Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  “I don’t mind. How about you?”

  “Me? I’m used to it.” He took a puff. “You know, nowadays it’s illegal to slaughter your own pig like this, without any sort of regulation. If the authorities find out, there’s hell to pay. But the people here keep doing it anyway.”

  I scanned the terra-cotta tiles of the nearby houses, trying to identify which one belonged to the uncle they were all forbidden to even say hi to, and which one belonged to the girl his mother fooled herself into believing Pietro would take as his wife. But to me the houses all looked the same.

  “So, what’s this car thing?” I asked, but Pietro shook his head, puzzled. “That lady said you’ll get one when you graduate. Unless I misunderstood.”

  “Oh yeah, that car.” Pietro confirmed that the gift was a given since the day he started university.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool, though, if you and me saved up and bought a used car of our own?” That idea, which I’d thrown out without much thought, had a romantic ring to it that I ended up liking. I wound my arm around his. “You know, an old beat-up melon.”

  “You mean a lemon.”

  I hid my embarrassment by looking out into the distance. With that error, which may have been more than simply semantic, I had the feeling that something was slipping through my fingers.

  “I need a car now anyway. How else will I be able to visit you when I start my civilian service?” As if to make up for the painful reminder, Pietro pulled a roasted chestnut out of his jacket pocket and placed it in my hand.

  Automatically I peeled back its mahogany outer shell. “When are we going to talk to your mother, Pietro?”

  “About what?”

  “About our plans. About the future.” It had to be today, with the place pleasantly humming like an anthill, on the crest of that tiny but significant triumph.

  “Actions speak louder than words, don’t you think?” He smoothed my hair. “Heddi, what we’re doing now—being here together in front of half the population of Monte San Rocco—is no small feat. It took real balls for us to show up here, and it will pave the way for everything else.”

  He was probably right. I bit into the chestnut. I could never decide if I liked the taste of chestnuts. How could something so beautiful and so sweet leave such a bitter aftertaste?

  “But right now, baby, let me lie down,” Pietro said, turning into the house. “Please, I’m dying for a nap.”

  With Pietro succumbing to the couch in the dining room, I sat by the dying fire, occasionally prodding the charred logs with the prongs. They burst into ephemeral flames that gave out little warmth. In the stillness of the house I could hear the ticking of the clock, syncopated to the sound of chopping that was coming not from outside but from inside the house. It had to be Lidia in her downstairs kitchen.

  I was seized by the urge to go down and speak to her. Did I really need to wait for Pietro? The truth was that his mother had forgiven him for his deception about our living arrangement and had gotten over our trip to Greece. She didn’t have a score to settle with him, but with me. And today, when I was no longer feeling like a victim, was a fine strong day to discuss things openly and honestly.

  I made my way to the stairs, without pausing to consider if I should always be so trusting of my impulses and without any idea of what I might say to Lidia once we were face-to-face. Only a few steps down and I could already see her woolen stockings stuffed like butcher paper into her chunky black shoes and a bowl of pork meat on the floor next to the little table where she sat. It was too late to turn back now.

  “Hello again, signora,” I said, feeling self-possessed and shivering only because of the sudden drop in temperature.

  His mother greeted me in a limp voice without looking up from the chopping board where she was dicing meat.

  “What are you making?”

  “Soppressata.”

  That took me back. I remembered how during that first dinner party at my place Pietro had brought homemade soppressata to share. Now I realized that, on that electrifying night that had changed the course of my life, I had savored and ingested something made by Lidia’s bare hands. In that hand-to-mouth exchange there was an involuntary but undeniable physical closeness, almost a bond that couldn’t be severed.

  “Delicious,” I said as I eased myself down, since there were no other chairs, on a sack of flour against the wall.

  “That’s our wheat.”

  I felt the sting of that subtle scolding and looked out through the glass door at the friends and family in the driveway, a festive, faraway world. Lidia’s kitchen was now garlanded in fresh salami that clogged the air with the sickening smell of meat, and I could already feel my resolve begin to weaken. What had I really thought to accomplish by coming down here, on her turf? I made to get up.

