Kitabı oku: «Lost in the Spanish Quarter», sayfa 2

2

THE DAY AFTER, the day of the hangover, I was sitting on my creaky bed turning the pages of my textbook when I heard Luca coming down the hallway toward me. I could tell it was him even before his voice broke through the mournful Bulgarian folk songs and the humming rain. It was the smell of his tobacco that gave him away. His smoke meandered in through my open door and danced before me as elusively as a wish.

For as long as I’d known him, Luca Falcone had always smoked those hand-rolled cigarettes: he was puffing on one when I was first introduced to him. Leaned against the dejected plaster outside the café across from my department, he was holding something very alcoholic and wearing out-of-fashion leather pants, seemingly oblivious to the historical era or the geographical location he’d wound up in. Luca was already in his third or fourth year and he was pockmarked, weathered like a traveler who had crossed the desert to get to that bar, that bourbon, that stopover.

That moment marked the beginning of my university life as I knew it now, for most unexpectedly Luca took a shine to me and slipped me into his inner circle—the alternative crowd majoring in Urdu or Swahili or Korean at the Department of Arabic-Islamic and Mediterranean Studies and the Department of Oriental Studies, whose remote Italian origins (Puglia, Basilicata, Sicily, Sardinia) branded them as outsiders too.

“The movie’s starting,” said Luca with the lilt of his native Varese, in the Lakes region.

“I’ll be right there. I’m just finishing the page.”

Up close, Luca smelled of lavender soap. He stamped a kiss on my forehead, a big one like he was farewelling me at the train station. Yet he didn’t leave. He lingered in the doorway to bore his eyes into me, as he sometimes did, as if to hypnotize me. That prolonged gaze always threw me into confusion while at the same time giving me the strange certainty, at least for as long as it lasted, that our friendship was not limited to this moment or these circumstances, that we had a bond which would outlast the rest. I knew it was ridiculous, and that I was no exception: everyone wanted a piece of Luca Falcone.

On either side of the now empty doorframe were some of my black-and-white photographs, taken with a macro lens, hand-printed and taped to the wall. They were good shots, though somewhat abstract. Through the window, sandwiched up against another building and transformed by the rain into a game board of Chutes and Ladders, I couldn’t even see my neighborhood being beaten down by the weather and by the passage of time. But it was Sunday and I knew that at that hour all the shops would be closed and the markets packed up, and every last soul would be back home for a marathon meal, followed by the compulsory nap. Sunday lunchtime was the only time when people felt sorry for me. Poor stray, so far from home.

Home. The word itself puzzled me. Didn’t home mean my dad grilling steaks or my psychotherapist stepmom doing her on-the-spot dream analysis? Wasn’t it my mom’s shiatsu foot rubs, her chilly but soft hands, or my brother plucking the bass? The cats? Apparently not, because for all the other out-of-town students home was a place. Colle Alto in the province of Benevento, Adelfia in the province of Bari. Home was a red dot on the map, a reference point that was so very small and yet able to contain, it seemed, everything. People appeared to take it for granted, as if it were just another basic human emotion—happy, sad, angry, home—and yet their eyes lit up when they said the word. Casa. I struggled to grasp that extraplanetary sensation but in the end I couldn’t really feel it. I had to resort to logical analysis to get my head around it.

I was from everywhere and from nowhere. Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia Beach, the outskirts of Boston, Athens in Ohio, and a few other forgettable stop-offs. That was until, at sixteen, I was assigned a dot on the map by an international exchange program that landed me in the nation of Italy, the province of Naples, the town of Castellammare di Stabia, the apartment of a divorcée with two grown sons who told me to call her Mamma Rita. It was Rita, and not AFSAI, who begged me to stay on after the first year and who had the foresight to advise her “American daughter” to graduate from a liceo linguistico.

I became convinced that nothing in this world is random. It was that diploma, in fact, that got me into the Orientale. The admissions lady had narrowed her eyes. I wasn’t Italian, but with that piece of paper I couldn’t not be Italian. When she thumped my admission form with four glorious official stamps, she turned me into a university student like any other. And among Luca’s friends, who were now mine too, the camouflage was almost perfect.

The boys and I had a fun little game, which would start with a request for a cold beer and usually end with a cup of hot tea.

