Heddi Goodrich - Lost in the Spanish Quarter

We had no choice but to backtrack and try another path, and that’s when we became lost. Pietro wove his fingers through mine as we tried to chisel some sense into those indistinguishable streets. At one point, recognizing a distinctive pair of purple pants hanging from a balcony, we realized we’d gone full circle. Pietro suggested we ditch the whole thing, saying he wouldn’t know anyone at the party anyway, but then, entirely by accident, we found the right building.

We followed the laughter and music to one of the upper floors. In the entranceway Gabriele kissed the hostess, a classmate of his who was delighted with the home brew; then he disappeared. Loose tiles creaked under our feet as Pietro and I inched our way through the guests. The apartment was a series of candlelit rooms without a corridor that simply flowed from one into the next. It was loud with voices and bittersweet with pot. Cats moved soundlessly between rooms, letting themselves be caught momentarily, only to slither out of my hands. I followed one of them into a less crowded room, losing Pietro in the process. Before me were chairs lined up awkwardly against the wall. Moved by their solitude, I sat down.

Soon enough Gabriele had settled into a chair beside me and was handing me a plastic cup of red wine. “Here, this will help you relax.”

“But I’m OK without it,” I said, taking a sip anyway. “Life is enough of a high for me.”

“I know. And it’s infectious,” Gabriele said, downing all his wine at once. “Aaah. All that walking in circles made me thirsty.”

“In squares, actually.”

I would have gladly given Gabriele my wine even without that pretext. His eyes lit up as he emptied the contents of my cup into his, a gesture that was an admission both of fastidiousness in matters of hygiene and of an emerging intimacy between us. This made me want to open up to him in some way, and for some reason I decided to tell him about my visit to the Fontanelle Cemetery.

As I spoke, Gabriele leaned in toward me, ever closer, so as to hear me better in the midst of all the noise. I found the closeness pleasant. I could see every detail of his face: his unshaven jaw, his lips already a shade darker from the wine. Despite his excessive attention to cleanliness, Gabriele paid little mind to his appearance. His hair was always a mess, his eyebrows, too, and he dressed shabbily, with missing buttons and baggy pants that dragged on the ground. And now, having him right up next to me, so close I could smell the spicy complexity of his wine as though I’d drunk it myself, I felt a tipsy sort of desire to straighten the strands of his hair and the cords of his corduroy jacket.

“Unfortunately, Eddie, I have little time for outings myself. However, I do know it’s not the only area in the city with caves like that,” he said. “There are many, many more. Underneath our feet, Naples is almost completely empty.”

“What do you mean by empty ?”

A flicker of fire passed over Gabriele’s eyes, as though he’d concentrated in them the light of all the candles in the room. I could see he was relishing my confusion at his words, and I let him have that desired effect in the same way I’d let him have my wine.

“Look around you. This building, all the other old buildings around it: they’re all made of stone. They go on as far as the eye can see, with hardly a patch of green. But where do you think they get this construction material from?”

“I’ve never thought about it before.”

Holding that flimsy plastic cup as if it were a fluted wineglass, Gabriele explained that while other cities had risen with the help of material shipped in from the countryside, Naples had not. From Greek times it had been known that the land was almost entirely made of yellow tuff, a stone of volcanic origin that is excellent for construction purposes due to its high workability. So they simply began dragging it up from underground, as well as from the surrounding hills. And as they dug and emptied the land invisibly beneath their feet, the city aboveground grew noticeably. Yellow tuff was so easily accessible that the practice continued beyond the late 1800s. Hence, added Gabriele, the Spanish Quarter was built in the same manner, even though the masonry walls weren’t up to the standard of thickness used in the stately palaces, located elsewhere in the city. Perhaps in order to cut building costs even further, the thickness of the walls diminished on the upper floors.

“Upper floors like your place,” I said, not to mention my place.

“Well, keep in mind that the structures in the Spanish Quarter rose to no more than four or five floors. The others are all raised floors.”

“Raised?”

“Illegal floors, dear Eddie, without any building supervision. Just think about it for a minute. You’ve already got the thinnest load-bearing walls they could get away with: add to that the compression caused by the weight of the extra floors, and what you’ve got is major structural fragility. Neapolitan tuff is particularly soft and brittle. Have you ever noticed that, when you touch it in spots where the plaster has come off, it crumbles between your fingers?”

Gabriele extracted a cigarette and, as he fumbled for his lighter, I suddenly grasped the true meaning of the adjective illegal , so commonly and nonjudgmentally used in Naples. Illegal didn’t mean unwelcome so much as precarious .

He lit up and took a puff. “For this and other reasons, Naples is incomparable. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world.”

An explosion of laughter and clapping came from another room, and all at once I felt overwhelmed by the facts I’d just learned, alluring and at once disconcerting details like a bunch of Lego pieces that I just couldn’t put together and were thus running through my hands with a clatter as deafening as that laughter. I didn’t get Naples, not really. I was missing the bigger picture, a true map. The Spanish Quarter, then, wasn’t on the outskirts of society but the very quintessence of Naples. A place that on the surface appeared simple to unravel but that in reality followed its own mysterious logic that twisted it into a knot you couldn’t untie. My knowledge of my adoptive city was so full of holes that I knew for sure I would never be like Luca, wise and at ease in the city. Because despite all the years I’d been there, despite the liceo and the excursions, despite all the passion I’d poured into it and my desire to surrender to it and lose myself in it, there was something about it that managed to elude me. Love wasn’t enough.

I looked over at Gabriele. Smoking in profile like that, he looked so much like Pietro—the long, hard lines of his nose, the gray curve of his stubble—and the flickering, uncertain light of that room further blurred the boundaries between the two brothers. I became pleasantly aware that Gabriele and I were developing a degree of closeness, maybe even affection for each other, and that seemed very important to me though I couldn’t yet figure out why. At the same time I didn’t trust myself to dose that affection because, even without alcohol in my system, even without the physical presence of Pietro, that night as always I could feel his words set my mind on fire, his caresses ignite my skin, his kisses intoxicate my mouth. What we were doing wasn’t having sex; it was like surrendering to an illness. And the most glaring side effect was that I released a sensuality I wasn’t sure if I wanted or didn’t want others to notice. A larger-than-life sensuality that was simply gushing from my pores and spilling sloppily around me, especially on Gabriele, who was genetically a part of Pietro and who was now sending a silky river of smoke to the ceiling, lost in who knows what thoughts.