Lost in the Spanish Quarter

by Heddi Goodrich

  It’s no easy feat. To this you’ll say that I’m trading you for material possessions, for some things . . . but it’s not that simple. I would love to be with you and live the life I imagined not so many years ago: travel the world, see new places until we find one we’d never want to leave again. But I don’t know if I’m able to grab my destiny by the horns, or if I want it badly enough. I can only hope to come out of this mess quickly, and hopefully without turning it into a big ordeal to all concerned (but that’s the hardest part).

  Probably at the end of the novel I’ll write, the readers will come to see (or perhaps I will too) that I’m just a coward, that I didn’t defend my love for you and therefore my self-love, due to cowardice disguised as fear and laziness (a fine combination, don’t you think?).

  Many times I’ve tried really hard to ignore or somehow drive away the part of my life I shared with you. It’s a futile and even harmful thing to do. It’s like you’re in my blood. I don’t have one thought, one feeling or action that is not related to what I learned from you. Actually, it’s more than that: I was like a parasite with you. I sucked everything I could out of your life.

  We were young and naïve. I was naïve and so were you. In my own way I loved you madly, just like in my own way I have never stopped loving you. But my curse, my hereditary defect, my environment make me make all the wrong moves. I let myself get dragged down by inertia, I let myself get carried away by the current. That which one moment I desired more than the air I breathe all of a sudden becomes intolerable. It’s probably because I’m only human, but I have yet to meet other people with my same stupid logic.

  Now I’m a bit tired, of working hard all day and tapping on this stupid computer keyboard (maybe I prefer to write by hand but I’ve never realized it) . . . I’m tired of everything, it seems.

  I hope that these few lines will shed some light on the situation but I’m sure they won’t, without underestimating your intelligence, which never ceases to amaze me. My hope is to see you soon and to read more of your thoughts.

  Ti voglio bene,

  Pietro

  33

  RITA FIBBED at work in order to take me to the airport. It seemed fitting that she would be the one seeing me off now since she’d been the first person to greet me at the train station all those years ago. I crammed my suitcase till nothing more could fit in, figuring that those last two books and that pair of jeans could be brought over later by Pietro.

  I’d left out the Roman effigy and set it beside the alarm clock so I could sleep near it. I hoped that tomorrow morning I wouldn’t be stopped at the airport for theft of cultural artifacts. But that statue, I realized, wasn’t the only gift Pietro had given me that was imbued with history: all of them had been, starting with those old songs he’d put together for me. I’d only ever given him new things. I myself was new, an amalgamation of random bits all thrown together, just like my potato dish, of dubious yet ordinary origins, which I reinvented each time I made it depending on the ingredients I had on hand. And I wasn’t so sure this was such a bad thing after all.

  Without our things, the room reverted back to its implausible size: the low ceiling, the tiny opening that was a window in name only. The port was doused in sunlight. It was still afternoon, but it already felt like the day was over.

  As I was dragging my suitcase to the door, something caught my eye: a small scrap of paper sticking out from under the mattress. On it was Luca’s number in Varese written in Tonino’s sloppy handwriting. It must have fallen long ago from my book bag. I picked it up, smoothing its creases and then carrying it downstairs along with my luggage.

  There was only one last thing to do: go visit Angelo in the Sanità, the only way to say goodbye before I left. I missed that boy. Maybe I just felt like walking too.

  The trash collectors must have gone on strike again because Via De Deo was bursting with refuse. Garbage was spilling from the dumpsters, and the air was a full-bodied mix of pork rinds and coffee grounds. I saw a few zoccole, rats of the man-eating kind. The storekeepers and shoppers on my street appeared unfazed by that visual and olfactory frenzy, but I opted for a shortcut.

