“What?” said Angelo. “You mean this?”
“Yeah, I’ve never tried it before.”
“I know!” Angelo grew a pleasantly stupefied smile as he handed me the joint.
I took it, trying to hold it as he had, pressed lightly between my thumb and forefinger and using my pinkie as a counterweight. Before me the smoke slithered in slow motion, creating vivid, oily shapes. Eels in the sea, dragons in the air. The moment had an oneiric quality to it, but it was a lucid dream and it was up to me to make the next move.
“What do I do?”
Angelo infused his voice with the warm patience of a schoolteacher. “Take a breath in, just a little one. Then hold it there for a bit before breathing it out.”
I glanced over at Pietro, who looked at me full of wonder and nodded in encouragement. Why had I asked for the joint? Was I suddenly curious after all these years? I didn’t feel curious. Or afraid. I felt nothing at all. In any case it was too late to go back now: the roll, as fragile as rice paper, was already pressed between my lips.
I drew in a breath. The smoke slid into my mouth like a liquid, tepid and so delicate that I feared it might melt into nothing. I held it there for as long as I could before sending it out with a kiss like I’d seen the boys do. Then a stench accosted my nostrils: that odor of burnt rubber and wet henna.
“How was it?” asked Angelo.
“I don’t know. I don’t feel anything.”
“You probably didn’t inhale,” said Tonino, lying back down.
Angelo suggested I give it another go, but I shook my head and passed him back the joint. For one exhilarating second when I’d been able to capture the smoke in my mouth, swirling inside me was my entire past with the boys: our hourless parties and empty hours, our hot teas and dirty jokes, our conspiracy theories and B movies. But the smoke was an elusive pleasure that faded behind my lips, and I just couldn’t hold on to it. There was no point trying to pretend. An era was over.
Perhaps seeing a side to me he’d never seen before, Pietro looked at me with fascination and mouthed the words Come ti voglio bene, in Naples the only real way to say “I love you.” Words you would say not merely to your lover but to your best friend, to your father or daughter, to those who felt like part of your flesh.
Christmas was only days away when the phone rang. Pietro picked up and asked in a monotone, “Have you eaten?”
It wasn’t a real question but a greeting with a deep stratification of meanings, a custom used perhaps throughout Irpinia or maybe just within the walls of the Iannace household. For me, those first words to his mother were my cue to leave the room. I fiddled in the kitchen until I thought enough time had elapsed before going back to the living room. Pietro had already put down the receiver but was still sitting there on the couch with his mouth in an unfamiliar contortion.
“Something wrong?”
He combed the floor with his eyes as if he hoped to spot a gold nugget. In the end he said, “It’s about Christmas.”
“What about it?”
“She wants it to be, you know, just a family deal.”
“You mean I’m not invited.”
“I’m sorry. I assumed it would be OK.”
I sank into the couch beside him. The vinyl screeched, my stomach churned. It wasn’t simply the effect of the bad news: it was the inexplicable feeling that something terrible was about to happen, in the same way that I knew that a cold sore was about to erupt on my lower lip.
“And what did you say?”
“What was I supposed to say? I didn’t say anything. But, baby, this holiday is just one big act. A bunch of best wishes here, best wishes there, visiting people you see only once a year because in real life you don’t have a thing in common with them. Zilch. And then, not because they genuinely like you but only because they feel obligated to, they offer you something to drink, something to eat—and if you refuse, woe to you and your entire family. All this deep-fried, sickeningly sweet stuff. At Christmas they stuff themselves like it’s postwar famine, I swear. They eat like if they don’t gobble it down fast enough the wolves are going to come down from the mountains and snatch it straight out of their mouths. Believe me, I would much rather stay here with you.”
For a moment that flood of resentment toward his hometown left me speechless. Then I said, “If it’s going to be so awful, then don’t go.”
“If I don’t go,” Pietro answered gravely, “we’re both in deep shit. My mother could actually decide to disown me. So even if she pisses me off, I bite my tongue for the sake of peace and quiet. I have to appease her for a little while longer.”
