John Domini: Earthquake I.D.

No amount of thanks can begin to express how much the support of Kate Gale, Mark Cull, and Red Hen Press have meant to this book.

Lettie Prell, likewise — though I must mention her crucial late reading.

Mark Shepherd, thanks for another bracing splash of a book cover. Rick Lovett, Valerie Grey, Reg Gibbons, Faye Bender, Connie Fischbein, Alexander Hemon, Lex Runciman, and Roxanna Khosravi, thanks for early readings.

Financial support came from the Northwestern University Center for the Writing Arts, Drake University, and the Metropolitan Arts Commission of Portland, OR.

To write about Naples is to inscribe on a palimpsest. That very image is an older one, from Peter Gunn, a British lover of the city. My cityscape was scratched across his, and across other renderings by Shirley Hazzard and Frances Steegmuller, by John Horne Burns and Gustav Herling, by William Morris and Thomas Belmonte…and Goethe, and Shelley…. really, no book can complete the list, not even the heartrending Naples: 44 , by Norman Lewis. To all I say grazie , and bravo .

Among my Naples friends, the essential connection was Ognissanti, a visionary in terracotta. Also see the dedication, and spare a thought as well for my late father, born Vincenzo Vicedomini by the Piazza della Borsa, also called Piazza Bovio.

One good look at Naples on a map and Barbara began to wonder. This was weeks before the family got on a plane. Barb was still running the kids to springtime activities, and her husband, Jay, was tying up loose ends with Viccieco & Sons. One Friday her husband called from midtown to say he’d catch the later Bridgeport local, and when he did get home, Jay pulled from his ever-emptier briefcase a map big enough, unfolded, to cover the entire dining-room table. German make, the thing was four or five maps in one. You had inserts for the island of Capri and the excavations at Pompeii, for the inner city of first Greeks then Romans then, God knows, another ten ruling orders up through NATO. It was all Barbara could do to get her mind around the greater metropolitan semi-circle, the urban sprawl that curved around the Bay between volcanoes north and south. To the south was the more serious trouble, Vesuvius. The towns destroyed in the latest earthquake all lay near Vesuvius.

“We’ll never be lost,” the father announced over the gathered bent heads. “Hey. I mean, never.”

But Barb had to wonder. For starters the thing was largely illegible, the distance key in kilometers and the indexes set up according to some obscure Teutonic notion of what a traveler needed to know. The only words she recognized were Italian. This confusion extended even to the coloring, since each of the maps-within-maps had a border on the Bay. The water was a brilliant ceramic blue, a color that attracted the twin eight-year-olds. The two girls had to touch, cooing, but meantime the mother’s bewilderment gave way to worse. Against the ubiquitous sea the city center was always depicted in yellow, whether shown from a distance or in close up, and either way, to Barb it started to look like a gaping maw the color of pus. The few highways that threaded the area were blood red, and the metropolis itself presented lips spread wide for a love-bite. There was a bit of tongue, the peninsula on which stood the Castel Del’Ovo. Barbara stood faced with a soul kiss full of disease.

And who was expected to return the kiss? The mother thought of her church work. Who was playing Jesus to this leper? She and the rest of her family, that’s who. The husband she’d stood by for nearly twenty years and their five Lulucita children.

There at the dining-room table, tugging at the armpit and belt of a perfectly good spring dress, she managed eventually to wrestle down her worries. She convinced herself, by the time the map was put away, that the family wasn’t in fact throwing itself into something grotesque and beyond diagnosis. What she just thought she’d seen must’ve had more to do, rather, with all the sore spots that preceded the move. Some of those spots weren’t entirely free of infection themselves, yet. Barbara was still troubled by their failed attempt at adoption over the winter.

And anyone had to wonder, didn’t they, about a longtime solid provider like her Jaybird abruptly quitting his vice-president’s chair? About him accepting, instead, a position in the quake-relief effort, very much not-for-profit? Barb had agreed to the move, granted. Nonetheless she and Jay had hashed out their reasoning in yet another foreign language. They’d exchanged vague talk, vague and abortive, about how “a fresh perspective” might be good for them. This when, over in Naples, Jay would be working with the most volatile of the region’s many quasi-legal populations. He’d been stationed at a facility for the people who were homeless before the quake. The boat people, most of them not long out of Africa.

Anyone would feel concerned. Anyone might see a horror show coming. And when Jay was hit and robbed their first day in the Mediterranean city — a quick mugging for such a big man, and a clean sweep of the family’s contracts and credit cards and passports — Barb could only think: I knew it . The family could never survive such confusion. There in Naples, they’d come to the end of everything.

The muggers on the other hand had used the local scarring for camouflage. Their bike roared out of an alleyway, out from under the scaffolding of reconstruction, clearing a shot through the downtown crowd. Weekday crowd, early June, broad daylight. Somehow the thieves knew the exact moment and corner at which the family would present the easiest pickings. A number of streets in lower Naples remained walkable, if a person was willing to share space with jackhammers and power coils. This particular vicolo got a lot of foot traffic, and the intersection had forced Barbara’s family to walk single file, with Jay and his refilled briefcase at the rear. You could swear the attackers knew precisely where and when.

They cleared a shot, the motorino’s two riders, jammed together like lovers. Their closing in and gunning away might’ve been a single inhale and exhale.

No one saw what the crooks used to whack the man. There were two blows, the first with the full momentum of the bike behind it. But this was explained later, by doctors astounded at Jay’s condition. At the time, Barb only heard a sound like clapping your hands around a soggy washcloth. What turned her to look was a stranger noise out of Jay’s throat, a strangled shout and whimper the likes of which she hadn’t heard since their first lovemaking.

She turned and took a blow herself, a hit to one breast. An elbow caught her, and as the cycle roared away the pain flared in her mind’s eye in the shape of one attacker’s kite-like blue bandanna — the lone bit of evidence the family would have for weeks to come. Barbara whirled in the eddy of the blow, that breast jarred out of its bra, so that her flag-bright pain was threaded with the shaming tickle of the nipple against her summer shirt, a shaming exposure; she saw the entire family half-naked and staggering here in the middle of a downtown crowd, under close-crowding palazzi. Then there was Jay, changing shape. Her husband shrank as if to fit the out-of-date street, as if finally and suddenly he’d lost the wide American back built up during varsity football and summer jobs on the highways. The hand that had held the briefcase began to purple, waggling, helpless, another bandanna aflutter above the thronging Smartcars and three-wheeled trucks, and all the other bikes, roaring but harmless.