Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  From: heddi@yahoo.com

  To: tectonic@tin.it

  Sent: November 8

  Dear Pietro,

  I loved reading your thoughts and hearing your voice, even if it is from a distance. I’m sorry though to hear about your health: Is there any way you could see a specialist, or have you considered trying alternative medicine?

  Did you know that I’m officially unemployed now? I quit my job two weeks ago. I can get by for about two or three months on the money I have saved up, and anyway I don’t have many expenses or needs. I’m happy enough having my freedom back, especially now that summer is on the way. Now, whenever I feel like it, I can hop in the car and explore some new corner of the rain forest, which is just outside the city limits. It’s full of birds that make beautiful, strange songs—some sound like hiccups or sneezes or laughter—and it’s so thick with trees that if it rains you don’t even get wet. Anyway, I’d like to take you there . . . but first you have to get better!

  Once you asked me if I have a tattoo. I don’t, but not because I’m afraid of the pain. Tattoos are forever: What symbol, what concept could I believe in forever? I don’t know. Once I met a young Maori woman who came from a little town called Tuai, in a very isolated part of the country on the shores of Lake Waikaremoana. She said that if we were ever in the area to ask for her uncle, who for a very good price would let us ride his horses through the practically virgin forest. She told us the story of how when she was about twelve years old her grandmother called her over and said simply Come with me. She didn’t know where her grandmother was taking her until a man had her lie down on a bed and began tattooing her back. It was her entire family tree, so that she’d never forget it. It took many sittings to tattoo the trunk and all those branches. And every time she would cry beforehand but her grandmother each time would hold her down. She didn’t show us the tattoo but told us it spanned her entire back, with a bit of skin left to complete the family tree further down the line. But she had no intention of finishing it, and she’d since moved to Australia.

  I’m going on and on, I know, but it’s almost like through our letters I’ve remembered the language that you and I have always spoken, and I don’t want to forget it again . . .

  Yours,

  h.

  30

  I TRIED TO KEEP MYSELF BUSY. I opened an electronic mail account and exchanged a few emails with Snežana. I started packing up my own books in order to ship them to Barbara and my dad’s place, all the while trying to ignore the pandemonium that broke loose in the courtyard once or twice a day. In the evenings Pietro would call and we’d stay up so late talking that the couch would turn into a bed and the receiver into a shell that I pressed hard against my ear so I could hear it whisper like the sea.

  There was no rest for him in Monte San Rocco. His father was always barking orders: to collect the firewood, drive him somewhere, move sacks of flour or cases of the family wine. Around the table, all anyone talked about was money, who owed whom what, a conversation that only the TV could interrupt. Having Gabriele there was of little solace because, due to either the heat or the wine, he seemed more fed up than usual. He didn’t even want to talk politics: he’d simply get up from the table, glass in hand, and withdraw into the other room, legs crossed (“like a marquis,” in Pietro’s words), to read Proust or channel-surf.

  “I swear, you’d think they were the sick ones,” he said one night, followed by a long pause that sounded like a drag from a Marlboro.

  “How’s it going without cigarettes?”

  “It’s tough, baby, really tough. Maybe that’s why I sometimes wish Gabriele would just piss off. He smokes like a Turk!”

  “In the house, right in front of your parents?”

  “Yeah, in the house . . .” But the real torture, he added, was being far from me. And, as if alleviating my loneliness could in some way alleviate his own, he suggested I get together with the boys and Sonia.

  Sonia was meant to be in Sardinia. I had no news from Tonino, Angelo, and Davide: Telecom still hadn’t granted them a landline and probably never would. But in a way, I didn’t want company, other than Pietro’s. The windows of the apartment were wide open, letting in at that late hour the monotonous swish of mopeds and the unshakable light of the streetlights. With that sallow halo that would be there till dawn, Naples was adept at keeping away not only the authorities, if the phone company could be considered such, but even the night itself. Tonight in particular that strange yellow light played tricks on my mind. It illuminated the alleyways and night owls in a radioactive, almost alien, glow that was neither light nor darkness. It was a color that, like the red safelight in a darkroom, washed out the ugliness and the beauty of everything it touched and created a certain suspense; however, unlike a darkroom session, that yellow night produced nothing magical.