“Ah, c’mon, gorgeous,” pleaded Tonino that afternoon lying starfish on Luca’s bed. In the spastic light of the TV, I could see that Tonino looked as miserable as the old wallpaper behind him, covered only partially by Luca’s Arabic calligraphy. “If I don’t inject more alcohol into my bloodstream, I’ll never get rid of this bastard headache.”

“You did ask for it,” said Angelo.

“Like you asking for that bong …”

“Listen, boys,” I said, putting on my sternest voice, in no way meant for Luca, who was rolling a cigarette. “You have class tomorrow, bright and early. C’mon, boys, it’s the last week before the break. You can do it! Honey or sugar?”

Tonino cursed half-heartedly in three dialects (Neapolitan, Sicilian, and his own), but they both gave in straightaway. I smiled to myself on my way to the kitchen, knowing full well that what those two really craved was not a drink at all but a bit of mothering. I paused in front of Angelo’s cracked door, catching a peek at his black-and-white cowhide rug we often lay across sipping green tea from Japanese cups while deciphering our respective codes, kanji and Cyrillic. I climbed the staircase, which had lost its railing, swerving at the top to avoid stepping on the crack in the floor, just in case there was some reality to that childhood truth. The fracture started at the fireplace in the kitchen, half a meter out from the wall, and shot through to the end of the living room, dissecting the tiles to where they met the terrace. I wondered, as brazen as that crack was, why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d moved in with the boys. I’d probably been too distracted by the aging beauty of the once luxurious apartment, by all its fireplaces, frescoes, and bas-reliefs flaking and fading in the shadows.

I carried back beer mugs of tea and a pack of cookies; the bed sagged in the middle under our weight. I’d missed the opening scenes, but then again it was a movie we’d watched over and over, a New Zealand film I knew only by the name Una volta erano guerrieri, and I was very familiar with the plot. Tattooed Maori thugs bashing each other at night in parking lots and bars and on green lawns, spattered with blood and foul language dubbed in proper Italian with a northern accent.

“Man, what an awesome place New Zealand must be …” said Angelo dreamily.

“Awesome my ass,” Tonino spat back.

“It can’t be all that dangerous. Look at those wide-open spaces, they can do whatever the hell they want. I’d love to go there one day.”

“Sure, blondie, better to get an ass whipping from a Maori gang than a kneecapping from the Mafia.”

Angelo frowned, defiantly pulling up the plaid blanket. He had a nose ring and a proud Sicilian accent that should have lent him an air of toughness. But, whatever the situation, Angelo was like a kid in a candy shop and this was something Tonino just couldn’t let him get away with. It certainly didn’t help matters that Angelo had the complexion of a Swede, a washed-out color that didn’t stop at his face and hair. I only knew this because I’d nursed him back to health once when he was suffering from excruciating neck pain. Angelo had turned facedown onto that cow rug and pulled down his pants; quickly, before I lost the nerve, I jabbed the syringe of anti-inflammatory into his right buttock.

“Well, one day I’m gonna go there,” Angelo reiterated through a mouthful.

“You’re as baked as that cookie,” said Tonino.

“You should go. The world is a book …”

That last enigmatic sentence emerged from Luca’s smoke. I hadn’t even realized he’d been listening. Yet another night scene plunged the room into darkness, but Luca’s Arabic pendant, carved out of what looked like bone, shone as if reflecting light from an unknown source.

“New Zealand’s too far,” I said, and in fact I preferred destinations like Sardinia, Umbria, the Netherlands, Kiev, Vienna—with or without my family. Or better yet, Capri, Procida, the Phlegraean Fields, the streets of Naples. “Who wants to come with me to the Maria Santissima del Carmine Church during the break?” I suggested. Another one of my “field trips,” as the boys called them.

“A church over Easter?” said Angelo. “I’ll pass. I’d rather be sitting around a table stuffing my face with cassata.”

“It’s also known as the Fontanelle Cemetery,” said Luca. “Definitely worth a visit.”

Hope swelled up inside me. Maybe, just maybe, this time Luca would set aside his band practice or research for his thesis to wander with me through the city that was his by right of blood. But he said nothing more and slipped definitively back into the darkness.

