We stayed the night on Corso Umberto, in the apartment of a friend of his who’d gone on vacation. It was stinking hot even at night, so we turned out all the lights and opened the balcony to let in some fresh (though polluted) air. We sat there in the dark watching an old movie on TV while Gabriele drank whiskey. The scene was so familiar that suddenly all the painful memories came flooding back and I just couldn’t hold them back anymore. Now I understand why you used to say your eyes stung every time you came back to Naples, although for me it’s not because of the smog.
I have to go. I keep thinking of you, but the pictures I keep seeing in my mind’s eye are no longer past-tense images but the present-tense ones from only a few days ago. So you’re not just some ghost after all, but a man in flesh and blood . . .
A big hug,
h.
25
THE SPRING FLEW BY between writing the first draft of my thesis and hanging out with our friends. One evening when I went out with Angelo and Tonino, we were walking along Via Costantinopoli in the direction of Piazza Bellini when a moped rode up close to me, much closer than necessary given how empty the street was at that hour. The Vespa slowed to a crawl and, with the muscle control of a skilled classical dancer, edged in close enough to caress me with its breath but without so much as brushing against me. Then the driver reached a hand out to slide it like a letter opener between my legs. Just like that. Then he revved up and sped away, with the boys chasing after him hurling abuse at his wake. When I got home I didn’t mention the incident to Pietro. It would have only fueled his anti-Naples fire, which was already raging with polluted air and potholed roads, unemployment and corruption. And even I was starting to suspect that the urban regeneration we’d gradually come to believe in might simply be a gift that could be taken back at any given moment.
It was in just such a climate of distrust that the day arrived when I was scheduled to discuss and defend my thesis. As though it were any old morning, I first stopped by the homeless man, the priest, to give him breakfast. As I left, I told him to take care, reverting back to the formal “you” that his true social position deserved. He waved back at me joyously: he’d never done so before and I took it as a good sign.
The truth was that I was in a mild state of panic and searching for signs: any one would do. I’d begged Pietro not to come with me to the deconsecrated church across from Palazzo Giusso, so as to not make me nervous. However, Mamma Rita hadn’t taken no for an answer. Her bleached blond hair was easy to spot among the other parents and relatives dressed in their Sunday best. I squeezed through to sit in the pew next to Rita, who smelled of Fendi and roasted eggplant and fresh nail polish, wishing we weren’t there but in her kitchen cooking and gossiping. All the more so when she pointed her candy-red nail at the photographer she’d hired to take pictures of the big moment.
“Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart,” she said, pretending to be cross as she often did. “What, you think the pictures are for you? They’re for your dad and Barbara.” Then she loosened my hair from its messy bun, blending in some dialect to say, “But, for heaven’s sake, you could’ve at least brushed your hair. You look like a wet cat, just like the first day I met you at the train station in Castellammare, remember?”
“How could I forget?” I said, waiting excitedly for the story she loved to tell again and again.
“It was drizzling and your hair was plastered onto your scalp just like it is now. And there was Tanya coming off the train along with you, and without even having seen a picture of you I recognized you straight off the bat. I said to myself, I did, ‘That’s my Eddie.’ Remember? And Santina was still being such a pain in the ass, going on and on like a broken record, ‘C’mon, Rita, why don’t you take Tanya home with you instead? She won’t be happy at Giusi’s house. I’ll just swap the forms for AFSAI and it’s done. One American girl is as good as another.’ And I went, ‘Forget it, Santina, for the last time! Tell AFSAI that I don’t want no girl called Tanya. Eddie’s coming to live with me, end of story.’”
Rita giggled like a schoolgirl, heedless of the seriousness and pride surrounding us. A few audience members turned to look at her, while others preferred to simply eavesdrop.
“And you remember how my sister Italia couldn’t ever remember your name so she decided to call you Candy Candy, like the doll?” She was laughing contagiously, infecting me only to then reinfect herself and making her long earrings jingle, a pair I’d given her years before. “And now look at you, all grown up. Nearly a university graduate.”
