Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  “I’m here for you . . . I won’t leave you,” I said. “I love you.”

  Pietro turned toward the balcony, wiping his eyes and nose. “You love this? This broken man?”

  He kept on looking outside, so I followed his gaze. Beyond the little asphalted road melting in the sun was the park I’d sat in earlier. From above, it was impossible not to notice that all the benches faced the hospital. They sat there in front of the ward counting down the hours, serving their time. It was their only purpose.

  One of the benches soon became mine: between visits I would go straight to it. The odd thing was I never read. I would sit cross-legged like a monk in prayer, staring at Pietro’s balcony window and taking deep breaths that sounded like those embarrassing Oms I would hear my mom make years ago whenever I’d catch her meditating. I was trying to summon for Pietro the healing of the body, for me fortitude of spirit. And still I suffered. I grasped that true unhappiness is not being far from the person you love but being so very close, almost within your grasp, without being able to reach them.

  Naples seemed very far away, in space and in time. From this distance, it was hard to believe that somewhere in the world there existed a place so unruly, so consuming and so excessive—always overdoing it with its ferocious beauty and unforgivable ugliness. I looked around the deserted park, wondering where the other friends and relatives went during the breaks between visiting hours. Home, undoubtedly, for that’s what Rome was to them.

  Home, casa. The word still made my head spin, tangled my hair into knots. Is home, I mused, the place where you were born or where others speak your language? Or is it simply the place where you choose to put down roots, or the place that’s assigned to you? How could it be that after all these years in Naples I still couldn’t understand the true meaning of the word? Once I had loved the city so much I thought I could die, until something greater had taken ownership of my heart . . . Perhaps the reason why I found it so hard to get my head around the concept of home, I considered one afternoon, was because I was constantly trying to dissect it, to analyze it academically. Yes, it was true. I’d been shortsighted; I could only see trees, trees, trees and not the forest. And it wasn’t until that moment, alone on a park bench in an anonymous corner of the outskirts of Rome, that I finally got it.

  Home wasn’t a place. It never had been.

  One time I couldn’t find Pietro next to the balcony. I sat down on his bed, the springs groaning underneath me, and waited long enough to start worrying. Had they had to wheel him out to perform that other surgery? Finally he came shuffling back in, toting his bottle by its handle; his chest was particularly concave and his slenderness exaggerated by Giuliano’s oversize pajamas. He’d been to the bathroom: for the first time the nurses had let him go by himself. It had taken him ages to make it there and back, though the bathroom was just around the corner.

  “Well, one small step for man . . .” I said, hoping to make him laugh.

  “A three-year-old can go to the bathroom by himself. What would your father think if he saw me now?”

  It was tricky helping him back into bed without tangling up the chest tube. Afterward I pulled out the daily edition of la Repubblica and a selection of Giuliano’s novels, planning to read to him as I’d seen other visitors do. But Pietro wasn’t in the mood. He apologized, saying he’d slept badly, what with the medications administered in the middle of the night, the snoring, and the tossing and turning. He was tired.

  When he closed his eyes, it was my chance to run my gaze over him for as long as I pleased. It was torture not being able to touch him. Those thick eyelashes, the strip of bare chest, the tanned muscles of his forearms, his hands . . . Compared to the other patients, Pietro was the very picture of health. If I blocked out the dressing and the chest tube, I could picture him as just another boy on vacation soaking up some rays. For an instant his condition didn’t seem real at all but a hoax, one of those scams they pulled off on the streets of Naples. And last summer, I remembered, hadn’t he toyed with the idea of doing just that, fabricating an illness to avoid the military service? Now we had a good enough excuse—a short-lived episode and not a true illness, but one that was on paper nonetheless—to ask the authorities for a period of leave for his so-called recovery. A month, two months. Was it too much to hope for?

  I woke Pietro, who may not have been asleep anyway, to tell him my idea despite the fear of coming across as naïve or insulting him with yet another attempt to corrupt his morals by urging him to commit federal fraud.

  “The moment I got sick,” he replied without emotion, “my civilian service was over. I’ll be discharged.” Not only, but the doctors had given him a probable date of discharge from the hospital. Friday.

