Heddi Goodrich - Lost in the Spanish Quarter

HarperVia

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

This eBook first published in Great Britain by HarperVia in 2019

Originally published as Perduti nei Quartieri Spagnoli in Italy in 2019 by Giunti Editore

Copyright © Heddi Goodrich 2019

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Heddi Goodrich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008359966

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008359980

Version: 2019-09-19

To my father, in memory

Contents

Cover

Title Page LOST IN THE SPANISH QUARTER Heddi Goodrich

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Acknowledgments

A Note from the Translator and Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

From: tectonic@tin.it

To: heddi@yahoo.com

Sent: November 22

I know you’d rather I was dead. I’m barely alive. I don’t expect an answer to this email, and I won’t write you again. I’ve been trying to write you for the past four years. I should write a hundred-page letter to try and explain. I would never be able to, so I won’t try to explain myself now.

I’m a fool. I’ve always trusted my instinct but my instinct is a fake, a traitor, an idiot. A few years back I made the worst mistake of my life—unrecoverable, inexplicable, unimaginable. I lied to myself for a while (I can be quite good at that sometimes) that I did what my head, or my gut, was telling me to do. Maybe it was the right thing but it ruined my life. I just wanted to tell you that. Because you deserve to know that my life isn’t worth a cent. You deserve to know that every time I sit down to eat with utensils in my hand for a moment I have the desire to gouge an eye out with my knife.

I hope with all my strength that these words will twist a little smile of satisfaction from your lips, just as I hope that for you I was just a bad dream, not your cross to bear. My other hope is that my life goes by quickly so that I can be reincarnated into someone or something better than my current self. Then perhaps I’ll run into you in an airport in Stockholm or Buenos Aires.

Don’t forgive me, don’t answer, don’t be sad. Be happy, have babies, write books, make mixed tapes, take pictures … it’s how I always love to think of you. And now and then, if you can and if you want to, remember me.

p.

HEDDI.”

I heard my name pronounced as no one had said it in years, like a person might say the name of an exotic species. Rising into a question but mastered—subtle aspiration, short vowels, and all—as if it had been breathed in private again and again until it could roll off the tongue with startling casualness. No other sound in all the Spanish Quarter, not a woman screaming bloody cheater or a gun popping with the thrill of vendetta, could have made me turn away from the murmuring fireplace on such a cold night.

There stood a boy, a man, his mouth tightened like he’d said his bit and now it was my turn. His shirt was tucked in at the waist, rolled up at the arms, and strained at the heart, a handy breast pocket barely managing a pack of cigarettes. Nothing like the other guests, who with their face piercings and dreadlocks and pasty skin tried to cover up the wholesomeness of their childhoods spent frolicking at the beach and eating potato gnocchi. Despite the hour, their sweet scent, of patchouli and thrift shops and hashish, still hung in the kitchen, fusing with wafts of flat beer and saffron risotto. Clearly, he wasn’t from our tribe of linguists, the centuries-old Istituto Universitario Orientale, so easy to get into and so much harder to graduate from. Yet there he was, as still as the water of a deep lake.

“Here, I made this for you,” he said, fishing something out of his jeans pocket. Definitely a southern Italian accent, if not Neapolitan. His hand quivered, a slight ruffle, as he handed me a cassette tape in its homemade case. Per Heddi , it read, beginning with a capital H and ending with an inky splash, the dot on my long-forgotten i .

This threw me. It was actually the spelling of my name that derailed its pronunciation, for then it was easy to take it to its literal 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.