Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  “Cesare, don’t. Father. How can you fail to see that Aurora is the worst kind of bourgeois? How can you fail to get it, she’s one of the ones who’s keeping down the two poor creeps you’ve got stashed in the church?”

  The man’s joints were quiet. The way he stared, thoughtful under a white shock of hair, unexpectedly called to mind Barbara’s mentor Nettie.

  “I’m angry,” the mother said. “I’m still angry.”

  The movies got it wrong, she thought. What happened to foreigners in Italy wasn’t a mere hotting-up of the love life. It was crazier than that, a roiling makeover, the ingredients chopped and cooked into another kind of pasta altogether. The movies got it wrong, the mythology got it right: everybody turned into something else.

  “I think,” she said, “I’m the one who needs to get out of the house.”

  When Cesare nodded, she wasn’t watching. She only heard the scraping, his hard-to-shave neck against the confining collar.

  She had alternatives to working at DiPio’s clinic. A number of alternatives, in fact, including a couple that Barbara and Jay had rejected as soon as they’d left the meeting with Roebuck. The family could’ve moved, for instance, taking a place more under American protection. NATO housed most of its people at a base in Aversa, an old mozzarella town north and inland, not far from the old Borbon playground at Caserta. According to Cesare, according to Silky, the base was a transplanted California suburb. San Fernando Mediterraneo. The Lulucitas could’ve transferred to one of those ranch-style prefabs, walking distance from a PX with ten movie screens. Or they could’ve moved down into the Consulate compound. The Attaché herself kept some sort of executive apartment in one of the attached palazzi, with a gun-toting doorman and steel-shuttered windows. Telecommunications hookups linked the houses with both land bases and carriers, the Sixth Fleet, and the nuclear presence beyond the Suez was just fifty minutes away. Down in the Consulate or out at Aversa, the family could’ve holed up like Crusader princes in Castel dell’Ovo. The new monsters imitating the old monsters.

  But they’d all gotten enough of that with the late Lieutenant-Major. Nor did the parents waste time with Aurora’s loose talk about “the Grand Tour.” The in-law suggested that the family jaunt all over the NATO-lands. They could take in Hamlet at the Stratford-on-Avon; they could visit the grave of Jim Morrison. “Quite the spree,” so the grandmother put it. And all the family would need to do in return was make the occasional stop for Public Relations. A hospital here, an orphanage there.

  Aurora, however, surprised Barbara with the restraint she showed about raising the possibility. The old playgirl never suggested the Capitals-of-Europe business directly to the kids, she wasn’t so nefarious as that, and so the daughter-in-law had kept her head as well. She’d dismissed the grandmother’s proposal out of hand, but she’d been polite about it. Besides, Barb figured the children wouldn’t have wanted to leave town. Hadn’t they asked to stay? Hadn’t JJ announced that here, he and his brothers and sisters had found fresh ground for the spirit, an inner Nea Polis?

  Barbara, on the other hand, couldn’t get unstuck. That’s what she’d intended to talk about with the fallen priest, today, before the old man had let her know just how fallen he was. So ten minutes after Cesare left the apartment Barb found herself ranting again. She upbraided the old man in the sort of fury that, a few short days before, would’ve been reserved for the Jaybird and her marriage.

  “You’re a wolf in priest’s clothing!” she cried. “This is just another oily Latin-lover thing, another…”

  The empty room had an echo; that stopped her. She’d been railing at the blue-bordered map of Naples, open on the family table. What had triggered her outburst, the mother realized, was that she couldn’t find DiPio’s clinic on the map.

  She tugged at an armpit and turned to the door. Her bodyguard was across the piazza at the gelateria, but once she caught up with the overgrown boy, he assured her he knew “the asylum.” In half an hour Barb was down in DiPio’s office, and in another half an hour the place began to feel like just the change she’d been seeking.

