“It’s OK,” I tried to reassure him.
He shook his head and found the strength to say in an echoey voice, “Leave me.” Again he coughed. “Go. I don’t want you to see me like this. Go!”
I pulled my hand away, hot with his shame. I too was ashamed, of trying to help when he didn’t need me. I walked out but lingered in the hallway, in case he fell. I heard a flush, followed by running water. Shortly thereafter Pietro came staggering out and crumpled onto our bed fully clothed. He probably would have slept like that till morning had I not removed his shoes and jeans.
21
I STOPPED TO ROLL UP my pant legs; my boots, I could see, were coated in the finest dust. There were no trees, no shade at all; the sky was a piece of blue construction paper with the occasional scribble of a cloud. The dry air was odorless, but it brought that dust with it, that taste of the volcano. Maybe it was summer, it was hard to say: although the sun was beating down, nearly blinding me, I couldn’t feel its heat.
It felt like I’d been walking for hours and hours, yet the top was still far from my reach. I was on a geological expedition (I had to be: I was carrying a prospecting pick), but I had no idea what I was looking for. All I knew was that I had to keep going onward and upward, higher and higher, until I could stand on the edge of that giant bowl carved by the giants, or by the gods, and look into its depths. I was determined to reach it even if it took me all night. As if I were heading there to meet my beloved, the passing hours and the grueling hike didn’t weigh on me. So then why was my immense desire tainted with an unspeakable fear?
Step after step the details came back. I remembered that earlier I hadn’t been alone: I’d been hiking up the volcano with other people, a team of anthropologists and linguists. It had become a geological mission only after the others had decided to turn back. They’d learned that Vesuvius was about to blow, for the first time since that minor eruption during the Second World War, but this time it was going to be a big one, the one everyone had been fearing—and secretly hoping for. And yet I still kept making my way toward the top because, I figured, what could possibly go wrong on such a beautiful day?
All at once the sky went dark and the wind picked up, so strong it seized the pick out of my hand. The bad weather was here: the blue sky was a sham, the sun a big fat lie. And I’d fallen for it. I started back down the path. Little rocks at my feet began hopping about like they too were trying to hurry down the mountain, even though by now it was clear to us all how very futile it was. I could already feel the warm breath of the ash behind me as I raced down the incline, but I was too afraid to turn around and look straight at that heartless cloud swelling and thundering toward me and about to swallow me whole. It was nothing personal, though: I was just collateral damage, a random victim, a minor personal tragedy.
Like hands on my shoulders, the cloud gave me a shove that detached my feet from the steep terrain. I closed my eyes and fell into the void. I was falling for such a long time in such complete darkness that I even had time to cry. I had no fear of dying, only the certainty of it. The only thing that scared me, actually it terrified me, was the moment of physical pain I would feel on impact with the ground. So as I plunged through the abyss, whose bottom I would soon hit, I twisted my body, struggling not against death but against the inevitability of pain.
The pain awoke me with a jolt. My back was arched like a bridge, the muscles seized up: it hadn’t happened since I was little. Pietro was asleep by my side, his shirt badly wrinkled. Relaxing my spine, I propped myself up on my elbows to look out the window.
It must have rained overnight. The buildings tumbling down to the port were a shade darker, the color of drenched stone. The sky was quilted in clouds so laden they might douse us again any minute. And against that dark background the volcano lay dormant and clad in snow.
It wasn’t just a sprinkling: Vesuvius was covered in snow as I’d rarely seen it in all my years in and around Naples. The rough features of its peak were wrapped in a dazzling-white royal cloak, perhaps the true source of the soft winter light suffusing the city. Within that dim landscape it was in fact the only sun, the only god. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. It looked like a painting of Mount Fuji, like the one printed on a handkerchief I’d once owned, but in the flesh our volcano was far more impressive. It was majestic and fearsome. The more I looked at it, the more I realized it might only be pretending to sleep.