  His words had a magical effect, a spell that turned the puke-green walls into vast meadows. My eyes went big. This meant we could get our lives rolling again—and not in a year and a half but in three days. Happiness swept over me like a breeze. I didn’t know whom to thank: that scratch-and-win destiny I believed in only when it was magnanimous, or my lover, who in order to obtain this grace had had to sacrifice a lung. Either way, a thanks would have been in poor taste so all I said was, “That’s incredible!”

  Pietro didn’t reply; he was looking with concerned familiarity at the tube sticking out of his chest.

  “Aren’t you happy?”

  “Of course I am. But what a plot twist, don’t you think? I’d love to have a word with whoever the hell it is that’s directing my life and ask him why he decided to kill me off in such a pathetic way.”

  It was only three days, but they moved with sluggish stickiness. Rome, the eternal city. I spent most of my time not with Pietro but with my bench. It never occurred to me to sightsee between one visit and the next. I didn’t want to stray far from the hospital, and if my legs became restless, I’d merely wander aimlessly in the immediate vicinity.

  The chest drainage was working as expected: the pleural space was diminishing and the lung was reinflating. And yet Pietro himself was more and more deflated with each passing day. To compensate, I grew more and more cheerful, feeding him words of encouragement and celebrating every small sign of improvement. I was taking on the cheerleading role as I had with the boys in their studies, only now it wasn’t a game but a serious task—one that in reality I had no real talent for. Often Pietro wouldn’t answer at all: he’d simply rub his long stubble and look away. There was always something left unsaid in our conversations, but I didn’t want to dig deeper. I was afraid that if he confessed to me what a week in the hospital really felt like I wouldn’t be able to maintain the detachment necessary for my optimism. It was the fear of putting myself in his shoes, of staring into his abyss. It was also the somewhat childish fear that he’d burst into tears again.

  One day I handed him one of his T-shirts, brought by Giuliano from Monte Porzio and laundered (and I think ironed, too) by Rosaria and ready to be worn on the day of his discharge.

  “I need some air,” he said. “Can you help me?”

  I carried his bottle as we inched toward the balcony railing. Focusing on a spot on the road, Pietro asked if I’d seen “that guy.” Not in the outside world, he added, but the one directly across from his bed. I cast a sidelong glance at the handsome young man asleep in his bed. His hair fanned out on the pillow was dark and wavy, like Pietro’s but a bit longer. They’d brought him into the ward last night, Pietro told me, after operating on one of his lungs.

  “A pneumothorax too?”

  “No, a tumor.” Pietro was still looking outside with undue concentration, as if trying to count the pine trees in my park. “But the surgery didn’t go well. I know because I’ve been talking to him a little bit. He’s a really nice kid. Only twenty. He never smoked a day in his life. He studied, didn’t take drugs. He did everything right.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “It’s unfair, that’s what it is,” Pietro said hotly, plowing his fingers through his hair. “His life had onl
y just begun, and now he won’t get a chance to live it. You tell me why such a nice guy deserves such a raw deal.”

  Having no answer to give, I superstitiously touched my pendant. If fate could be so cruel, wasn’t I cruel, too, for believing in it, even only when it suited me? Out on the balcony, the heat was bandaging me from head to foot and I could feel the cicadas growing anxious and vibrating as if in my very throat. I could no longer run from the repulsive thought that for days I’d been refusing to confront. The thought of death. How many hours, how many minutes, had we had before Pietro suffered a heart attack? By how many millimeters had he dodged death? This time we’d had a lucky escape, but sooner or later death would have the last word. It always did. And in the face of it, we were nothing. Debris, ash, stardust.

  Then one afternoon the tube was no longer snaking out from under his bandage. Pietro was untethered now, but he kept on moving with extreme caution. I assumed this was simply out of habit, or out of fear he’d rip open his fresh stitches. The true reason threw me. “I’m not out of danger yet.”

  “What do you mean? You’re all better now.”

