Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  I’ve booked a ticket for Auckland, February 19th, through Hong Kong, 1,250 euros, a reasonable price without taking into account how long it takes to get there (26 hours). But I feel I want to do it. For you. For your eyes. For your skin, your hair, your voice. For all the things you taught me. For your stories, your family, the warmth of your body. For everything that you know and that you haven’t learned yet. We’re so far from each other, in every way, and I can’t forgive myself for my actions. But only a masochist would repeat the same mistakes.

  Recently a girl read my cards. She saw you in the queen of cups and me in the fool of cups, separated by the seven of wands. What does it mean? I don’t know, and the fortune-teller didn’t know, either . . . I have few certainties in my life, as you well know, but one thing I know for sure is that you’re the only person who’s made me feel like a man, in the fullest sense of the term. I’ve learned that you are and always will be the only woman I would have wanted to have children with . . . babies, a couple of little Pietros. I know I’m being stupid and cruel to tell you these things, but they are my deepest and most intimate thoughts . . . don’t be mad at me.

  I’m a stupid dreamer, even if I’m somewhat ashamed to be and I try to bury myself in work (when I’m well, at least). I’ve finished refurbishing the ground-floor apartment, even though my parents still insist on just using it as a storage room. The other two floors in theory should be mine. But all this space, all this effort, makes no sense—I’m alone, in spite of the fact that I know a lot of people. I’m missing a part of myself. And I think of you, I won’t deny it, with me . . . spending a few months of the year here, in this shithole that has nothing to offer other than what you can grab with your bare hands, but these are my ineradicable roots . . . then spending Christmas with a real family like yours, in a fantastic place like the US, and traveling somewhere new every year. Well, these are my fantasies, I can’t help it . . . I’m a lousy fatalist yet I’m always hoping there’ll be an improvement.

  I know, I deserve only for you to spit in my face, but I really did love you. And I still do. Even if deep down I hope you’ll find the right man for you, I, Pietro Iannace, of cursed and hopeless stock, will never be able to live without you. At least in my dreams. I will always dream of being for you what you are for me . . . Maybe sometime in the future when I’m feeling scared and confused (it often happens when your health fails) I’ll finally give in to some nice hearty girl. But no one will be able to replace what you’ve been for me, and what you’ll always be for me, and the place you’ve embodied in my life . . . I can’t explain it, but you are tattooed onto my heart. You just are, even if you don’t want to be.

  Maybe I’m able to open my heart to you now at this late hour of the night because I’m afraid . . . I keep thinking about pain and death and about leaving everything behind, even my beloved car. I’m well aware, even if I try to hide it, that I’m clutching at straws. I had my chance. I had my time when I could have done anything. I thought I could take on the world, bend it to my will (some would put this in the box labeled “errors of youth”) . . . and now I’m limping around the house like an old man. Ironic, don’t you think? It really is like a novel . . .

  Well, I have to say goodbye for now. I need to get up early to go make chicken feed—with the tractor, of course—then to the hospital in search of a butcher willing to carve me up and explain how exactly he intends to cure me.

  I’m holding you to me, closer than ever. You’ll be with me, whether you like it or not, for as long as I live . . .

  p.

  29

  I WALKED THROUGH the Spanish Quarter as if in a lucid dream. Though I’d only been gone a week, the neighborhood was nothing like I remembered it. Via De Deo in particular looked inconceivably narrow and dark, aggravated by an extraordinary quantity of sheets and tablecloths hanging from balconies and stealing the last pearls of opaque sky. Had the buildings always been this dizzyingly tall? To keep from losing my footing, I lowered my eyes to the ground and found the street slabs different too. They were more worn than I’d remembered them, and much blacker, black as night and oiled like skin. The afa was still there living it up, and it was uncannily quiet, as though all those who could had escaped.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked Pietro as we stepped over the threshold into our courtyard.