A chill snaked down my spine. I got back under the covers, moving in close to Pietro. I was hoping to wake him, but he was out cold and—I could see now catching a glimpse of the radio alarm clock—it was sinfully early to wake him on the first day of the year. I got up, put on a sweater, and went downstairs.
Madeleine looked like she’d been waiting for me. In skimpy pajamas, she sat as if in a trance before the chaos of the abandoned table; her legs crossed, she was kicking her Japanese flip-flop to a song only she could hear. In the semidarkness her face resembled an old photograph, blurred further by the smoke of a neglected cigarette.
“This is the part I hate,” she said.
“What part?”
Madeleine remembered her cigarette and inhaled through it meaningfully. “The next day.”
I asked her why she was up so early. Apparently the neighbors had woken her up again. I hadn’t heard a thing, just as she hadn’t seen the snow on Vesuvius. Her reaction was, “Snow, merde. Wasn’t Naples supposed to be sunshine, sea, and pizza?” She let out a forced laugh before turning on the radio.
The kitchen was a hideous sight of crusty plates and fish tails on oily newspaper, and all I could cope with was salvaging the coffee machine. Making coffee was a ritual I found comforting. I used the hard water from the tap, said to be the secret to Neapolitan coffee, and pressed down delicately on the grinds while listening distractedly to the Luca Carboni song over the radio. For a long time I stood there watching the hissing blue flame. I couldn’t see Madeleine from there but I could feel her heavy presence, her bad start to the day, her desire to say more—much more.
“Last night was crazy,” came her voice from the living room.
“Was it?” I opened the fridge. We were out of milk.
“We were big idiots, Eddie. It was like a war out there.”
I came in, adding our steaming coffees to the clutter of the table, where Madeleine proceeded to pierce me with her gaze until the guilt set in, as though it had been my idea to go out into the streets. Yet I wasn’t sure she was really talking about last night. I sensed that a little game had started between us, a game that wasn’t new to me but to which I didn’t know the rules, or even the purpose.
“It’s just another one of those silly things not to tell your parents about, Madeleine. Nothing bad happened in the end.”
“It was chance. We won at the roulette. But it could have been a catastrophe.”
I wished she would just drop it. I didn’t want to be forced to think about the homeless priest and the mysterious catastrof that had cut him in half. Nevertheless, Madeleine’s words started to dig into me like that coffee on an empty stomach. Could it really all be just a gamble, simply a matter of good or bad luck? But not wanting to concede anything to her, I said, “Well, once the garbage collectors have gone through, the neighborhood will go back to the way it was before.”
“But even before it sucked. A sucking fucking labyrinth.”
“It’s not a labyrinth, Madeleine. The Spanish Quarter has a predictable, mathematical layout,” I said, not wanting so much to contradict her at this point as to engage her in any sort of academic discussion. “It’s just a grid. Isn’t that what it’s called in urban planning?”
“Grid. A network of streets crossing one another at right angles according to the urban planimetry typical of Roman cities and some eighteenth-century settlements,” she said dryly. “Thirty points cum laude.” Her cup came to rest with a clunk. “So really, Eddie, you have never got lost in the Spanish Quarter?”
“No.”
She drew another cigarette from her pack. I couldn’t tell if, by accepting my half lie, she’d let me win or not. I finished my coffee, too, grasping that the game we were playing had something, if not everything, to do with my own pride.
Madeleine smoked, the house slept, the radio filled the silence. I was trying to remember the legend of the classical labyrinth, in Knossos, that my Greek professor had taught me during my first year of high school in Castellammare. If I remembered correctly, King Minos of Crete demanded of the Athenian king a yearly tribute of fourteen youths, seven young women and seven young men, to be let loose in a maze so intricate it had imprisoned its own architect, Daedalus. It was a warren of passageways that twisted and turned, forking off into multiple choices, leading to dead ends—all through almost pitch blackness. At the heart of the labyrinth lived the bloodthirsty Minotaur, half man and half bull, who devoured the youths one by one as they became lost. It was the stuff of nightmares. Finally, the monster was slain by Theseus, son of the king of Athens, whom Minos’s daughter had fallen hopelessly in love with. Ariadne, that was her name, had given him a ball of string to roll out so that he could feel his way back out of the maze. Afterward, despite her act of love, Theseus didn’t take the princess back to Athens with him, abandoning her instead on an island where they’d stopped to rest during the return voyage. He lifted anchor while she was sleeping.