  “Baby?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “I have a nice story to tell you.”

  “Go on then.” I pried my eyes from the city, settling deeper into the creaking, sticky vinyl. I wanted to hear a nice story. I wanted a fairy tale.

  He told me he’d found a puppy, a lump of skin and bones under a tree in the middle of the countryside. He looked like he hadn’t eaten a meal since he was weaned and he was covered in fleas the size of ticks. Pietro had taken him home and bathed him in a bucket before giving him some milk and leftover pasta.

  Suddenly no longer sleepy, I sat upright. “Are you sure he was abandoned? He may have just run away from home.”

  “I’m absolutely sure. People around these parts, you know what they do with animals they don’t want around? They put them in a sack and throw them in the middle of nowhere, or more likely in a river.” But this one, Pietro reassured me, had been rescued. In that very moment he was sleeping safe and sound in the tractor shed with Gesualdo for company; tomorrow he’d take him to the vet. “Start thinking about what we should name him,” he said, “because he’ll be our dog.”

  Our dog, a real dog, no longer the random recipient of our surplus passion but that third being which was beginning to seem more and more essential to the preservation of our relationship. I was mortified by my childish tears in that backstreet. Incredibly, and despite all the hassles and errands that could potentially have deteriorated Pietro’s health, a change of scenery and fresh air had actually healed him and he was once again embracing life. And now, unexpectedly and somewhat prematurely, the two of us were the owners of a tiny dog with brown fur and a pink nose. It didn’t matter that we didn’t yet have a place to keep him. We were young and healthy and madly in love, and that was nothing but a logistical detail we could deal with later.

  Pietro had been right: Sonia was back in Naples. She came to see me one roasting afternoon, hot enough to melt the bitumen on the rooftop. We sat outside under the savage sun to catch up on the events of the last month. Of the week in the hospital, I spared her the grittier details and vulnerable moments (not to mention the true cause of his ailment, our fight), partly so as not to relive them and partly so as not to tarnish the image Sonia had of Pietro. So as not to have to tell her that loving a man is loving him for, and not in spite of, his weaknesses.

  “It must have been a nightmare,” she said at the end with those big eyes the size and color of chestnuts that seemed able not only to speak but to listen too. “So when is Pietro back in Naples?”

  It seemed like a trick question, and I couldn’t come up with a good answer.

  “Well then, you’ll have to say goodbye to him for me.”

  “Are you leaving again?”

  “Oh, Eddie, I’m so glad you’re in town because I really couldn’t wait to tell you!” she burst out, with her bony hands stirring the soupy air of the Quartieri. “I’m going to Portugal! For a whole year. I won an Erasmus scholarship, can you believe it?” Sonia was shaking her head in disbelief and looking at the volcano as if she didn’t see it at all, and in fact Vesuvius was barely visible behind the sheer veil of the afa.


  An exchange program abroad. I was happy for her. I really was. So if I came across as a bit perturbed it was probably because of the car alarm that had gone off somewhere down in the streets and was now bleating bitterly.

  She explained that she’d received the acceptance letter a while ago but was unsure whether to go ahead with it or not. “I’m not a fearless traveler like you. I’m one of those people who needs to think things through carefully before making a decision. Did you know I even asked Pietro what he thought I should do? I bugged him even during your graduation party! I didn’t ask you, of course, I already knew what advice you’d give me . . .”

  I wondered what Pietro had counseled her to do: stay or go? The fact that I couldn’t honestly say how he might have answered made my head throb like that car alarm. Stay or go? And I had to admit to myself that that night, upon finding the two of them secluded on the rooftop, I’d experienced a moment of the most vulgar jealousy.