“Well, I wouldn’t be able to go for all the pussy in the world,” Tonino said. “March is when we prune our olive trees … Oh, that’s right, you intellectuals wouldn’t want your hands getting dirty, now would you? But it would actually do you some good. Check out these muscles. You think they’re just for show?”

The boys burst out laughing and I sat up with a jolt. Pietro. I hadn’t even looked at the tape since he’d given it to me the night before. I had a habit of doing that, setting aside letters and packages from home, sometimes for days on end, savoring the anticipation of opening them. Or maybe I’d just wanted to forget all about it after Sonia’s confession. But now I was beset by a sense of urgency. Where had I put it?

“Hey, where are you going?” Angelo called out behind me. “This is the part where Nig gets initiated into the gang!”

My suede skirt hadn’t forgotten last night: it smelled like a bonfire and was still holding on to the fragile little package I’d entrusted it with. In good lighting I could now see that the neatly written song list was framed by cartoonish drawings of ladybugs and fish in rust-colored ink, a detail of such playfulness, kindness, and undeniable intimacy as to make my head spin.

I sat on the bed and put the cassette into the tape deck. The first song was Aretha Franklin’s version of “Son of a Preacher Man.” I let out a sigh. My love life up until then had been a series of melodramas and misunderstandings.

In Castellammare di Stabia I met Franco, a rookie in the Camorra, the local Mafia. At the time it felt a lot like love. Or a movie about love, with scenes of gripping his thick waist on the back of a Vespa that snaked through the ruins of his ghostly neighborhood, which over the centuries had taken one too many punches from earthquakes and landslides. Watching his mother in their poorly lit vascio wail with chronic pain in legs as swollen as tree trunks. Listening to the story of how his friend had been shot dead by a rival gang. Holding Franco in my arms as he broke every code of honor to cry and cry against the backdrop of a friend’s uninhabited apartment that didn’t even have electricity. I was sixteen and I wanted to save him. One day without an explanation he broke it off. The ending was unsurprising, even desirable. After that, those adolescent sunsets over the polluted sea became even more beautiful and raw, like blood oranges.

Cesare was an error in judgment I paid dearly for. In hindsight, I could have guessed that his brilliance and eccentricity were the early symptoms of schizophrenia. But at the time I was enamored with how enamored he was with me, his searing gaze, his crooked teeth. He was disheveled, possibly even ugly, but he possessed a blinding confidence and wrote terse, dense poetry that read like haiku. Cesare quickly betrayed signs of obsession: only later did I learn he’d given me the cheap, useless gift of his virginity. Long after he left the university to be hospitalized back in his hometown of Catanzaro, he continued to send me packages, even to my dad and Barbara’s house in DC, containing self-published volumes of love poems or top-secret instructions for building a bomb. Those declarations of undying passion, which became more and more grandiose, intensified my bouts of cold sores and also my shame, verging on disgust, for how I’d played the part of the carefree girl and used sex as an intellectual experiment in carnality, for how careless I’d been and how easily my instinct for self-preservation had won out over my compassion.

And then there was Luca. Or rather, there wasn’t. Late one night while watching a movie on his bed we’d drifted into sleep and he tangled himself around me. I woke up. The movie was over and Luca’s torso was rising and falling in a faraway, untroubled rhythm that seemed extraordinary in itself. His hair had come loose from his ponytail and his lips were slightly parted, but even in his sleep Luca was still ruggedly handsome. I was only pretending to sleep. Paralyzed with pleasure and awe, I let the night tick away with the flashing green of Luca’s digital clock as his pendant pressed its cryptic script onto my skin. I was afraid to wake him. I wanted to lie next to him for as long as the universe had miraculously granted me, to absorb everything about him. His esoteric knowledge, his composure, his patience and faith in himself. During that long magical night, I gained an important insight: what I felt for Luca was not a crush, it was far more than that. I didn’t want Luca Falcone, I wanted to be him.

I dropped back on my pillow and listened. There was a certain euphoria, and an unmistakable sensuality, to the song that I’d never noticed although I’d heard it a thousand times. I wondered if Pietro could fully understand the lyrics, if he was aware he’d given me a love song.

