Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  I’d love to listen to your voice till the sun comes up, to feel your arms tighten around me like a ribbon around a present. If you don’t want the same thing, please tell me now. February is around the corner: it’s the start of the first semester and I’ve found a new job, in a university. Not to mention that you have a flight booked for February . . . I’m not convinced at all that you’ll get on that plane. In fact, I’m not waiting for you anymore, even if you asked me to (at least, I think you did). But if in the end you decide not to cross the ocean for me, I’ll accept it and I’ll finally come to see that destiny isn’t written in the future but in history.

  Affectionately,

  h.

  31

  BUONASERA.”

  That one-word welcome stretched out of Lidia’s small mouth like a particularly unpleasant household chore that unfortunately had to be done from time to time. And repeating that farce weighed on me, too, having to work my mouth into an unsuspecting smile and Lidia wishing me a good evening (for heaven’s sake, it was only two in the afternoon!) as she peeled a hand from her middle and gave it to me like a gift she’d rather not hand over.

  “It’s lovely to see you again, signora.”

  I kissed her. I’d always assumed her cheeks were rosy thanks to a healthy exposure to the elements, but this time up close I realized they were blotchy with broken capillaries, yet another sign of old age. I’d thought I was immune by now to her subconscious attempts to stir my pity but, as I once more noticed how miserably human she was, my chest tightened. It probably had something to do with my growing suspicion that I’d exaggerated, in my head and in the war of words with Pietro, how large a role she’d played in the breakdown of our happiness. Whatever had triggered it, the sensation didn’t last. It had been just a physical pain after all, a mere cramp.

  “Mamma,” said Pietro, setting my bag down on the kitchen floor and continuing, “go get them papers for the lawyer, wouldya?”

  “You going now? They’ll still be closed for lunch.”

  “You go get them and let me take care of it.”

  Only after his mother had left the kitchen did Pietro turn to say under his breath, “Don’t worry. The errand is just an excuse to get out of here. We’ll go for a drive. You up for it?”

  It was what I’d hoped for. This time we’d done the dutiful thing and come straight home from the bus stop. But I hadn’t traveled that entire distance to face Lidia in the kitchen but rather to pull Pietro close to me, embrace him in a clearing, make him mine. He gave me a quick kiss before saying that the errand itself was real: he had to go to the lawyer’s (not Francesco’s studio, though) to drop off some paperwork relating to a plot of land.

  “Which plot?”

  “The land down in Puglia, the one my father and I drove the tractor to, remember?” But before the slim hope could take hold that it was a transfer of ownership from Ernesto to Pietro Iannace, he added, “My folks want to make sure it’s in our names.”

  “Don’t you own it already?”

  Pietro combed his fingers through his hair. “It’s complicated. I’ll explain later.”

  I didn’t get the chance to ask where Gabriele was, for his mother was already making her way back to the kitchen with labored steps, document folder in hand. “Hurry back,” she said, followed by a rush of dialect from which I only fished out the pronoun edda.

  I waited till we were getting in the car to ask, “What did your mother say about me?”

  “Nothing, she’s just being stupid.”

  “C’mon, you can tell me. I have thick skin.”

  It was a blatant lie but it must have worked anyway because Pietro answered, “She said you have to go to bed early tonight, otherwise you’ll sleep in again.”

  Involuntarily I rolled my eyes.

  “Never mind her . . . That’s just the way she is. As they say in these parts, first she opens her mouth and only afterward she remembers to turn her brain on.”

  It didn’t seem so to me. But as the car reversed down the driveway, grounding the gravel underneath, I decided that on the subject of his mother it was best to bite my tongue. And maybe on other subjects too.

  We drove aimlessly over the hills. It was as if the summer had stored up all its heat to go out with a bang. I leaned out of the window, letting the hot wind slip like a comforter through my hands. The landscape, yellow and thirsty, wielded an austere beauty.

