Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  Of all the words in the world that was, and perhaps always has been, the most terrifying. It’s the ogre in the dictionary, the loathsome but very real possibility that none of us will be rewarded for our talent or kindness or healthy lifestyle, and that maybe death gets a kick out of taking the most talented, the kindest, the healthiest of all. But in the end death can weasel its way out of any responsibility for it, it washes its hands of it, because a tumor is not just any illness but the betrayal of one’s own body, which turns out to be capable of harboring evil within, to live with it for a long time without ever knowing, to destroy itself in all innocence.

  I muttered some sort of condolence, which Luca accepted with dignity, silently reaching in his jacket for his tobacco and rolling paper. A beer bottle shattered somewhere in the square. For a while I pretended to listen to the music but I was all too aware of Luca’s larger-than-life presence, a colossus by my side. I was afraid to say anything else, to break the spell and make him vanish.

  It was Luca who bridged the distance by stepping closer and pressing his shoulder against mine with pretend casualness. “I have something to tell you. I might be sent on a mission.”

  “What kind of mission?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. They won’t give out the details unless I agree to take part. Even the country is classified information.”

  “You’re leaving Italy then,” I said, as if resigned to living perpetually in his shadow, and it was only when he said, to the increasingly frenetic beat of the congas, the fatal words “the Middle East” that it occurred to me to protest. “No, Luca, not into combat . . .”

  “I wouldn’t be going as a soldier. It’s my knowledge of Arabic they want.”

  The rolled cigarette was balanced between his lips, a tiny papyrus that he hadn’t lit yet and maybe had no intention of lighting at all; he might even decide to put it back in his pocket and simply walk off into the night. It was impossible to predict Luca Falcone’s next move, for regardless of where he was living, near or far, he never ceased to amaze. He’d been able to find a use for his abstruse academic knowledge, but well outside the university environment. He was going into a war zone, but as an intellectual. And here we were among all those swaying dreadlocks and lip piercings, his tribe in the first place, and there was Luca standing out from the crowd with his crew cut, all cleaned up and respectable, making the straight and narrow path at this young age the only true rebellion. Never had I been more confused—and fascinated—by Luca Falcone.

  “It would pay very well,” he added, “and there would be no expenses.”

  “It sounds like you’re going then.” If it came out sounding more detached than I’d meant it to, it was only because I thought I’d already lost Luca—and how could you lose a person twice?

  “I haven’t decided.” Luca finally burned his creation. “I’d like to know what you think.”

  “Me?” Something in me instantly melted, just like the time he’d asked me for help with the song lyrics. I felt privileged, maybe even chosen. “I think you . . . should follow your gut,” I replied somewhat giddily, although I knew my advice couldn’t possibly help, but I had no other answer, even for my own life.

  Luca reached out with his free hand to tousle my hair like an older brother would, hard enough for me to tell that his fingers were calloused despite the paperwork. I felt little and important at the same time as he smiled and fixed his magnetic gaze on me, which as always tried to capture me and expose me in all my ignorance.

  But this time I summoned the courage to lift my eyes to his and hold them there for as long as need be. There was nothing easy about this, as anyone who’d ever met Luca Falcone could attest to, because he was never the one to let go first, and in fact I battled indecision and embarrassment as I stared back at him in an almost romantic way in a place full of people. But the longer I matched his gaze, the less it seemed to intimidate me, because I understood now that with that look Luca didn’t actually want to communicate or teach me anything at all. He was simply looking at me the way the moon looks at you. That light that makes you feel, for a moment, that you’re not merely a human being but part of something eternal, maybe even divine. That enigmatic smile that reminds you there’s no need to ask so many questions, for you already have the answers within.

  All at once, I could see our friendship with almost painful crispness: all its shared passion—for knowledge, for life, for people, for each other—compressed into a nearly invisible dot, a speck of saffron with the potential to burst with inexhaustible color.

