Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  “Ah, Greece . . .” Pietro said with a painful exhalation of smoke, as if recalling a moment that, far from representing the beginning of something big and wonderful in our lives, had regrettably concluded. A beautiful parenthesis.

  “All those plans . . . to get married, travel the world . . . did you really want to do them?”

  “I don’t know what the hell I want anymore.”

  I took another step backward, dragging my feet. I knew this nightmarish feeling: refusing to accept the terrifying reality but being utterly physically powerless to change it—or even wake up. “I have to leave,” I said with a feeble voice and unsteady gait. I reached out to keep my balance but the wall wasn’t there and my hand cut through the air.

  I must have stumbled because Pietro tossed away his cigarette and stood to attention, though with a slightly curved back. “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t stay here with you if you don’t want me anymore.”

  He didn’t contradict me, merely repeating, “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t know myself. I kept walking backward on the open road, the most convenient escape route. Pietro was getting smaller. Out of the corner of my eye I could see, on one side, the phony landscape of the Castelli Romani, and on the other side the ghostly calm of the bus stop. I’d hop on the first bus, that’s what I’d do, without my belongings or even money for a ticket. I would leave as a stowaway and a gypsy, whatever it took to avoid remaining a second longer before a man who didn’t love me and maybe even despised me. I had the same sense of definitive freedom as when I’d left Monte San Rocco by myself after the slaughtering of the pig. Now I understood it wasn’t freedom at all but a chasm opening up. It was the earth being ripped right out from under my feet.

  “Where are you going?” I heard his voice as if in the distance. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going . . . I’m going away.”

  “Away where?”

  “Naples, Rome, I don’t know.”

  “My god,” he said, not in his usual baritone. “Are you . . . leaving me?”

  I stopped to put Pietro into focus. The blood had drained from his face and he just stood there, palms facing upward toward the sky as if waiting for something to rain down on them. My heart went wild like a little bird in a cage as I stared at the face of the man who wanted to sell our love: his was like the face of a stranger and yet my lips knew its every hill and valley. I looked hard at him, trying to recognize him, to peel off the contrasting emotional layers from his face, to tear off the petals of his affection. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me. Yes, without a shadow of a doubt Pietro was shocked and afraid; I could see in his eyes that he was on the verge of desperation at the thought of losing me. How could I leave him?

  And so, despite knowing that the only way to come out of the situation with moral integrity and a positive outcome was to see my action through—keep on walking, backward like a lobster if need be, and then catch a bus or hitch a ride somewhere—and despite my intuition telling me Go back and you’ll die, just as I’d dreamed the first time we made love and Vesuvius erupted and I had the only boat, despite all this and despite the almost absolute certainty that I would ruin everything forever, I went back to him. I went back.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I said in disgrace.

  Pietro hugged me, leaning into me and sinking his face into my hair. I could feel the heat of his breath, the heat of tears buried just beneath the surface. “Don’t leave me, please,” he whispered. “I’m alone in the world without you.”

  Maybe we were both alone in the world. During that long embrace practically in the middle of the road, not a single car drove past, not a soul. Pietro was trembling, as was I, shaken by how close I’d been to the edge but also horrified by the failings in my character. When we pulled apart he didn’t stand up straight but remained hunched, nearly bent in half.

  “Is your back that bad?”

  “It’s like a knife . . . that goes from one side . . . to the other.”

  “From your back to where?”

  “To my heart. Heddi, I can . . . barely breathe.”

  The distance from the edge of town to the center seemed to have grown. Pietro struggled up the incline, pausing every few steps and no longer even attempting to smoke. It took an eternity to get to the piazza, which was still inexplicably empty. Maybe the crowds we’d seen at the dog show were people driving in from other towns; maybe the inhabitants of Monte Porzio had all gone to the seaside for the summer, or maybe the place really was just a postcard. Pietro collapsed onto the bench. Bent over his knees, he smothered his face with those long, slender fingers.

  “Maybe we should get a medical opinion,” I said. “There must be a pharmacy somewhere around here.”