  Though a stopgap measure with Byzantine funding, the clinic meant business. The disaster had left behind a considerable spectrum of situational disorders. Even as the goatee’d medico finger-walked Barbara through the building directory, it sounded as if she’d stumbled on a transatlantic annex to the Samaritan Center. Here was a counselor who handled phobias, there a pair did group work on socialization, and a third specialized in dissociative episodes. Barbara saw post-traumatic stress, family-of-origin issues, and dual diagnoses. The tune was so familiar that she could sing the harmony right there across DiPio’s desk. Between what she’d learned over the winter and what he needed this summer, Barb had no trouble arranging another of those jobs-in-quotes. She didn’t have to mention reimbursement from the Consulate either, not with her husband already at work in the kitchen. For the next four or five days, until one of the doctors called Mrs. Lulucita into his office for a chat, she arrived at the clinic each morning at ten, with Jay and the boys.

  Chris and JJ, though, never hung around the downtown studio for long. The boys were good for a chore or two, and if DiPio could think of some drug or other supply that didn’t need to be rushed back to the clinic ASAP the two teenagers were glad to handle the pickup. But for the few days that Barbara played at having a Master’s in Social Work, or the Italian equivalent, John Junior and Chris didn’t linger at the old palazzo much past the time Mama was assigned a client. As soon as DiPio had someone for her, JJ would throw the camera bag over his shoulder. He’d hook the canvas pouch to his belt as well, an extra precaution against scippatori, and the later some staff member would let Barbara know which of the security team had gone off with the boys. She and the Jaybird wouldn’t lay eyes on their two filmmakers again till dinner.

  This was as she’d expected, really. She counted herself lucky just to get the brothers to stop calling DiPio’s place a “booby hatch.” She knew better than to take them seriously, too, when the teens suggested that the patients’ psychosis might “rub off.”

  “That’s always the danger,” Chris said, “when you’re exposed to another culture. Like, it rubs off” The boy kept a remarkably straight face. “Next thing you know, JJ and me will go out and be crazy.”

  “Hey,” said the older brother, “why go out?”

  Wise guys. Barb had to admit, though, that the clinic hardly conveyed a sense of order. DiPio’s palazzo, like many in the centro storico, was a multi-generation treehouse. Five stories of unmatched heights, with porches in different places, teetered around a small courtyard that, at the time when some baron had tacked on the first of the upper floors, had served as the stable. Apartments burrowed from one converted space to another, from a Borbon widening to a Fascist subdivision. There were rooms that could only be reached by first stepping out onto a balcony. The doctor himself had made changes, setting up therapy-cubicles in a couple of street-floor parlors. When Cesare spoke about the place, he fell back on antique vocabulary: a veritable Bedlam.

  So far as husband and wife were concerned, actually, Bedlam felt like a healthy work environment. Around the clinic Barb and Jay encountered fewer hot buttons, fewer issues that came back to sex. They might’ve been a couple of expats going partners on a B&B. The Jaybird never gave the least indication of hurt feelings, for instance, about having his wife outrank him. She was playing doctor, around DiPio’s studio, whereas Jay’s position might’ve been chief cook and bottle-washer.

  Not that Barbara didn’t experience a worse shiver, now and again. There were times when she pulled open a door to discover something she hadn’t expected, a closet instead of an exit or a dormer instead of an office, and there came the shiver… not déjà vu, say rather gia visto. The chilling sense that, once more, she’d tumbled back into her first day in the old city. In the corner of one of the ground-floor wards, where the wall might’ve gone up over a medieval oven, where there might’ve lingered a ta
ng of ash, Barbara discovered the standing cross from the Refugee Center. She had to touch the thing, jammed in at an angle. The corners of the wood remained furred here and there, no better sanded than the day Silky and Paul had carried it into the fluttering chapel. That hadn’t been so long ago, that visit to the Center. Yet how many reiterations of Day One had the mother suffered, since?

  Now in the clinic Barbara stood staring at the cross until, behind her, one of the patients started to laugh. Or rather this guy pretended to laugh, his hilarity an imitation, too wicked to believe. A parody of a villain out of James Bond, and maybe he was right to poke fun. The mother couldn’t be certain this soft-pine cross was the one her middle child had helped slap together. A lot of accessories around here were makeshift. Cesare used to handle the Mass, but never on a regular schedule. Lately the Vomero priest had declined to drop by at all, claiming he was too busy (and when DiPio told Barbara that, she had almost broken into a wicked laugh herself). The old medico responded by bringing in Jay’s former colleague from the Refugee Center—what was his name? Interstate? In any case the hairless German with the Franciscan T at first seemed uncomfortable around Barbara. His Midwestern greeting sounded pinched. But the wife had no interest in raking through the garbage about Jay’s initial UN contract.

