her to meet me at Caffè Gambrinus. Its gilded mirrors and their multiplying effect on the well-to-do only made me slouch further into the antique chair, velvety and reassuring like the gray-green underside of olive leaves. Yet that day I needed the pitiful comfort of my favorite refuge, where I could order a cappuccino after midday without so much as a flicker of disapproval on the face of the bow-tied waiter, and indulge my adolescent fantasies about what Italy was supposed to be. A literary hub in the 1800s, Gambrinus was one of the few last reminders that at one time Naples had been a major European capital. Gabriele D’Annunzio had lived in Naples (and was a frequent patron of Gambrinus), Degas and Goethe too. And hadn’t the Marquis de Sade himself called Naples an infernal heaven?
Sonia took a seat. I felt a few stares in our direction, at my shabby jacket, at Sonia’s black uniform. “Wow,” she said, “it’s so fancy in here.”
I remembered Pietro at our rooftop dinner saying something like that about our place. It wasn’t hard to imagine Sonia and Pietro as a couple. They spoke with the same candor; they came from the same world and had watched the same cartoons. As if I’d deprived her of her one true match, I was struck by the idea that I’d left Sonia to the wolves. And I didn’t like being that person.
We sipped our coffees and talked about our strictest lecturers. Hers was a Portuguese grammar zealot and mine an elegant Bulgarian native who from day one had banned our class of two from uttering a single word of Italian, but who soon had us calling her by her first name, Iskra, and visiting her grown daughter while on a scholarship to Bulgaria. As Sonia and I chatted away, through the window I stole glimpses of Piazza Plebiscito, which up until my first year there had been a massive inner-city parking lot. The recent urban renewal had rid it of cars, revealing, in addition to lewd graffiti and peeling posters, an unexpected spaciousness, a place open to a thousand possibilities.
Sonia’s empty cup came down on her saucer with a final, devasting clank. It was now or never. But I didn’t know where to begin. I hadn’t spoken to a soul about Pietro. Now I could either trivialize what had happened between us or tell the shocking truth that since that kiss I could hardly read a line in a book—or sleep.
“You look so serious. You’re not in some sort of trouble, are you?”
“No, I’m fine, I’m fine … Remember when you told me about Pietro, up there on the roof?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s so gorgeous.” Sonia rolled her eyes upward as though recalling something heavenly, before adding, “I mean, gorgeous in a kind of unusual way, don’t you think? And he has such beautiful hands, the hands of a gentleman …”
The observation shook my resolve, and I started a string of sentences without finishing a single one. I felt like a rambling fool, a circus clown rummaging through a rickety suitcase and tossing out item after useless item—a shoe, an umbrella, a banana—until he finds what he needs. And what I needed was vagueness. “I have feelings for him,” I said finally.
Sonia’s smile dropped ever so slightly. “And I would imagine he has feelings for you too.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
Sonia stopped me midsentence, conveying in her fast, almost urgent, Sardinian way how happy she was for me and wrapping me in a hug that smelled of watermelon shampoo.
It was like a puzzle piece gloriously clicking into place. Outside the café, the midday sunshine ricocheted off the shop windows as I walked the short distance back to the Spanish Quarter. I turned into its alleyways, where I was welcomed back by the call of fish sellers, the purr of motorbikes, and the canopies of laundry. My legs effortlessly drove me up the incline of Via De Deo. Aromas of roasted peppers and seared steak came steaming out over the balconies, enveloping me in a mouthwatering mist. I remembered I hadn’t eaten anything all day and my stomach reawakened. This only accentuated the lightness in my head, and in every fiber of my being, as I slid through the gate left ajar and sprinted up the stairs two at a time. I hadn’t called, I hadn’t even buzzed. I was going to show up at lunchtime, uninvited, without even the courtesy of a loaf of bread. But still I rushed there as if I were running late.
PIETRO SET ABOUT cooking for me, chopping the onions like he was afraid to cause them pain and gently adjusting the flame under the frying pan. He sure knew how to maneuver in that tiny kitchen and how to make do with the few ingredients he had, as though he were used to having guests turn up unannounced for lunch. He didn’t want any help; he was simply glad that I’d come back, he insisted, sitting me down on the terrace step with a cape of sunlight on my back. He also put a glass of wine in my hand, and what harm could it do? The wine was in fact a medicine that cleared my head instead of clouding it. I understood that my concern over talking to Sonia had been blown out of proportion, and now all the drama fizzled into a sweet pulp like those onions sautéing with pancetta.
“You’re a man of many talents. Geologist, cook …”
“I’m not a geologist yet. And anyway, wait until you try this amatriciana before you say I can cook.” He let out a hoarse laugh.
The wine on an empty stomach made me uncharacteristically bold, and I said, “You didn’t cover your mouth this time when you laughed.”
“You have an eye like a hawk’s.”
“You have a nice smile. Why hide it?”
Pietro took a while to answer. He emptied a jar of home-bottled tomatoes into the pan and stirred them thoughtfully. “Can’t you tell? It’s my teeth.”
I beckoned him over, and reluctantly he kneeled before me, that silver sun jingling. When he parted his lips slightly, all the wine I’d drunk slipped its long red tentacles around me, wrapping me in a hot, stinging pleasure.
“Let’s have a look.” I tried to focus on his teeth. They were straight and somewhat boxy, pearly white corn that I felt an overwhelming desire to run my tongue over right then and there. He smiled. I hadn’t noticed it before, but in fact on one of his front teeth there was a faint gray shadow. “It’s hardly noticeable,” I said, and we kissed, an intimate mixture of wine and smoke and hunger that made a commotion of my heart.
He stood up. As we waited for the water to come to a boil, out of the blue he said, “Did you know I used to live in Rome?”
My eyes went involuntarily big. “Then why did you come to Naples?”
I knew it was hypocritical of me to ask him the very question that had been put to me countless times, as if my answer might justify why any of us were there. But it was true: Naples was never a choice. It was a gift that had to be forced on you, by birth or by fate.
Pietro told me that his brother was the one who’d chosen to go to Naples, to study architecture. Their parents had readily given Gabriele their blessing. School was all he was good at. But Gabriele didn’t stop there: he told them he wouldn’t leave without Pietro. His younger brother, too, he argued, had the right to fulfill his own dream of studying geology. This time they refused, unwilling to let go of their only son who knew how to turn olives into emerald liquid and wheat into golden powder. But Gabriele was headstrong, and eventually the old folks gave in.
Pietro didn’t stop there either. He told them he wanted to study not in Naples but in Rome. It was as far away as he could imagine going. And perhaps it made no difference to his mother and father, as they were losing him anyway, to one city or another. The farthest they had ever been was Schaffhausen, where both he and Gabriele were born, but all any of them ever saw of Switzerland was a dairy factory and a toy-strewn hallway of a rental apartment. More than a hallway, it was a babysitter: with the doors securely shut, it was a safe place to keep the little boys when shifts overlapped. Sometimes when their mom got home, she’d bring them ice cream from the factory. Once they were tall enough to reach the doorknobs, she took them back to Italy to start their first day of school in the same class, as though they were twins.
Pietro had great expectations of Rome. But the reality of it was