I went quiet, stunned by the amount of anger he was now spewing at his mother. Was he simply venting or was he trying to get me to intervene in some way? But on such short notice, just three days before Christmas Eve, I struggled to find the oomph for a rebellion. I already had a more intimate battle on my hands, a battle against a loathsome self-pity I’d known since I was a little girl. A negative trait of Cancerians, I told myself in an attempt to fend it off, further reasoning that I hadn’t even wanted to spend Christmas in Monte San Rocco in the first place. Nonetheless, I couldn’t deny the fact that Lidia had gladly and openly rejected me, in no uncertain terms, during the holiday period when I didn’t have any family around, something I experienced not as an insult but as a wound in my chest that was becoming more and more painful. My throat went tight and it was all I could do to fight back tears.
Pietro again apologized, hesitantly brushing a strand of hair off my face. He’d done a deal with his parents, he said, that he would spend Christmas there but return to Naples for New Year’s. “This one last sacrifice and we’ll be celebrating the beginning of our lives together.”
Why was it that he was always talking about us in the future tense? And yet I was guilty of it too. Because all our plans, all our dreams—the castles we were building—were as vital to us as the air they were built in.
Madeleine was the last to leave. She was in a bubbly mood, no doubt due partly to the fact that Saverio was waiting for her in the street below on the restless horse of his motorcycle, poised to whisk her away. At the door she wished me a merry Christmas, adding with a small voice and big eyes, “But what a shame to leave you here all lonely. Poor you. I will save for you some panettone!” I tightened Madeleine’s rainbow-striped scarf around her neck, wishing she would just hurry up and go. Madeleine, full of pity for me? Oh please.
But as soon as the lock clicked behind me, the house seemed suddenly drained of life, as though the electrons of every object in it had stopped spinning. The only light on, the desk lamp, was a flat reflection in the windows, and the festive sounds from the courtyard came through muffled: the bubbling and the frying, the grating and the arguing in preparation for the big Christmas Eve dinner.
I didn’t have to be there, in the Quartieri. I had chosen not to go to Castellammare only out of pride, so as to avoid explaining myself to Rita, who thought I was with Pietro in his hometown. And anyway, what was Christmas once the magic of childhood was removed? A mere convention, nice and colorful but ultimately devoid of intrinsic value, a tradition that could be broken as easily as drinking a cappuccino after midday.
Why wait till morning then, I argued, to open the presents according to my own American tradition? I pulled out the package my dad and Barbara had sent, cutting through the masking tape. Inside were, among other thoughtful items, a bag of New Mexico chili peppers and a silk shirt for Pietro. I brought them to my face and breathed in their unfaded scent of the house in DC. But now was not the time to give in to missing my family. Not tonight.
My cold sore by now had aggressively taken over and my lip was throbbing with heat. I opened up the box of a new antiviral I was willing to try since lemon juice and the other natural remedies had failed to work, swallowing down the first two pills at the kitchen sink. The water in Naples always tasted like chalk. I sat at Pietro’s desk and pulled the gas heater close enough to warm my hands.
I figured I might as well study.
I began browsing through my index cards with quotes that would potentially be of value to my thesis. I lingered on one in particular where I’d jotted down: “The third person is historically the weakest form . . . [undergoing] a fierce decline.”
He, she, it, they . . . These were all destined, not just in Italian but in many other languages, to evolve, become simplified, or even fall into disuse. Spoken Mandarin didn’t distinguish between he and she. English speakers were more and more inclined to opt for the genderless they instead of the burdensome he or she—thus, at least in language there was gender equality. However, I grasped a certain naïveté in that quotation that brushed off the third person singular: it underestimated how powerful it was, deviously so, but maybe that’s why it was still alive and kicking after thousands and thousands of years. Because referring to an individual as he or she was an unavoidable form of othering. They were saying, authoritatively and nonnegotiably, that that other person was unlike them, an outsider to their community and their family, such an outsider in fact as to appear invisible despite standing right there before them in the very same kitchen.