The anxiety came back with a vengeance, worse than ever when a procession of professors walked in to reign over a long table decked with bound theses and microphones. A sacred silence fell over the audience when the first candidate was invited to take a seat before the panel. I tried to focus more on what the girl was saying than on my heart hammering inside my chest, but her words—mangled by the microphone and echoed in the vault of the church—seemed unreal. Compounding my stupor were the camera flashes from the professional doing ninja moves around her.
I came back down to earth only when the poor girl was asked a question by none other than Signorelli, my glottology professor who had kept me glued to my seat morning after morning at the Astra Cinema. I was relieved to see that my supervisor, Benedetti, was seated beside him looking positively amused by the excess of formality. At the far end of the table sat my Russian language professor, the unfaithful husband of my amnesiac literature professor, wearing the expression of a death mask, his eyes pointing downward and cheeks drooping earthward as if tugged down by the gravitational pull. Was it boredom or rather regret?
A round of flashes and a round of applause and the student wasn’t a studentessa anymore but a dottoressa and they were already calling my name. Rita gave me several encouraging, snappy pats on my thigh.
I stood up and walked toward the panel professors as if in a dream. Everything sounded faraway and was moving in slow motion. I had enough time to straighten my pant legs and survey the crowd of relatives, the statue of Saint Mark taming the lion, and even the photographer inserting a new roll of film into his camera. And still I hadn’t reached the committee table. My feet were leaden; I had to drag them.
When I finally did reach my seat, the real world flooded back to me in all its speed and coarseness. Someone in the audience cleared phlegm from their throat. The fat microphone shoved into my hand was sticky with the previous candidate’s cold sweat. “Buongiorno,” I heard myself say in an amplified, foreign voice.
When Benedetti lifted up my thesis—its blue cover and gold lettering—summarizing it with excessive praise, I landed firmly in the present. I was in fact so rooted in the moment, maybe even bogged down, as to be certain I wouldn’t retain a single memory of any nonsense that came out of my mouth. I spoke about pronouns and political correctness. I pulled out dazzling terminology, I gesticulated liberally. I even made an ironic joke that caused Benedetti to guffaw and whack the table—and the pens to go flying. I faltered only when my Russian professor asked me a question in Russian. As I stammered out an answer, kneading and shaping those impure vowels with my tongue, I hoped with every ounce of my being that I’d never be forced to use Russian again, every sound of which was a painful reminder that I’d made a terrible mistake. Nevertheless, my Russian professor nodded his approval and I found myself on my feet along with the committee, showered in flashes. Benedetti cranked my hand up and down, saying over the applause in his booming, northern voice, “One hundred and ten points with honors! Excellent job, dottoressa!”
I had pulled off my last disguise.
One more candidate and the morning session was over. We all flowed out of the church like a river into the sea. Outside, the stagnant, early-summer air embraced me. My relief was so enormous as to appear fatal, and I was suddenly overcome with the sleep deprivation accumulated over the previous few months of obsessive rewrites. Rita held me against her—she was laughing or perhaps shaking with emotion, I’m not sure
—and I collapsed into her large chest, brittle hair, and red sugarcoated kisses. She said, “Listen, sweetheart, this Saturday night we’ll all be waiting for you in Castellammare to celebrate. Bring something sexy to wear because afterward I’m taking you out dancing in Sorrento.”
I was still waving her goodbye when Benedetti sidled up beside me and leaned against the low stone wall. I noticed that, true to his principles to the very end, even today he was wearing blue jeans. Fixing his outrageous eyes on me from behind his thick lenses, he flashed me a mischievous smile. He told me there was a small publishing house he’d already published with that might be interested in putting out my thesis. I was watching his lips move but I couldn’t make sense of his words. It was only when he mentioned a doctorate that I gathered my wits.