Maybe Madeleine too was lost in such thoughts, for she said, as if to settle the matter once and for all, “Better a labyrinth than a grid.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Because in a grid all the streets look the same. So you think you’re on the right path and then you suddenly understand that, oh shit, you are lost.”
That foot started kicking again, completely out of sync with the new song playing on the radio, and with more vigor than ever. Rage was becoming on Madeleine: it wiped the slate clean, revealing her breathtaking, primordial beauty that made me feel, if not ugly, decidedly average. With that cigarette she seemed to be sucking back unutterable thoughts.
“Eddie, tell me. Why are you here in Naples, in this shithole?”
“It’s a long story, Madeleine.”
“To learn about a few stupid buildings? To meet some boy and then go back home?”
It took me a moment to understand she was talking about herself. I said, “You can always come back.”
“Sure I can,” said Madeleine with a mocking grimace, threatening then to wake the entire household by belting out half the chorus to “Torna a Surriento.” But maybe it was a mistake to fish out from Naples’s deep past such an emotionally charged song, for her sarcasm turned against her, twisting the corners of her mouth and wetting her eyes. “No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It was always supposed to be a short time. Just a parenthesis and then I go back to my life. And back to my French boyfriend.”
I’d lived in Naples too long to be shocked by infidelity. However, I’d always considered it an ill of the older generations, and the fact that a young intellectual woman, a foreigner no less, could cheat on or alternate lovers further complicated the picture I had of Madeleine.
“Soon I have to leave,” she struggled to say. “But what will I do? I don’t know who I am anymore. I even don’t remember how to speak French.”
Everything about her moved me, against my will—her defeated tone, her glistening eyes—but all I could offer her were a few measly words. “It’s not the end, Madeleine . . .”
“Don’t you get it, Eddie? I have lost myself!”
I thought she was angry with me, but then the tears broke loose, big and shiny like drops of mercury. She seemed oblivious to them and unashamed, as though they were not her tears at all but raindrops fallen from the sky. She didn’t even try to dry them. The game was over, and she’d won. And yet all she could say over and over again was how lost she was.
I wasn’t involved enough in her Neapolitan life or her relationship with Saverio to understand exactly what she was referring to with that Gallicism I have lost myself. To my ear, it sounded like nothing more than the rambling of someone who was hungover, overtired, or hypothermic. At the same time I sensed that that phrase, purified by the tears and the cheap champagne, was the truest of truths and thus made perfect sense and that I was the one who failed to understand it because of its simplicity, because there was no ulterior motive behind it other than to be whispered like a mantra. She was sobbing and I was just sitting there watching her, unable to sympathize or act in any way.
“Wait one moment!” said Madeleine all at once, cranking up the volume on the radio. “Yes, it’s that song! Remember it?” She sprung up, her flip-flops smacking the floor, her hips swaying to a samba. It was “Joe Le Taxi” and Madeleine was singing it in a voice no less captivating than that of Vanessa Paradis eternally stuck at fourteen, raising her arms to the ceiling and twirling them like a belly dancer. I was mesmerized as I listened to her sing in her mother tongue, which made her more sensual than ever, until she reached those arms out to pull me up. “Come, dance with me!”
I danced half-heartedly and ungracefully, my body suddenly heavy with sleep deprivation. But I couldn’t let her dance alone, not the first day of the year with tears drying like fresh paint on her cheeks. When the song faded out, Madeleine flashed me a smile that felt like a personal compliment. She draped her arms around my neck, enveloping me in her scent (she didn’t smell of alcohol at all but milk), and saying, “One day you must come visit me. Me and you in Marseilles!”
