Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  I keep thinking about a trip I made a couple years ago with my German roommate to a place about an hour’s drive from Auckland, a beach called Pakiri, where you can do horse trekking in small groups. Our instructor got us to saddle up and ride along a path that weaved through the forest until it came to a fork. She asked which of us wanted to keep on going through the woods, an easy ride for beginners, and which of us more experienced riders wanted to canter on the beach. The sea was right there; you could see the stretch of dazzling white sand. My friend, who had much more experience than me with horses, opted for the beach, while I chose the forest. But my horse wouldn’t budge, he wouldn’t follow the single file ducking under the trees no matter how hard I kicked him in the sides: he was just standing there, still but tense. Then without warning, he spun around and started running toward the sea. I grabbed the reins but I was practically suspended in midair above the saddle; I could feel his muscles taut with his frightening strength, his hooves crushing the scrub and wrecking the sand dunes, his mane flapping against my face. He was actually galloping, just like they do in Westerns, and it was a miracle that I didn’t fall off. He slowed down only when he got to the water’s edge, once he was side by side with my friend’s horse. I only found out later that he was in love with that horse and couldn’t stand to be away from her.

  New Zealand has helped me find pleasure again in being by myself and finally trust my abilities. But, in a certain way, everyone who passes through here does so without leaving a trace—they’re footprints in the sand. New immigrants are always coming in, while those born here sooner or later leave to explore the world, including many of my friends. I’ve always accepted their departures gracefully and welcomed with open arms those newly arrived to take their places. Will this junction end up being the place where I can finally rest my itchy feet? But then what am I meant to do with this Neapolitan heart of mine?

  I have to tell you that I’m afraid, too—of the thoughts we’re confessing to each other, the daydreams that we’re having . . . I won’t deny that I often imagine the two of us here together, walking up volcanoes with our backpacks or having dinner with my friends, who have that funny accent you’d have trouble understanding at first. I imagine you finally working as a geologist, and you and me in Italy two months a year, in the summer there, and the others saying “Lucky them” because we will have found a way to spin the earth like a globe between our hands and make it so that for us winter and bad weather no longer exist.

  I hope you can imagine how difficult it is for me to write these words to you. I know that this way I run the risk of making the same mistakes too. But we have only one life to live . . . or maybe not. I hope you’ll have it in you to bet on this hand (bet it all?) and come see me at the ends of the earth, even if it’s just for a short vacation. And then we’ll see.

  I’m hugging you back,

  h.

  27

  I FELT LIGHT. My feet seemed to float above the path and my body was wrapped in the finest sheet of mist. For once I was on an excursion without my camera, so I wouldn’t even carry a memory of this hike that left no footprints. My bag didn’t weigh me down, either, for I’d left it behind, nor was I burdened by the awareness of not knowing where I was or where the dirt path was taking me. All I had in my hand were a few crinkled sheets of paper.

  I looked down at them. They were scribbled with frantic peaks like electrocardiograms. They seemed like important graphs but they weren’t mine and I couldn’t decipher them. Suddenly, I remembered I’d been handed them by the professor in the observatory. It’s the writing on the wall, he’d said. And there was the observatory down there, a little square painted, like the Capodimonte Museum, in a shade of red that was neither here nor there, and built in a secluded spot high up enough to stay clear of the lava flows. It was a historic building that knew its place and that’s why after so many centuries it was still standing. Don’t go to the crater, the professor had warned me. Take my advice.

  But in the meanwhile I had nearly made it to the crater. I could tell from the sharp tilt of the path, which was crumbling more and more beneath my feet, and from the sudden difficulty I was having gaining ground. I could tell from the mist that wasn’t mist after all but a cloud, and I was inside of it standing right before the shrouded mouth of the volcano as if I’d stepped into the path of a Chimera. I could tell from the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare.

  The wind began to blow, ripping the papers from my clenched fist and releasing them into the void. They flapped about like seagulls before a storm and then disappeared. I was truly on my own now. The wind blew away the cloud, too, revealing the jagged, desertlike crater in all its terrible greatness. Under the blinding sun I could see with almost painful clarity every single rock, big and small, each one halted in its own inexorable roll toward the bottom. And below merely debris, pulverized rock, a wasteland. Is this it? I thought to myself.

  The crater that I’d so longed to reach wasn’t a thing and it wasn’t even a place. It was simply nothing, an emptiness I didn’t think our planet was capable of—it was like a crater on the moon, a void without any hope of redemption or hope of life. I grasped that there is something infinitely worse than an eruption.

  But I had no intention of giving in to the sense of betrayal, and even less to vertigo, and I quickly turned to begin my descent. As if toying with me, the volcano started moving, shimmying this way and that, until I tripped. I ended up facedown on the path, my mouth dry with that reddish earth that tasted like nothing. I closed my eyes tight to block out my reality, but underneath me the mountain kept on rolling like a water mattress. So this was what an earthquake was like?

