I came here tonight for you. Understanding this, the fork still poised between my fingers turned to lead—I could hardly hold on to it—and the blood drained violently from my face until all that was left of me was a wandering spirit. The scirocco was now having its way with me but I had no strength to fight it, or to hold Pietro’s gaze even a second longer.
I turned away. The laughter flooded back into my ears. Pietro looked away, too, and gone was the certainty, unassailable only a moment ago, that we’d had a dialogue without speaking. Clearly I was delirious, perhaps even drunk.
“Have you taken volcanology?” Luca was asking.
Pietro answered, without emotion and without addressing anyone in particular, that he’d taken it for a year only. “It’s not my field. But I do have great respect for volcanoes, let’s put it that way.”
So he was a geology major. That breast pocket, those shoes: it all made sense now. What could be intimidating about a geology student?
“What about Vesuvius,” I said, surprised to hear my own voice. “Have you studied it?”
“A little. It’s a perfect example of a stratovolcano.”
“What does that mean?” asked Sonia, and he explained that they were the cone-shaped volcanoes, built up over hundreds of thousands of years from all the lava flows, with basalt and rhyolite and other enigmas coming to the surface.
“Basically, a giant zit,” said Davide, chewing on a piece of soppressata.
Pietro smiled and again covered his mouth, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw. “You could say that. But it’s the most dangerous type of volcano on Earth.”
“Oh god, should we be worried?” asked Sonia.
“Maybe. Almost half of the world’s volcanoes that have erupted recently have been stratovolcanoes.”
“Define recently,” said Tonino.
“In the last ten thousand years.”
Davide and Angelo were now guffawing at something at the other end of the table. The noise drew my gaze to the edge of the terrace and out over the city all the way to the volcano, looking radiant in the orange light of the scirocco.
“But that doesn’t mean,” I found myself saying, “that Vesuvius is going to erupt now. It could be thousands of years away, right?”
“Who knows, but there’s no point worrying. It’s the law of chaos. There’s not much we can do about it.”
Pietro had spoken with a fatalism that poorly matched his baritone, which was firm yet reassuring like the voice of a news weatherman announcing the perfect storm. In fact, Sonia said, “Well, I’m not going to freak out about it then.”
Seeing her light up like that had a sobering effect on me. It was Sonia’s night. Maybe she’d even told her secret to Angelo, who was now conspiring to help her by inviting Pietro over. It also occurred to me that Pietro might not have understood a single word on that entire mixed tape of American songs, that for him it was merely a sharing of tunes with a native from the land of rock ’n’ roll. Now I was doubly convinced that what I’d earlier perceived as a silent exchange across the table was nothing more than a glance in my direction, and like most glances it had in fact lasted only a few seconds. It was even possible that Pietro, on his own accord, had come here tonight for Sonia, or for no one at all. I vowed to avoid any future dramatization—and to not take even one more sip of his wine.
Pietro sliced more soppressata for the table. “But anyway, we’d get some warning, in the form of earthquakes.”
“That’s what Pliny the Younger described too,” offered Luca, and, as was the case whenever he decided to speak, everyone went quiet. “The residents of Pompeii felt the earthquakes in the days leading up to the eruption. But they made no connection at all to Vesuvius.”
“And the water tasted like sulfur before the wells suddenly dried up,” added Pietro, “but they made nothing of it. They didn’t have the science. The people didn’t even know it was a volcano. For them it was just a mountain that gave them good grapes to make wine with …” As if to restrain inappropriate laughter, or for having said too much, his hand was back over his mouth.
His knowledge must have impressed Luca, for after that he collegially, almost gentlemanly, deferred to Pietro for every geological detail of his historical tale. Perhaps Luca’s greatest wisdom was knowing what it was that he did not know, and Pietro added or corrected with the very same humility. One day around one in the afternoon, as the story went, came the blast, along with an eruption column about thirty kilometers high. When it hit the top of the sky, the column spread out like an umbrella pine, according to the eighteen-year-old Pliny watching the disaster from Misenum. Eventually though, the earth took back what rightfully belonged to it and all the erupted matter came back down—ash, pumice, rocks. Darkness fell like a sudden midnight. All afternoon and all night, rocks hammered the city, a malicious rain that made roofs cave in and filled up bedrooms and the streets of Pompeii and Stabiae, all the while sparing Herculaneum so as to leave it to the mercy of mudslides. Clouds of suffocating ash caught any who had survived. Just as the sea had pulled away from the coastline, leaving fish and shellfish on dry sand, so too were the gods deserting man.
As Luca spoke, the scirocco brushed his cigarette smoke east and then west before blurring it into the yellow night. “On top of that, there were toxic gases.”
“And intense heat,” added Pietro. “Pyroclastic surges.”
Luca nodded gratefully before concluding, “That day over ten thousand people lost their lives.”
I listened as if strapped to my seat. For years when I’d lived right there, in what was ancient Stabiae, where Pliny the Elder himself had died suffocated by the ash, like everybody else I gave little thought to the stories beneath my feet. Now, for some reason, that familiar truth filled me with an electrifying fear that bordered on euphoria: maybe it was the shimmering threads Luca had woven into the story, or maybe something else entirely.
I glanced over at Pietro, whose eyes, too, were on Luca as he drank from his cup, unperturbed by the Saharan wind teasing strands of hair from his ponytail. It was the way I often looked at Luca myself, with an admiration I was desperate to hide, all the more in moments like this when his tongue was loosened—by the wine or by the wind, I couldn’t tell. Everyone else, though, was craning their necks to catch a glimpse at the volcano beyond the city lights, as though they’d only just now noticed it was there.
“Not to mention the devastating eruption of 1631,” Luca said finally.
No one dared to ask about 1631. Someone shouted in the streets below, a motorbike skidded: it all seemed so far away. Pietro reached for his shirt pocket swollen with the perfect rectangle of his Marlboro Lights. As he did so, his shirt stretched opened a little, giving me a peek at a silver pendant. A sun?
Quickly I turned away. It wasn’t my gift to unwrap. And yet the wind was fiddling with the collar of my moth-eaten jacket, breathing onto my neck, breathing my name. Hurry up, Heddi, hurry up.
The wine was gone, the soppressata, too, but the evening wasn’t over. The mismatched chairs had moved like checker pieces away from the table; Davide sat on the edge of the fountain talking thick as thieves with Luca. The conversation shifted to lighter topics. At one point, Angelo took a breadcrust and balanced it on his upper lip. “How do I look with a mustache?”
“You look like Signor Rossi,” Tonino said drolly.
“Oh yeah, Signor Rossi, that cute little cartoon guy,” said Sonia. “I loved him when I was little.”
“So people in Sardinia already had television then?” Angelo teased her.
Again laughter. I didn’t look Pietro’s way to see if he was laughing or not. Surely he, like everyone else, knew who this childhood hero Signor Rossi was. I stood to clear the table.
“I’ll give you a hand.” Pietro was already at