  The sun was abandoning the Quartieri, becoming a privilege of the highest floors. Down in the streets, like the anonymous one I found myself in now, darkness lingered like hard luck. My shoes smacked the big, square basoli, moving from one to the next as if across a giant chessboard. There was a bad vibe there. In a ground-floor home a woman painting her toenails threw me a suspicious look. I suddenly became fearful. There wasn’t a specific reason why; there was nothing unusual about the street or the woman. It was a generic fear, a caution planted by the guidebooks on Naples when they write about its narrow streets: hold on tight to your bag, be on your guard, or better yet, don’t go down them at all.

  I took another side street. Had I been down this one before? It was hard to say: even after all this time, all the streets looked the same. I walked surefootedly so as not to betray my uncertainty, not to myself and definitely not to that young boy wearing filthy, oversize slippers and stalking me with his eyes. I had two choices: either trace one of the straight lines down to Via Roma or follow one of the perpendicular streets that would eject me out into Piazza Carità. After all, the Spanish Quarter possessed a mathematical symmetry.

  My feet chose to turn right. As soon as I rounded the bend, I was flooded in light as though someone had flashed a spotlight on me, and I had to squint. An entire block of buildings had been demolished or had collapsed, leaving a crater in the neighborhood. The sun thus had free rein, but it wasn’t a pretty sight. As if to discourage street kids and their dingy soccer balls from getting any ideas, a wall, heavily graffitied, had been shoddily built around the ghost of the building. I was disoriented by that dazzling and at the same time dead space that broke the geometrical laws of the Quartieri. Starting to panic, I dove into the first left-hand alleyway.

  I’d strayed far from Via De Deo, that much I knew: I couldn’t even hear its comforting bustle. All I could hear was a toilet flushing and water coursing through pipes and my blood throbbing through my veins. I was lost but I kept on walking. The real danger was in stopping.

  I ran my eyes up the façades of the buildings. High above, the last sunlight was an orange juice being sucked away by a straw. It was getting late and I had to get to Via Roma as quickly as possible. My footsteps gathered speed, aiming for the next side street, searching for a straight line—any line—that would take me downhill. And there was one right there.

  No sooner had I turned the corner than I came to a halt. I knew that place. The low walls barricading the street, the scaffolding bracing the brittle stone, the harem of pigeons and the bed of cardboard, and on top of it, sprawled out like an undefeated general, the big black dog.

  Checkmate.

  The birds, frightened in turn by my intrusion, burst into flight. I had to duck to avoid them in their clumsy escape, but all the same I felt the breath of those many wings and their papery feathers lifting my hair and brushing against my forehead. Only then was it just me and the beast with his glazed-over eyes as soulless as black pearls.

  I stood there paralyzed, fearing that if I made a move in any direction, the dog would pounce on me and bite me with those hard, yellow teeth. I knew he had it in him to do just that, judging from his battered body, a map of battles scribbled in black scars that glistened in the dying light. And he was undoubtedly faster than me. My eyes darted left and right in search of the quietest, most submissive exit. Yet I was unwilling to retrace to my steps: turning back just wasn’t an option.

  All of a sudden, I noticed that the first wall, the one being used as a clotheshorse directly behind the dog, had an opening that wasn’t obstructed like it had been last time. It was just wide enough for a moped to fit through . . . so surely a person would be able to. I realized in fact that all the walls had a small opening. Should I go for it? I thought to myself.

  Again I looked at the dog, his scars expanding wit
h each breath. Feeling bold, I took a step in his direction but I wasn’t looking at the ground and kicked an earsplitting plastic bottle across the cobblestones. The dog bared his teeth and I retreated.

  But something inside, maybe that gambler in me, again pushed me forward toward the beast, who despite the heat wasn’t panting but breathing through his nose like a bull. His black-leather nostrils widened as he sniffed the air, picking up my human smell invading his territory, and his blank eyes too were rolling this way and that as if looking for a thief in the night.

  Suddenly I got it. The dog smelled me and sensed my movements but he couldn’t see me. He was blind.