  “The wheat that comes from our land,” Lidia went on. “The land that’s going to be Pietro’s one day.”

  She seemed talkative as never before. I sat back down in my irreverent seat, hazarding the question I already knew the answer to, “And what about Gabriele and Vittorio?”

  “Vittorio? Eeeiihhh . . .” It was a high-pitched wail, like the screech of a crow, all I’d ever heard her utter about her eldest son. Then, as if struck by a toothache, she let out a moan in which she named Gabriele. “Who knows when that boy will ever finish his studies. He’s always asking for more and more money. And to think he was always the good one at school.”

  “He is very good, signora. I’ve seen his drawings.”

  “Drawings? After all these years all he has is a bunch of drawings . . .”

  “Degrees take time.”

  “What would I know?” she said, throwing cubes of fat into the bowl on the floor. “I only got to do four years of schooling.”

  I was impressed. Here was a woman who hadn’t even finished elementary school and yet she was quite well spoken, despite her habit of pronouncing each word the same way she did her chores, in a sort of sluggish and calculated way. And I was amazed that, although she kept on staring into that bowl of meat, Lidia had just shared a piece of her childhood with me. Had Pietro been right all along, that doing the dishes was actually the key to wrench open her heart?

  Dolefully she continued, “I had to work on my father’s land, to put food on the table. Those were hard times, not the life of luxury young people have today.”

  “Where’s your family’s farm?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I got married off and never stepped foot on it again.” Her face twisted briefly as if she’d smelled something foul. “I was old by then, almost thirty. I didn’t have a choice. It’s not like these days, with people living together and whatnot.” I held my breath, convinced that our talk was about to take a turn for the worse. But it didn’t. “My husband didn’t own any land,” she carried on. “We already had our first boy and still we had nothing to our names. So we went abroad . . . as laborers, working six days a week, for fifteen years.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  Pietro’s mother stood up without a word. It occurred to me that she might not actually want to have a conversation with me: she only wished to speak. I would gladly settle for that. She went to the far corner of the room to fumble among some jars and burlap bags. I stole glances at her as she bent over to grab a handful of something from a sack on the ground, another handful from a jar, movements that caused her to let out little huffs of exertion and her kerchief to fall forward over her forehead. I tried to picture Lidia as a young woman, newly betrothed, to conjure up her smooth but plain face. Yet I could only really see her as she was now, old and frustratingly fragile.

  “Can I help?”

  My rhetorical question fell on deaf ears. Lidia came back to the table, pulling from her apron pocket a fistful of rock salt and peppercorns that she then scattered over the meat and fat. The mixture went the same pale pink as her hands kneading it. “We sent the money home to buy land,” she picked up her story. “We’ve worked our whole lives for this land
, this house.”

  This time I had the wisdom not to comment. I mentally sewed together the various stories Pietro had told me. Two years after they came back from Switzerland, one cold Sunday in November of 1980 during a televised soccer match between Juventus and Inter, the earthquake hit. A violent movement of the fault that would later be described as “extensional” or even “normal,” but for the peasants who experienced it the land had turned into water. One minute and thirty seconds, an infinity, in which the land rolled like the sea and howled like a storm and swallowed up houses, churches, hospitals, entire villages. Almost three thousand dead, nine thousand injured, three hundred thousand displaced. The province of Avellino was the worst hit, with the so-called earthquake capital, Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, located only a few kilometers from Monte San Rocco. The earthquake spared their newly built house but many others didn’t survive.

  “All those sacrifices. It was all for them, for those boys.” Lidia shook her head, her gold earrings shaking. “But they don’t care a thing about the land.”

  “Pietro often comes to lend a hand.”

  She lifted her eyebrows derisively. “When he feels like it. But when we die, God’s will be done, there won’t be anyone left to look after the land. No one at all.”

