‘They heated this. Do you see? He burned his hand. It was deliberate. Do you understand? This is assault, and you saw who did it.’ Now warmed up, she looked over Peña’s shoulder and caught sight of Sami’s toys laid out across Peña’s kitchen table. Her voice immediately slipped gear, became incredulous, alarmed. ‘What is this?’ She turned to Peña. ‘Those are my son’s toys. Look,’ she shouted to Lanzetti and pointed, ‘look, she has his toys. It was you? It was you! I’m calling the police.’ One hand covering her mouth, Anna turned and ran back to her apartment.
Back in her apartment Anna vented her rage at her husband. In one long monologue she lay out her dissatisfactions, her outrage, her unhappiness, and this, this assault, was the natural result of how they lived. A burn on his hand today, and what tomorrow? Lanzetti could not soothe her and found no consolation for her outrage.
* * *
Lanzetti came to apologize. Peña stepped aside and allowed him into her apartment. His eyes settled first on the table. She had cleared the boy’s toys away, hidden them in a drawer. Uncomfortable, the doctor nodded at the windows — the closed shutters.
‘All these people,’ he said, ‘so close. The way we live now.’ Lanzetti meshed his hands together.
She asked if he would like a seat, but the man remained standing, the size of him, filling the room. ‘How is your son?’
‘It’s not so serious. He has a blister.’ Lanzetti forced his hands into his pocket. ‘He was fishing,’ he said, ‘playing a game with people he couldn’t see. He sent down a toy on a piece of string and they heated it up.’ He began to apologize. ‘She spends all of her time with him. She won’t let him go to school. It’s difficult for her. And Sami,’ he said, ‘believes all of these things, these ideas. He mixes them up.’ Lanzetti smiled and shook his head. He spoke slowly and chose his words with care.
‘He says that he can hold his breath for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. This is what he says. He believes that he has special powers, that he can control things. He believes that if he concentrates hard enough he can shatter glass, or start fires, or flood a room. He believes that he can make the building shake.’
Lanzetti cleared his throat. ‘He does not like to sleep, because he thinks that when he sleeps he cannot control these powers. He believes that when he is idle he makes bad things happen, that when he is asleep he is responsible for earthquakes and landslides. For accidents. I read the paper with him every day to teach him that these things are coincidental. That they have nothing to do with him, that the world works without him and he is not responsible. But unlike other children he isn’t able to let this go. He thinks that there are people hunting for him. I’m not sure what we will do.’
WEDNESDAY: DAY D
Mizuki told the story in class about the brothers at the station. An ordinary moment, easily told, about how, on three successive days, she had noticed one man on the platform, the other up on the concourse, and how on that first day she was confused to see a man she assumed to be behind her, suddenly, so quickly, ahead. Today she’d found the men waiting side by side at the top of the escalator: both men had watched her walk by, hands in pocket, one without much interest, the other with a certain intensity. This time she had her phone ready, but didn’t dare take a photograph, and didn’t pause to buy water. In crude and cumbersome Italian she explained her confusion and delight in seeing one man doubled. Today, the couple (could you even call brothers a couple?) followed her to the station exit — although she couldn’t be certain that this was deliberate. She used the words attractive, handsome, when what she wanted to say was brutish. Bruto in Italian meant ugly, and the word caused confusion.
The tutor nodded as Mizuki spoke: not in agreement, but collecting mistakes. The group discussed what the men could be waiting for — some crime no doubt, Mizuki should watch her bag. Those stations are dangerous.
The tutor shrugged. ‘It’s part of our culture to observe. It rarely means what you think.’
The women disagreed, and began speaking in English. It wasn’t the looks, so much, but the comments, or the tutting, what was that about? Men tutting at women? And wasn’t it worse in southern Italy than anywhere else?
Mizuki found nothing problematic in the men’s interest. Nothing troublesome. It wasn’t quite interest in any case. She knew the word in English, she knew it in Japanese: one of the men was assessing her. Collecting information. He’d looked at her, three times, with a kind of assessment that had little to do with catching her eye. When men look at you they usually expect a response. But this man didn’t appear to want anything.
Although her story had nothing to do with coincidence, the class became busy with stories of happenstance: a woman who missed a flight that crashed into the ocean off Brazil, only to be killed one year later in a car accident in Austria; a man who survived one bombing in London to die four years later in another. Mizuki could not follow the logic. Europeans, she thought, Americans, are like birds in the way they collect information: greedy and undisciplined. How foreign this all seemed in comparison to the look she’d received three times at the Circumvesuviana, a look of solid concentration, a look signifying intelligence, a focused assessment.
With some effort the tutor drew the conversation back to the previous night, to conversations the students might have attempted in Italian. But the discussion slipped into rumour and could not be retrieved.
‘I don’t like it here. It isn’t safe.’
The group nodded in agreement.
‘It’s no worse than anywhere else.’ Mizuki shrugged and added that the city was beautiful, knowing this would please the tutor.
‘It’s not the city. It’s the people.’
The other students keenly agreed. Something about the city just didn’t feel safe. Mizuki flushed with embarrassment.
One of the military wives spoke up. ‘They warn us not to go into the centre on our own. We aren’t allowed into the Spanish Quarter. Don’t even think about it.’
While Mizuki had spent time in Berkeley there were still some American accents she couldn’t follow.
The tutor clapped her hands, ‘Italian! We speak in Italian!’ This was not what she wanted to discuss.
A French student shifted her chair forward. ‘I couldn’t live here. It’s all the same. The restaurants serve Italian food and nothing else. There’s a Japanese restaurant in Vomero, and guess what? They sell pizza.’ She held up her hands, exasperated. ‘Seriously. This is old Europe. It’s important what village you come from, or street, or neighbourhood. It matters. People actually care about that kind of thing.’
Mizuki couldn’t accept the point. How different was this, say, from New York, Paris, Tokyo, where people took you more seriously depending on your street, district, zone.
The American student held up her hand. And what about the Spanish student in Elementario Due who was chased through the Centro Storico by a man with a machete?
The tutor dipped forward in defeat. She knew this student, she said, and Erica, point of fact, wouldn’t run even if her head were on fire.
‘I heard this from an Italian,’ the American continued regardless. ‘There’s an earthquake in the middle of the day, OK, and a house shared by two families — one family from Milan, the other from Venice — and it’s totally destroyed. Which family die?’
The women fell silent.
‘A family from Naples who broke in while the others were at work.’
Mizuki could not look up and didn’t want to face the tutor. The class fell silent: when the tutor finally spoke she suggested they take an early break.