samoa for about five weeks to visit all the beaches and all his aunts and uncles. I took some nice photographs there, of the floral lavalavas and the pineapples peeled in a spiral.

  He led a healthy lifestyle, all yoga and sushi, no alcohol or cigarettes: just the kind of guy my mom would have picked for me. But together we were like two recovering alcoholics, each consumed by our shameful misery and unable to really trust each other.

  He was the one who taught me how to drive. Are you proud of me? I’m the delighted owner of a golden wreck of a car, manual no less. You made it look so easy when you drove your parents’ car up and down the hills, steering with one hand and changing gears without even needing to look. But it actually does take a while to learn.

  I almost forgot my real reason for writing. I have good news. My brother and his girlfriend are getting married! I think I already told you that she’s originally from Trieste, even though she’s lived in America since she was little. They’re planning an initial celebration in Washington, but the actual ceremony will be in Trieste in August. I’ll be the maid of honor. Of course I can’t possibly miss the chance to go down to Naples. Will you be there? I hope you won’t have taken a job with some Australian firm by then or we’ll be like two planes passing in the night.

  h.

  18

  BY THE END OF SUMMER, with the exodus of the out-of-town students (including Pietro and Gabriele), Naples resembled a ghost town. In reality millions of locals stayed put, but they only made their presence felt after the sun had rolled like a marble behind upper Naples, the hour in which all that humanity came trickling out of the buildings, freshly showered and voraciously awake. Yet for many hours of the day the inhabitants were battened down in their homes, hiding from the heat.

  That clammy heat—afa they called it—was not just hot air but a thing. A touchable, almost corporeal entity that exhaled sulfur through the streets and dug its sticky fingers into the garbage to then stroke the nape of your neck, fondle your breasts, grope your inner thighs. There was no outrunning it. It would slip into the ground-floor vasci and would crawl just as effortlessly through the window of your seventh-story bedroom, where it would slide into bed with you, on top of the origami of your sheets. In the delirious siesta, the afa panted on your neck and licked your hair and wouldn’t let you sleep.

  I tried to study, but all I really wanted to do was go to the beach. Fat chance. The Gulf of Naples, whose water was good only for feeding mussels, sat there sparkling like fool’s gold, winking and laughing at those of us who were left behind in the city.

  I decided to bide the remaining heat at Rita’s house. But sometimes when we went out at night, along the promenade in Castellammare or Sorrento, I’d look out at the bay, black as tar except for cardiograms of yellow lights on its surface, and on the other side Naples would be glaring at me. Enveloped in an orange haze, it seemed to be slowly burning away in the embers of an old fire. I knew I had to get back to the city. I had to be there, for better or for worse.

  As soon as Pietro came back to Naples, he took his sedimentology exam and failed. It had little to do with our two-week vacation and more to do with the farmwork and his hydrogeology assignment. But there was no opportunity to present these justifications to his mother when she phoned him.

  “Hello?” he said. “Have you eaten?”

  His mother didn’t answer but simply asked, “Did you pass your exam?”

  “No.”

  She hung up.

  Pietro sat there on the couch with the receiver bleating in his hand. We left the apartment in the direction of the city center, mostly in silence. I was sifting through my memories for a similar anecdote from my dad’s geology years to console him with. But I couldn’t think of anything.

  The streets around the university were already being deconstructed with discussions of Descartes and Derrida. The students had once again taken over the city. And this meant business not only for the secondhand bookshops but also for our favorite haunt, La Campagnola restaurant, where we were meeting Sonia and the boys for lunch and where every day the menu was a surprise scribbled on a blackboard and the bill an approximation scribbled on butcher paper. The place was a hole-in-the-wall that sizzled with people joking and squid frying; the stench of hot oil democratically permeated the tweed jackets of professors, the plaster-spattered smocks of builders, and the retro shirts of students.

  “Let’s order some red wine for the table,” Pietro said, adding in English, “Even if their red wine sucks.”

  True, it was no longer the season for white wine. And now that we were back to our abnormal normality, the dialect could no longer be our secret code.

  Pietro motioned to the owner to bring us two whole jugs of wine. “Might as well blow my last cash,” he said, reverting back to Italian, “seeing as how I’ll probably get disowned.”

  “It’s just one exam. You can take it again next session.”

  “Either way, I’ll still be the worst son.”

  “Oh, that.”

