Not that Barbara didn’t experience a worse shiver, now and again. There were times when she pulled open a door to discover something she hadn’t expected, a closet instead of an exit or a dormer instead of an office, and there came the shiver… not déjà vu, say rather gia visto. The chilling sense that, once more, she’d tumbled back into her first day in the old city. In the corner of one of the ground-floor wards, where the wall might’ve gone up over a medieval oven, where there might’ve lingered a tang of ash, Barbara discovered the standing cross from the Refugee Center. She had to touch the thing, jammed in at an angle. The corners of the wood remained furred here and there, no better sanded than the day Silky and Paul had carried it into the fluttering chapel. That hadn’t been so long ago, that visit to the Center. Yet how many reiterations of Day One had the mother suffered, since?
Now in the clinic Barbara stood staring at the cross until, behind her, one of the patients started to laugh. Or rather this guy pretended to laugh, his hilarity an imitation, too wicked to believe. A parody of a villain out of James Bond, and maybe he was right to poke fun. The mother couldn’t be certain this soft-pine cross was the one her middle child had helped slap together. A lot of accessories around here were makeshift. Cesare used to handle the Mass, but never on a regular schedule. Lately the Vomero priest had declined to drop by at all, claiming he was too busy (and when DiPio told Barbara that, she had almost broken into a wicked laugh herself). The old medico responded by bringing in Jay’s former colleague from the Refugee Center — what was his name? Interstate? In any case the hairless German with the Franciscan T at first seemed uncomfortable around Barbara. His Midwestern greeting sounded pinched. But the wife had no interest in raking through the garbage about Jay’s initial UN contract.
What difference did it make to her if, here at the clinic, a deal had been struck between the chaplain and his former American Boss, and a bit of cash had changed hands? What mattered was, the Jaybird would tell Barbara if she wanted to know. The husband would do as he’d promised; between him and his Owl Girl things were on a fresh basis. As for the Missouri-trained chaplain, Jay had gone so far as to show him a piece of paperwork from early June, a notice of a bank transfer Silky had arranged.
And as for the people under DiPio’s care, they found the German’s freewheeling religious services just the ticket. The cases here, like those out at the Center, had seen their worlds destroyed in more than a single, simple sense. Barbara could see why most of the clinic staff needed a couple of degrees and three or four languages. Her first morning downtown, she found herself shuttling between the kind of decision-making for which she was trained and considerably greater challenges. She took a hand in one-on-one counseling, in groups and role-playing sessions. Once or twice she even suggested her own therapeutic variation, since despite their education the counselors here remained Neapolitan, willing to improvise. And she liked it — hail Mary full of grace, she did. When Barbara got to try one of her improvisations (a “trial methodology”), she enjoyed a sober exhilaration that fired up all her daytime energies and yet never lost the sense she was in control. Whatever other alternatives she’d had to staying up in the Vomero apartment, none could’ve offered so sweet a fit to the nervous system.
And come bedtime, while she and Jay exchanged mumbles about the ups and downs of the workplace, these worked like a relaxation massage composed entirely of words. The Jaybird sometimes broke into a snore before he finished an anecdote. Even to discuss the politics of the clinic had a gentling effect, strange when Barbara thought about it. In this same bed, after all, she’d lost hours of sleep fretting over who was calling the shots within the family.
Yet Barbara’s visits to the inner lives of the terremotati could also leave her troubled and let down. There was a distressed afternoon or two when she picked up her bodyguard outside the clinic and, before getting into the car, shook off anyone who approached her for a handout or a prayer. She wasn’t able to do much for a lot of these cases, no more than for Maria Elena back in Bridgeport. Rather she was forced to see as well the stubbornness, the grip of pattern and loop, that had made those syndromes so familiar in the first place. It hardly mattered when Barbara didn’t understand a victim’s fevered Italian, peppered with dialect. She couldn’t mistake the old story of their night sweats. During such difficult nights, the vision of a visiting saint only distracted these terramotati from the real problem. Worse, it was usually the same saint, Padre Pio. Pio was a recent addition to the canon, a Capuchin who’d worked his miracles in the 1950s and 1960s, and mediagenic in his way. Nowadays, when Fond came on the tube to pester the family, he earned his camera time by a sleek hint of hard living. The refugee Lazarus. Pio had been the opposite, Yoda, squat and wrinkled yet aglow within his robes. He was said to have convinced a movie producer, via telepathy, to bankroll La Dolce Vita. And so long as Barbara worked downtown, it seemed that some of the sorry creatures she tried to help would’ve gotten more out of watching Fellini than going on their knees to Padre Pio. Fellini would at least have showed them outrageous faces not unlike what had hurt them. But the figure out of their Catholic faith, Barbara’s own faith, got in the way of their trauma, of coming to know it, as if they’d hung some hollow gold knickknack over the pain — another ojetto for the city’s tormented walls. She hated to see it. Her church had brought her better than that, palpable comfort, honest strength.
But the clinic’s population couldn’t risk depths like that. They preferred the saints, the stand-ins. None of these patients claimed to have seen the Devil, or none that Barbara talked to, though a couple suffered nightmares in which some troublesome relative figured as a witch. She knew all about that one. She understood the kind of people she was dealing with, Cesare’s “bourgeois.” These were card-carrying citizens, the professional class, all registered with the national health program. Yet while DiPio’s cases had little in common with the desperate strays out at the Centro Rifugiati, they were by no means untouched by tragedy. More than once Barbara was left looking for a place to pull herself together, trying unknown doors with a dripping face. There was a man who couldn’t get beyond a thoughtless curse he’d growled at his mother, an angry word that he believed had attracted the Evil Eye. There was a woman who spoke obsessively, in halting half-English, of the extension cords she’d run into a child’s bedroom, overloading the circuit behind the wall.
And there was one neurosis Barbara had never come across in the textbooks, nor on the internet either: a man who claimed he couldn’t be living in Naples because he wasn’t old enough. This was a guy of about sixty who styled his remaining hair in a frowsy Mohawk and claimed he was still at work on his name. Every stage of life, so Mohawk believed, was a city. He himself had only recently reached the minimum entry requirement for elementary cities, like the fresh and exotic Portland, Oregon. In another ten years, if he kept up his research and steered clear of the wrong crowd, he might grow into Houston or Tokyo. The last thing you wanted, he explained, was to try and jump a level — to claim a more complex citizenship before you’d worked up the orientation. The last thing you wanted was to have the avenues around you all at once changing direction, thrusting out fresh lampposts like fingers through the holes of an afghan, the lampposts plastered with notices in God knows what language and your own frail body God knows how far from the sidewalk. Or you might discover yourself at the wheel of a new SmartFiat, engineered to millennial environmental standards, careening head-on towards a knight on horseback toppling from his pedestal. Repeatedly the old-timer insisted he wasn’t ready for the next move, and not nearly prepared for the adult dose that was Naples, or say Damascus. Those sank their underground agora and raised their satellite dishes only for the most mature.