  “The hell I am,” he nearly shouted. And now, though lowering the volume, Pietro began to purge all those thoughts he’d kept buried till now in an incandescent stream of words, skillfully shifting between medical terminology and lewd dialect. He reiterated that his pneumothorax wasn’t triggered by a trauma, such as an explosion or a car accident, but by a piss-ass subpleural air pocket, a relatively rare event that occurs in victims who had the nerve to be tall, slim males under forty years of age. He said that there could be other fucked-up air pockets on his pulmonary apexes and that they, too, might decide to pop one day—maybe even the next day—perhaps this time involving not one but both lungs.

  “Who told you this?”

  “The surgeon.”

  Now I was the one fuming, though I kept it to myself. I was angry with the doctor whose flippant comments threatened to undermine all the confidence I was battling tooth and nail to instill in Pietro. I was angry with the statistics. I was even angry with the handsome boy who had the gall to die of cancer right before his eyes.

  “Just my luck. I drew the wrong card, the one that says ‘Go directly to jail, do not pass Go,’” Pietro went on. “I had only just begun, not exactly to travel, but at least to head out from my starting point and . . . wham! I got nailed straightaway. Jesus Christ, I only got as far as Rome. What a great world tour that was.”

  “Doesn’t Greece count?”

  “Do you realize, this could have happened over there. And who could have saved me in the Cyclades, the pelican vet? And can you imagine if it happens to me when we’re in some Thai town in the middle of nowhere? Maybe the only surgeon with a bit of experience there is the guy who’s a butcher by day.”

  Anxiety was starting to creep into his voice, I could hear it. I looked him straight in the eye and told him we could start all over and rethink our plans. It didn’t matter where we went—I stressed this point—as long as we were together. I took his hand and held it tight, channeling all my strength into wiping from his memory that moment in Monte Porzio when I’d almost made him believe I could walk away from him. Now all our problems—his mother, the money—faded into the background. I wasn’t even sure anymore that these were the real issues. I had the nagging feeling that, in pointing the finger at Lidia, at a little old lady, I’d missed something bigger. Something much bigger.

  “And until we figure out what to do, until you’re better,” I said, “we could stay in the Spanish Quarter.”

  “No, I’m through with Naples.”

  “Me too.”

  It was a retort I’d blurted out thoughtlessly, a me too that felt at once like a betrayal and a liberation, an evil truth I’d been too much of a coward to put into a complete sentence. But now I was adrift. Where would we go if the world was, for the time being, no longer at our fingertips? Monte San Rocco was out of the question and, since Naples was now, too, what alternative did that leave us? Perhaps Pietro had been right all along, that America was the most sensible choice . . .

  “I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with you, baby,” he said. “But it’s not that I don’t want to travel, it’s that I can’t. The doctor said I have to avoid high altitudes or this will almost certainly happen again. How am I going to travel the world if I can’t take an airplane?”

  Enough, I’d had it. I resolved that before Pietro was discharged, I would demand to speak with the surgeon to clear up all the misunderstandings and expose him as the scaremonger that he was. I might even win him over to my side: I needed someone in a white coat, a male no less, who could back my conviction that Pietro would live his life to the fullest. Pietro told me he’d try asking, though he wasn’t hopeful the surgeon would grant us a meeting because, being the chief physician, he was a very busy man.

  We did get a meeting, but from the onset things did not go as I expected. The surgeon wasn’t the coldhearted, tactless professor I’d imagined but a deeply tanned family man with a broad smile, loose tongue, and thick Roman accent. His office wasn’t lined with books and skeletons after all but was airy and sparse (except for a framed picture of his wife and children), underlining its democratic nature as part of the public health system. He invited us to take a seat, starting off by asking Pietro if he liked Greco di Tufo wine.

  “I prefer red,” he answered self-consciously, no doubt so as not to admit that, despite its being a local wine, it was well beyond his means. “But I can see you have fine taste.”

