eyes narrowed and ready to snap … or burst out laughing. Oh, he thinks he’s a hotshot, all loose in the tongue from whiskey and soda and loose in the hips from rock ’n’ roll, but I’ll show him as soon as he gets home, you bet I will, and I’ll slap him good, or maybe I’ll stroke his cheek, before cutting him down to size in front of the whole slum: “Look at you! You’re nothing but a Neapolitan! Tu si napulitan’!” and if he so much as dared to come back at me with a lame “Ailoviu” I would really lose it.
Apart from the last expression that was supposedly in English, the lyrics were in dialect so I wouldn’t have been able to spell them—nor was there any academic standardization for, or even interest in, faithfully capturing those sawn-off endings and tight-lipped sounds that disfigured Italians’ famously operatic vowels. I wouldn’t even have dared utter the lyrics without music. They were vulgar and truthful and sharp with that satire that Neapolitans were so skilled at turning inward upon themselves since the fall of their city. And it was the words themselves that were directing me, assigning me the part, to the point where, as I channeled the character through the dialect, I wasn’t an American at all but a vasciaiola who could see through the Americanness and expose it for nothing more than an act.
The others tapped a foot and chimed in for the chorus. Finally Luca raked his fingers over the strings. “I can’t remember how it ends.”
I leaned back in my chair, sweating and giddy, almost tipsy. There was always a mimic in me, or maybe even a gambler, waiting to burst out. No sooner had the fire popped lethargically than I was already on my feet. “We need bigger pieces of wood. I’ll go up on the roof.”
“I’ll come up with you, Eddie,” said Sonia. “I could use the fresh air.”
Luca and the boys shifted effortlessly into a Pearl Jam song. English rolled much more readily off their tongues than Neapolitan, but they butchered it, slurring the diphthongs and crumbling consonant clusters. Sonia and I climbed the spiral staircase beside the fireplace. The space was so tight and Sonia so tall that she had to duck, the black sheet of her hair dipping forward, her combat boots ringing the metal all the way up to the flat rooftop.
“My god, it’s cold,” I said, my words little clouds in the night.
“Freezing.” Sonia hugged herself, adding in that Sardinian accent that was as crisp as the air, “So I guess you know Pietro.”
“Pietro? From tonight?”
“Yeah, Pietro.”
The name had rolled extraordinarily lightly off her tongue. It occurred to me, for an instant of folly, that we must be talking about two entirely different people.
“What do you think of him?”
“I don’t really know him.” I crouched to pick through the loose wood, a bookshelf dismembered and lumped against the protective wall of the roof. “Why do you ask?”
“Don’t tell the boys.” As Sonia sank to the spongy ground, her face as bare as a full moon, I grasped that it wasn’t a breath of fresh air at all but a confession. Kneeling like that and looking considerably less tall, she reminded me of how young she really was, just in her second year at the Orientale. Although only the stars could have heard us, she fell into a whisper. “We’ve barely exchanged a handful of words. But there’s just something about him, I don’t know …”
“He seems nice enough.” Instinctively I patted my pocket that held the cassette tape, as if to smooth out its conspicuous bulge.
“I really do like him. Next time I see him, I’m going to go up to him.”
“You definitely should. You have nothing to lose.”
Sonia had a way of biting her bottom lip when she was restless. She breathed out hard as if preparing for a sprint.
“Chin up, Sonia. You’re beautiful, smart. This Pietro guy would be a fool not to give you a chance.”
I loved Sonia’s sweet doodle of a grin, but the word fool used in connection with this stranger named Pietro somehow felt like an insult to my own sensibility and filled me with remorse. Sonia offered to help, grabbing a broken plank and letting out a brrr.
“You’re cold,” I said. “Take those and I’ll finish up here.”
“OK.”
But as soon as I was alone, I lowered the wood to the ground and leaned my elbows on the wall, the only barrier preventing a seven-story free fall to the street. “Tonight …” I whispered to myself in English, but I was unable to finish my own sentence.
A cold breeze pressed the smell of the gulf against my face, that unique infusion of fish and diesel and salt. Below me, the city shimmered its way down to the water, strings of yellow streetlights beaded here and there with the pearly glow of kitchens. Naples never really slept. Even in the dead of night, fluorescent lightbulbs shed their cheap, unforgiving light onto family members who were up and about and slapping the kitchen table in god knows what argument or joke or confession. But, like a moth, I was drawn to those white lights. If I could, I wished now as always, I would flutter toward them and slip in through a window. I would sit there soundlessly and seamlessly blending in with the wallpaper, trying to piece together the shards of their sentences into a narrative that made sense.
A foghorn blared. I couldn’t tell which of the many ships it could have come from, vessels invisible but for their connect-the-dot lights suspended in the utter blackness of the bay. It was a rare clear night, and without a moon I couldn’t even see the volcano. The only trace of it were the homes on its flanks sketching its silhouette as far up as they dared. Vesuvius hadn’t made a peep in half a century, but I stared at it through the curtain of the night and tried to imagine what it might look like breathing fire as in so many of those eighteenth-century oil paintings. I stared so hard I almost believed I could will it back to life with my eyes.
My hands had turned to cool marble, yet I hadn’t had my fill of Naples; I could have stayed there all night drinking in its scent and feasting my eyes. Still it would have been in vain. The city was water seeping through my hands, and my very love for it filled me with sadness, especially at night. It was a sadness I could never fend off or even put my finger on. I’d given myself over to the city, maybe even betraying myself to do so, but even after all these years it still held me at a distance.
Vir’ Napule e po’ muor’, they say: “See Naples and die.” A city so magnificent that once you’ve seen it there is nothing left in the world to see. The saying had become such a cliché that I would never have used it in conversation, but right then I whispered it to the night as the truest of truths. Then I collected the firewood before heading back downstairs.
From: [email protected]
Sent: November 30
Pietro,
I don’t know what to say. It’s been four long years since I last heard from you. Time makes everything bearable, even waiting. Or maybe I simply forgot what I was waiting for.
I still don’t know why you did what you did. Sometimes at night I look at the stars hoping for some kind of explanation from them. It’s crazy, I know, to think that the constellations could read like a sort of story with a beginning, middle, and maybe even a happy ending. But to be honest, I can’t make any sense of them. I can’t even recognize the simplest of constellations: the sky seems jumbled, upside down, unfamiliar. And yet I like looking at the stars anyway. Every single one of them is, after all, a trace of a luminous object that is unique and perfect and no longer exists. A luminous memory?
I’ve worked hard at forgetting everything to do with you. A kind of self-induced amnesia, which has been quite successful. Of course it helps not having people, places, or things around me that could remind me of you. Except the Roman figurine. But that’s not something I could regift or throw away. Maybe it would make more sense to one day