  Pietro pulled over and turned off the engine. Outside the car, the cicadas serenaded the heat in that strange language of theirs, all hisses and clicks. I wondered if it was true that cicadas spend seventeen years underground, waiting in silence to come out and spend just one season, one glorious season, on this Earth.

  We leaned against the warm hood of the car. “My god, you’re beautiful,” Pietro said, handing me a bottle of water. It tasted like warm plastic but it was good. I asked to see his wound, motioning him to come closer. With a knowing smile, he began unbuttoning his shirt to show me his chest, the sweat barely there. How long did we have before we had to go to the lawyer’s?

  “It’s healing up. I’ll have a good old scar, though.”

  In fact, after having been forced to stay open for four days, the incision had left a thick line of pink skin, raised like a row in a vegetable patch. I reached out but it looked too tender to touch, so instead I took his hand, the one he wore the silver ring on. I brought it to my lips, turning it over to kiss his palm, an instinctual act of pure passion, of pure submission. It tasted like salt, dust . . . and something else.

  “You’ve started smoking again.”

  “Just once in a while,” he said, retracting his hand.

  “But you went cold turkey in the hospital. They say that after the first week the physical dependence lessens.”

  “Doctors talk a lot of crap.”

  “Who knows if there’s an acupuncturist in this area . . .”

  Pietro ruled it out, but he lost his wry tone, sounding almost enthusiastic, when I suggested we buy him some nicotine patches. He stood to go, saying we could look for them in the pharmacy in Monte San Rocco. At the thought of already heading back to the village, my chest seized up again, just like it had when I’d kissed his mother, only this time there was no release. The next breath in gave me a tiny electric pang that made me dig my fingers into my skin.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Can you take me for another drive?”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere,” I said, changing my mind once we were back in the car. “You could take me to the field where you left the puppy.”

  Pietro placed a hand kindly on my shoulder. “Baby, I’m begging you, please let it go. Otherwise it’s just too hard . . . on both of us.”

  I kept my breathing shallow along the winding road, flanked by stalks of wheat that were dry and ruffled like sun-lightened hair. The spasms in my chest kept coming, closer and closer together. I didn’t even reach out, as I usually did, to caress the nape of Pietro’s neck as he drove. I wondered if this was how he had felt when he woke up that morning in Monte Porzio Catone. How could I possibly be experiencing the same thing? I felt like a phony. Yet there was nothing fake about the very fine thread of pain that was being stitched through me with extreme precision.

  I needed distraction, so I asked him, “What’s the deal with the land in Puglia?”

  Pietro dove into his story with gusto, his eyes glued to the road as it slipped beneath the car like a conveyor belt. It was a plot that his parents had bought in the ’60s, he explained, when the government had put some schemes in place to promote agricultural development in southern Italy. Back then it was practically still postwar famine down south, so many people took advantage of those incentives to escape poverty. Lidia and Ernesto also seized the opportunity to purchase a plot of land, despite it being far from the town. As it turned out, however, the recipients hadn’t won actual grants but co-owned the land with the government. “I guess my parents didn’t r
ead the fine print before signing.”

  With an x? I wondered. “So what are they going to do now, pay out the government?”

  “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea how much that would cost?”

  “Why, is it a lot of hectares?” I asked, trying out that word that I didn’t know the real meaning of.

  Pietro laughed. “No way, that plot is only a small portion of all the land we own . . . basically, the government had no intention of ever exploiting the land in any way. So after all these years they’ve decided to give up their share of ownership. But they don’t make it easy, you see: you’ve got to apply for it. A thousand forms to fill out, a thousand documents to get notarized, enough to make you want to pull your hair out. And of course, as they always do in Italy, they set the deadline right in the middle of the summer, when half the country is away on vacation.”

  “Let’s hope your folks can make it in time.”

  “We’ll make it. We have to,” he said gravely. “Otherwise, some serious shit will go down at home.”