I let my mind stray to where it had wanted to go from the very beginning. To Pietro’s mother. Edda, that’s what she’d reduced me to. That very first morning she could have said nothing, but if she really couldn’t keep it to herself she could have at least told me to my face, You’re a skinny little thing, aren’t you? That pronoun edda wasn’t even a grammatical necessity (the conjugated verb and the feminine form of the adjective would have sufficed)—but no, Lidia had deliberately chosen to use it: she’d meant to underline my irrelevance in that room; she’d meant to negate me.
Now in the stillness of that house I tried to pronounce it faithfully, but my tongue struggled to reproduce that double d, reminiscent of Sicilian and subtle enough to sound like an r. Edda, erda, erra. No, I couldn’t quite get it. It was one of those unreachable, mountainous sounds of the dialect. Edda. Now that I thought about it, it actually sounded like a woman’s first name, an old, black-clad, bent-over widow like those dotting the streets everywhere. Certainly not a name suited to my character, my age, or my love of life. So then why was it that it had taken me this long to realize the name was almost exactly like mine as it was usually mispronounced?
The night was gradually pervading the apartment, but under the lightbulb I could clearly see that pronoun for what it is; I could interrogate it, dissect it. Everything was coming into focus now. Had I really thought, even for a second, that his mother was simply going to welcome me with open arms into their home for a traditional family Christmas, a Catholic holiday no less? The scene so implausible it could have been lifted from a bad Hollywood movie, a cheesy and even nauseating resolution. As if on cue, a wave of nausea thrust its way up my throat, but then again it could have just been the antiviral, which I’d taken without having read the contraindications.
Yes, it had been uncouth of Lidia to exclude her son’s girlfriend right at Christmastime, given that our relationship was now official . . . in more ways than one. So in a certain sense, her rejection was actually a rejection of the expectations society put on her, a refusal to go along with that masquerade requiring her to use good manners and all the niceties. She was tired of pretending—and actually I was too. The absolute frankness of her gesture ended up giving me a strange sense of peace.
The nausea again: I hadn’t imagined it. I ran up the stairs toward the bathroom, making it to the toilet bowl just in time. There must have been something in the pills I was intolerant to. Or was I meant to have taken them with food? I drank from the faucet before lowering myself onto the chilly tiles, trembling but relieved.
Out of sight, out of mind. Lidia was probably feeling quite pleased with herself right now that at their table decked with food there was just my ghost. But she was delusional if she thought this meant I would simply give up on her son and fly back to America. Again I had to lean over the toilet to expel nothing but the water I’d drunk. My throat was burning, my stomach was empty. I had nothing left to lose.
Surely it was a pitiful scene, me all alone on Christmas Eve vomiting my guts out. But instead of feeling sorry for myself as the zodiac expected me to, I felt almost happy. I’d relieved myself of a burden and now I was light, ready to start over. With or without a name, what Pietro and I had was unbreakable, a bond stronger than blood or bones. Together we were not merely the sum of one plus one but an exponential multiplication, a force greater than the two of us and mightier certainly than some third person who was tired and depressed and trying to get in the way.
As if the universe were confirming as much, in that very moment the phone rang. “It’s hell here without you, baby,” said Pietro, pierced with guilt at what he called his “weakness.” No, I replied, he hadn’t been weak. He had been right all along: his battle was mine, too, and we were going to fight it together. In fact, together we had an almost unfair advantage.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: June 16
Dear Heddi,
That really is great news. I’ll be there in Naples, don’t you worry. I’ll come pick you up, whatever you need. Give me your dates as soon as you have them.
Getting your email did me a world of good, and I apologize that it’s taken me this long to write back. Recently my life has been consumed by health problems. I haven’t worked over the last few weeks: I’ve swapped one shithole (the Adriatic) for another (Monte San Rocco). I sustained a knee injury, the kind athletes are supposed to get, but the accident I had you see more often in old men. I won’t go into it: it’s too embarrassing.
