extreme, with a melodramatically elongated e and the d duly hardened by consonant doubling, which southern Italians took so very much to heart. That the H was ignored was entirely forgivable, for in Naples breathiness was reserved exclusively for laughter. “As in Eddie Murphy?” people would ask and I would simply nod. I didn’t mind really. Heddi was before and Eddie was now.
“Music?” I asked, and he merely nodded awkwardly, his knuckles taut over an empty beer bottle.
My back was warmed by the erratic dance of the flames and by the oblivious laughter of the friends I affectionately called “the boys,” i ragazzi. That I belonged there too and could turn back toward them at any time made me feel undeniably safe, a privilege that all of a sudden I perceived as unfair.
Downstairs the front door shook with a thud, probably the last of the guests staggering out, and my gift bearer looked jolted by the awareness that the party that had been whirling around him earlier was now gone. He tried to hide his embarrassment but I felt it all the same, a painful pinch followed by my own regret at being, once again, the only one sober.
“It’s probably getting late,” he said.
“I guess so, but there’s only one clock in the whole house.”
Abruptly, he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and unintentionally I mirrored his asymmetry by tilting my head to one side. The better to see him with, at least, though his face was hidden every time he found solace in his shoes—comfortable, practical shoes—by a dark mane. I could honestly say I’d never seen him before, I could have sworn by it, because if we’d ever locked eyes I surely would have remembered that determined look, a willingness to bide his time.
“I should probably get going.” He set his bottle down as if afraid to break the glass, despite the fact that the kitchen counter was an invitation to make a mess, with its knocked-over bottles, greasy pans, and mugs stained with wine like old teeth.
“I’m sorry, what was your name?”
“Pietro.” It was a rock of a name, straitlaced and somewhat hard, and he lifted his eyebrows apologetically.
“Thanks for the tape …” I said, but his name died in my throat. “So you’re leaving?”
“Yeah, I have to get up early. I’m off to the farm for a few weeks. My family’s farmland, in the province of Avellino. I go every Easter. Well, not just Easter, but you know …”
I didn’t know but I nodded anyway, grateful for the string of phrases. I still held out hope that in those last seconds before his departure (and I would probably never see him again) I could solve the mystery of how he’d come to be on such intimate terms with my name and why he’d gone to such trouble to make me something.
“OK, bye.”
“Bye, enjoy your farmstay. I mean, your stay at the farm.”
I wished he would just go now, this outsider who was now a chance witness to my slip of the tongue. It was exasperating how my Italian, my favorite disguise, could still come apart at the seams whenever I was taken by surprise.
A round of goodbyes and he was gone. I reclaimed my seat by the fireplace, slipping the tape into the pocket of my vintage suede miniskirt. The flames felt their way boldly up the scavenged firewood, fondling what had once been the leg of a proper chair or the headboard of a single bed. Within seconds the blazing fire swept any trace of unease from my face.
“What was that guy’s name again?” asked Luca beside me, tossing a cigarette butt into the fire and slipping a white ribbon of smoke from his mouth.
“Pietro, I think,” I said, tasting just how solid the name was.
“Oh, yeah. He’s a friend of Davide’s.”
“Davide who?”
“The short one with curly hair,” said Sonia, the only other girl in our innermost circle.
Davide, now I remembered. Luca sometimes played in his band. Davide, Pietro, did it matter? The truth was we didn’t need anyone else in our clan. We were fine just as we were.
I was fine.
Mesmerized by the flames, we let the night slide into a moonless, hourless limbo. We talked about Hinduism, the Phoenician alphabet, the Mani Pulite judicial investigation that was cleansing a corrupt government and making a killing at the newsstands. Now and then a chunk of wood caved into the embers, triggering a showy display of sparks and a few oohs and aahs for that little moment of drama. When the fire started to nod off, Luca rummaged through the stack of makeshift firewood. Beside it was an acoustic guitar, which Tonino’s hairy hand reached for.
“You’re not throwing that in,” said Angelo, another of the boys.
“No, Tonino, please!” said Sonia.
“Party’s over, children,” Tonino announced with a heavy Pugliese drawl as he propped the guitar on his knee. “About fucking time for your lullaby.”
This was the part I loved the most. Tonino’s foul language drawing us in closer, his glasses turning to golden rings in the firelight as he began playing a tune that sounded like Lucio Dalla’s “Attenti al lupo,” “Watch Out for the Wolf.” He strummed with those small chunky hands covered in dark fleece, the hands of a garden gnome come to life. And he was hairy all over. Once Tonino had asked me to shave his back to deal the final blow to some crab lice, incontrovertible evidence that he really had managed to get someone into his bed—a Spanish girl, or so he said. Underneath it all, shorn like a spring lamb, Tonino possessed almost fine features that made him look, in a certain light, like my own brother.
Tonino sang that ballad like a heavy metal front man, with death growls and all, managing all the while to tweak the lyrics to his needs. “There’s this tiny little house … with a tiny little grapevine … and inside there’s a tiny little professor … who won’t fucking shift the deadline … And there’s this tiny little student … with a brain the size of Einstein’s …”
“Fuck me, that’s a hit song,” said Angelo. “You know what? Forget your studies. You should start a punk band.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll ask my Sanskrit professor if she wants to be the drummer, what do you say? That way she can beat the shit out of something else besides me.”
“Play us one of those traditional Neapolitan songs instead,” said Luca.
Tonino handed over the guitar. “I’m not the fucking Neapolitan,” he said. It was a compliment.
“I’m only half.”
“The bottom half, naturally,” said Angelo.
His shoulder-length hair falling over his face, Luca cradled the instrument and offered them an off-center laugh, but his eyes were on me. That half smile was in itself a compliment, for Luca was as selective with his smiles as he was with his words, as if he’d spent his last incarnation seeing all the irony in the world and in this lifetime had achieved Zen. Although technically he too was one of the boys, I had always thought of him as distinct from the other two. He was simply Luca Falcone.
“This one’s for you.”
It took only the first few notes for me to figure out that he’d chosen Carosone’s old classic “Tu vuo’ fa’ l’americano.” It was like I’d been caught out, the American incognito, and in fact Luca was looking my way, waiting.
I didn’t feel like singing, and if I did from the second verse onward, it was only because I realized the others genuinely didn’t know the words and that it was up to me to fill the silence. Perhaps I did it for Luca too. To show him that, if nothing else, I could put on an impeccable Neapolitan accent, a low-class growl rising from even lower in the gut than his. To see if I could make him smile. For his benefit, I crooned comically and gesticulated like a fishmonger, magically transformed into one of those poor women standing in the doorway of a typical inner-city vascio, a street-level, one-room hovel