  “Hey, who wants some of this soup?” Tonino cut in, pushing a beer into Luca’s hand. “It’s warm as piss but I took it anyway. I’m not one to offend a lady, am I?”

  Their friend was gone and it was the four of us again, just like old times: only Sonia was missing. Luca took a swig of beer and handed me the bottle. I didn’t refuse. Nothing, not even alcohol, could have tainted my high spirits or my clarity of mind.

  “This band’s not too bad,” said Angelo.

  Tonino adjusted his glasses in the direction of the stage, giving them the benefit of a moment’s doubt. “Are you deaf, blondie? An attack of diarrhea has more rhythm than these guys.”

  After my Italian literature exam, there was only one blank space left in my blue booklet, for Russian literature. But that would have to wait until my professor had recovered from an unusual case of amnesia. Word had it that, shocked by the infidelity of her husband, who coincidentally was my Russian language professor, she had lost the memory of the last thirty years of her life. She was regaining her memories bit by bit, in chronological order—the first being how to speak Russian again, which she’d learned as a young woman—but she was still far from remembering any of her students’ names, and so for the time being she was at home recovering. Either way, I’d lost any passion I might have once had for that useless language with its sounds that stuck to the palate like boiled potatoes. Russian had only ever been a vague interest dating back to a short-lived Dostoyevskian phase as a moody teenager. Therefore, with or without my professor’s amnesia, in that overcrowded classroom I was never going to be anything but a nameless face.

  The scirocco came back. It blew with wild determination through the streets like tropical stormwater racing toward the gutter. As it passed through, it tore open jackets and amused itself with skirts. It wrestled with fishermen pushing out to sea and table umbrellas outside Caffè Gambrinus. It ripped off my wool hat to play with it across the cobblestones like a cat with a hapless sparrow. It blew chalk through my hair, caressing the nape of my neck, and panting into my ear, Remember me? Remember when we were in Greece together and we capsized ferries and then afterward we’d go back to the hotel and screw? It was all just hot air. The scirocco embellished the truth so as not to have to admit that it had never actually been to Greece, that it came from the Sahara, from Africa, where many said the city should piss off to anyway. Bunch of Moroccans, they said up north.

  The wind whirled, time flew, and the only thing that thankfully didn’t change was Pietro. Every detail about him reassured me. His glasses reflecting the computer screen, his hand curled thoughtfully over his mouth when he was reading National Geographic or the Italian translation of Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the disastrous ascent of Everest. The courteous way he always put down grocery bags, like he was afraid to bruise the pears. How, when he talked about physics or was nervous for some other reason, it almost sounded like he had a lisp, a stress-induced speech impediment. The blurry yin-yang tattoo he’d needled into his own forearm with the same steady hand he’d cut his name into the handle of his pick. The pearly buttons leading down his shirt, the little plunge his chest made in the center. His broad hands, the salt on his skin.

  We made love as though he was about to be sent to war: in the morning, in the evening, sometimes in the deep of the night when we were awakened by an accidental caress or the moon snowing onto our covers. We called each other by those private names that make single
people cringe. But mostly I loved calling him simply Pietro. Pronouncing it was like breaking into a broad, sunny smile before blowing a kiss, one that went unreciprocated and ended in that closed o, a beautiful though somewhat sorrowful conclusion.

  With the arrival of the scirocco, Sonia and Carlo broke up and Madeleine went back to Marseilles. In the days leading up to her departure, I strictly avoided looking her in the eye, afraid to see tears or an invitation to play one of our little games. But in the end, the day of her departure arrived without incident, her last moments in that apartment abruptly announced by Saverio pressing the buzzer three times.

  At the door Gabriele took her in his arms, saying, “Please don’t, Madeleine, you’ll make me cry too. We’ll see each other again. One day I’ll come visit you in Marseilles, I promise. It will be a good opportunity to practice my French, mon petit chou.”

  “I’ll miss you too,” she said, now turning to Pietro, who hugged her with the usual suspicious affection he had for her before making his second rhetorical offer to walk her downstairs.