  I struggled to get back on my feet, to save myself, but my legs felt like they’d been set in plaster casts. I begged the painfully bright sky to give me a reason to get back up, something to believe in so as to prevail over my weak body, my tired spirit. But the sky did nothing. It was the dreadful knowledge that I was all alone but somehow had to find the strength anyway.

  The sun in my eyes woke me up. We’d neglected to lower the blinds, so the morning rays came freely through the window from the sports field. It was a tight fit in that single bed, and I’d been keeping my legs unnaturally straight in the unconscious attempt to give Pietro space. Only half-awake, I rolled the other way, pulling the sheet with me. I distractedly fingered my silver pendant, hoping to fall back asleep.

  But soon details from the night before resurfaced: the pacing back and forth, the extreme words, the drops of sweat, and my final, unanswered question, The money or your freedom? Memories that now, in the light of day, devastated me.

  “Could you pass me my cigarettes?” came Pietro’s voice. “On the bedside table.”

  “Sure.”

  He straightened up, hunching his back against the bare wall. He took the pack listlessly and squeezed his eyes shut, as though it had just dawned on him, too, what juncture he was at. I almost expected him to announce that he was going to speak to his mother this very day. Instead he said, “My back hurts.”

  “Where?”

  “In the middle, maybe a little bit over to the left.”

  “A cramp?”

  “No, it’s more like a dull pain.”

  “You probably slept funny.”

  “Could be. This bed must have been built for one of the seven dwarfs.” He lit a cigarette. “I’m not used to sharing a bed this small.”

  I lowered my bare feet to the tiles without leaning over to kiss him first. It was the only way I could get back at him for his selective memory. How could he not remember the countless times we’d slept in that tiny bed of his before the ceiling collapsed? I was already halfway to the electric burner when Pietro said there was no coffee or anything at all to eat. He suggested we go out for breakfast.

  “A café in town?”

  “No, we’ll just go to the hotel up the hill.”

  We got dressed and headed out. It was a Sunday and the village was still sleeping. Afte
r a few minutes, Pietro stopped in that crooked stance and scrunched up his face.

  “My back,” he said.

  “Maybe your muscles have seized up. If you want, we can turn back and I’ll try to massage it out.” When he declined, I told him the knot would probably work itself out as the day went on—unless he’d pulled a muscle.

  Pietro nodded. Maybe he wasn’t listening, and I, too, had the impression I was talking nonsense. Either way, I made no further mention of it. Fumbling in his pockets for another cigarette, he said, “Just give me a minute to catch my breath.”

  The road wasn’t that steep and his sluggishness, indeed his lethargy in everything, was sorely testing my patience. Or perhaps it was just the heat. The cicadas were sounding their incessant alarm to warn us of the scorcher on its way. Even though it was only just after eight o’clock, a hot humid haze was already back blanketing the valley, which was still indiscernible but must have been truly beautiful if it had made Pietro feel, if only for a moment, like the master of his fate.

  “That’s the hotel up there,” he said, pointing to the top of the street. He took a few drags from his Marlboro Light, deeply as if breathing from an oxygen mask, before making another series of steps forward. “Let’s keep going. I can make it.”

  We were no more than twenty meters from our destination, but from the way Pietro was talking you would have thought we weren’t walking to a hotel but tackling a summit at high altitude, conquering Everest like they did in books.

  Our conversation was further reduced, to the point where over breakfast we exchanged only pleasantries. Afterward Pietro took me to see the library where he would be slaving away for an eternity yet.

  “Here it is,” was all he said.

  The library was closed, so we stood in the shade of a tree looking at it from the outside. I didn’t know what to say. If only there was a breeze, I was thinking, to make a little choir of those leaves above us—any noise to shatter this fake calm! But there wasn’t even a breath of air.

  Pietro smoked, inspecting the cobblestones. “It’s hot today.”

  “It is . . .”

  In reality, though mild compared to the Neapolitan afa, the heat was sucking every last drop of vitality from me too. It was as though a battle had ended and I couldn’t tell, nor did I have the strength to figure out, whether I’d come out of it defeated or not. I was confused and exhausted.

  We kept on walking through the little streets. Maybe he thought he was simply doing his duty, given that yesterday afternoon I’d asked him to show me around the town center. But yesterday afternoon seemed to belong to the distant past, and the stroll felt forced. There were no signs of life, the stores were closed, and every now and then Pietro had to stop to catch his breath. The healthy glow he had yesterday had vanished and he was chain-smoking. Had my arrival done this to him?

  “This is the piazza.”

  “It’s nice.”

  More than a piazza, it was a statue, a bench, and a phone booth randomly thrown together. Pietro crushed his cigarette butt underfoot, saying, “So do you like it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Monte Porzio Catone.”

  Hearing him once again pronounce the name of his prison so very faithfully and lovingly, I was gripped by a mute fury and said, “Why, do you like it?”

  He didn’t answer, reaching into his pocket to take out yet another cigarette. All at once I found I could no longer tolerate either his Marlboro Lights, and light they most certainly were not, or these meager dialogues, which were nothing but commonplace strategies to avoid the heart of the matter. The money or your freedom? I felt like shouting it, but how could I repeat a question that was essentially rhetorical, a question to which there was only one possible—only one conceivable—answer?