  Somehow I’d managed to convince myself that those words, attached as they were to me, that girl, had hurt me more than they’d hurt him. In any case hadn’t they freed us, absolving him of all responsibility and allowing us to go on vacation together? But now it occurred to me that maybe we hadn’t left so much carefreely as carelessly. Wasn’t it really for Greece, and not for the exam, that his mother had hung up the phone on him, to make him pay for it? You’re my worst son. I’d been foolish to brush off those words, pronounced in Italian as though he were the foreigner, for hearing them again they still shocked me.

  “I’m sure she didn’t really mean it, Pietro,” I said. “It was probably just the heat of the moment. Or maybe that’s just her way of saying you have bad taste in girlfriends. You know, that skinny Ameri
can girl.”

  Lidia sure did have a gift for conciseness. She’s too skinny. I recalled how those three tidy little words had been able to sum me up, isolate me, and reject me all in one quick slap. And much of their power, I realized, lay in the pronoun edda, the third person singular in their dialect . . . And, just like that, I thought I might have found a topic for my thesis.

  “She doesn’t understand the first thing about you, Heddi. I don’t know what I did to deserve you. Maybe some heroic act in a previous life.”

  Without much ceremony, the wine and glasses came clanking down on our plastic tablecloth. Pietro filled our glasses and drank greedily, wiping his lips with those long fingers. He let them stay there, covering his mouth in thought, or perhaps in self-imposed silence.

  “But I’m right about your mother, aren’t I? She can’t stand the sight of me.” Openly associating his mother with contempt I found somewhat exhilarating: it felt almost transgressive crossing that line, the line of politeness.

  “Nothing slips by you, baby.” Pietro lit a cigarette as if to collect his thoughts. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Me?” Was he reproaching me for the fact that, unlike him, I hadn’t been able to win over any hearts?

  “Then who?”

  “You, Pietro. What are you going to do about it?” My face felt flushed though I hadn’t yet touched my wine. Now I was indignant.

  He answered that he was already doing everything possible to put his foot down, that he’d told his parents he would return to the farm only once between now and Christmas. “They can have my slave labor for the olive harvest and that’s it. They can sow the wheat themselves. But, baby, I really need you to do your part too.”

  “What more can I do, Pietro? Offer for the hundredth time to do the dishes?”

  “Forget the dishes.” He crushed out a perfectly good Marlboro Light and pressed my hand with purpose, like a lump of clay. “Look, my folks have figured out what’s what. They know it won’t be long before I graduate and so they’re shortening the leash. I need your help getting them off my back a bit.”

  I slipped my hand from his grip. “Wait a second. I’m supposed to save you from your own family?”

  I was smiling, fully expecting him to contradict me. But he didn’t. He pointed his eyes on me so hard it nearly hurt, a look that lasted far too long and was broken only by Angelo coming through the door of La Campagnola.

  “Man, you guys look great!”

  Peruvian saddlebag over his shoulder, Angelo weaved like a skateboarder through the restaurant crowd to hug us in the indelicate way of the strong and healthy. Plopping himself on a chair and pouring himself some wine, he told us the disjointed story of his summer: the outdoor concerts in Catania; hooking up with a hot Israeli chick on the island of Filicudi; learning how to spearfish, unfortunately for him in a marine reserve and at a heavy penalty. The thought of fishing seemed to whet his appetite, and he suggested we order at least an antipasto. There was no point waiting for Tonino, who was still packing up his books, he explained going off on a tangent, but I only truly lost the thread of the conversation when he started talking about beams.

  “I admit it does look a bit Frankenstein,” he went on, rearing back in his chair. “But when they cover up the beams with the floor, you won’t notice a thing. The only difference will be that the kitchen floor will be a half a meter higher, but who the hell cares with those high ceilings. And as soon as they put the new tiles on we can move back in.”

  Only then did it register, but I didn’t even get the chance to apologize, for Angelo was already saying they were planning to ask Davide to move into the old place. The new place. How was it possible that in my heart I couldn’t find the slightest trace of nostalgia for that apartment I’d so loved but merely a childish feeling of hurt that they hadn’t asked me to move back in with them?

  Sonia turned up. Flowing behind her like bat wings were her flared sleeves and raven hair, yet with that golden skin you would never have known she was a goth. As we ate, she told us about the picture-perfect Sardinian beaches she’d visited with Carlo. I didn’t dare ask if Carlo had been allowed to sleep in her room or been spoken to at the dinner table. When the question came around to our side of the table, our amazing adventure abroad, all meltemi and temples and tame pelicans, allowed us to leave out the fact that we’d actually spent most of the summer apart.