3

I COULDN’T QUITE picture Pietro’s face. Our encounter had been so very brief and I’d even rushed it to a premature conclusion. The harder I tried to conjure up his image, the more it slipped away, until it was no more than a collection of indistinct features blending with the many eyes, noses, and mouths all around me, like those in the audience at my glottology lecture in the Astra Cinema. Fearing I would lose it forever in the crowd, I told myself not to dwell on it and to focus on my lesson instead.

The theater was warm and dark, womblike, the comfy seats upholstered in red velvet, my professor’s voice a low frequency. I couldn’t be dragged away from here even by wild horses, I thought to myself before realizing it was not a thought at all but a line from the second song, by the Rolling Stones, on Pietro’s mixed tape.

I refocused on my notebook, where I was attempting to transcribe every word coming from the stage. “All the world’s languages vary according to what we call taxa, or language families,” I jotted down in tidy, compact letters. “Colors are a type of significant taxonomy: in fact, we might even say there is such a thing as ethnic chromatism …”

“Please shoot me now.” The dark-haired girl next to me widened her made-up eyes, adding in a low whisper, “Signorelli’s head looks like an Easter egg, don’t you think?”

“He’s really good, though.” Actually, to me he seemed like a rock star.

“Sure, but he can’t teach. He just reads straight from the textbook.”

It wasn’t entirely true, but I found myself once more trying to shake the familiar fear that I’d enrolled in a university in shambles.

“I’ve seen you a bunch of times in Russian class. What’s your name?”

“Eddie, and yours?”

“Are you the foreigner?” My classmate leaned in close, too close, like I had something magical that could rub off on her. I didn’t know her but I recognized that hunger, so widespread in the Department of European Languages, that yearning to be beamed up to a galaxy far, far away. She fired breathless questions at me: “Where are you from? Are you German? Why did you come to Naples, of all places?”

“I’m from … the Spanish Quarter.”

I Quartieri Spagnoli. I knew how to lop off the final vowels and palatalize the sp in the Neapolitan manner and I’d learned to tame the awe in my eyes when I roamed the city, but there was no hiding my un-Italian features. In fact, the girl didn’t fall for it, but at least she steered her attention off me and back to my professor, who deserved it far more.

“… a distinction between bright white and dull, plain white. In Greek, melas is a radiant black, a concept that was completely lost in the shift from ancient to modern languages. And it’s not clear why. In antiquity there was a particular focus on luminosity …”

“That’s all I can take; I’ll just read the book at home.” The girl closed her notebook, murmuring with palpable joy, “In Sala Consilina, that is. I’m catching the train tomorrow morning.”

“Sala Consilina …”

“It’s in the province of Salerno. You wouldn’t know it, it’s just a nothing town …”

I could see she was embarrassed. I wanted to tell her not to worry because if anyone was provincial it was me, having grown up in one characterless suburb after another. But she wouldn’t have understood. It would have been an unthinkable concept for an Italian: hailing from the provinces was such a historical and deeply ingrained humiliation, but mine was a modern shame—tangled up with that typical American uneasiness of knowing that I was, on some fundamental level, one of the privileged.

“Have a safe trip then.”

“Happy Easter.”

I turned again to look at my professor. Excluding the bald head, I thought, one day that will be me. Signorelli truly was a brilliant man, endowed with the ability not only to convey fascinating tidbits on the evolution of language but also to trigger surprising insights into humanity itself. These nonverbal, or perhaps preverbal, inspirations would come to me during class or even in the most unlikely of settings, sparks of knowledge I could never catch hold of and write down before they were gone like fireflies.

But once in a while something amazing would happen. Several of those wordless sparks, which I’d been unable to capture but apparently hadn’t left me for good, would start to gather on their own and whisper to one another. Secrets in a foreign language, maybe an animal language, that all together made a low, humming sound. Within seconds that buzzing would grow in intensity, a strange and exciting cacophony like instruments warming up before a concert. Gradually those unintelligible sounds would begin to slide into place and consolidate into one overriding idea that would explain everything. And it wouldn’t be just a simple statement but a roar, something so unheard of, so astonishing, it might even be deafening. The truth.

If only I could hold my breath that long, I thought, for that crescendo of notes to meld into one whole and boom their mysterious message, then I would know. I would understand the primeval urges of man, the true reasons why people do what they do and are who they are, since the dawn of time. Art, war, religion … love.