  What difference did it make to her if, here at the clinic, a deal had been struck between the chaplain and his former American Boss, and a bit of cash had changed hands? What mattered was, the Jaybird would tell Barbara if she wanted to know. The husband would do as he’d promised; between him and his Owl Girl things were on a fresh basis. As for the Missouri-trained chaplain, Jay had gone so far as to show him a piece of paperwork from early June, a notice of a bank transfer Silky had arranged.

  And as for the people under DiPio’s care, they found the German’s freewheeling religious services just the ticket. The cases here, like those out at the Center, had seen their worlds destroyed in more than a single, simple sense. Barbara could see why most of the clinic staff needed a couple of degrees and three or four languages. Her first morning downtown, she found herself shuttling between the kind of decision-making for which she was trained and considerably greater challenges. She took a hand in one-on-one counseling, in groups and role-playing sessions. Once or twice she even suggested her own therapeutic variation, since despite their education the counselors here remained Neapolitan, willing to improvise. And she liked it—hail Mary full of grace, she did. When Barbara got to try one of her improvisations (a “trial methodology”), she enjoyed a sober exhilaration that fired up all her daytime energies and yet never lost the sense she was in control. Whatever other alternatives she’d had to staying up in the Vomero apartment, none could’ve offered so sweet a fit to the nervous system.

  And come bedtime, while she and Jay exchanged mumbles about the ups and downs of the workplace, these worked like a relaxation massage composed entirely of words. The Jaybird sometimes broke into a snore before he finished an anecdote. Even to discuss the politics of the clinic had a gentling effect, strange when Barbara thought about it. In this same bed, after all, she’d lost hours of sleep fretting over who was calling the shots within the family.

  Yet Barbara’s visits to the inner lives of the terremotati could also leave her troubled and let down. There was a distressed afternoon or two when she picked up her bodyguard outside the clinic and, before getting into the car, shook off anyone who approached her for a handout or a prayer. She wasn’t able to do much for a lot of these cases, no more than for Maria Elena back in Bridgeport. Rather she was forced to see as well the stubbornness, the grip of pattern and loop, that had made those syndromes so familiar in the first place. It hardly mattered when Barbara didn’t understand a victim’s fevered Italian, peppered with dialect. She couldn’t mistake the old story of their night sweats. During such difficult nights, the vision of a visiting saint only distracted these terramotati from the real problem. Worse, it was usually the same saint, Padre Pio. Pio was a recent addition to the canon, a Capuchin who’d worked his miracles in the 1950s and 1960s, and mediagenic in his way. Nowadays, when Fond came on the tube to pester the family, he earned his camera time by a sleek hint of hard living. The refugee Lazarus. Pio had been the opposite, Yoda, squat and wrinkled yet aglow within his robes. He was said to have convinced a movie producer, via telepathy, to bankroll La Dolce Vita. And so long as Barbara worked downtown, it seemed that some of the sorry creatures she tried to help would’ve gotten more out of watching Fellini than going on their knees to Padre Pio. Fellini would at least have showed them outrageous faces not unlike what had hurt them. But the figure out of their Catholic faith, Barbara’s own faith, got in the way of their trauma, of coming to know it, as if they’d hung some hollow gold knickknack over the pain—another ojetto for the city’s tormented walls. She hated to see it. Her church had brought her better than that, palpable comfort, honest strength.

  But the clinic’s population couldn’t risk depths like that. They preferred the saints, the stand-ins. None of these patients claimed to have seen the Devil, or none that Barbara talked to, though a couple suffered nightmares in which some troublesome relative figured as a witch. She knew all about that one. She understood the kind of people she was dealing with, Cesare’s “bourgeois.” These were card-carrying citizens, the professional class, all registered with the national health program. Yet while DiPio’s cases had little in common with the desperate strays out at the Centro Rifugiati, they were by no means untouched by tragedy. More than once Barbara was left looking for a place to pull herself together, trying unknown doors with a dripping face. There was a man who couldn’t get beyond a thoughtless curse he’d growled at his mother, an angry word that he believed had attracted the Evil Eye. There was a woman who spoke obsessively, in halting half-English, of the extension cords she’d run into a child’s bedroom, overloading the circuit behind the wall.