  Pietro had taken a bureaucratic matter regarding a small, faraway piece of land that wasn’t even in his name very much to heart. Actually, he was funneling more energy into it than I’d seen in him in months. I was perplexed. What did it matter to him since—sooner or later, one way or another—he would be giving it all up, leaving scorched earth behind him? I said lightheartedly, “Some serious shit over such a little thing?”

  “It’s not a little thing, Heddi.”

  For a while I watched the landscape whoosh past. By now every breath was a stab in the heart. One particularly bad spasm made my face twist into a grimace and my fingertips burrow into my chest.

  “What’s wrong, baby?”

  I brushed it off at first, but when I saw how truly concerned he was I ended up telling him the truth. Pietro, changing gear and then course, stated in a calm but resolute voice that he was taking me to the family doctor, just to be on the safe side. I was struck by the role reversal but tried not to compare my performance to his. In any case, I was in too much pain to think about it or even to protest. We’d already taken the turnoff toward Borgo Alto.

  The doctor’s appointment initially went as I’d expected. Sterile office, chilly stethoscope, elderly doctor with moisturized hands. He palpated me, lifted my arm. In a measured Italian well suited to a foreigner, he asked me questions about the pain and my breathing; he asked me how long Pietro and I had been together and whether I liked Naples. He seemed satisfied with my answers. “All right,” he said. It was somewhat humiliating to be declared in perfect health and to sit there in my bra. The doctor then turned to Pietro to check his wound. “All right,” he said again as I put my T-shirt back on, figuring that was the end of it.

  But then the doctor did something that surprised me. He spun toward me to look me tenderly in the eyes. “Pietro suffered a pneumothorax, and you . . .”

  “And I clearly haven’t,” I said to preempt him.

  “Yes, but you are presenting some of the symptoms. Have you asked yourself why?”

  “No.” I cast a glance at Pietro; his brow furrowed.

  “I believe that you’re suffering from what is called a somatization of Pietro’s sickness. Do you understand what that means? I’m talking about psychosomatic pain.”

  I was struck dumb. It was a New Age thing that Barbara would have said, not a backward doctor in an even more backward place. But I didn’t like that diagnosis that put my physical pain down to a wild imagination. Not only that, but it exposed me as a liar in front of Pietro by letting him know that the inner strength I’d shown him in the hospital was all an act, that deep down for the entire week I’d been just as frightened and dispirited as him.

  “I’ll write you a prescription for painkillers,” concluded the doctor, “because pain is pain, regardless of the cause.”

  “I still have plenty of Voltaren at home,” Pietro said. “You prescribed me enough to medicate a horse.”

  “Oh, so this lovely girl’s staying at your house? Good, all right then. Say hello to your father . . . and, Pietro, do try and rest a little. Technically you’re still recuperating.”

  We got back in the car and, after popping in to the lawyer’s in Vallata, drove straight back to Monte San Rocco.

  It was the five of us for dinner. This time Gabriele’s presence didn’t lighten the mood at all. He picked at his food and drank plentifully, without engaging any of us in conversation but simply huffing every now and then at the television. More than an absence, Gabriele’s silence was a presence that made itself felt. It was silence used as a protest; it was a hunger strike. Nonetheless, after dinner when Pietro went up to his room to get me his painkillers, I joined Gabriele on the couch in the lounge where he’d withdrawn to watch TV. He didn’t say a word, merely acknowledging me with a nod.

  I hadn’t offered to do the dishes. Left on her own in the kitchen, their mother was washing them like she was trying to punish them for something they’d done to her. I watched her from behind: the gray hairs popping sheepishly from her kerchief; her compressed stature, as though she were crushed by an unfair dose of gravity; her back hunched by the lowliest tasks that give no gratification because they have to be done and undone every single day; her blind devotion to a world that was disappearing. It was a sorry sight: an old, unhappy woman pitifully alone even in her own house. All of a sudden, I understood that what I had interpreted as a manipulative tactic to make me feel sorry for her was in fact completely involuntary. Lidia was truly worthy of compassion. Therefore, seeing her in all her fragility wasn’t a concession on my part but the most merciless way of disarming her. And just like that, she lost every hold she’d ever had on me, perhaps forever.