  I nervously readjusted my weight on the sack where I sat, on the heart of the land. Had his mother already figured out that Pietro was going to sell off the plots one by one? To preempt a possible attack on my lover’s moral character, I replied feebly, “Pietro’s doing the best he can.”

  “Eeeiihhh . . .” she uttered again, a sound I’d assumed was reserved for Vittorio alone. “If he was doing his best,” she said, “si sposasse quella brava ragazza.”

  He would marry that nice girl. My chest ignited with fear, despite the fact that his mother had just exposed her education in all its provinciality by mangling her conditional tense—si sposarebbe quella brava ragazza was the correct form—a mistake that could have given me a false sense of superiority, and despite the near certainty that she was merely referring to their neighbor, the girl who was as much of a marriage prospect as a mollusk.

  “Right now that boy’s not thinking straight,” Lidia mumbled as if talking to herself, “but it’s just a phase . . . it’ll pass.”

  I looked down at the concrete floor. It’ll pass. I was the phase that would eventually pass, like the way a fever passes or a wound heals. She’d said it without malice, in the same crestfallen way she’d spoken about her own life. Still, the phrase was as concise and final as a prophecy, almost a curse.

  The time had come for me to say something. Something that summed up our love in a few unassailable words and made it clear that nothing and no one could make me walk away from him. A phrase uttered in a firm voice, in clear Italian with a smattering of Neapolitan to lend it a devil-may-care attitude. But nothing like that came out of my mouth. I quickly made up an excuse—dishes to dry or something like that—and climbed back up the stairs without looking behind me.

  The fire was dead as I collapsed on the couch at Pietro’s feet. He was sleeping like a rock. I gently laid my hand on his chest, not to wake him but simply to remind myself of my incredible good fortune. In sync with his breathing, my hand rose and fell in the same hypnotic way we rose and fell driving over the hills around Monte San Rocco. It lulled me. How nice it would be to fall asleep, I thought, to surrender to it, to just let go. Let go of everything.

  And I really was tired. Tired of the effort of continually seeking Lidia’s approval, and tired already of trying to keep the noble promises we’d made at New Year’s. It was obvious to me now that not only would his mother never warm to me, but she would even actively oppose our future plans. She’d taken the time to tell me her tale of famine and arranged marriages not because she wanted to let me in or even vent her own grief, but for the sole purpose of showing me that her dislike for me was entirely justified. We’d been acting under an illusion. In reality there was no heroic battle to win because Pietro and I didn’t stand a chance. There was only one thing left to do: walk away.

  I was struck by an idea that was astonishing in its simplicity. I could simply leave, go back to Naples. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before—perhaps my optimism, or my masochism, was to blame. I could leave that very evening, even in the dark, the bus rocking me to sleep, the window my starry cushion. The mere thought filled me with a colossal, even final, sense of freedom, as though if I left Monte San Rocco now I’d never ever have to come back for the rest of my life.

  When Pietro stirred, I whispered his name.

  “Hi, baby,” he said through a stretch.

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Sure did. The sleep of the just.”

  He was already reaching for his cigarettes and lighter so I quickly added, “Pietro, listen. I know we have another couple days here but I’m thinking of leaving earlier.”

  “When?”

  “This evening. Tomorrow morning.”

  “OK,” he said, not looking at all surprised: if anything, he looked relieved. “There’s a bus from Borgo Alto at noon tomorrow.” His readiness perplexed me. Wasn’t he even going to entertain the idea of leaving with me? He turned to me then with something like nostalgia in his eyes and said, “Look, Heddi, if only one of us can be free, I want it to be you.”

  Later in the afternoon the hanging carcass was gone. The only traces of the pig were scraps lying across the bloodied table. Many of the villagers had gone home; those who remained scraped bones to salvage every last thread of flesh. The sun, too, was hanging by a thread, and the driveway was growing heavy once more with the chill of winter and the fear of being wasteful. On the terrace I lifted my scarf over my mouth, whispering into it the warm secret of my departure. I stepped on a fallen branch and it let out a satisfying snap.

