Earthquake I.D.

Chapter Three

29 John Domini Chapter Three A lepers’ city, a city full of crooks, a city for the end of everything . . . no. The Naples Barbara encountered over the next couple of days proved impossible to label and file away. At times it did seem a city of prayers. But more often she could be certain only of the appearance of prayers. You knew the prayers by their empty husks, clinging to the walls of chapels and shrines. The things littered the old downtown churches, the ones that remained open. As soon as Barbara ducked into the sanctuary, navigating another doorway marbled with dust and braced by scaffolds, she’d spot the offerings on the walls, the ojetti votivi. Also hand-lettered notices lurked amid the ironworks of reconstruction: OJETTI VOTIVI. Where you found a church, you found a shop, supplies for the faithful. In there, among crucifixes and medallions, you could buy a piece to represent whatever prayer you had in mind: a miniature in low relief, plated with silver or gold. There were broken hearts, small as half a pinkie or as large as two spread hands, and sacred hearts crowned in flame. Also the heart as muscle, anatomically correct. Here was a leg, there a head, there a household animal, or (its lines as sharply drawn as if lifted from an ad for medical supplies) a syringe. Plus every shop offered the allpurpose clasped hands. These surrogates came with small hooks and nail holes, the better to be hung onto a reliquary, or tacked into the plaster of the chapel wall. The offering could linger for years, after that, growing as dirty as the streets outside. In the emptier chapels Barbara spotted graffiti too, beside these single-use icons. In one case she made out a date back in the previous century, scratched beside a few desperate words. The letters had gone black with accrued grime—something like the resentments built up over a long marriage. 30 EarthquakE I.D. The mother had good reason, over these few days, for going back into the breathless and rackety alleys down at sea level. She had obligations that got her out of her mansion on the hill. Now that was a puzzle, the Lulucitas’ apartment, ten rooms and two balconies as a throw-in on her husband’s deal with NATO and the UN. Plus anyone who’d gotten over the jetlag could see at once that the neighborhood was far better than the one in which the man had been hit. Barbara could see it the very next morning, as she fell into place among the commuters heading for the funicular.Nonethelesssherodedowntothecenter,theoriginalcity.First she had her appointments with the bureaucracy, functionaries whose job it was to confirm that the face before them, flesh and powder, was the same as in the photo on the new I.D. Another day she had paperwork with an Italian bank and the American Consulate, and when she was done with those errands she could come up with something else. On one trip she went to the central police station and registered her picture and fingerprints, hers and the children’s. This meant the kids were with her that time, down from the protected heights of the bourgeoisie, and so the family made only a single stop for prayers. A prominent cathedral lay a block from the station. “You know Mama,” John Junior explained to the girls, “she’s always got to find the Duomo.” But when Mama descended into the centro alone, she had her choice of churches, outside of five or six that had been shuttered and padlocked following the quake. These always gave her pause, the edifice still consecrated and yet vacant. Their porticos were blocked with sawhorses, wood and iron both, then double-x’d with ribbons of orange plastic. The off-limits sign bore no church insignia but rather a government stamp, machine-black. Barbara suffered a chill the first time she faced one of those, during these confusing couple of days. She shivered, she blinked, and then she visited a travel office. She asked for the agent who spoke the best English. The mother learned that the airlines preferred twenty-one day notice, in order to guarantee the best connections and a reasonable price. But on the other hand there were flights to New York every day. Of course she couldn’t make reservations till she had a better idea when Jay’s mother was arriving. Grandma Aurora...