  “You know what it’s like here at the end of summer. Half the city goes away. And those who can’t, turn to food for comfort.”

  Indeed, it was lunchtime, and the residents of our building were among the poor souls who didn’t have the means to run for the sea. Forced by the heat to leave their front doors wide open, they seemed to be challenging each other gastronomically by circulating the tantalizing smells coming from their kitchens—the second floor took the prize for the crispiest seafood fry-up, the third floor had the smokiest provola cheese and the arugula with the strongest bite, the fifth floor the richest eggplant parmesan. If cooking was a competition, eating was a prayer. The only sounds we could hear were the sizzling of oil and whining of children, a running faucet and a dramatic line from the Bold and the Beautiful, simply Beautiful in Italy. Perhaps it was these faraway, muffled noises, not to mention my complete lack of appetite, that made me feel that I was dreaming, that I could wake up whenever I wanted to and make it all disappear. I just had to decide when.

  “I can feel it in my eyes already,” echoed Pietro’s voice as we stepped inside our apartment.

  “Feel what?”

  “The smog. My eyes are already stinging.”

  He gently set his backpack down on the tiles. I looked around the living room. Here was our undisputable reality—our books and CDs, the computer, an espresso cup left in the dip in the table—which lent the place a sort of sad coziness. The air was stuffy, so the first thing I did was open the windows and balcony doors. “Let me take a look at those eyes in the light,” I said, turning back toward him. “You’re right, they’re a little red. But I predict a full recovery.”

  “Thank you, dottoressa.”

  Without another word, Pietro led me by the hand upstairs to the bedroom, where we made love with the blinds still lowered. It was all very delicate: the diamonds of light piercing through, the still neighborhood, the soft kisses. I made sure not to touch his wound, fearing he’d once more end up bent over in pain because of me. We fell asleep in utter exhaustion.

  When I woke up, my hair was damp with sweat. Pietro was gone. I crept down the staircase still in my underwear—we were alone in the house after all—to find him sitting on the couch with the phone pressed against his ear. Legs crossed, he was jerking his leg to a nervous tempo, maybe dying for a cigarette. “All right, all right,” he was saying in that curt way he always used with his brother, like he’d already had an earful. He put down the receiver. “Gabriele says hi.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Depressed as usual.”

  I sat beside him. “You know, my eyes are sore too. I don’t know if it’s the smog or the sleep.”

  “All this smog is definitely not good for my health. The surgeon said no smoking, but a day breathing in this lethal air is like smoking half a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “And these stairs? After a week in bed, they’re one hell of a workout.” It seemed there was more to come, and in fact even before I could comment Pietro concluded, “Maybe I should go back to Monte San Rocco for a while.”

  So that’s what he’d been discussing on the phone with Gabriele. Perhaps it was all organized already. “If the stairs are the problem, you don’t need to worry about a thing. I’ll go out to get the groceries. I’ll cook for you. You can rest, you can read . . . you won’t need to lift a finger.”

  “Baby, you’re the sweetest nurse in the world, but it’s not you. It’s this building, this neighborhood, this madhouse they call a city! I can’t handle it anymore. If I have to spend one more day here, I’ll go out of my mind.”

  I sensed that
his aversion to Naples, right or wrong, was only the tip of the iceberg of that unclear, unresolved crisis. Wishing only to smooth things over, I quickly replied, “OK, whatever you need.” And how could I blame him, after what he’d been through? In his shoes I would probably have run home to my parents’ too. And maybe a bit of mountain air would do him some good.

  It wasn’t until he said, “You can come visit me,” that I let out a cynical laugh, knowing full well I would be willing to face anything, swallow any bitter pill, just to see him again. “Tomorrow morning Francesco’s coming to pick me up, though I’m not so sure about him driving that brand-spanking-new car all the way up our street. In any case, since I’m getting a ride I might as well take some of my stuff back. Books, other heavy items. There must be a few cardboard boxes around here somewhere . . .”