  With that heavy suitcase, Madeleine appeared to falter on the threshold, like she was wavering. I pulled her toward me, as hard as ever: she was so petite, so fragile, that I suddenly feared I might crush her. A cacophony of goodbyes and she was gone, just like that, sucked down by the stairwell.

  “What a shame she’s left,” said Pietro. “I sure will miss the way she kicked that hot-water heater.”

  “A shame? It’s devastating,” replied Gabriele. “I abhor it when people go out of your life like that.”

  As soon as he went upstairs to his room, I turned to Pietro. “When we leave for good, we have to take him with us.”

  “Who?”

  “Gabriele.”

  “As if. Can you imagine you, me, and Gabriele traveling the world? What a threesome. Where did you get such an idea?”

  The phone rang and Pietro picked up. Rolling his eyes, he collapsed onto the couch. “Have you eaten?” I was already starting toward the kitchen to give him his privacy when I overheard him say, “Easter? Of course I’ll be there.”

  Outside the sky was colorless and the air odorless, yet the scirocco had its days in Naples numbered. As did we. But leaving the city didn’t seem like a choice to me anymore: we had to go. Because among the thousand tired old reasons to drag the city through the mud—heard up north and down south, uttered among Neapolitans and among us—the most serious was its geographical birth defect of being only one hundred and two kilometers from Monte San Rocco.

  From: tectonic@tin.it

  To: heddi@yahoo.com

  Sent: July 15

  Dear Heddi,

  I’m sorry for my usual silence, by now you know what I’m like . . . Today I was out in the countryside. I cut willow branches to use as string for the grapevines. I planted some trees, one with your name.

  I have to confess that I think about you all the time, and I’m ashamed of it. I believe I’m suffering from a sort of double personality or even a triple one, I’m not sure . . . I only know that when I think of you I see myself as a different person, completely different from who I am and who I represent myself as being in my everyday life. I love thinking about that person that I once was, or maybe it’s only my imagination. Sometimes I fantasize that when I see you again it will be just like when we left off. I can’t imagine that you’ve changed at all, and you’ve hardly changed on the outside judging from the picture you sent me . . . I remember you well and I will never be able to forget you. And I really mean it: I will never forget you or who I was or everything you taught me or how I sacrificed you . . . and you aren’t even capable of hating me.

  I’m useless, I know, but I’m horribly human. I hurt you, I lied to you . . . even during that fateful phone call. There was no other woman: that was really just an excuse to leave you. I’m a coward. I have never been, nor will I ever be, good at picking the right way when put in front of a crossroads. Often I’ve thought that the secret is not to choose, not to think at all about the consequences, everything is meant or not meant to be. But destiny is the excuse of fools and the weak . . .

  I’m blathering on and on, I know, but I would like to be able to share all my thoughts with you. And I’d like to be optimistic: according to my horoscope, this year everything will be resolved! And why not believe in it just a little?

  You’re leaving in a few days, so I wish you a safe trip. I’ll see you on the morning of August 20th at Rita’s. Wait for me . . .

  p.

  24

  I SPENT EASTER in Castellammare with Rita, a quick visit because I needed to keep chipping away at my thesis. When Pietro and Gabriele returned to the city, loaded down with hydrogeological surveys and peasant food (a misnomer, I now knew), my excitement was such that I invited them both to come with me to the so-called Underground Naples. Pietro’s justification for not going was that he was only interested in natural caves, not the man-made kind. “Besides, they’re probably full of crickets,” he added.

  It seemed appropriate, in any case, that Gabriele would be the one accompanying me into the bowels of the city. As soon as we hit Via Roma he locked his arm in mine and didn’t let go the whole way there. Gabriele was like that: he showed his affection through old-fashioned, chivalrous mannerisms, unlike his brother, who, as though afraid to spoil a secret by broadcasting it to all of Naples, was becoming more and more jealous of our privacy. As we walked arm in arm, Gabriele told me how lucky I was not to have spent the holiday with them. “Easter in Monte was nothing more than a feeding frenzy,” he explained, “from which I barely escaped alive.” Easter in Monte. I loved how Gabriele, not in the least intimidated by the village, shortened its name. The Mount sounded like a ski resort.

