University. To solve this problem he bought a secondhand moped, thus spending much of his monthly allowance on gas. Not wanting to prove his parents right, he didn’t ask them for more funds. There was no one to go out with anyway for a coffee or a pizza: his classmates were too cliquey; some openly snubbed him. The only friend he had there was Giuliano, a fellow geology student who shared his origins, the mountainous Irpinia district around Avellino, but unfortunately Giuliano lived on the other side of the city.
Pietro studied and studied. He excelled in geophysics, did well in mineralogy but failed mathematics twice. He became plagued with doubt. What the hell was he doing there, in the capital? Did he really think that someone like him, who’d come from nothing, was going to become a geologist? Looking back on it now, he was probably depressed. If it hadn’t been for Giuliano, who knows how far he might have spiraled …
That’s when he called his brother, who didn’t hesitate to say, “Come to Naples then.” University life was a blast, Gabriele said. They all lived in the center of the city and walked everywhere discussing politics, literature, art. They drank wine at lunch, studied at night, slept all day. In Naples it was possible to live like kings on very little money. Students were given discounts to see plays and movies, and vouchers for three-course restaurant meals at only two thousand lire. Not to mention the dirt-cheap rent in the Spanish Quarter.
Pietro’s story took only as long as the penne took to become al dente. We sat at the table. “Another day, another meal,” he said. “And who knows what tomorrow will bring.” Then he laughed without emitting a sound.
I loved the way he played with the language, like no one else I knew, but it was never affected. And I had been right: he could really cook. Yet after only a few bites I was no longer hungry. Maybe I’d had too much to drink, though my full glass was proof to the contrary. And I was sober enough to tell that the surface of the wine was skewed, due certainly to the table itself, which dipped significantly at the center. Not only, but the liquid itself was quivering: Was it the ripple caused by his neighbor’s television turned up too loud or was it the stirring I felt inside?
I put my fork down. “You fought for what you believed in, Pietro.” For the first time I’d addressed him by name, a slip of the tongue that startled me and moved me as much as if I’d made a love confession. “And now here you are.”
“Here I am, with you. Amazing.” Pietro too lowered his fork. “Thank goodness I left Rome. Best move I ever made.”
We looked at each other and I could see he’d lost his appetite too. Who needed food now, or ever again?
Pietro led me up the staircase but this time there was no fourth-grade awkwardness. We were giants in his little room. He cupped my face and kissed me like a long-lost lover, with both pleasure and heartbreak. Then his hands curled around my ribs, drawing me hard against him.
I surprised myself by pushing him backward onto his tiny bed. He surrendered easily, taking me down with him. The full pressure of my body against his—the crushing weight, the complete closeness—gave me a brief moment of relief, until I felt him go hard underneath me, a pressing heat, and I grasped that nothing in me, absolutely nothing, was at peace or under control.
Again we kissed, not like we had the other day but like we were simply picking up from where we’d left off—straight into the most perfect darkness where we could exist once more, where maybe we had always existed—and yet we kissed as if we couldn’t wait a second longer, like travelers so thirsty from wandering through a vast wasteland that, now with water finally before them, drink without stopping for breath. When I moved my lips down to his now perspiring neck, he tried to undo my hair tie but could only get halfway before the kissing overpowered us again, and we couldn’t stop, we just couldn’t, even if a landslide had begun rolling down the Spanish Quarter to swallow us whole. It was only this that mattered, only him and me, and we were trying to devour each other with our mouths, our hands making fists of the other’s hair, and soon we were begging each other, begging God, whom I didn’t even believe in, and I grasped that it might actually be possible to die of pleasure.
We were breaking more than a few rules: shoes on the bed, girl on top, window wide open in broad daylight. But it was the siesta, and the only one watching was the volcano.
The afternoon sun lit our clothes thrown like laundry on the floor. We looked at each other and laughed, a hearty laugh, teeth and all, like we’d both suddenly gotten a brilliant joke. Through the window, the ships waited under the sun on the silver platter of the gulf. It really did seem that the heat the scirocco had promised was finally inching along in its wake.
“Summer’s coming,” I said. “I can smell it in the air.”
“I want to spend every day of it with you, if you’ll let me.” I nestled into the crook of his arm and felt his lips moisten my forehead. “Come closer,” he said in a raspy whisper. “Sleep with me.”
The last thing I wanted was to sleep, but there was something about the late sun spreading across us like a second bedspread, the wine having gone lukewarm like a forgotten bath, and the tempo of Pietro’s breathing that eventually lulled my racing mind.
I was standing outside a lone house: perhaps I lived there. It was a beach house, maybe somewhere near Castellammare; behind it was a slope of olive trees as pilly and gray as a much-loved wool blanket. Yet on closer inspection, I realized that towering behind the olive grove and the house was a breathtaking wall of rock, something not from our world but from the world of giants. Vesuvius. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? It seemed to grow before my eyes, so I dared not lose sight of it as I backed away toward the sea, but the more I watched the volcano, the more I became mesmerized by it.
Out of nowhere came clouds, gray and laden like fieldstones being nested one on top of the other. The sun vanished. I was getting trapped in by the very sky, and when the ground rumbled beneath my feet, I no longer had any doubt as to what was happening.
I turned my back to the volcano and staggered toward the sea. There was a rowboat resting on the beach. I pushed it out into the water with a single shove, grinding the beach pebbles underneath. I rowed out far, disconcerted as to how the sea could be so very glassy and calm when disaster was imminent. The sea and the sky now mirrored each other, of the same ashen color that was neither day nor night, the color of the end of time. All at once, in a fit of fury or passion or folly, Vesuvius unleashed molten rock down its sides like hot wax from a candle, maybe even destroying itself in that unstoppable act. I watched as the lava, dazzling even in its apathy, rolled toward the olive trees and the house. Why hadn’t there been any warning, not even the slightest sign? But none of that mattered now; I had to keep going. Keep rowing, rowing, away from there.
All of a sudden, I heard screams as people began pouring out from the olive grove, most of them women and children. Where had they come from? I had the only rowboat, the only salvation. I had to go back and save them, as many as I could. And yet now the volcano was spitting rocks, too, and the rocks were pelting the water all around me. Go back for them and you’ll die, I heard a voice in my head. I sat in the rowboat rigid with terror as I understood what I was about to do.
All I saw next were the sparse hairs on Pietro’s chest rising and falling with his breath. The room was still ignited with sunlight; it seemed I’d only been asleep for a moment. I reached over to touch his jagged silver sun.
“Hi there,” he said, his voice heavy with sleep.
“I had a bad dream.”
“Are you scared?”
“Not anymore.”
He turned to kiss me, a whirlpool pulling us in deeper and deeper until it ejected us, breathless. “One day …” he said in a hard whisper as though he didn’t have enough air in his lungs. “One day I’m going to marry you.”
THE NEXT FEW NIGHTS we were inseparable. During the day—in class, the library, or the study room—I did my best to study but I felt