  “OK,” I repeated mechanically. “I’ll help you.”

  I was saying one thing and thinking another. Inside I was completely at a loss. Pietro was packing up and leaving, and it was clear that he wouldn’t be coming back to live in that apartment ever again. There was no need to spell it out. And he was leaving not because the Spanish Quarter had, within a few undramatic hours, pushed him to his limit, but because in his darkest hour I hadn’t been able to truly support him and because now, on the spur of the moment, I hadn’t been able to come up with a better solution than Monte San Rocco. But I didn’t have any answers or any plans (not even for the immediate future, in which I’d be homeless); I had nothing to offer him but my useless love.

  Pietro too appeared bewildered because out of the blue he said, “Without you, Heddi, I’m just a leaf swept away by the wind.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  When Francesco arrived at 33 Via De Deo, the curious and the lazy swarmed around the station wagon. It wasn’t simply because it was a Sunday, for in the Spanish Quarter meddling was the first order of business. Kids with dirty fingernails asked, “You got a name, mister?” Men in undershirts and old women in dressing gowns leaned over the balconies to join in for the collective chorus that went, “Who is it? Who is it?” A few insulted residents glowered at the intruder: the woman living in the vascio that Francesco had parked his car in front of; the man on the motorbike who stopped right before its license plate, head-on as though about to gore it with his handlebars, murmuring abuse and pretending he didn’t have the dexterity to weave his way past.

  Everyone was checking out the shiny car as we loaded it up; some even groped it. And they looked at Francesco the lawyer with the same lack of modesty: at his polished shoes and showy watch, the starched shirt that hugged his belly and the unfashionable beard that aged him. In that sweltering scene of urban decay, Francesco stood out as the good-natured and well-fed man from the provinces who was about to get screwed over in some way. So provincial, in fact, he might as well have been from the suburbs.

  “Let’s get a move on,” Pietro said anxiously as he handed Francesco the last bag, but his jumpiness eased as soon as he hopped in the car.

  I gave him a quick peck through the rolled-down window and waved to Francesco. I said, surely in vain, “Don’t drive too fast.” The car inched up Via De Deo, whose gradient became so impractical a few meters ahead that it was forced to give in to a series of steps.

  “You can’t go that way!” I called out after them.

  The residents turned to look at me: the clamorous lack of dialect had exposed me, threatening to make me a target like Francesco. Whether he heard me or not, he pulled off a three-point (or four- or five-point) turn to head down toward Via Roma. Several street kids ran after the glossy car as if scrambling for a single lollipop. With more restraint but with the same insatiable hunger, I followed it too. Then the street swallowed them all up and they were gone.

  I no longer had a reason to be out in the streets, no lessons to go to or shifts at the café or visiting hours at the hospital. If I lingered in a state of waiting, it was purely out of habit, for the fact of the matter was I no longer had any deadlines or goals I was working toward. Nevertheless, my feet had a relationship all their own with the streets of Naples. I could have walked blindfolded and still my feet would have taken me to the place I didn’t even know I was meant to be.

  That’s how I found myself only a few steps from the spot where the homeless man was always parked. So that was the reason I was there: to bring him a cappuccino and a croissant. I might even sit on the ground next to his wheelchair; this time his ghost legs wouldn’t frighten me. And maybe if I waited long enough, he would finish telling me the story of his catastrof and why in the world he’d stayed on in Naples afterward.

  But the priest wasn’t there. His spot was smudged and disturbingly empty, like a pencil drawing that’s been hastily erased. I went into the café anyway and ordered a cappuccino. I asked the cashier, “Excuse me, do you remember the man that usually sits outside here with his dog? I think he’s German.”

  “Do I remember him? How the heck can you forget a guy like that? You can smell him all the way from Piazza Plebiscito,” she replied. The young barista joined in on the chuckling.