  Pietro, wearing that black wool hat, called out to me from the driveway. “You still want to go for a tractor ride?”

  “I’d love to.”

  He spread open the metal doors of the shed. Gesualdo the dog wasn’t there: maybe he was off on one of his escapades or gnawing a pork bone somewhere more private. Pietro took a seat and started up the tractor with a roar that sounded like an act of rebellion. He was using farm equipment in an entirely unproductive way and he didn’t give a damn. He reached out his hand, saying, “Watch your step.”

  On top of the tractor I felt tall and exposed to the elements. The lingering butchers waved up at us as we rolled down the steep lane. It was hard to keep my balance; I kept slipping forward on the metal seat toward Pietro, and the effort to stay put made me laugh. “I’m going to fall!” I shouted, but my voice could barely be heard over the engine and my breath escaping from my scarf melted into the air.

  “You won’t fall,” Pietro turned to me to say with the same heartfelt and confident voice he’d used the very first time we were driving to Monte San Rocco—when, like a pool player sinking the eight ball, he moved the black gear knob smoothly into place without even having to look at it—and he told me that we weren’t in the eye of the storm, that there was no storm at all.

  The sun had almost completely burned out and the air smelled of snow as we drove past windows, vegetable gardens, doors. An old man saw us and waved. I waved back the ecstatic way you do when you’re passing by in a parade and you never have to stop or see that person ever again. It was odd, though, that little old man waving mutely and our big beast needlessly growling past him.

  I looked at Pietro, who was waving too. He looked slightly amused but tired, like he was listening to a favorite joke for the hundredth time.

  23

  I GENUINELY DIDN’T THINK I’d ever see Luca Falcone again. So when I saw him standing before me one night at a free concert in Piazza San Domenico, I thought I was seeing a mirage. Everything around me was swaying to the rhythm of reggae—braids and dreads, hemp bags and Peroni bottles—and I just stood there in the middle like a statue. I blamed Tonino, who’d planned the surprise
by pulling me and Angelo by the hand to a spot whose dismal view of the stage only made sense now.

  “Heddi,” Luca said with that off-center smile.

  So absorbed was I in the unique asymmetry of his face that I didn’t at first notice his arms were open wide. I fell into them in what was not so much an embrace as a wrinkle in time, a scrunch of worn leather I’d perhaps always known, a familiar infusion of dried lavender and loose tobacco, and yet when we broke apart I was astonished by his changed appearance. It was his hair. Gone was the unkempt ponytail (Angelo was ruffling his cropped hair) and along with it had gone his wise old look. Had I never really grasped that Luca was only twenty-six years old? His youth was startling.

  The boys too were looking at him with admiration, asking how long he was in town. He was only staying for a few days with his aunt in Barra, Luca told us with a particularly melodic accent, his voice having lost any hint of Neapolitan gloominess it may have once had.

  “Go on,” Angelo said, “give us some stories from the barracks. Do you have to shine your boots before roll call?”

  “Bunk bed plastered with Monica Bellucci pinups, I bet,” said Tonino. “Naked, obviously.”

  Luca smiled as if to humor them. He didn’t live in the barracks, he told us, but most nights made it home for dinner with his parents. Much of his work consisted of pushing paper at a desk. He’d even put on a bit of weight, he admitted. He was an officer, after all, and well paid at that, a role of responsibility and respect only the well educated had access to.

  I was only half listening. I was trying to fix in my mind everything about him: his gestures, the way he talked. Who knew when I’d see Luca again. I knew that I had no right to expect another visit from him, that I wasn’t a close enough friend. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he’d conspired with Tonino to plan this little surprise, conceivably for me.

  A blond girl hugged Tonino and Angelo and handed them beers. In that break I asked Luca how his mother was doing, a question I instantly regretted when he answered, “She has cancer.”