linguist.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Is it true you speak five languages?”
“Four, actually. My Russian’s terrible,” I said, putting the dishes beside his on the kitchen counter. I never counted Neapolitan—no one did—though it, too, was technically a language, Vulgar Latin steeped in Oscan, Greek, and even Arabic.
“Russian, I’m impressed. And a whole other alphabet too.”
“It’s actually not that hard to learn. I could teach you to read Cyrillic in five minutes.”
“I’d like that.”
Had I been so bold as to offer him a private lesson? I hadn’t meant it that way. But I had asked him to follow me inside, away from all the others, when surely I could have cleared the table myself. All I knew was that out of the restless wind talking seemed easier. I beckoned him over to the sooty, cold fireplace. Up close I could smell his cologne. A breath of fresh air, a pine forest.
I pointed to the brown flowers on the tiled floor. “What do you make of this crack?”
“I see,” he said. “How far does it go?”
“All the way to the terrace.” I watched him as he stepped along the crack, cautiously as if on the edge of a crevasse. “I think it’s getting wider,” I added. “But the boys don’t seem to pay any attention to it, not even Angelo, who has a crack in the ceiling in his bedroom.”
“I’m not sure. But it doesn’t look good, the way it follows the outer wall like this.” He paused above it, squatting now.
I followed suit. I didn’t know what I wanted from Pietro, who was neither an engineer nor an architect but a scientist of the Earth, but all I knew was that it was good to be able to crouch beside him, not looking at each other, in such a domestic stance.
I caught a glance of Sonia outside on the terrace. She was so goodhearted, and from a good family. Despite her cranelike frame, she retained that wholesome baby fat in her cheeks that I’d lost abruptly, overnight it seemed, some years back, unveiling a raw pair of cheekbones like rocks after the tide has pulled away, a vestige perhaps of the Cherokee blood that coursed through my veins and that, even in a small dose, could one day reawaken the nomad in me.
I thought about Sonia’s solemn confession on the roof that night, but I didn’t know how much weight to give it. Was it like in that card game where the first person to play their cards has the implied right to win the hand? Somehow it seemed so and that, according to these rules, it didn’t matter that Pietro had given me a gift, and that the old churchwoman in the cemetery mysteriously seemed to have known about him, and that the memory of his gentle nature was a music that wouldn’t give me rest, and that now his far-fetched face, with that nose appearing oddly delicate up close, was looking back at me with a rather serious expression. Was he worried about the crack in the floor or was he having the same thoughts as I was?
I RAN INTO PIETRO two days later near my university. Without much small talk, he invited me for a coffee that afternoon at the house he shared with his brother. Around four o’clock, he suggested, scribbling on a scrap of paper “Via De Deo, 33. Iannace.” Their place was in the Spanish Quarter, apparently only four or five blocks from mine.
Yet on the way there I got lost, just as the neighborhood had hoped I would. Its grid pattern of streets had been designed for just that since their conception as Spanish military barracks. Nearly identical cafés, fruit vendors, and makeshift stalls with eggs or contraband cigarettes on every corner heightened the mirror effect of that grid, which was ideal for keeping the outsider out and the insider in.
To overcome this problem, I’d memorized paths through the quarter. For example, from my building to the Orientale it was left, left again, then right at the street shrine, then straight, sidestepping the puddles under the trays of octopus and mussels, until the street exhaled me out of the quarter and onto the main boulevard, Via Roma. Guided by a sort of muscle memory, I could walk through it all unscathed, even untouched, as if balancing on a tightrope drawn past the antennae and the hanging laundry, through the smog and the hollering. The Spanish Quarter couldn’t be conquered, yet by following such routes I maintained the necessary control to navigate it practically with my eyes closed. But Via De Deo wasn’t on any path I knew. I held on tight to my book bag, occasionally letting my eyes dart up to the street plaques.
“Hey, toothpick!”
It was a young girl who’d checked me out and summed me up and was now staring me down, raring for a catfight; she may have only been nine years old, but in Neapolitan years that was something like nineteen. It was always hard to tell what the locals thought of us university lodgers. It was said that they tried to shield us from their criminal dealings, but who knows. Sometimes they appeared curious, at other times violated. But mostly they looked at us the same way they looked at the neighborhood’s stray dogs, with annoyance but not without tenderness, and kept us at arm’s length.
The girl gave up and moved on. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something black and white run up a side street and into a vascio. A goat, I was almost sure. And I thought I’d seen everything there was to see in the Quartieri, including a white rabbit living in the woodpile under a pizza maker’s oven. The goat seemed like a good sign and I dived into the alleyway after it. There was a farm smell but no trace of the animal. Locals were glaring at me from their doorways. I kept my eyes glued to the volcanic street stones, but I could already feel panic digging into my bewildered feet with its small, desperate claws.
I recoiled into the first right-hand alley. A deli, thank goodness. I took cover under the dangling meat and stole a glimpse at the street sign. Via De Deo. So much like Dio, it occurred to me. Real or not, the goat had shown me the way. Naples always came through for me in the end.
My thighs tensed up as I made my way up the steep incline. It gave the motorbikes a good workout too: men drove up it with their heads down in concentration, fat widows rode on the back, sidesaddle as their skirts and their years required. Women heaved uphill the burden of their shopping and of their children. Twenty-three. Twenty-five. Twenty-seven. My heart was racing. I blamed it on that ridiculous street, which, if it didn’t ease soon, would take me all the way to San Martino, the monastery just beyond the Spanish Quarter that appeared to hover above it like the very gates of heaven.
Thirty-three. Through the gate I could see a courtyard sunken in darkness but positively thriving with potted plants. My gaze slid up the dizzying face of the building. Above was a blue rectangle, a hint of vastness that made me feel I was about to burst.
I tried to remind myself that it was just a coffee. And yet, as I pressed the button and heard the instructions to go to the top floor, the ensuing click at the gate sounded like the nonnegotiable voice of fate.
Pietro looked up from a table. The buttery smell of coffee was already permeating the house and a cigarette smoldered next to several others that were doubled over in the ashtray. He stood to greet me with a tight-lipped grin, his shirt tucked in hard. He seemed poised to shake my hand: he didn’t, but neither did he kiss me on the cheeks.
“It’s very … sunny up here,” I said, out of breath.
“It’s our Monte Carlo.” He let out a short laugh. “Have a seat. Wherever you like. The coffee’s ready. How do you like it?” He was firing words at me as he made his way to the adjoining kitchen.
“With a splash of milk, if there is any. Otherwise don’t worry.”
I took a seat at the table and looked around the spacious living room. Other than the size and the similarity of being on the last (and likely illegal) floor, the apartment was nothing like ours. As if it had just been moved into, there were no pictures or posters, just a sigh of white space interrupted only by the metal of a desk and a line of books. Above a vinyl sofa was a modern staircase that led to a second floor. Windows and still more windows allowed