  “Do you really think you should still be smoking?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, you don’t look in very good shape today.”

  “It’s the last,” he said, adding derisively, “May I?”

  He lit the flame with an expert flick of his lighter. As I watched him burn his cigarette to ashes, it suddenly occurred to me that I may have misunderstood the heart of the matter. Perhaps the choice he had to make was not the rather abstract and open-ended one between the money and his freedom, but rather the more concrete and immediate choice between the money and his girlfriend. Pietro must have been aware of it, too: that’s why he was avoiding my eyes. But if that was the real question, I reasoned, wasn’t it even easier to answer? No one in their right mind would choose money over the person they professed to love. So then why put off answering, why make small talk and smoke like a chimney? It was an extravagant waste of time that I was simply not going to put up with anymore.

  I glared at the cigarette that gave him such comfort. He’d said very little all morning, but now I saw him make a move that was much more eloquent than any word he could have uttered: he turned his back to me and crossed the square by himself. At first I just stood there watching Pietro, who was a gentleman by nature, leave me in the lurch and walk away with the cavalier strut I recognized from the Spanish Quarter. Then I started thinking crazy thoughts. That he wouldn’t stop at all, that he’d walk on without a backward glance till he got to the far edge of the town, that he’d climb over the wall and disappear, covering his tracks. That I’d never see him again.

  I got scared. I ran after him, not without a hearty dose of self-contempt, chasing his toxic wake through the winding street. Pietro must have heard me coming because he stopped for me to catch up. Interpreting this as an olive branch, I became hopeful, yet when I reached him he wasn’t extending that or his apologies or even his hand, which he brought instead to his chest, digging in his fingers with an afflicted expression. I fell back into my funk.

  We started walking again, together this time but god knows where, and after a while he stopped again, and then again, with a shortness of breath that wasn’t improving even now that the street was going downhill. It was getting hotter and hotter, and I realized it wasn’t a normal heat, not simply a new summer’s day on its way, but a stagnant, threatening heat like a storm cloud that hadn’t burst. Not even Pietro’s backache was what it seemed, since his chest apparently hurt now too. But my bitterness was such as to make me think he was merely exaggerating the discomfort in order to stir my compassion and throw not only me off the track but also the issue tailing us everywhere we went.

  Before long we were back at the widening in the main road where the bus had dropped me off the day before. There wasn’t a single car and Pietro crossed the road without even looking. He leaned against the stone wall beyond which the town wasn’t authorized to go—nor he. I followed him.

  “There’s more air here,” he said. “Before I felt like I was suffocating.”

  I took the hint—that I was smothering him—and grew indignant. “Who do you think I am, Pietro? I’m not one of those classic uptight girlfriends, the jealous ones that hassle you and won’t let you go out with your friends and then demand an engagement ring and a house and a wedding, just for appearances’ sake. I am not a ball and chain around your ankle.”

  “I wouldn’t be with you if you were like all the other girls.”

  “So then let’s get this straight: Are you with me or not?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I want to know at the end of the day what your decision is going to be.”

  Pietro turned his back to me. Leaning forward over the wall, he looked through the veil of haze to admire the hills, somewhere beyond which was Rome. Then he inhaled deeply from his cigarette before saying, “What decision?”

  “What decision,” I mumbled, pressing my hand against my forehead in exasperation. Pietro just kept on pretending nothing was wrong, forcing me to voice a vulgar alternative that made me sick to my soul, a choice that cheapened and debased our relationship. Love for sale. Yet, willing to do just about anything to get past this crisis, I said crudely, “It’s either me or
the money.”

  Silence. The mere fact that Pietro didn’t refute it was devastating confirmation that I had in fact found, within that tangled ball of wool, the end of the yarn, the bottom line. Finally he muttered, “What can I say, baby? Everything hurts.”

  “If you have to think twice before answering that question, then . . .”

  Pietro spun around. “Then what?”

  “Then . . .” Why was I always the one having to say what he didn’t have the guts to? Why was I always the one dirtying myself with words? “Then that means you’ve already made up your mind. You’ve chosen the money. OK. Are you happy?”

  I’d said it without believing a word of it. It was simply a false accusation aimed at shaking him out of his apathy. I wanted a reaction. I wanted us to argue, make up, make love. But Pietro replied matter-of-factly, “The fact is, Heddi, I can’t afford to . . . burn bridges with my family and end up on the street.”

  The thick air pushed me backward. Oh god. Not only had he known the real question all along, he already knew the answer too. Thus not answering, since last night, was him simply stalling for time: he was waiting for a more favorable moment to destroy me. It had been a conscious, deceitful silence. And now as I took one step backward, then two and three, everything seemed to be crumbling down around me, a landslide tumbling on top of me and turning my strappy sandals into rubber boots that quickly filled with mud and debris.

  “All that, in Greece,” I said, meaning by all that traveling together, being part of a real family, being so ridiculously happy, “did it mean nothing to you?”