  We found the hand-painted sign; the bolt was undone. It was almost lunchtime and the yawning doorway let out a blast of warm, earthy air that made the notices and brochures in the tiny entranceway flutter. A bearded young man on duty lifted his eyes from a book and told us to hurry if we wanted to catch up with the last tour group of the day. He added, in a welcome instance of the Neapolitan art of rule bending, that we could pay another time. He showed us the way by pointing to a stairwell that descended into the very throat of the earth.

  “So should we go then, Eddie?”

  “A guided tour? I don’t know . . .”

  I would have preferred to go adventuring like always; however, Gabriele wasn’t referring to the tour but to the dark descent before us. As if to muster all his will, he ran a hand vigorously over the fresh stubble on his head, freshly shaven to tackle his creeping baldness.

  “Wait. Take these,” said the man, handing us a couple of lit candles, the long white ones usually used in religious processions.

  We started down the stairwell. With one hand I shed quivering light onto the uneven steps that had been yanked forcefully out of the rock, while with the other I steadied myself against the damp and grainy wall. I kept my eyes on Gabriele’s shape ahead of me and on his flickering shadow, sometimes statuesque and sometimes grotesque, cast onto the wall that was coming off on my hand.

  “Tuff?”

  “Exactly.”

  At the bottom of the stairs all we had to do was follow the voices. A woman with a well-to-do Neapolitan accent, like Carlo’s, was saying, “And then in World War Two they were used as air-raid shelters. Come in closer. Do you see these?”

  Our passageway ended in a small room carved into the rock, where five or six candles were gathered round to light up a wall that resembled a Neolithic cave painting.

  “Take a look at this,” Gabriele whispered. He brought his candle up to a drawing etched into the volcanic tuff, a fighter plane with clouds of destruction beneath it. It was signed “Enzo” and dated August 6, 1943.

  “The bombing from the Allied forces must have seemed to the people of Naples like endless, gratuitous violence,” said the guide, her face a mere sketch in the dancing light. According to her, during the air raids—which lasted days, weeks
, and sometimes months at a time—the civilians who had sought refuge in the underground caves had nothing to do but “fill the time with prayers and express their fear through art.”

  “Graffiti, in other words,” said a man with a Tuscan accent. “Naples sure does have a long tradition of that.”

  “As you wish,” was the guide’s retort, “but remember that Naples was the most bombed of all Italian cities.”

  “Show some respect,” another man joined in.

  “People were married down here,” the guide went on. “Children played, babies were born.” Records stated that a certain Carmela Montagna gave birth to a baby girl, who within months died of pneumonia brought on by the cold and damp conditions. “A life cut short without a single caress from the sun.”

  Her words affected me, although I couldn’t decide if they were simply scripted for the tour. Authentic or not, they brought to mind the child-size coffin I’d seen at the Fontanelle Cemetery. A bead of water fell out of nowhere and landed on my cheek. I wiped it away.

  After the war, the guide told us, the city was buried in debris but life must go on—and people of Naples always rise up again. Nonetheless, with all means of transport destroyed the only way for the inhabitants to clear the city was to dump the rubble of their fallen homes into the underground caves, filling them in. “Perhaps they were also attempting to bury the memories of what they’d endured down here. And in fact from the 1960s onward no one talked about these caves anymore.”

  “So why wasn’t this one filled in?” asked a girl.

  “You have to keep in mind that there were over four hundred of such bomb shelters all over Naples. Actually, most buildings had internal access to one. And besides, a single generation couldn’t have possibly undone the great architectural and engineering feats begun in Greek times. Please come this way.”