  Placing all my foolish hope in that intuition, I held my breath and edged toward him. I came close enough to feel the heat rising off his body, the foul steam coming from his nostrils. His muscular head tattooed in wounds turned right and left trying to locate me, but I didn’t give him the chance. With a surge of adrenaline in my legs, I darted behind the dog toward the opening in the wall. I heard him stir on the cardboard but I kept going, not daring to look behind me as I slid through one passageway after the other, until I’d gotten past the entire block forever in need of reinforcement. Once I was out the other side, for some reason I burst out laughing.

  I took a street that looked promising, and indeed it took me to safety on Via Roma, where the anarchy of the Spanish Quarter might seem like nothing more than a strange dream. However, instead of continuing on toward the Sanità, I headed back in the direction of Via De Deo. I couldn’t be sure I’d find Angelo at home or even recognize his decrepit building, still standing only by some miracle. Besides, to be honest, I was a little tired.

  After talking on the phone with Pietro for over an hour, I got into bed with an issue of National Geographic. Despite worrying I wouldn’t hear the alarm clock in the morning, I felt at peace knowing that soon (two or three months at most was Pietro’s guess) we would begin living the life we’d dreamed of for so long. Leaning back against the wall, I was flipping through the glossy, saturated pages of an article on the Islamic peoples of China when I felt it.

  It was a push from the wall behind me, like a stranger jostling me at a crowded concert, so rudely it even moved the mattress. My first thought was that it had come from Gabriele’s room; I almost called out his name, though I knew I was alone in the house. When the wall gave another push, I grasped that it wasn’t the wall that had pushed me but rather the mattress, with me on it, that had thrown itself against the wall. Like in a boat on the sea, the mattress slid shoreward once more, and this time the wall and the mattress began knocking together repeatedly, like teeth chattering in the cold. I even considered the possibility that someone was shaking the bed. The munaciello! That cheeky little spirit was getting back at me for not having offered him any coins when I’d moved in. It was a split second of the most sober madness. Only when I saw the glass vibrating in the window frame and the makeshift bedside table clicking against the wall did I finally understand.

  An earthquake. I threw off the sheet and the magazine and hurled myself barefoot down the stairs, making a dash through the living room and straight for the front door. I didn’t open it. I stood there on the threshold, wrapped in the shadows, my heart thundering and my head wondering if this was the end or just the beginning.

  I waited. Sinking to the floor in my underwear, I ran my fingers through my hair. My hand was trembling, but I felt proud of myself for remembering Pietro’s advice to run for shelter under a doorway and for having chosen, without stopping to think, the doorway which in our illegally built house was probably the strongest. However, it hadn’t been a conscious memory at all but rather an instinct, like a nomadic memory I’d always carried in my bones.

  The house was still now. How could the neighbors not be yelling themselves hoarse over this in the courtyard? Maybe they were asleep or too wrapped up in their ridiculous squabbles to notice that the earth had moved beneath their feet. Admittedly, though, it had been a minor tremor and a short-lived one at that. I couldn’t have said I was disappointed, but I became aware of the fact that I’d actually wanted to experience an earthquake or an eruption. Or rather, I wanted to take part in something truly big and powerful—a release of latent energy, an explosion of truth.

  I felt like calling Pietro to tell him what had happened and be enfolded once more in the velvet of his good night. But at this hour I ran the risk of waking his parents. And as my eyes scanned the living room resting in the semidarkness, I saw the crinkled slip of paper with Luca Falcone’s number.

  On impulse (or maybe not) I grabbed it and dialed, quickly so that I couldn’t change my mind. As the phone rang, I looked out the window and spotted—so low in the sky it looked like it was emerging from the Spanish Quarter itself—the finest sliver of light, as fragile as a splinter of glass but practically blinding in its intensity. The moon, mother of the tides and the only witness to the fact that even geological time isn’t truly linear but comes full circle, and that for every goodbye there’s always a return.

  My old friend picked up; I recognized him straightaway from his peaceful voice. But since he wasn’t expecting my call, I said, “It’s me. Heddi.”