  “He’s actually a very decent person, you know,” I said to that woman who wore on each finger, save her thumb, a golden ring mounted with a rainbow of gemstones. What did she know about living in the streets?

  “I know, he’s got a heart of gold. You can tell, even if you can’t understand a darn thing when he opens his mouth.”

  “Has he been around lately?”

  “What would I know, miss? I’m always in here working my butt off, even on a Sunday in the middle of August . . .”

  I thanked her and placed my receipt on the counter with a two-hundred-lire coin. But of course, why hadn’t I realized it earlier? Here things didn’t work the way they did in Washington. There was no way a homeless person could have camped out next to the café every single morning begging (or waiting) for alms without the blessing of the owners. To get by in Naples you had to know the right people, and the same went for a disabled foreigner with broken Italian. It may well have been anarchy but it had its rules . . . and its humanity. I regretted having thought badly of the cashier, who in reality had helped him out without any personal gain.

  The barista placed the coffee before me. “Anyway, that hobo hasn’t been around for a while now. I think he’s left for good. Who was he, though, somebody from your country?”

  The arrival of new customers spared me from having to answer. The coffee took immediate and fierce effect. With every sip, my heart rapped faster and faster at my ribs. When was the last time I’d seen the priest? Maybe even the day of my graduation. That morning he’d waved me goodbye, an unusual gesture . . . maybe a farewell.

  I wanted to believe that he had found a permanent place in the shelter or been taken in by the monks or, better yet, that someone from his past, a brother or a niece, someone who all these long years had searched for him high and low, had finally tracked him down. I wanted to believe he’d fled from Naples on a magic carpet.

  But there was something phony, even hokey, about my optimism. Only Hollywood could guarantee a happy ending. In the real world, a fit nonsmoker could die of cancer at twenty, so I was kidding myself if I thought something sinister, like a heart attack or assault, couldn’t happen to someone who was handicapped, malnourished, and elderly. I couldn’t even rule out the possibility that, given the social isolation and the solitude he would have had to combat every day, he hadn’t decided to end it all, regardless of the religious stigma. And who would remember him now that he was gone? He didn’t even have a name.

  I had a sudden flash of that communal grave at the Fontanelle Church—the unnamed femurs, ribs, skulls—and my stomach churned. What had I done to help that lovely man other than hand him my spare change and the occasional breakfast, when it fit into my schedule? I’d been no better than all the others who’d paid him attention only when the puppies were around, even though I was the one (and perhaps the only one) who knew who he really was—not som
e crazy wino but a man of god. But now it was too late.

  He’s gone. A deep sense of unrest washed over me, one whose source couldn’t have been just the caffeine but may not have been simply the priest’s disappearance either. I was hit by a wave of loss greater than the situation. I felt left behind, and deservedly so. Luca had been the first to leave Naples, then Madeleine. And now Pietro had left, with his rock-heavy books, his prospecting pick, his button-down shirts, everything that carried his incomparable scent. It was hot and the café was quickly filling up, the coffee grinder was growling, the steam wand was whistling. I had to get out of there, and fast.

  Half the city may well have been away, but the other half held captive was enough to prevent me from finding an easy escape route. On Via Roma there was two-way foot traffic that overflowed from the sidewalk and engulfed me with its counterfeit perfumes and sweet Sunday pastries. The mob was dragging me and the shore seemed farther and farther away, and then panic grabbed me by the shirt, pulling me down with it. But finally the crowd seemed to have sensed my urgency, for it pushed me out into a side street of the Quartieri lined in death notices. I found shelter under a balcony and burst into the most pathetic tears.

  But in Naples, even in the most insignificant and darkest alleyway, you’re never alone. I’d shed only a few scalding tears when a gaggle of girls came up from behind. They were heavily made up with plunging necklines, set to prowl the piazza, yet they were the ones who looked at me judgmentally. I acted like nothing was wrong, drying my face and smudging my mascara, before heading, with no real purpose, back to Via De Deo.