Heddi Goodrich - Lost in the Spanish Quarter

Madeleine was their roommate, who’d come to Naples on an Erasmus scholarship, but so far we hadn’t crossed paths. Halfway down the stairs, Pietro whispered, “I should warn you: she’s a bit nuts. Though Gabriele prefers the term ‘architectural genius.’”

“What does she have to do with the shower?”

“Just wait, you’ll see.” He called out her name once, twice, and was about to give up when a door at the foot of the stairs opened and out came a girl.

She was like a small, perfectly formed tornado, with an unsettling allure that came from her stormy too-short hair, her crumpled too-short T-shirt, and flirtatious navel. From the way she was rubbing her eyes with her fists and cursing the neighbors for disturbing her sleep again, from her husky voice with an unmistakable French accent. From her Japanese flip-flops and white socks, her tiny frame and big exasperated eyes.

Madeleine’s gaze crawled up the staircase and came to rest on me. Looking suddenly awake, she gleamed with a strange voraciousness, as if she could smell our lovemaking. After we introduced ourselves, I stared at her almost to the point of rudeness. Madeleine was devastatingly beautiful. And she was the only other foreign student I’d ever met in Naples.

Madeleine frowned comically at Pietro. “You want my help with the shower, no? OK, but what about me?”

“I’ll owe you one.”

“And a handmade coffee?”

“Sure. As soon as I’m done.”

“You do have a way with the ladies,” she said with an even huskier voice, making Pietro go red in the face as he made his way back up the stairs.

Madeleine didn’t seem crazy at all, I thought as the shower quickly steamed up. Rivulets of hot water took jagged paths down Pietro’s chest, some puddling in the little dip where his chest caved in slightly. I observed him openly, as if looking at a photograph of him: the slender body, the long runner’s legs, the pitch-black hairs between them. He was almost too gorgeous to touch.

Then there came a thundering from downstairs.

“What’s that?”

Pietro laughed. “It’s a water pressure thing, which pretty much sucks up here on the seventh floor. So when the flame in the hot water cylinder goes out, it has to be kicked back to life. But that French girl, man, she whacks it like she’s practicing for a kickboxing match. Anger management issues, I’d say.”

“Sounds like you need a plumber.”

“I just need you.”

We kissed, and as the warm water trickled into the cave of our mouths, Madeleine started pounding again. Laughing, we resisted the desire to linger in the heat, and the growing desire to make love standing up, and hurriedly shampooed each other’s hair.

Gabriele returned from the village weighed down with almond biscotti, stuffed peppers, and red wine. Before closing the door behind us, he grabbed one of the bottles for the party he’d invited us along to.

Night was a watercolor bleeding down onto the Quartieri, but nonetheless the timid warmth of that spring afternoon remained trapped in the streets, caught in the webs of forgotten laundry and in the clouds of frying squid and sickeningly sweet trash. We heard a thud behind us and spun around. Enormous rats (referred to by the locals as zoccole , a name they shared with hookers and other man-eaters) scattered out, their nails scratching across the cobblestones, just as a bag of garbage, still trembling from its fall, was starting to leak its sharp, greasy secrets onto the street. Whichever wise guy threw it from above, just to avoid the stairs, was already closing the balcony doors behind him. Did it really matter? By morning the trash truck would have swept it all away.

“Would you two mind terribly if I stopped for some cigarettes on our way?” asked Gabriele.

“I’m out, too,” said Pietro.

A fluorescent light drew us in, a beacon in the dark. With all the shops closed for the night, ground-floor homes could now open for business. This vascio was particularly lavish. Just outside the door was a small table displaying candies; dangling above them were bunches of potato chips. They were inviting signs that helped dissolve the boundary between street and home, between public and private, in the same way that the swampy night air melted the distinction between the warmth I felt outside my skin and the heat I was nurturing inside.

In the vascio an elderly man eating his cutlet at the table looked straight through us, like we were invisible. There was no need to go to any trouble for any old customers, and the night was young. His wife rose from the bed behind a partition, shuffling out in her slippers. I didn’t want to look at that bed with its cougar blanket, its disheveled and still warm sheets, its sloppy intimacy, but the pull was irresistible. In the end I gave in and looked at the couple’s bed with the fascinated horror with which one might watch a TV screen flashing scenes of passion or bloodshed. The woman, however, was relaxed, perhaps indifferent. Wearing a pink dressing gown, she nimbly walked the razor’s edge between business and pleasure, selling and sleeping, day and night. She squeezed in behind her husband, who was still busy chewing, to rummage through a utensil drawer and hand over her black-market cigarettes. The cash did a magic trick, vanishing into the pocket of her gown.

“They taste nasty but they’re cheap,” said Pietro, slipping the Marlboro Lights into his breast pocket.

We kept walking, the tapping of our shoes muffled by television sets turned on in people’s homes. Suddenly Gabriele stopped in his tracks. “Oh god, now what?”

Pietro and I also stopped. Before us was a massive dog, so black he might have been just a figment of the dark. Under the feeble glow of the streetlight, the dog lay across a bed of cardboard, looking straight at us with mirrory eyes that reflected splinters of artificial light. Pigeons fat as chickens circumambulated his body, a map scribbled in scars from who knows what battles. He was breathing through his nose like a wild horse and rolling his eyes with us, now left, now right, following our every tentative movement. I gripped Pietro’s arm.

“Now that’s a beast if I ever saw one,” he said.

The dog lay there with, it seemed, a sense of purpose, and it took me a few moments to understand that he was standing guard. Behind him was a series of low cement walls that trailed behind him like large graffitied dominoes, barricading the road before us for the length of the entire block. In that space, the flow of the city was cut off and, as if to build a haphazard dam, lawn chairs had been laid out, Vespas parked, undershirts hung out to dry. Above it all, scaffolding crossed out the sky, making a metal cage of this corner of the neighborhood. The dog let out a low rumble, or maybe it was a motorbike in the distance.

“Are you sure this is the right direction?” Pietro said to his brother in a low voice.

“I do believe so.” Gabriele pulled out a limp piece of paper, the invitation.

“We’ll just have to scoot past him then.”

“But even if he lets us through,” I said, “how are we supposed to get past the walls?” It would have been an obstacle course: the only visible opening, in the first wall, was obstructed by a parked scooter.

“Indeed. Unstable buildings in need of reinforcement,” said Gabriele contemplatively. “Hence the barricade.”

Pietro mouthed the words Hence the barricade , lifting his eyebrows mockingly. I frowned at him, hoping Gabriele hadn’t noticed. Couldn’t Pietro tell how much, how hard , his brother loved him?

We looked down the left-hand street, but another series of low walls blocked that too.

“Unfortunately, according to this map,” said Gabriele, “to get to Anna’s house we must get to the other side.” Glancing at the dog, he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “But I fear the direct route is not an option tonight.”