me. Still, I managed to pass my cultural anthropology exam, though with a score I wasn’t eager to advertise.
“It might not be a thirty, gorgeous,” said Tonino as I came upstairs into the kitchen. “But it’s twenty-eight more points than I got in Sanskrit.”
“You do know that you actually have to take the exam, Tonino, in order to pass it,” said Angelo, congratulating me with a full, fleshy kiss on the cheek.
“But even if I pass it, wiseass, what the hell is it for anyway?”
“It’s knowledge, Tonino,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be for anything.” With all the commotion, I couldn’t tell if the boys were even aware that I had Pietro in tow, or whether they made anything of the two of us showing up there on our own or paid any notice to his silver pendant now hanging so conspicuously around my neck. I could only tell that Pietro, now standing in the exact same spot where he’d handed me that trembling cassette not so long ago, was greeted by the boys with a mere nod and without a glint of surprise. I took their lack of astonishment as acceptance and their silence on the matter as the ultimate sign of brotherly love.
I’d actually come by only to get some clean clothes and was, for some reason I couldn’t grasp, relieved that Luca was out. But the boys, still in their pajamas with cigarette ashes as thick as snowflakes on their splayed books, weren’t in any hurry to let us go. They pulled out a few chairs and a bottle of whiskey, like they’d been waiting all day for no better distraction from linguistic philosophy or the history of calligraphy than a discussion about rocks. Rocks, sand, dust: now these were real things. At one point, Angelo asked Pietro how oil was found.
“Well, you have to study the sedimentology and the stratigraphy of the area first,” he answered. “Then if it looks like there could be hydrocarbons under the surface, you have to drill these exploration wells.”
Tonino asked, “Any chance that while I’m out in my wheat field I could stick my pitchfork into some black gold?”
“What, in Puglia?”
“You’re a communist,” shot Angelo. “What the hell do you need the money for?”
We all cracked up, some whiskey spilled. Pietro had effortlessly slipped right in with the boys, who began calling him all sorts of names, which for them (and particularly for Tonino) was the greatest sign of affection. It was more than I could have hoped for. As usual when he laughed, Pietro cupped his mouth in a movement I now saw as well-mannered, even graceful. I had the sudden awareness that in Pietro I’d found something of dazzling beauty—a precious, and maybe priceless, stone among all the other gray, drab ones on my path—and I could hardly believe that in that treasure chest of a bedroom he was mine.
Pietro, more talkative than ever, went on to say that there were plenty of opportunities in oil, if you were willing to travel, and that he had a good rapport with his petroleum geology professor. He wanted to do his thesis with her, and she, being well connected in Italy and abroad, had already mentioned the possibility of landing him a job with an oil company. Pietro added that there were lots of countries to work in, some places you wouldn’t even know had oil. “Like the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Louisiana,” he said, looking over at me just then in what seemed like more than a pronunciation check. “It doesn’t matter to me. I’d go anywhere.”
“Anywhere but this shithole,” said Tonino.
Everyone nodded in agreement. And I knew that feeling, the need to pack my bags and discover the world, but at some point out of love for Naples I’d set aside my gypsy spirit. Yet now, while everyone was going on about all the things the city was notorious for, its unlivability and backwardness, my love for Naples, my need for it, struck me as childish and indulgent.
“My parents have no idea,” Pietro said. “They think getting a degree in geology is like taking a course in the mineral components of fertilizer or something, that afterward I’ll just go back to the village and run the whole farm.”
“Oh yeah? How many hectares do you have?” asked Tonino, an unlit cigarette between his lips.
Pietro lit Tonino’s cigarette before his own. Puffing symbiotically, they talked in complex measurements of land. Angelo and I shrugged at each other across the table.
“It’s tough living on the land, though,” Pietro said. “Eight months of the year you’re cold to the bone.”
“And you’re always worrying about the damn weather. Is it fucking going to rain or not?”
“Let’s be honest, the work is backbreaking. The landscapes are pretty, it’s a nice place to go for a visit once in a while. But go back and live there? No way in hell. I’ve already done my time.”
The window beside us cooed with nosy pigeons. Under the table Pietro’s hand landed warm on my thigh, a private signal. I finally got up to get my clothes, and when the two of us left together, there was again no amazement on the boys’ faces, only disappointment that now they would have to get back to staring at the pages in their books.
Once, instead of spooning in that tiny bed, we slept in Gabriele’s queen-size bed while he was away in Monte San Rocco for a few days. Despite how comfortable that futon was, set directly onto the floor under the sloping roof, I awoke with a start. I could hear hollering in the thickest form of dialect—insults, I was sure, but they didn’t belong to a human language. It may well have been rabid dogs tearing each other to pieces or violent coughing fits spewing possibly infectious matter from the lungs. Whatever those sounds were, they came from the lower, darker floors of the building, becoming amplified as they made their way up the chimney-shoot courtyard. One final blast and the storm blew over.
“God, you look beautiful, baby,” mumbled Pietro, awake now too. “My grandmother always said you should judge a woman’s beauty by looking at her first thing in the morning.”
I had to laugh because it was only technically morning, because I’d skipped a conference on the history of theater, and because I lay naked between the sheets belonging to my lover’s brother. Behind the bed, right at our eye level, was a little window overlooking the neighborhood. On the windowsill Gabriele had placed an aquatic plant inside a wine bottle. On that threshold the plant seemed in great peril. It was so very moist and delicate, enclosed in its green refuge, yet it teetered on the edge of a sheer drop over a jumble of treeless, sunbaked houses, like a Tunisian medina. All it would have taken was to open the window.
I zoomed out to take in Gabriele’s large, book-lined room with its drafting table in the corner. In addition to his countless volumes, the shelves housed so many small inviting objects—etched pencil cases, inlaid boxes, swirly marbles, amphorae, feathers, pine cones—that, had Pietro not been there, I would have likely given in to the temptation to snoop.
I sat up, pulling the sheet over my breasts. “Are you sure it’s OK to be in here?”
“I told you, Gabriele won’t be back till six tonight. Besides, he’ll be so psyched about the job my folks have given him that he won’t even notice we’ve slept in his bed.”
“What, is he tilling or plowing or something?”
“Are you serious? Gabriele wouldn’t be able to steal an egg from a chicken. No, he’s just designing something for my mother.” At my puzzled look, Pietro added, “Ask him about it sometime. I’m sure he’d be deeply honored to tell you all about his avant-garde design. But right now what I really want is a shower. Let me see if Madeleine’s here.”
Madeleine was their roommate, who’d come to Naples on an Erasmus scholarship, but so far we hadn’t crossed paths. Halfway down the stairs, Pietro whispered, “I should warn you: she’s a bit nuts. Though Gabriele prefers the term ‘architectural genius.’”
“What does she have to do with the shower?”
“Just wait, you’ll see.” He called out her name once, twice, and was about to give up when a door at the foot of the stairs opened and out came a girl.
She was like a