  “There is . . . but it’s probably closed,” he said, pointing down a side street.

  “You never know.” I headed down the little lane at a normal pace. But as soon as I was out of his line of vision, I broke into a run, stopping only when it became obvious that the shutters were locked down. Panic began to set in, but I went back to Pietro instilling my voice with a realistic casualness. “It doesn’t matter. We might be able to find a doctor instead.”

  We took the few steps toward the phone booth. By now Pietro had lost his pride: every step was accompanied by a grimace. It was clear that this was more than just a bad night’s sleep. The inside of the booth was damp and intimate, and as I flipped through the white pages I noticed up close how very difficult it was for him to breathe and how the pain made him bite his lip. There was only one doctor in town, and as I inserted the shiny coin as if into a slot machine I prayed that that particular Sunday the doctor wasn’t away on vacation or sleeping off a Fernet-Branca hangover and that he would pick up straightaway. But the phone rang five, six, seven, eight agonizing times. I hung up.

  “No problem,” I said with a composure that was clearly unraveling now. “Let’s try calling a doctor in one of the surrounding villages. What’s the name of the nearest town?”

  Pietro shook his head, reminding me that we’d have no way to get there anyway. He said, “I’ll call Giuliano.” Flinching, he twisted around to pull from his wallet the piece of paper that had all his important numbers written on it. I inserted the coins for him. It must have been Giuliano who picked up, and not Rosaria, because he spoke without ceremony, in dialect and in a deep, monosyllabic voice, putting the receiver down without so much as a goodbye. “He’s coming to get us,” he said.

  “That’s good. He can drive us to the next town over.”

  “We’re going . . . to Rome.”

  “Good idea. There will be lots of doctors on call there.”

  “No, he’s taking me to the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” I said with a start, instantly betraying every secret of my anxiety for him. For us.

  Pietro seemed to sense this, for he said as justification, “I feel like . . . I’m drowning. But the sea is miles away.”

  28

  WE TOOK THE HIGHWAY, as straight and inevitable as every road that leads to Rome. And all the while Rosaria, beside me in the back seat, was pressing him, “Are you sure, Pie’? Maybe you ran into something without realizing it.”

  “How the hell do you run into something without realizing it?” Giuliano spat back, hunched over the steering wheel of the Fiat Uno that made a giant of him.

  “It’s a broken rib, I’m telling you.”

  Pietro wasn’t even making the effort to protest: his eyes like two slits, he just sat there in the front passenger seat scratching his shirt. Every now and then I placed my hand on his shoulder from behind, and he gave it a lifeless squeeze. I looked out the window searching for a sign of good luck, a nod from the universe that everything was going to turn out all right, and in fact I spotted a red car with the number thirty-three in its license plate and a billboard with a smiling child giving two thumbs up to Mulino Bianco cookies. I knew fully well I was clutching at straws and by doing so mak
ing each and every propitious sign I’d ever been given meaningless.

  Finally we pulled off the highway, piercing through Rome’s outer layer until we came to a ramshackle hospital. Once Giuliano parked under a pine tree and turned off the air-conditioning, the midday heat overwhelmed us. Like in Monte Porzio, the only inhabitants seemed to be cicadas, as though even the sick were away on vacation. The nurses idly waiting outside the emergency department pounced upon Pietro as soon as Giuliano opened the passenger door. They helped him to the hospital entrance, telling us tersely to wait outside.

  “I bet it’s a pinched nerve,” said Rosaria, hands on her hips in the jagged shade of the pine. “Or maybe a slipped disk . . .”

  I didn’t argue with her. I was mulling over in my mind the drama that had turned our lives inside out within the course of a single day. When I’d arrived, Pietro was perfectly healthy. Did I have to be so hard on him? I felt that somehow I’d broken him.

  After a while Pietro came out supported by nurses. I knew it was serious even before they made him lie on the stretcher and began preparing the ambulance. I could tell from his blank stare and stiff body that was well past trembling now. “Heddi,” he said on his back, that H costing him dear, “they have to operate on me.”

