and to blanket every last soul in a twisting, grating warmth.
Still, there was a raw pleasure in the scirocco: in its temporary lawlessness, in the sense of powerlessness and the heat it brought with it. It was finally warm enough to eat outside. The desert wind was a sign that summer was on its way, shepherded slowly up from Africa, and now more than any other year it made me yearn for that long, laid-back season. A desire that, upon hearing Sonia’s words, became a dull ache in my gut. I heard a murmuring in my ear. It was the wind: Hurry up, it was saying.
“I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to talk to him tonight.”
“Great, Sonia. You really should.”
“Oh, the pasta!”
“I’ll go.”
At least in the kitchen there was no one around, not even the wind. I stirred the bucatini, the clumsiest of all pastas, long pasty limbs that went all awry and refused to be tamed, especially tonight, by my big wooden spoon. Before long I heard voices rising up from the front door. Then footsteps on the stairs.
Angelo was squealing, “Wicked, this stuff is the bomb!”
Then a vaguely familiar male voice. “Yeah, my grandparents make it too.”
Finally, a deep, soulful voice. “It’s not as good as last year’s. I hope you like it anyway.”
How had I not been moved, the night of the party, by the power of his voice? Pietro came up the stairs first, holding an unlabeled bottle of wine. I didn’t look at him but at the curly-haired boy behind him, whom I recognized as Davide, followed by Angelo carrying something wrapped in butcher paper.
“Look what Pietro’s brought from the farm,” chirped Angelo, opening the brown paper for me to see. “Homemade soppressata, how about that?”
“Great,” I said, stealing a glance at Pietro as he waited in the living room under the ceiling medallion. He just stood there awkwardly, leaning heavily on one leg as if the other was lame.
I put down the steaming spoon. “It’s this way,” I said under my breath and, whether he’d heard me or not, he followed me outside.
“Jesus Christ,” were his first words. “What is this place, the royal palace?” He was looking at the chipped stucco waterspout attached to the terrace wall. In better times, water would have poured from the mouth of the devilish face into the basin.
Tonino greeted Pietro with a manly pat on the shoulder, taking the wine from him. “Whoever built it was probably just some prick trying to look like King Ferdinand the Fourth. Have you seen the frescoes? Fucking cheesy.”
“In other words, the apartment’s an illegal addition,” said Luca, “built on top of the original building from the 1600s. It probably dates back to no earlier than the 1930s.”
“Well, whenever it was built,” Pietro replied, “the owners must have been rolling in cash.”
“Yeah, maybe years ago when this neighborhood might have been halfway decent,” said Angelo. “But the current owners are just a bunch of vasciaioli. They’re trashy as hell, and they’re crooks too. You should hear what fine Italian they speak when they call to put up the rent.”
“They spend the day in the vascio,” Luca clarified. “But their private rooms are on the next floor up.”
“Big fat difference …”
“How the fuck do you always know all this shit?” Tonino said.
“I couldn’t help noticing your delightful neighbor,” said Davide, and in fact no one ever missed the transvestite standing outside the ground-floor home across from our building, with legs like a horse’s. It wasn’t easy to walk past without slowing down and at the same time tear your eyes away from the innards of the room, which, with its blood-red couch, faux marble, and fake gold fittings, tried to suck you in like a Chinese brothel.
“Enough to make a straight guy turn gay,” said Tonino, his machismo perfectly intact.
Angelo was shaking his head. “Why anyone would choose to live down there instead of in an awesome place like this is beyond me.”
“To avoid the fucking stairs,” replied Tonino. “I swear, one day these six flights are going to be the death of me.”
“Or to be right in the action, in the heart of it all,” said Luca, extending a pack of tobacco to Pietro.
Pietro politely waved it away, pulling out a pack of Marlboros instead. He looked more relaxed as he took his first lungful. “They’re Lights,” he said, turning toward me. It was an apology.
Sonia came out carrying the pot of bucatini alla puttanesca, its bare-cupboard ingredients and uncertain origins—Sicily? Rome? Ischia?—the perfect dish for our motley crew. We all took a seat around the table, Pietro across from me. His red wine was served around. I hardly ever drank—alcohol only made me nauseated—but tonight I let my glass be filled, halfway … all right, three-quarters. I took a sip out of politeness and no sooner had I than liquid heat charged through my veins in the same pleasurable but invasive way that the scirocco was now furrowing its warm, fat fingers through my hair. I wrestled it back into an unsuccessful bun.
“Buon appetito.”
We ate in customary silence, as good food required; the chaotic wind, too, imposed a certain solitary focus. It was the best chance I had to study Pietro unnoticed, to see if my memory matched reality. I had remembered his features after all, but now I was struck by their singularity. Pietro had the huge, expressive eyes of a deer in the woods, yet his long, bony nose lent a Babylonian majesty to his profile. As for his mouth, my eyes wouldn’t go there.
I watched him as he topped up Davide’s wine (“It won’t win any awards,” he was saying, “but it’s better than water”), deciding that his attractiveness was well out of the ordinary, a kind of exaggerated beauty that bordered on ugliness. But although Pietro constantly toyed with the boundary between inaccessible beauty and easy vulgarity, he never crossed it. He was strange and magnificent. I studied his features so closely that, though separated by the table, I swore I could feel the warmth released through his nostrils, the tingling feather of his eyelashes. Again the wind went, Hurry up.
I took a big sip of wine and noticed that Sonia was clearly studying him too. She was watching his lips. Slightly reddened with tomato, they were moving, and it was only then I realized Pietro was speaking. Tonino had asked him a question.
“Hydrogeology,” Pietro was saying, “is useful if you want to find water; for example, if you need to figure out where to dig a well.”
“Do people still dig wells?” asked Sonia.
Tonino said, “Aren’t you supposed to be from Sardinia?”
“Ah, the urban youth of today …” said Angelo, feigning a resigned sigh. He enjoyed teasing Sonia good-naturedly for the fact that she too was born at the far reaches of Italy.
“Can’t you just use one of those sticks to find water?” asked Davide.
“The old folks in the village do,” Pietro answered.
“You mean those wife-beating sticks?” chimed in Tonino. “My dad has one of those.”
Everyone laughed so I did the convivial thing and joined in. Pietro was laughing, too, that is, until he wrapped his long fingers over his mouth in a rather contemplative gesture and rested his eyes on me. I could feel the weight of his gaze: it was as though he’d been waiting all evening for this racket, this rowdy opportunity when everyone was distracted, to unload it onto me. Any lightheartedness I might have had instantly abandoned me. I couldn’t even hear all the happy chatter because in reality I was no longer with my friends around the table but with Pietro in a deep and clear world, a seabed where silence throbbed in our ears to the slow, inevitable rhythm of the waves.
There the two of us were alone.