all the way back to our place in her bathrobe and slippers, looking around and listening poker-faced to Luca’s account. Goodness knows what cards she had up her sleeve, but what she ended up pulling out was a pricey cell phone, with which she called her nephew, shouting through it in a rapid-fire, rabid form of dialect that not even Luca, whose father was Neapolitan, could penetrate. She hung up with a saccharine smile, passing on to Luca the results of what was not a heated dispute after all but an off-site building assessment. She trusted her nephew like her own son, and anyway he was the best engineer in the Quartieri, or at least he would be once he finished his degree. Her nephew had recommended that a series of steel beams be installed to brace the floor to the outer wall, which was in effect detaching itself from the house. The reconstruction would take about six months, in Neapolitan time: until then, the place was uninhabitable.
For a while the deafening coffee grinder pleasantly filled our silence. Slumped in his chair, Angelo was the first to speak. “Damn, I love that house.”
I freed a clump of plaster from his hair. “So do I,” I said, but at the same time I felt something quite different pulling at me, something willful and irresistible like a rip current, and part of me knew the worst thing to do was to fight it.
“There’s got to be a bright side here,” said Sonia.
“Yes, you’re right!” Angelo nearly jumped out of his chair. “Summer’s coming and most of us are going home anyway. So I say we pack up the necessary items and just be homeless for a few months.”
“Yeah right, blondie, I’d love to see you, all prim and proper, squatting with those real street punks,” said Tonino.
“What the hell would you know? No, I was thinking I could stay with Davide, and you could stay with whoever will put up with you. C’mon, guys, we’d save a ton of rent, and then the place should be ready to go by the time classes start again in October.” And with that, he sat back with a triumphant smile.
For once Tonino agreed with Angelo. From across the table Luca gave me one of those stares, powerful enough to put me under a spell, and this time I was sure that he was trying to tell me, in his infinite wisdom, to just let them talk—and to just let go.
I moved into Pietro’s place. There was a naturalness, a predictability, in that decision that I didn’t want to read into. In the heat of the moment I didn’t stop to consider that we might be rushing into things, or to analyze the possible consequences. The future wasn’t an issue, it never really had been, but the past was even less of one. Once I’d let go of that decrepit old palace that I’d so loved, I could suddenly see it for what it was and what it had been from the very beginning: a stop along the way.
Pietro pulled his mattress to the floor, dragged away the frame, and brought in a second single mattress. The already cramped room seemed to shrink even further. I stood in the doorway, unsure of how to help him in that block puzzle of sliding furniture and preoccupied with thoughts of the boys, of where and how often we’d see each other now.
“I think they’ll fit best over here,” Pietro said, before heaving the mattresses one by one into the corner under the window. Now there was only enough space left to open and close the door.
“Are you sure …?” I began again.
“Without a doubt.”
“I can pay—”
“Out of the question.”
“It’s just for the summer …”
“We’ll see.”
I stood there in awe of his one-man strength and his absolute certainty on the matter, as though all he’d ever dreamed of was to share a room the size of a wardrobe with another human being. He was wearing an expression of humble satisfaction, perhaps for having solved a geometrical puzzle, and standing heavily on that leg he preferred, hands at his hips. All at once I remembered him as he was that first night he came to dinner at our place: awkward and breathless from the stairs, he stood there under the ceiling medallion as if waiting for something to drop from the sky.
That image of Pietro as a stranger sent a chill through me. Wasn’t that less than two months ago? But it seemed more that I was a stranger to myself, for how rashly I’d gone to stay with him when I still knew so little about him; for how easily his touch transported me, maybe even transformed me; for how gladly I’d skipped lessons and conferences to be with him; and for all the ways in which I’d proven myself to be impulsive, irresponsible, and maybe even foolhardy.
Together the mattresses formed a queen-size bed slit down the middle. “It’s too bad about that crack, though,” he said.
“It’ll be fine.”
The crack did grow larger throughout the course of the night. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I saw was the long blue pencil of the sea. From that new angle, the Spanish Quarter seemed to have vanished into thin air. Pietro was still asleep when I got up.
I used the downstairs bathroom, which housed the boiler Madeleine had beaten to a pulp as well as a bathtub that had no difficulty filling up with hot water for when no such assistance was available. I put the coffee maker on the stove and stepped out onto the terrace. Two more steps and I was on the tar-sealed roof.
What a beautiful morning. All around me, TV antennae were trying to pierce a sky white with sun. I wondered how many of those decaying towers were balanced on hollow ground, as Gabriele had said. I wondered if this one was. Who cares, I thought. Up there I felt tall as never before, in a world without a ceiling. It was early and the neighborhood was making only muffled little noises as soft as slippers. The air too was half-asleep, smelling of newly lit cigarettes and freshly melted tar, hot bread and cool sea. I could have gorged myself on those scents, drunk it all in with my eyes, covered myself in the glitter of the gulf. On its calm surface, the container ships looked unreal: they quivered like mirages and were of a dusty, rusty brown, the same fragile color as the volcano behind them.
When the coffee gurgled, I stepped back into the kitchen. I was surprised to find Madeleine standing there with turbulent hair and minimalist clothing, but what surprised me even more was that she smiled generously and kissed me. She seemed so unlike the grumpy girl who had helped us with the shower. Clearly, with a solid eight hours she was positively charming. Pietro came downstairs, too, and all three of us sat down at the slanted table to have our coffee.
Any doubts about Pietro had melted away. I felt at home, and I loved him.
I could only imagine how shaken Sonia and the boys must have been after having experienced the collapse of the ceiling firsthand, but my reaction was to go in search of proof that Naples itself wasn’t falling to pieces. One Sunday morning I took Pietro with me on an outing to Capodimonte Park, on one of the city’s tallest hills. We might as well have been in Bali. Tunnels of trees trembled with exotic chirping, the grass was moist and freshly cut, and there were palm trees. To me, every palm tree in Naples was a vital sign, a symbol of its innate and indestructible beauty, and there were plenty up there.
“Now this is a sight for sore eyes,” said Pietro. “Why have I never been here before?”
“There’s no shame in it,” I teased him. “Being shown around your own country by a foreigner.”
He pulled out a pack of Marlboros, squinting as he lit up. “I love that you’re from somewhere else. That you’re not stuck in the same old mindset as everybody else.”
“Everybody who?”
“Most people, especially the people where I come from.”
We wandered around the grounds, hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder, past reassuring traces of civilization like lampposts and iron benches. Now and then we crossed paths with normal-looking people: elderly couples stopping for a rest, parents pushing strollers, people enjoying healthy pastimes like biking or jogging. I looked at all of them barely suppressing a smile, hoping they couldn’t read on my face the unchecked pride I felt walking beside Pietro. It seemed rude to flaunt it, to flash them with my wild joy over something I had and they didn’t.