“I have connections at the University of Bari,” he was saying. “You’d have a good chance of being offered one for the next academic year.” With that, he gave me a comrade’s pat on the back so hard it nearly took my breath away.
I was flattered, but no. The last thing I wanted was to keep on studying until I turned into Benedetti, somewhere even deeper in the boot than Naples.
To celebrate my graduation, we partied into the night. People I hadn’t seen in a while turned up, as did others I didn’t know at all—Tonino’s or Gabriele’s friends or perhaps friends of friends—who seemed unaware of the occasion. All the better. I drank a beer and half a glass of wine, I was cheerful and outgoing. But eventually I became nauseated and irritated by the music turned up too loud and the smoke saturating my clothes and hair. I thought about seeing if Pietro wanted to sneak away from it all, upstairs to our bedroom, but I couldn’t find him. I scoured the living room and the kitchen, squeezing through the guests to make my way out to the little terrace. And there he was, in a poorly lit corner of the roof talking with Sonia.
He was leaning against the protective wall, his legs slightly parted. Smoking a joint, he was listening to her carefully, nodding and grinning. Sonia looked agitated: she was talking with her hands, laughing nervously. It was crazy but seeing them like that, just the two of them on the roof with the city ablaze behind them and the surprise of the marijuana—the pure secrecy of the scene—I felt as if I were burning inside with a little blue flame, a cold hissing heat.
“Oh, hi, Eddie,” said Sonia as soon as she saw me in that rapid-fire way of hers. Pietro turned to look at me, letting out a soundless, self-conscious laugh. Sonia, quickly saying that it was late and she needed to get going, left us alone on the black bitumen, hot under my feet as if it had absorbed all the sun beating down on it throughout that long summer’s day.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“It’s nothing . . . maybe I had too much to drink.”
“You could afford a hangover, you know.”
I took it as a criticism—always the one who didn’t know how to drop her defenses, let loose, chill. But evidently that’s not what Pietro meant.
“You don’t have class tomorrow morning,” he clarified with a mixture of admiration and envy. “Not tomorrow or ever again. You’re free, now you can do whatever the hell you feel like.”
That’s when it finally hit me, the extraordinary reality that after two decades of continuous study I was free. And that the only thing now anchoring me to Naples was Pietro.
As soon as the sun came up, a humid heat would start rising off the Spanish Quarter like sweat evaporating with the first rays of light. The afa was back, that bad breath released from the street slabs which first snuck into the street-level homes to then move on to the first-floor apartments. By eight thirty in the morning the afa would already be slithering up the crumbling plaster of our courtyard, stopping off at every balcony—on the second, third, and then fourth floors. It took its sweet time, drying itself off with the laundry on the line and licking the garlic braids and maybe even dropping in for a coffee. Then it would make its way to the upper floors, hauling up with it, as though personally delivering us a full paniere, all the smells and sounds of our building’s residents as they dragged themselves out of bed: the first smokers’ coughs, the first showers, the first altercations.
The afa got under people’s skin. Our neighbors at 33 Via De Deo bickered more and more often, at more and more indecent hours. Two voices in particular stood out from the rest: a female voice all fire and brimstone (and yet she was always referring to that other element, water) and a male voice claiming innocence, even ignorance. But if he wasn’t able to mollify that fire alarm by playing Mr. Nice Guy, then it would get ugly fast, with him screaming back at her in the most graphic language. Had they not been separated by the courtyard, they surely would have come to blows. The uproar would wake me up for good, if it wasn’t the heat that got to me first. Especially now that I had no lessons to run to, the afa poked fun at me first thing in the morning; it seemed to enjoy watching me toss half-naked on the sheets and laughing at my freedom.
One morning I cajoled Pietro away from the computer to come out with me for breakfast. Knowing Gambrinus made him feel on edge since it was “only for a certain class of people,” I suggested the humble little café on Via Roma. “Plus, there’s a man there I’d like you to meet.”