  The head doctor praised the capocollo from the Avellino area before stepping forward to check Pietro’s incision one last time. “Good,” he said before moving on to Irpinia’s chestnuts. It was clear that Pietro’s case was neither rare nor one of particular interest. Most likely Pietro had taken an offhand comment and magnified it. Like a true scientist he’d done too much investigating and discovered one too many ifs. Undoubtedly, fear had blown everything out of proportion. And even I had to acknowledge that, although the surgeon was downplaying Pietro’s illness and speaking to us like old friends, in the flesh he intimidated me too. Here was the man who’d opened up my lover’s chest; here were the hands that had sewn it back together. He’d seen inside him. He’d saved his life.

  Nonetheless, before the doctor could glance at his wristwatch and herd us out of his office, I had to find the chance to ask him the crucial questions that Pietro wouldn’t venture as he sat there flipping through his discharge papers, freshly showered and dressed in street clothes, pen in hand and ready to sign.

  “So is that all?” I asked. “He doesn’t need to come back to the hospital for a checkup?”

  “No, no.” The surgeon explained that all he had to do was see his family doctor to change the dressing. The stitches would dissolve on their own. “In fact, I never want to see this young man again!”

  “So you’re saying that he shouldn’t have another pneumothorax . . .”

  “Well, you never know in life. But listen to me, don’t think about it . . . You’re young: go to the beach, eat, drink, and be merry. He got himself a good fright but look how well he is now. Healthy as a fish,” he said, using that common expression, sano come un pesce, which struck me as particularly inappropriate in this instance. “He can continue doing all his normal activities; he can even go surfing if he wants to. The only thing that may reduce the risk of a reoccurrence is quitting smoking.”

  Pietro lifted his eyes from the documents as if startled from sleep. I was just as dazed. How could I have forgotten the symbiotic relationship between Pietro and his Marlboro Light, the meditative way he used to hold it wedged between his fingers? Therefore, for the entire week in the hospital Pietro had been battling not only pain and fear but also nicotine withdrawal. It all made sense now: the mood swings, the rage, and the desperation.

  “Other than that, he can do anything . . . even fly in a plane, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

 
“What about the altitude?” asked Pietro, who was all ears now.

  Making a little temple of his golden fingers, the surgeon confirmed that the chances of a recurrence increased at very high elevations insofar as they were oxygen poor. “So you wouldn’t want to be climbing Mount Everest or doing other nonsense like that.”

  Taking the signed papers from Pietro, the doctor shook our hands with fondness and vigor, wishing us a good summer and recommending we try Greco di Tufo. All in all, the meeting had gone very well, but outside in the empty hallway Pietro appeared morose. I assumed it was the news about the cigarettes that had disheartened him so, and in a way I would miss them, too, so out of genuine sympathy I said, “What a bummer, though, about the cigarettes.”

  “It’s not that. It’s the Everest thing that’s bothering me.”

  “You didn’t seriously want to climb it, did you?”

  “Who knows,” he answered, looking down at his shoes. “Who knows what I might have done with my life.”

  As if at a sudden impasse, he stopped midway down the corridor to lean on one leg, that asymmetrical, biding stance that was so familiar to me—and yet for a moment I barely recognized him. Who was this man who was afraid to travel in a pressurized cabin with air-conditioning and pretzels but who wanted to ice-climb to the roof of the planet? Who was this man who was more concerned with what his girlfriend’s father thought of him than what she did? Who was this man I loved?

  From: tectonic@tin.it

  To: heddi@yahoo.com

  Sent: October 25

  Dear Heddi,

  Thank you for your wonderful email. I really needed some warmth and affection . . . The night before a weasel had slaughtered all the rabbits and some of the chickens. A terrible sight. My father cried like a child. And me too.

  I haven’t written in a while: I’ll try to explain. You’ve said more than once that you like the way I write; I hope I won’t disappoint you now. I’m not well. Do you remember that problem I had with my knee? It hasn’t gone away: actually, it’s gotten worse. Every twenty days the pain routinely comes back. Maybe it’s an inflammation, maybe they cut something they shouldn’t have. I don’t know, it’s a nightmare. When it flares up, I can’t walk, I can’t even really sit at the table, all I can do is lie on the couch. Heddi, I’m in deep shit, and I have the distinct feeling it’s not the first time. Maybe it’s my natural habitat and I splash around in it like a frog in a swamp. Maybe I like it. I don’t know what to say.