Anyway, my knee kept on bothering me, or maybe it was just an excuse to get out of laboring in the middle of the sea and have some time to think about life . . . I’m always looking for excuses. So I decided to get myself seen by a doctor, hoping he’d write me a note saying I needed some time off . . . but no! He said I needed a “tiny little” operation. But from the very beginning I knew that something was amiss: I probably ended up in the wrong hands, in the hands of two characters who call themselves doctors but actually would be more suited to selling chestnuts on the street corners . . .
In any case I’m alive and kicking, despite the sweat trickling out from underneath the bandage. The warm weather makes me want to sleep all day long. Not exactly the period of reflection I thought it would be: it’s more like moments of boredom alternating with moments of chilling out or feeling comfortably numb.
Today the big boss called me and, putting on a charming voice, asked me what my plans were for the near future. I said that slaving away out at sea is not for me, that I have (or at least I had) other ambitions, and he—sounding now like a kid standing before an ice cream vendor—told me that it was never his intention to work me to death (a watery death!) and that he had other plans for me which he wanted to discuss with me personally. But I won’t fall for it, I know his type: he called me only because he’s in shit up to his neck and wants to convince me to stay on . . . but I’m not willing to sell myself for money. I’m happy doing nothing, at least for the time being, and anyway c’mon, man! I’m still young and I can come up with something better! I still have too much of the world to see.
Don’t I?
p.
20
NEW YEAR’S EVE was a breach in time that didn’t belong to the old year or the new one, a no-man’s-land that wasn’t subject to the usual laws. The house filled once more with pirates—from France, Sardinia, Sicily, Irpinia, America—who since the night before Christmas had been cutting notches into the wood of the dinner table, counting down hour by hour to this moment, this neighborhood. Thirty-three Via De Deo thus became a port, a melting pot, a night without a nation, without a history. Again everything became possible.
We went on a last-minute shopping quest, and we weren’t alone. The stores stacked up our street were crammed with people stocking up as if for an air raid. To make better
time, we split up. Sonia and Carlo went to the seafood shop; Angelo, Davide, and sister Silvia to the delicatessen; Madeleine and Gabriele to the bakery; while Pietro and I went to the fruit and vegetable grocer, the one who always managed to slip in a rotten apple or squashed tomato for good measure. He was constantly trying to pull a fast one on us, but we just let him because he looked like he could use the money.
“It’s gonna be a good night for them fireworks,” said the vendor, looking up at the fracture of clear sky between the buildings and handing me a bag of rather apologetic-looking escarole.
Apart from the escarole, I was pleased. That night in Piazza Plebiscito, across from the mountain of salt that had been installed with wooden horses poking out of it (“art” they called it), the city was putting on a free concert followed by a fireworks display. Why watch from the rooftops when we finally had a reason to get out into the streets?
“Careful, kids,” the fruit vendor added. “After eleven o’clock it’s nuts out there.”
It was already eight thirty by the time we started preparing the big New Year’s Eve meal. Even within our rebellion, there was an allegiance to the traditional southern Italian recipes. Tradition was alive in the mere fact that we had to eat in order to have a good time. But without food, how could we celebrate anything or disagree about anything or show one another our affection?
There was a great deal of slicing, sautéing, setting out plates and silverware. I’d been entrusted with the important job of making the lentils with pork cotechino, the consumption of which was apparently key to a good financial year. But because we were broke we had to forgo the meat, making up for it by adding a sprig of rosemary according to the recipe from Davide and Silvia’s hometown. Through the open French doors I could see the terrace stretching out like a cold sigh, and beyond the protective wall the lights of houses clinging optimistically to the volcano. Gabriele came in from outside, a glass of red wine in hand, and sat down a bit unsteadily on the step to watch me cook.
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 20