But amid the morning mob—people heading to work or window shopping—I couldn’t see the priest’s wheelchair. Pietro and I went in the café and ordered coffees and a croissant to share. Once outside, I again scanned the bare patch of sidewalk. Maybe he was spending the day at the shelter, in spite of the fine weather.
“So who was the guy you wanted me to meet?”
“Oh, maybe another time.”
“Should I be jealous?”
To stretch our legs, we cut behind the old bank building to reach Piazza Municipio. Overlooking the square was Maschio Angioino Castle; the sea was reduced to a dotted line behind the ships docked at the port. The sky was that chalky blue that signaled a sweltering day was on its way, and in fact the stray dogs in the piazza were already gasping for breath in the paltry shade of the umbrella pines. Emaciated, they lay there with their titties stretched out beside them like IV bags barely keeping them alive. Nothing moved in the still air.
“Cigarette break? Take pity on me,” Pietro said, dropping onto a bench. “It’s stinking hot today. I can’t wait to get out of this city, to run for the hills. Even if I have to do my civilian service to do it.”
“Well, you’ve asked to be stationed in or around Naples, so just wait and see.”
Pietro said nothing as he pulled out a cigarette. Although there wasn’t even a hope of wind, perhaps out of habit he cupped his hands around the flame to light up.
“You’ve put in a request, haven’t you?”
His lips pressed around his Marlboro, Pietro mumbled something that was neither a yes or a no but managed to devastate me all the same. “They would have never given it to me anyway, baby. That’s not the way it works in Italy. They try to send all the peasant boys to the north and the factory boys to the south. That way, at least in theory, the two learn to not beat the crap out of each other. And so it will have taken only two hundred years to achieve the unification of Italy. Here we either make Italy, or we die!”
I tied up my hair, damp with sweat. He’d quoted General Garibaldi in an unpleasantly cheerful military voice, as if he took pleasure in following orders. “And that’s OK with you?”
“Hell no. I’m just saying that’s their plan and we’re just pawns in it.” Pietro blew smoke toward the sea; the ash crawled noiselessly up his cigarette, and beyond it the traffic moved smoothly along the road flanking the port.
“Don’t you want to be near me?”
“Is that what you think? It’s not about you.” He crushed his half-smoked Marlboro under his shoe to look me square in the eye. “I don’t come from money, like Carlo, and I’m not well connected so I can forget about getting stationed in the province of Naples. But even if I wanted to try my luck by requesting it, it would be like shooting myself in the foot.”
&nbs
p; “Why?”
“Because staying here would mean another year and a half with my parents breathing down my neck. It makes no difference to them whether I’m in Naples studying geology or playing bingo with paraplegics. They’ll still want me to make the trek all the way to Monte San Rocco every goddamn weekend to work my butt off.”
“You could say no once in a while.”
“Easy for you to say. Don’t you see how hard it is to say no when they’re just a stone’s throw away? I need physical space from them, that’s what I need. Monumental space, topographical space! Is that too much to ask, for fuck’s sake?”
It shocked me to see him so short-tempered; I almost thought I’d done something wrong. I wrapped my bare arm around his, creating a silk of perspiration between us. “OK, let’s talk about topography then,” I said, listing each and every one of our dreams around a world that was a ball in our hands.
My words seemed to lighten his mood because he squeezed his eyes shut, saying, “It doesn’t matter where we are, baby, as long as we’re together. I’d live with you in a suitcase, in the trunk of a car, in the hold of a ship . . . a tepee in the desert . . .”
“. . . an igloo in the Arctic . . .”
It was a testament to just how inhospitable Monte San Rocco was that we would find it more feasible to live out of a car or sleep on the bare ice. Ignoring the heat and the public place, we kissed. A Vespa came sputtering up a nearby street, and as soon as the young driver had reached our height he mimicked a sloppy kiss, with sucking sounds and all, at the nasty end of which he shouted in dialect, “Get her to do you a blow job too!”
Lost in the Spanish Quarter Page 27