  A deep memory resurfaced, one dating back to my first year with AFSAI. Among the foreigners hosted by Castellammare families was a Danish girl, sixteen years old like me. Her name was Inga, if I remembered correctly. She was the one who pointed out to me, once when she was putting on mascara in the mirror in Rita’s bedroom, that the two of us could have passed for sisters. I looked at our reflections. It was entirely conceivable that I had some Viking blood in me, too, because in actual fact the resemblance was uncanny—same light-colored eyes and hard-angled eyebrows, same delicate nose and sharp cheekbones, same downward turning lips and squared-off jaw—with the big difference that she was much prettier than me. Not only that, but she was also more self-possessed, more extroverted, more independent. She didn’t get frazzled or hung up, she didn’t apologize for everything like I did. She was a charismatic but serene person. She didn’t overthink things but neither did she trust every crazy impulse that came over her. Inga was the more successful version of me. At the end of that year in Castellammare, she filled her luggage with all her useful experiences and went back to Denmark. No one heard from her again.

  What was special about me? Fearless traveler? It was just an illusion. I thought about the Scandinavian girls Pietro and I had met on the ferry to Athens, with their heavily stamped passports and their leather chokers and long tanned legs, and I was gripped by a sense of dire threat and primitive territoriality that I couldn’t control. I grasped that true jealousy wasn’t what I’d tasted a month ago on the roof. True jealousy was this, this terror and ruthlessness, sprung from nowhere and pointed not at a single woman but tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of women that I didn’t know and that spoke languages I hadn’t studied. It was the chilling truth that there was an entire planet of women, real women, all with sunnier dispositions and more bold and beautiful than me, who could make Pietro wild with desire and could run their hands down his chest and clutch his sex and steal the secrets of his mouth . . . and the secrets of his soul. It was the cold and excruciating injection of poison that was now spreading through every vein in my body and wouldn’t let me breathe.

  Finally the car alarm stopped. Gradually my dark thoughts faded, like a nightmare upon awakening, and I let myself be infected by Sonia’s enthusiasm as she talked about getting ready for her trip. As it always did around that time of day, the smell of fresh bread rose from a nearby bakery up to our roof. The air was thus hot and inviting, practically edible, and yet it made me only want to make a run for the sea. And there it was, blue serrated pieces of it behind the TV antennae.

  “I’ll be back in Italy for Christmas,” Sonia was saying. “I’ll try to make it to Naples, too, we’ll see. I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye to the boys yet . . .” Tonino was still in Puglia, she told me, but apparently Angelo was back in town, having fallen hard for some girl from Mergellina, that strip of seaside that made Naples look like a resort, surely one of those girls that Pietro would have defined the “high and mighty.”

  “Sonia, what ever happened with Carlo?”

  She sighed toward the unobtainable gulf. “I don’t know . . . He became too possessive. Or maybe I just didn’t really love him. Either way, as soon as I broke up with him he slept with my roommate . . . right in my own house.” She added, in a deviation from her usual calm and collected self, “Nothing like a bit of revenge sex!” before standing up and wiping the dust off her pants.

  “Are you going already?”

  “Yeah, I need to move out and send all my things to my parents’ house in Sardinia. But even if I weren’t going to Portugal, I still wouldn’t be able to go back to living in that house . . .”

  All at once, I understood I had a bond with Sonia that I didn’t have and would never have with any other friend, and she was already at the door when I became dreadfully afraid to lose her. Only my best intentions (that Pietro and I would go visit her in Portugal, and so on) prevented me from considering the possibility that I’d never see her again. I’d been a terrible friend, and I would have given anything for a chance to start all over again and relive with greater mindfulness all those days and all those nights spent eating and philosophizing and risking life and limb. On the doorstep, instead of kissing each other’s cheeks we hugged, and I held her longer and tighter than was culturally acceptable.