For a moment I was deeply flattered, but I resisted the temptation. Only in theory were we alike—both the same age, far from home, with an academic streak—but the similarities ended there. I wasn’t endowed with her magnetic beauty, like that of a falling star, nor her fickleness, and for the rest of my life I wouldn’t be able to love another man. Maybe these were shortcomings, maybe they weren’t. So if I squeezed her tight right then, it was only to rush the embrace to its natural conclusion. I was going back to bed, I told her, adding that she ought to put on a sweater because with that T-shirt and this cold she could easily catch something.
“Joe Le Taxi” hadn’t had the least effect on Pietro, who was still asleep half-dressed in the fetal position. I slipped under the blankets and cuddled up to him. This time he woke up, telling me to bring my cold feet closer. I told him about the snow on the volcano, although he didn’t feel like turning around to see it for himself, and I told him about my dream, feelings so sharp I began to wonder in my sleepiness whether the eruption of Vesuvius had been real after all and the strange, chimerical conversation with Madeleine was just something I’d dreamed up.
“Do you believe in prophetic dreams?” I asked him.
“Look, baby, when that pimple blows, we’ll be long gone from this squalor, I guarantee you that. It was just a dream, that’s all.”
Feeling reassured, I said, “Then let’s play the numbers.” It was a joke, of course: we wouldn’t have been caught dead with a copy of La Smorfia, the traditional Neapolitan book associating dream events with lucky numbers to be played in the lottery.
“Yeah, right. Feeling afraid, number ninety.”
“A disaster, seventeen.”
“We’re going to get rich.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed my fingers. “Anyway, apparently we’re all good for the time being, since San Gennaro’s congealed blood melted again recently. It’s a miracle, a miracle!”
His dry tone filled me with shame: in truth, that dark religious rite fascinated me. “And what happens if one time it doesn’t melt?”
“A calamity, according to these troglodytes. Every time it didn’t liquefy when it was meant to and then afterward some sort of disaster occurred, they used hindsight to connect the two events. And they call it science.”
“Like what kind of disaster?”
“Like the earthquake in Irpinia.”
I pressed my face into the chain of his spine. Suddenly overcome by an unbearable adoration, I closed my eyes to breathe
in his smell of forest and sweat. That was when I experienced something of an out-of-body experience. As in a bird’s-eye—or a pigeon’s-eye—view, I could see myself and Pietro from above.
I could see us lying curled up on a mattress on the floor. It wasn’t a room we were in after all but a glorified closet, and it wasn’t a real house we lived in but an illegal floor, one of the many in an infinity of illegal floors building a tower of Babel as they raced each other up to Saint Elmo’s Castle, if not to the low-lying clouds themselves. And seeing it from above, our neighborhood indeed proved itself to be a labyrinth, a series of identical alleyways and dead ends, many one-way streets and only one way out, all buried by last night’s festive violence, which, even if it did get swept up, would return sooner or later. The volcano could see all this from its throne but would neither confirm nor deny. I was amazed to discover from that great height that the land encircling the bay resembled an enormous mouth, a Pac-Man trying to gobble up the islands, and from higher up still I could see the basin of the Mediterranean and all Eurasia and then the entire Earth that only looked like a stationary globe but in reality was at the mercy of a dizzying logic.
For Pietro and me it was now the first of January, but elsewhere in the world, in Sydney or Beijing or Hong Kong, people were already welcoming the first few hours of the second day of the year, the first few hours of tomorrow. I wondered what was happening in this place called tomorrow. Great things for sure, I thought, wonderful and modern and important especially in their vagueness. Whatever these great things were, in that moment I realized that I was missing out on them and in fact I’d missed out on them for years. Hundreds and thousands of lost tomorrows, of wasted opportunities. I felt a stab of misery, a sensation of intolerable immobility, a sense of loss there was no remedy for. In Naples we were always a step behind, incurably trapped in yesterday with its old magic and blood science. What the hell was I still doing there?
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 22