  “Operate? Why?”

  “I have a pneumo . . . pneumothorax.”

  “A pneumo what?”

  “One of my lungs . . . collapsed.” Now that his eyes were present again, it was worse. In them I saw a sense of injustice over how he’d been wronged and a helplessness that I couldn’t bear to look at.

  I tried asking the nurses a question, but they were too busy. The only information I managed to wrangle out of them was that they were taking him to Carlo Forlanini Hospital. But no, only medical staff were allowed to ride in the ambulance with him.

  I grabbed his hand. Pietro squeezed mine back so hard his knuckles went white. It wasn’t hard enough for me. I wanted to feel his level of pain, make it mine and take it from him. I leaned down to kiss his cheek. “Don’t worry, Pietro, it’s going to be OK,” I said. “They’re going to take good care of you.”

  “Fuck, baby . . . I’m scared.” He strained to remove his wallet, keys, and watch and handed them to me: he’d been told to take everything off before the operation.

  “What about your ring?”

  “No, I already told you,” Pietro said. “I’m never taking it off.”

  The next time I saw him, he lay propped up against several white pillows, his chest bare except for a square dressing with a long, slender tube jutting out from underneath.

  “Hey, buddy,” said Giuliano. “Everything went beautifully. Except they also had to perform a tiny little emasculation procedure while they were at it.”

  “You’ll be the one shooting blanks,” Pietro shot back, letting out an involuntary smile.

  I took heart. I hadn’t seen him smile in twenty-four hours, let alone make a joke. But Rosaria said, “My god, look at you. You look totally stoned.”

  “Sedatives are pretty good drugs, aren’t they?” said Giuliano.

  “This is one hell of a party.”

  We were all standing around his bed, our healthy bodies the only partition in that greenish room he shared with ten or so other patients. Relatives were camped around them, holding containers of pasta, crossword puzzles, cards. Only the smell of disinfectant managed to cut through the air that was fat with meat sauce, latex gloves, rotten flowers.

  “Well, I think you look good,” I said, smoothing his sheet, careful not to touch him.

  “But every breath . . . still hurts.”

  “That’s just the chest tube exiting the wound,” the nurse said at our backs. I didn’t get the chance to ask her what the chest tube was for, or how long his recovery would take, for she was already clapping her hands and announcing that visiting hours were up. The visitors packed up their picnics, and I went back to Giuliano and Rosaria’s tiny apartment in the outskirts of Rome.

  The two of them performed enviably well under stress. Rosaria pulled out a fresh set of pajamas for Pietro, one of Giuliano’s T-shirts as a nightgown for me, and two toothbrushes still in their packaging—basic supplies until Giuliano had time to drive back to Monte Porzio Catone, possibly Tuesday after work, to pick up our things. I hadn’t even realized we wouldn’t be going back there.

  Giuliano splayed a map across the table, tracing his finger over the veins and capillaries of the capital. To get to Forlanini tomorrow, I would first have to cut through the city center by tram and bus, swooshing past the aqueduct and the Colosseum and people dressed in the latest fashions and gleaming cars, all under a spotless sky. It pained me to think of making a journey that would start out like a field trip but end at the hospital.

  They had me make a long-distance call to Gabriele to tell him what had happened. He was about to leave for Monte San Rocco and didn’t even hint at the possibility of him coming up to Rome: it wasn’t an option. Everyone had charged me with Pietro’s care. It was what I wanted, and it was also a public acknowledgment of just how serious our relationship was. How ironic then that the recognition I’d so longed for had come only hours after Pietro and I were about to throw it all to the wind.

  That evening Rosaria made meatballs. My stomach was in knots, but she insisted, “You have to taste them, Eddie. It’s a recipe from back home.”