  When Pietro finally stood up, no doubt to surreptitiously pay the entire bill, Angelo began gutting his bag in search of lord knows what. In that gap Sonia leaned toward me to ask how it had gone with Pietro’s parents. She would have been right to expect some sort of improvement, but instead we now had a situation, the mere thought of which suddenly triggered a tiny dull ache inside me. I wasn’t able to lie, not to Sonia.

  “C’mon, Eddie. How could his mother possibly hate you?” was her reaction. “Well, even so, you’re still the luckiest girl in the world.”

  “How so?”

  “Pietro loves you madly: you’d have to be blind not to see it,” she said lowering her voice. “Isn’t that what everybody wants, to be loved like that?”

  I couldn’t say I agreed with her on that score. My experience had taught me that the real thrill was loving. Being loved was secondary.

  That Pietro and I had had the closest thing we’d ever had to a lovers’ quarrel didn’t upset me in the least. Some truths had surfaced and we were all the closer for it, or so it seemed. Our lovemaking received a new burst of life, as if we’d tapped into a previously unknown and gushing underground spring. In any case, after our so-called fight his mother pleasantly evaporated from our conversations. We had other things on our minds.

  The new academic year was a whirl of activity, amid exams, meetings with Benedetti (as the supervisor of my thesis), seminars, and lessons. Nevertheless, after those encounters I didn’t feel like wandering the streets with my head in the clouds as I used to, bowled over by the notions that the various academics had exposed me to. Instead I walked head down, picking apart their arguments and noticing where they’d fallen prey to hypocrisy, vagueness, or arrogance. I even found it hard to get excited about the debates led by Tonino, Gabriele, or Madeleine regarding the difference between socialism and communism or the advantages and disadvantages of public housing. I wanted to pass my exams. Do research for my thesis. Graduate.

  I ran to and fro buzzing with an impatient sort of energy, especially in the city center, home to the vast majority of university students—often in awful shared rooms at inflated prices. I felt comfortable in that part of Naples, where the strong out-of-town element, not to mention the presence of African street hawkers known as vuccumprà, watered down the Neapolitan element. Besides, its tangled paths had an immediate antidote: Spaccanapoli, the Greco-Roman street dissecting the whole of ancient Neapolis from east to west, from one sun to the other, as straight and deep as a scalpel incision performed by a steady hand and cold heart, without a moment’s hesitation or a single deviation. All the alleyways around the university, among the narrowest and darkest in the entire city, sooner or later flowed into it, and suddenly you’d find that your claustrophobia was gone, for Spaccanapoli offered the closest thing the historic center had to a panorama. But it wasn’t a view of the gulf or the castles or even the sky. It was a glimpse penetrating the heart of Naples, as far as the eye could see, and yet it was as dizzying as a skyscraper. Looking into Spaccanapoli made your head spin because you could stare at it as hard as you wished, until your eyes went blurry, and still you could never see where it ended. The end, if there was one, always slipped out of sight, blending with the shadows and hiding behind the laundry, the motorbikes, the multitude.

  It was on Spaccanapoli one day that I noticed a hand-painted sign hanging above a bolted door. Napoli sotterranea, Underground Naples. I’d never seen it before: perhaps it was new. Was this an access point to the underground caves Gabriele had told me about? I resolved to mention it to him. Maybe we could make a “field
trip” out of it, but for what purpose was not clear in my mind. I only knew that I could reignite my passion for Naples if I treated it like the temporary stop that it was.

  And yet that detachment didn’t come entirely natural to me: it was like an act I hadn’t yet mastered. Because, no matter where I went in the city, I was accompanied by that melancholy I’d known since the first day I’d set foot in it, a sadness that remained insensitive to the positive signs of an urban regeneration we were coming to trust more and more. It didn’t make any sense for me to still be suffering from it. I was fulfilled with my life, or nearly, and happier than I’d ever been—in love, strong, maybe even unconquerable. Perhaps then it wasn’t a melancholy related to my inner reality but rather an external malaise that was there long before my arrival and simply took me over, like the way the winter gives you its blues. It was a sorrow too deep, too ancient, to be mine: it had to belong to the city.

  Melancholy lived in the Ospedale delle Bambole, the Doll Hospital, on Spaccanapoli, an old buildup of broken dolls, of unfinished work, so eruptive as to practically swallow up the worktable and chair used by the overworked “doctor.” It was in their limp bodies, heavy makeup, and clumped hair; it was in their arms outstretched in an unreciprocated hug. Lolita dolls with faces as beautiful and unreadable as Madeleine’s.