Heddi Goodrich - Lost in the Spanish Quarter

“To avoid the fucking stairs,” replied Tonino. “I swear, one day these six flights are going to be the death of me.”

“Or to be right in the action, in the heart of it all,” said Luca, extending a pack of tobacco to Pietro.

Pietro politely waved it away, pulling out a pack of Marlboros instead. He looked more relaxed as he took his first lungful. “They’re Lights,” he said, turning toward me. It was an apology.

Sonia came out carrying the pot of bucatini alla puttanesca , its bare-cupboard ingredients and uncertain origins—Sicily? Rome? Ischia?—the perfect dish for our motley crew. We all took a seat around the table, Pietro across from me. His red wine was served around. I hardly ever drank—alcohol only made me nauseated—but tonight I let my glass be filled, halfway … all right, three-quarters. I took a sip out of politeness and no sooner had I than liquid heat charged through my veins in the same pleasurable but invasive way that the scirocco was now furrowing its warm, fat fingers through my hair. I wrestled it back into an unsuccessful bun.

“Buon appetito.”

We ate in customary silence, as good food required; the chaotic wind, too, imposed a certain solitary focus. It was the best chance I had to study Pietro unnoticed, to see if my memory matched reality. I had remembered his features after all, but now I was struck by their singularity. Pietro had the huge, expressive eyes of a deer in the woods, yet his long, bony nose lent a Babylonian majesty to his profile. As for his mouth, my eyes wouldn’t go there.

I watched him as he topped up Davide’s wine (“It won’t win any awards,” he was saying, “but it’s better than water”), deciding that his attractiveness was well out of the ordinary, a kind of exaggerated beauty that bordered on ugliness. But although Pietro constantly toyed with the boundary between inaccessible beauty and easy vulgarity, he never crossed it. He was strange and magnificent. I studied his features so closely that, though separated by the table, I swore I could feel the warmth released through his nostrils, the tingling feather of his eyelashes. Again the wind went, Hurry up.

I took a big sip of wine and noticed that Sonia was clearly studying him too. She was watching his lips. Slightly reddened with tomato, they were moving, and it was only then I realized Pietro was speaking. Tonino had asked him a question.

“Hydrogeology,” Pietro was saying, “is useful if you want to find water; for example, if you need to figure out where to dig a well.”

“Do people still dig wells?” asked Sonia.

Tonino said, “Aren’t you supposed to be from Sardinia?”

“Ah, the urban youth of today …” said Angelo, feigning a resigned sigh. He enjoyed teasing Sonia good-naturedly for the fact that she too was born at the far reaches of Italy.

“Can’t you just use one of those sticks to find water?” asked Davide.

“The old folks in the village do,” Pietro answered.

“You mean those wife-beating sticks?” chimed in Tonino. “My dad has one of those.”

Everyone laughed so I did the convivial thing and joined in. Pietro was laughing, too, that is, until he wrapped his long fingers over his mouth in a rather contemplative gesture and rested his eyes on me. I could feel the weight of his gaze: it was as though he’d been waiting all evening for this racket, this rowdy opportunity when everyone was distracted, to unload it onto me. Any lightheartedness I might have had instantly abandoned me. I couldn’t even hear all the happy chatter because in reality I was no longer with my friends around the table but with Pietro in a deep and clear world, a seabed where silence throbbed in our ears to the slow, inevitable rhythm of the waves.

There the two of us were alone. Pietro was anything but a stranger. He was looking at me, inside me, with the spear of his gaze puncturing everything I held dear, and without having to utter a single word he was telling me, I came here tonight for you. Understanding this, the fork still poised between my fingers turned to lead—I could hardly hold on to it—and the blood drained violently from my face until all that was left of me was a wandering spirit. The scirocco was now having its way with me but I had no strength to fight it, or to hold Pietro’s gaze even a second longer.

I turned away. The laughter flooded back into my ears. Pietro looked away, too, and gone was the certainty, unassailable only a moment ago, that we’d had a dialogue without speaking. Clearly I was delirious, perhaps even drunk.

“Have you taken volcanology?” Luca was asking.

Pietro answered, without emotion and without addressing anyone in particular, that he’d taken it for a year only. “It’s not my field. But I do have great respect for volcanoes, let’s put it that way.”

So he was a geology major. That breast pocket, those shoes: it all made sense now. What could be intimidating about a geology student?

“What about Vesuvius,” I said, surprised to hear my own voice. “Have you studied it?”

“A little. It’s a perfect example of a stratovolcano.”

“What does that mean?” asked Sonia, and he explained that they were the cone-shaped volcanoes, built up over hundreds of thousands of years from all the lava flows, with basalt and rhyolite and other enigmas coming to the surface.

“Basically, a giant zit,” said Davide, chewing on a piece of soppressata.

Pietro smiled and again covered his mouth, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw. “You could say that. But it’s the most dangerous type of volcano on Earth.”

“Oh god, should we be worried?” asked Sonia.

“Maybe. Almost half of the world’s volcanoes that have erupted recently have been stratovolcanoes.”

“Define recently ,” said Tonino.

“In the last ten thousand years.”

Davide and Angelo were now guffawing at something at the other end of the table. The noise drew my gaze to the edge of the terrace and out over the city all the way to the volcano, looking radiant in the orange light of the scirocco.

“But that doesn’t mean,” I found myself saying, “that Vesuvius is going to erupt now . It could be thousands of years away, right?”

“Who knows, but there’s no point worrying. It’s the law of chaos. There’s not much we can do about it.”

Pietro had spoken with a fatalism that poorly matched his baritone, which was firm yet reassuring like the voice of a news weatherman announcing the perfect storm. In fact, Sonia said, “Well, I’m not going to freak out about it then.”

Seeing her light up like that had a sobering effect on me. It was Sonia’s night. Maybe she’d even told her secret to Angelo, who was now conspiring to help her by inviting Pietro over. It also occurred to me that Pietro might not have understood a single word on that entire mixed tape of American songs, that for him it was merely a sharing of tunes with a native from the land of rock ’n’ roll. Now I was doubly convinced that what I’d earlier perceived as a silent exchange across the table was nothing more than a glance in my direction, and like most glances it had in fact lasted only a few seconds. It was even possible that Pietro, on his own accord, had come here tonight for Sonia, or for no one at all. I vowed to avoid any future dramatization—and to not take even one more sip of his wine.

Pietro sliced more soppressata for the table. “But anyway, we’d get some warning, in the form of earthquakes.”

“That’s what Pliny the Younger described too,” offered Luca, and, as was the case whenever he decided to speak, everyone went quiet. “The residents of Pompeii felt the earthquakes in the days leading up to the eruption. But they made no connection at all to Vesuvius.”