  And there was one neurosis Barbara had never come across in the textbooks, nor on the internet either: a man who claimed he couldn’t be living in Naples because he wasn’t old enough. This was a guy of about sixty who styled his remaining hair in a frowsy Mohawk and claimed he was still at work on his name. Every stage of life, so Mohawk believed, was a city. He himself had only recently reached the minimum entry requirement for elementary cities, like the fresh and exotic Portland, Oregon. In another ten years, if he kept up his research and steered clear of the wrong crowd, he might grow into Houston or Tokyo. The last thing you wanted, he explained, was to try and jump a level—to claim a more complex citizenship before you’d worked up the orientation. The last thing you wanted was to have the avenues around you all at once changing direction, thrusting out fresh lampposts like fingers through the holes of an afghan, the lampposts plastered with notices in God knows what language and your own frail body God knows how far from the sidewalk. Or you might discover yourself at the wheel of a new SmartFiat, engineered to millennial environmental standards, careening head-on towards a knight on horseback toppling from his pedestal. Repeatedly the old-timer insisted he wasn’t ready for the next move, and not nearly prepared for the adult dose that was Naples, or say Damascus. Those sank their underground agora and raised their satellite dishes only for the most mature.

  Delusionary, indeed. The guy could’ve taught Barbara something. If she’d spent more time with this “unripened metropolis,” him and his frayed toothbrush of a hairdo, she too might’ve achieved a more profound shakeup and understanding. So she told herself at week’s end, anyway, after one of the ranking psychologists asked her into his cubicle.

  This doctor had done two years at UCLA, and she could hear it in his voice, relaxed, beach-y. Nonetheless he was firm with her. The man made it clear that he and the rest of the medical staff could no longer trust the fragile personalities around here to an amateur. No longer, Mrs. Lulucita. She didn’t have so much as a certificate for social work, let alone medical credentials.

  After a while—after he saw how calmly she took the
news—the psychologist began to sound more Californian. He assured Barbara that everyone in the clinic had nothing but affection for her, personally. She’d brought a fresh perspective to the work, and that was always useful. She was certainly welcome to help in some other capacity, some sort of work like her husband did…

  “Like my husband?” Barb tugged at her shirtfront. “What? Take out the trash?”

  The doctor ran the entire length of his tie between thumb and forefinger. When he spoke, the edge had returned to his voice. “I realize that you and your husband have powerful friends.”

  He realized, too, that dottore DiPio himself was among those friends. But Mrs. Lulucita needed to understand, should she have it in mind to contest the staff’s decision, that DiPio didn’t oppose it. He might be a bit of a maverick, the old man, but he would never go against the consensus of the people he depended on to run his clinic. And (at this the young therapist fingered his tie again) additional funding from the Consulate wouldn’t change anyone’s mind either.

  “Ci sono limite,” he concluded, his first sentence in Italian. “There are limits.”

  Her driver and bodyguard, the big curly-head, hadn’t expected l’Americana to knock off early. Now as Barbara waited for him, on the bench inside the clinic’s iron gateway, she figured that what she felt was something like her Vomero priest in his church: she was disgusted with herself for all the time she’d spent eavesdropping, her whole working week vicarious. Yet even this afternoon, in Naples she couldn’t remain entirely a sourpuss, not as the downtown emerged from riposo, as it set up a fresh display of the pedestrian baroque. Barbara discovered, or rediscovered, that this must’ve been part of the reason she’d chosen to work down here in the original city. She’d never grown indifferent its stagy mash of hustle and museum effects. There was still the echo, the gesturing, the whole-body Neapolitan shrug. Then too, one or two downtowners recognized the mother of the miracolino; they came close enough to extend a medallion or crucifix through the bars. A man who looked to be at least eighty, his hand like the brown husk of an insect, went into a staggering bow as he held out a silver-plated heart.