I started humming “Wild Horses” to myself. All at once I felt trapped by my seat, by that windowless cinema. I wanted to break free, run home, and listen once more to the tape. To listen between the lines.

I got up and left. University students streamed out of cafés and used bookstores, forcing the cars to slow and bend to their will. Here the city was ours. From our tribe I spotted Costantino, a Japanese major, and Rina, who studied French, but unable to stop in the crowds we simply waved excitedly to each other. I was going against the current. It seemed almost as though all the other students were heading away from the center, toward the train station. By the end of tomorrow they would all be back in their hometowns. People brushed past me, even pushed me, but it was never done with malice, only familiarity. Yet I kept to my path, the street known as Spaccanapoli, a long and deliberate cut through the heart of Naples that would lead me back to the Spanish Quarter.

The Easter break freed me to visit the Carmine Church. I didn’t know the way there, so for once I’d taken the bus. The Sanità neighborhood felt run down, almost unwell. A knife struck a cutting board a few stories up, a motorbike stirred lethargically in the distance. Certainly not the kind of place to use my camera, the Minolta my dad had passed down to me. Instead I pulled out my well-worn map, waking it from its comfortable folds. Then I veered left.

The streets tightened around me like vises and had a mind of their own. With every step my shoes gave me away, clapping on those typical Neapolitan cobblestones—volcanic basoli, large flat slabs with chisel marks that turned the streets into giant, moth-eaten quilts. My footsteps were regular, almost a musical rhythm. I realized that I had, in fact, yet another of Pietro’s songs in my head, a U2 song that was dictating my pace: “Where the Streets Have No Name.”

I came to a stop before sheer yellow cliffs of volcanic tuff. It was like being inside a desert canyon. Everything there was the color of sand, but the sun had no business here. Oozing from natural caves were houses, very poor dwellings without windows that appeared pinned down by the weight of the rock. A pregnant woman in her pajamas stood in a doorway. Sometimes, thinking myself invisible, I gave in to the luxury of staring. When she saw me coming, she shut the door.

I walked along that far edge of the neighborhood until I came to a church. Although it too was half inside a cave and as yellow as the cliff above it, the church seemed not so much a product of the rock as an ornate statement of uprising against circumstance.

I went in seeking refuge more than anything; I doubted this was the right church. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the place: just the usual tinted marble and frankincense, a few old women sitting in the pews fingering rosaries. One of the women got up and made a beeline for me.

“You’re here for the dead, aren’t you, my dear?”

“Actually, I am.” How could she tell? From my breathless entrance, or the fact that I’d neglected to puncture the surface of the holy water with my fingers?

“I’ll take you down.” She talked in a manner typical of Neapolitan widows, drawing out the syllables as if to mourn each and every one of them, yet she was smiling generously. As I followed the woman toward the altar, she turned to say, “You’re not from here.”

“No.”

At the far end she took me down a stairwell. It was musty and so dark that my feet had to make tentative guesses until, at the bottom of the steps, they hit packed earth. As I got used to the dim light, the space grew before me. A dirt path carved through piles of what my eyes could only see as kindling, unstable mounds pushed hard against the sandy walls of the cave. Above was a single hole of sunlight, a square choked with weeds. In that swampy light the mounds gradually, horrifically, began to take their true shape.

“Whose are they?”

“Only the good Lord knows,” said the churchwoman, her voice echoing. “They’re the unnamed dead. Folks who died in earthquakes. Or the plague. People used to drop like flies back then.”

Among all those random pieces of people, I could make out thighbones, vertebra, and smaller bones that might have been fingers. Only once had I looked death in the eyes, at my step-grandmother’s funeral, and it had stared back at me blankly, like a mannequin. I wasn’t afraid of death but only of saying the wrong thing, of taking the wrong step.

“Our women here dedicate their prayers to these people,” the woman added, “in the hopes they’ll see them in a dream.”

I went up to a particularly slender, curved bone. What had she meant by see them in a dream? But when I turned around to ask her, she was gone.