  The next time we talked on the phone, Pietro lying in the little bed in his childhood bedroom and me on the couch, he entertained me with his many colorful stories. The hectic days, the bulls in the pasture, the late-summer food festivals (which he didn’t go to), such as the zenzifero festival—and even he didn’t know what food that was supposed to be.

  “So, what about our puppy?” I asked him at one point. “What name should we give him?”

  There was a stillness at the other end in which I could have sworn I heard an inhalation of smoke. “Baby, I meant to tell you . . . I’m sorry, I had to give him up. My mother found him in the shed.”

  I sat up. “But you were going to take him to the vet,” I said, but my tongue had tied itself into a knot and the word veterinario came out all twisted. “Did you tell her that?”

  It was like talking to a wall, according to Pietro. Besides, with a hole in his chest and an even bigger hole in his pocket, he wasn’t in any position to put his foot down. After a while, though, he stopped justifying himself to ask for my forgiveness, thinning his voice until it was as inconsistent as the telephone cable connecting us. “I feel terrible, baby. Like a real jerk. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep . . .”

  “Maybe not all is lost . . . maybe you could get him back. Who did you give him to?”

  “It’s too late.”

  I leaped to my feet. “Says who?!” I wanted to stay cool and pragmatic but even I could tell that my voice, amplified by the receiver and invaded by the dialect, was starting to unravel as I remembered how the locals got rid of unwanted animals. “Where, Pietro? Where did you take him?”

  “Far from here. I put him in a box and then I put the box in the car. I drove a long way, far out into the countryside.”

  “And then what did you do?” I began pacing back and forth, as far as the telephone cord would let me. “Please tell me!”

  “Fuck, I’m so sorry, baby. I can’t even believe what I did . . .” He’d pulled over on the side of the road beside a wheat field and searched for a good tree. There in its shade he’d put down the cardboard box, one of the ones he’d used to bring his books back from Naples. There was a farmhouse nearby: that’s why he’d chosen the spot, in the hopes that the puppy would find his way there or that the owners would come across him working the fields. “He’s probably found a new home by now, I’m sure of it . . . No harm done then. Only cats get attached to places. For a dog, one house is as good as another.”

  “But that makes it worse.”

  “How so?”

  “Because the puppy will have gotten attached to you.”

  There was another long silence. Pietro was smoking, I was certain of it. “Look, I know,” he said finally. “And I hated myself as I did it. When I p
ut him down and opened the box, he looked so cute . . . with his tongue hanging out, his little wet nose, eyes are big as saucers. He was even happy to see me, but I could also tell he was sort of confused as to why he was there, in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t even look at him I was so ashamed. Then I got back in the car and drove away as fast as I could, before I could change my mind.”

  “Do you remember what area the field is in? We could go back there and look for him. Do you remember the exact spot?”

  Pietro let out a weary sigh, saying that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack and that I should try to forget about him. That’s when I decided that it couldn’t be put off any longer, that before another sun spilled its red onto the horizon, I’d be on the bus to Borgo Alto for the fourth (and maybe the last) time, even if it meant making bad blood worse.

  From: heddi@yahoo.com

  To: tectonic@tin.it

  Sent: December 22

  Dear Pietro,

  I’m writing you from a campground. They have a computer with internet access here, coin-operated no less. I was checking to see if you had replied to my email, but clearly not. Did you end up having that surgery in the end? I haven’t heard from you in two months; your silence has gone on longer than usual. It seems you don’t feel like talking much these days . . .

  I printed out and saved the last email you wrote, as I’ve done with all the others. Maybe you can use them one day for that novel you want to write . . . But obviously you can’t write it yet because you don’t know how it ends.

  Years ago, in Naples, I saw our relationship as perfect, destined to be, and it was inconceivable to me that we would ever part. I was afraid of losing you, of course, but to an accident or an illness. What a fool I was: I didn’t understand that destiny (which in theory kept us together) and death (which had the potential to separate us) are the same damn thing. I was too caught up in cosmic matters, or maybe too in love, to take the human factor into account . . .