  From: heddi@yahoo.com

  To: tectonic@tin.it

  Sent: February 8

  Dearest Pietro,

  You write so well. Thanks to all the emails you’ve written me, I’ve finally understood once and for all that you do love me, in the Neapolitan sense of the word. But I know something else, too: you won’t come to see me or take me away. I’ll spare you the unpleasant task of having to tell me yourself. The truth was right in front of me all along . . . how could I not have seen it earlier? You tried to tell me in every way, now and years ago, but love is hardheaded . . .

  They tell me that when the first Englishmen came to these remote shores they tried to buy land off the various Maori tribes—dense, muddy forest that was practically impassable. In exchange they offered money and goods, and the Maori took these gifts and laughed in their faces. They laughed. How absurd, they thought, to think you can buy the land! Because in their worldview the land can never belong to man: it’s man that belongs to the land. In fact, Maori call themselves Tangata whenua, literally, “people of the land.” You and I will always love each other, Pietro, more than anything, but you belong to your land and I’m destined to be here.

  Oh, destiny . . . I’ve decided: if I did want to get a tattoo one day I know what it would be. Not an image at all but a word. And it wouldn’t be destiny or even knowledge, but the Maori word aroha. Aroha is a sublime concept of love: it encompasses generosity and the creative force of the spirit, and involves not only the heart but the head and all the five senses . . . and probably that sixth sense, too, that led you to me.

  You won’t ever come here, and that’s the way it should be. I won’t hold it against you, I couldn’t possibly, because thanks to you I experienced a kind of love that few people in the world have the privilege of knowing, and for that I will always be indebted to you.

  Yours,

  Heddi

  21 March

  Dear Pietro,

  How are you? I’m writing to you with pen and paper, like you always preferred, like maybe I always preferred too. I haven’t heard from you in ages. It’s been almost a year since I told you about my engagement (and buying the house); thanks again for your sincere congratulations. I don’t know if you got my short email from Vietnam or the one I sent you from Cambodia (we were traveling with Barbara, my dad, my brother and his wife) . . . you didn’t reply. If I don’t hear from you now and then, I feel something is missing from my life.

  We got married on the beach in the month of February. As you can see from the pictures, it was a beautiful summer’s day—actually, four beautiful days because the festivities lasted that long. Beach, music, lots of food. My dad took charge of the barbecue, Mamma Rita made spaghetti with shellfish. Guests came from all corners of the world, including Ivan and Snežana and—you won’t b
elieve it—Luca Falcone! He just appeared from the crowd with the same ease as always, as if he were simply walking toward me in Piazza San Domenico and not at the ends of the Earth. In perfect Falcone style, he stayed for only two days . . .

  But my wedding isn’t the only news I wanted to give you. Do you remember that novel you always wanted to write as an old man? Well, I wrote it . . . I hope that you don’t mind too much, and that you’ll want to read it. It turns out I remembered everything; evidently, my amnesia was merely transient.

  Please let me know how you’re doing, otherwise I’ll start to get worried. I hope that you’ve found or will soon find everything you desire and deserve, and that you won’t feel regret when you look back on our story, which (in the novel as in real life) begins and ends with you.

  h.

  From: tectonic@tin.it

  To: heddi@yahoo.com

  Sent: April 16

  Dear Heddi,

  Where should I begin? I’ll begin with the obvious. Today I got your letter. I can’t describe the little leap my heart gave when I came home from work to find it sitting on the mantelpiece. I should have expected it, though, because today I witnessed a very strange phenomenon. I was putting some tools back in the truck in a spot where I spend most of my time. It’s just outside Monte San Rocco, in the hills surrounding it, where there aren’t any houses whatsoever and all you can see are the “giants” (the windmills). I was alone, absorbed in completely trivial thoughts. Then I clearly heard, very close to me, the sound of an animal. The voice of an animal. It took me a few moments to figure out what it was: a small white owl perched on a metal pole. It was looking at me and belting out its song. I thought about how odd it was to see an owl during the day, in such damp and cloudy weather, and I thought of the Greeks and their belief that owls are Minerva’s messengers. But I decided on the simpler explanation that that little bird had a broken clock and had confused day with night. But in the end it was a messenger!