  Despite the meandering journey and the warren-like hospital complex, I arrived well in advance of the morning visiting hours and found the door to his room locked. I walked back outside. Straight across from his ward was a shady park with concrete benches. I hadn’t brought a book or anything to distract myself with, so I simply sat there staring up at the façade of the building wondering which of those windows was his. The cicadas announced the start of the mating season from the pine trees, where they too sat in wait.

  I went in forty-five minutes later. It was a Monday, drastically culling the number of visitors in the room. The sick were all lying in bed, their faces lined and beards unkempt. Those who weren’t asleep acknowledged my arrival with lackluster interest. Pietro wasn’t in the same bed as yesterday but in one beside the open balcony.

  “A room with a view,” I said in the sunniest voice I could muster.

  He cracked a smile. “You’re here, baby.”

  “Where else would I be?” I sat on the arthritic bed, kissing him lightly on the mouth. He had chapped lips and gave off an antiseptic smell that reminded me of the cleaning products I used to scour the bathrooms at the end of the night in the Piazza San Domenico café. “I’m staying here as long as necessary. I’ll quit if my boss isn’t happy about it.”

  “I hate the fact that you took that job. You should, I don’t know, work as an English teacher, for example . . . you’d be really good at that.”

  As he spoke, he caught me stealing glimpses at his chest tube and hastened to demystify it for me: its job was simply to release the air. With a pneumothorax, air had slipped in between the pleura and the lung, deflating it. As an emergency procedure, they’d inserted a needle into his chest cavity, replacing it afterward with the tube.

  A needle in the chest. I could practically feel the pinch myself, the long, drawn-out assault of it. And, whatever a pleura was, I grasped that yesterday in Monte Porzio he’d had only one good lung. He’d gotten by on half the oxygen he needed and he’d hardly complained.

  It took all my goodwill to face the ugliness of the tube. It gave the impression of coming straight from his heart, to then slither off the bed until it reached a glass bottle on the floor. It was like a cider bottle or the kind used for bottling oil (and in fact it contained a layer of yellowish liquid), not a piece of medical equipment but something scrounged from an old hut in the mountains. I didn’t know what disturbed me more: the thread of rubber keeping him alive or that crude thing weighing him down to the bed.

  “So once the air is gone, you can go?”

  “I dunno,” he said reflexively in his dialect. “They’ll
discharge me when there’s no more ‘pleural space.’” He clarified, “Space in the pleural cavity.”

  Plural space? More than ever, glottology struck me as pitiful preparation for real life. I didn’t have the lexical or psychological means to comfort him, especially when he added with visible concern that if this treatment didn’t work he would require a more serious operation. “It’ll work,” was all I could come up with. “It has to work.”

  “I swear, why does everything always have to happen to me? As if I didn’t already have enough to worry about, I had to get a fucking spontaneous tension pneumothorax.”

  Spontaneous instantly lost any fun connotation it may have once had. Based on what the surgeon had told him, a small air pocket formed on Pietro’s lung; it might have been there for years just biding its time. Then for some reason, it popped, puncturing his lung.

  “Apparently, the pneumothorax I had was a major one: there was the risk of going into shock . . . cardiac arrest.” All of a sudden his eyes went glossy and his voice splintered. “Do you realize, Heddi? If we’d waited any longer, I could have died.”

  I pressed my cheek against his, not only to console Pietro, who was now shedding hot tears and trying to stifle his sobs, but also to console myself. He’d never shed a tear in front of me, and now seeing him cry with such despair, like a child, hurt me deeply. I was beating myself up. If Pietro was in that bed with his life hanging by a thread, it was my fault and no medical opinion—no science—could have convinced me otherwise. For the first time I felt I hated words, my own cutting words, my big fat mouth. I’d attacked him verbally and unrelentingly, expecting him to be far more heroic than I could ever be and thus putting everything on the line. Everything. And once more, just like during the years they’d spent together in Rome, Giuliano had been the one to come to the rescue, not me.

  That clumsy embrace was the closest I could get to him without touching his fragile chest. Afterward his red eyes seemed to burn with humiliation. Go! I almost expected him to say, I don’t want you to see me like this. But he said nothing.