  It was a hollow victory. Because if his mother was powerless, if in the end she didn’t matter, then why was Pietro still there? I felt sore and useless. I hadn’t achieved anything since my arrival. I hadn’t managed to get the puppy back or restore hope in the man I loved or create an action plan for our future. Gabriele was distractedly changing channels and the television was doing the talking. Thank goodness. I was more convinced than ever that language doesn’t help change the world for the better: words are either hot air or sticks and stones. I would be heading back to the city empty-handed, having only gained this worthless, delayed psychosomatic pain. My god, was I only capable of feeling and not doing?

  Gabriele was sipping his whiskey and looking straight ahead, his face lit dimly by the screen, so it surprised me to feel his hand come to rest on top of mine in the darkness. He’d never done so before and his palm was tender but very hot, as though he’d held a hot coal tight in his fist for a long time and without a word of complaint.

  The gesture injected me with such intense pleasure that I only managed to mumble, “It’s almost like you have a fever.”

  He turned to look me square in the eye. “Mine is indeed a fever, and I would never dare give it to another person. Especially the person I love.”

  I didn’t understand; he seemed angry with me and in fact he pulled his hand away. I asked, “Are you actually sick?”

  “No, I’m not sick. In truth, I never have been. And neither has Pietro.”

  I still couldn’t follow, and yet at the same time something inside me dropped, a cold awareness that was small but incredibly important, like a key sliding through a tear in my pocket.

  He sighed, softening his voice. “It’s not us, Eddie, it’s the place. It’s this land that makes people ill. And if you stay here, it’ll end up making you ill too. Run away, if you care for me as much as I care for you . . . and you can’t begin to imagine how much. Run and don’t look back.”

  He turned back to the TV, and so did I. An image from that afternoon had flashed before me, the drive back from the doctor’s. I remembered watching with relief as the town crumbled away and gave way to hills set aflame by the sun. Pietro was rubbing my thigh; he looked content—and more relaxed than I’d seen him in many months . . . or in many pla
ces. We flew by fields, thickets, dilapidated farmhouses, a couple of goats tied to the roadside. Through the open window came the smell of sage and the sound of cicadas, all of them together like bells jingling on a gypsy’s anklet. I wished the road would never end, a road at the mercy of the rolling land, twisting and turning with it, crawling up and diving down with it. And inside the car, we too obeyed the land, which, because of the gear changes, frequently interrupted our stolen caresses in those last stolen moments as it rocked us to its lullaby. Up and down and up and down, the land swelled over those warm sunlit hills and sank into the cool shaded dips; it rose and fell just like inhalations and exhalations. Because of the pain, I wasn’t taking deep breaths—the kind that Pietro had been completely deprived of not long ago—but the land was. The land was breathing.

  From: tectonic@tin.it

  To: heddi@yahoo.com

  Sent: January 14

  Dearest Heddi,

  Sorry for my long silence: my computer caught a virus over a month ago and I’ve been cursing at it like a sailor. On top of that, over the last couple of days a Siberian snowstorm has buried us under a half a meter of snow.

  I should consider myself lucky . . . the operation went well this time. They tell me that soon I’ll be able to climb mountains, but obviously to climb mountains you need more than two good legs.

  Everything you said in your email was true and irrefutable. What you wrote about our love is founded on the most absolute of truths. I loved you—no, it was more than that, I adored you, more than that, I worshipped you . . . and I still do . . .

  But I no longer know if all those dreams, projects, and scenes I see in my head still belong to me. I wish I were a different person. I want to be happy but I’m not. I want to be free but I’m not. I want to be healthy as a fish but I’m not. I want to be with you but I live in Italy.