Finally alone, I stepped deferentially through the cave. So the real church was down here. The path narrowed, the bones thickened. It was not scary but simply quiet, a stroll through a forest of felled pines, my trail scattered with branches, twigs, needles. But my imagination ran wild. Maybe one of Naples’s many cholera epidemics had killed a woman, perhaps married with two or three children, who then in the dead of night was thrown like a rag doll into that cave. Or maybe the volcano had sputtered during a Sunday market and a boy selling persimmons, hard new-season ones that make paper of your tongue, had suffocated in the poisonous gases. No, that was impossible: Mount Vesuvius had long been dormant; it was just a backdrop on the other side of the bay. Maybe an earthquake had toppled a wall on top of him, flicking the fruit like orange marbles across the street stones.

The dampness of the cave began to pinch my bones, an arthritic sort of feeling I knew well from years of living in unheated rooms where the paint peeled from the walls like bandages and the plaster still bore earthquake wounds that refused to heal over. I lingered in front of a coffin, built from wood that looked just as salvaged as the firewood the boys collected. I peered inside. Finding it empty filled me with gratitude mixed with an unspeakable disappointment. But just behind it was a much smaller coffin in a more advanced state of rot, only big enough for a baby.

I didn’t belong there, that was clear to me now. But I didn’t stop, for my eyes were too hungry, and eventually I came to a stack of skulls. They shone like varnished wood, as if caressed daily over the years; some were housed individually in crude wooden boxes with crosses gouged into them. I kneeled before one.

The face, the only earthly access to the soul. Big black eyes looked at me, astonished by their fate, the mouth releasing one long scream that I couldn’t hear. This was no longer an excursion and I no longer felt excited or even curious. I wanted to stay there with that person and find the courage to run my hand over their skull, like putting a baby to sleep, to watch over them as they slept. I wanted to prove that I wasn’t afraid of death because fate knew what it was doing. Didn’t it?

“Everything all right?” The churchwoman’s voice punched through the stillness. She’d obviously come to check on me, and perhaps I wasn’t even really allowed there on my own. “Each of these skulls is the responsibility of a parishioner,” she explained with a slowness that I now understood was not mourning at all but simply the effort to speak in Italian. “They take one or two in their care. It’s like they become part of the family. They clean the skull, build an altar. Every day they pray for that person to get out of purgatory.”

I listened without saying a word. I’d always pictured purgatory as something of a waiting room, and in my life I’d never known hell … or heaven, for that matter.

“Everybody needs somebody to look after them,” the woman went on, letting out a bit of Neapolitan this time. “Someone to hassle the heavens for them.” Some truths could only be spoken in dialect. If I’d been a Catholic I might have said amen. From my anthropological studies, I knew she was right—we are social creatures after all—yet I only grasped that her words were meant not for all of humanity but for me personally when she added in the raspy whisper of a smoker, “You got a boyfriend?”

“Me? No.”

It was the only possible answer, and yet at the same moment my heart leaped inside my chest. Because along with that no, which came out more like a protest than a fact, an image of Pietro had appeared before me with a clarity I didn’t think my memory was capable of. His lean body and solid gaze, his distinguished and slightly crooked nose, his mouth sealing a mysterious pleasure.

“Pretty little thing like you. There’s gotta be someone,” answered the woman, slipping into the dialect now like into a pair of old clogs and cradling my hand in hers, which were coarse and warm. “Someone’s waitin’ for you, I’d bet my bottom lira.”

A man waiting for me? I met the old woman’s eyes. There was something in them, a warmth easily tapped into with true-born Neapolitans that made me almost want to trust this stranger, in the middle of a mass grave, with the story of how someone had given me a gift that I couldn’t get out of my head. A young man whom I didn’t know and would probably never see again but who must have seen something—in me, in us—that I simply couldn’t see.

Instead I said, “I like being on my own.”

“On your own, huh?” She patted my hand—too hard, almost a slap—before letting it go. The moment was gone. And yet hadn’t she just read my mind—and maybe even my future?

Outside the cemetery, the sun was unbearably bright and the neighborhood unbearably alive despite the premature siesta, the closed shutters, the lazy graffiti. Did the streets even have names here? A shield of tears—of discomfort or emotion, it was hard to tell—welled up in my eyes, turning the neighborhood into a molten, unreal landscape. Was the world bending to my vision or was it my own very atoms whirling like a dervish and fusing with the world around me? For an excruciating and beautiful instant there were no boundaries. Anything was possible.

From: tectonic@tin.it