It was a man, probably somewhere in his forties, although it was hard to tell. He looked very old, a bit shorter than I was and much thinner, wiry as they say. The skin of his face and neck and hands was ravaged by what likely was a lifetime spent on the streets, at least out of doors, and yet he was well dressed in a clean blue and white striped oxford shirt and deep indigo blue jeans that seemed to have just come off the rack. His face, close enough to mine to sneak a kiss, was deformed, bunched and swollen, and his eyes were small and higher up than usual, with one slightly lower than the other. So, bad luck in the genetic lottery. He looked up at me with his mouth open in a kind of half-gape, half-smile, freely displaying his glistening, toothless gums.
—Good afternoon, I said.
The man smiled but said nothing. So I tried dialect. From my mother and grandmother, I spoke a little. I was about as fluent in the language of their youth as tourists are in mine. Hello, goodbye, how much, curses. But he still did not respond.
—What’s your name? I asked, first in Italian, then again in dialect.
The smile grew and traveled all over his face. I tried to keep my eyes focused on his and not the salivating cavity of his open mouth.
—How are you? I asked.
I looked around. The farmers had begun to bundle their wares and load them into the backs of small trucks and handbarrows. Others were taking down tarpaulins. No one seemed to notice us.
—What is your name? I asked again.
The man made a moaning sound that might have been language and tugged on my hand several times, lightly but with obvious eagerness. Then I was no longer looking at his face but the slick black hair on the back of his head, and he was pulling me down the Via San Stefano, back in the direction from which I had come.
—Tell me your name, I said, as I let myself be guided by him. I felt like a tuning fork vibrating, still holding his hand but following his lead when, with an excited sound, he took us down Via Guardia. This street I knew. I loved it, actually. Here, at any time of day and no matter how pitiless shined the summer sun in all its ancient brightness, here the air was always dim and blue, almost subaqueous thanks to a semipermanent covering of tarpaulins strung from the balconies on either side of the street to protect this section of the open-air market from the sun and rain and the occasional hailstorms that appear out of nowhere in late summer. Here one could find the things that are always in season—kitchenware, electronics, black-market DVDs, butterfly knives and flashing knickknacks from China. Other things you would never dream of finding in such a place. The man stopped at a stall selling consumer electronics and pointed.
—Qua, he said. He looked at me, as if for a reaction, and then back to the stall. Qua. His speech was slurred, but I was sure that was what he said. Qua. Here. So he did speak dialect, after all.
—Here what? I asked. What is here? Do you want that? Is there something you need?
But we were moving again. I had the impression he had only meant to show me something, but I could not imagine what I was meant to see, an impression that only grew stronger as he pulled me around the marketplace and eventually up Fontananuova and out of the market altogether, then along the winding streets of Contrada Petrara and finally along others I had never walked before, pausing now and again to point gleefully at this thing, or to gesture with pursed lips, and say, Qua, Qua, Here, Here, shifting his gaze excitedly between my eyes and whatever it was that he was showing me and never letting go of my hand. Carried away by emotion, sometimes he squeezed it rather hard. At each of these stops, he seemed to search for something in my face, and in response I felt a sense of tremendous importance—obligation, really—without having the slightest idea to what it was supposed to attach. I tried hard to match his enthusiasm, to respond to his Heres with Heres of my own, and for a time I had the sense that the world is revealed only to those who forget themselves, but he showed me a lot that day, he took me all over town, and eventually my stamina and my patience began to give out.
A black dog. A yellow door. A trattoria called “Old Growth.” A stretch of road paved in small, square stones laid into the shape of scallops. A school window. A temporary fence of perforated green plastic and, beyond it, a vacant construction site. A pair of women peering into a baby carriage. The glaring mountains in the distance, almost white at this time of day, their pine forests cut a thousand years ago and never once permitted to grow back. Sights I could not identify. A cellphone repair shop in an alley and, beside it, a weed-filled lot seen through a locked iron gate. There was a padlock on the chain, but it was either broken or had been left unfastened.
—Where are we? I said. I was afraid he would reply, Here, but he only looked up at me in silence. —I don’t know where we are. —I need to get back to the center, I said. Can you show me the way.
—Yes, he said, and he took me there, in less than ten minutes and by way of some cobblestone streets and a humble neighborhood that we had not yet traversed.
—Well, I said, once we had returned to the now empty piazza, Thank you. I have to go. He looked up at me and, at first, said nothing and didn’t let go of my hand. He had held it for at least an hour, although it must be said that all this time I had been holding onto him, too. My palm was sweating and my fingers sore. Still, I was reluctant to let go.
—I have to go, I said, and I tried to pull my hand away, but he held on. For the first time I really felt the strength of his grip. It was like iron.
—Portami, he said. Take me. Or: Take me with you. Or: Take me away. This phrase he had pronounced not in dialect, but proper Italian.
—I can’t, I said.
I tried again to free my hand, this time more assertively but still without the sort of violence I feared would give offense, but he refused to let go, and all I achieved by jerking my arm was pulling him closer to me. We were now standing almost chest to chest.
—Portami. Per favore.
—Please, I said, it is not possible, and this time I tore my hand away and turned my back on him and set off rather too fast in the direction of the soccer stadium, where I had parked the car. As if to prove that I wasn’t coldhearted, not really, and that it wasn’t personal, I gave him a wave over my shoulder and called, See you soon, and as I heard myself speak those essentially meaningless words of hope and intention, I knew that although their message was intended for the man whose hand I had held for the past hour or two, their sound had been directed not only at him but also at the disappeared farmers, and also at this town where I had been born but now entered as a tourist, and also to the regions of myself, my life, the regions of this world that I could never forget or leave behind because I would never know them. In other words, I called to him in the loud, halfhearted voice of a market vendor at the end of day, and I never turned, and I never looked back, and that night I had a dream.
II.
Of course it was impossible. I could not have taken him anywhere. What would that have meant, anyway? Where did he think I was going? What did he think we would have done once we got there? But let’s not be sentimental. There was no place in my life for him. We cannot simply take strangers off the street into our lives, just like that, although here again I must admit that, it does seem like the sort of thing that people do, for good and for ill, all the time. I would soon discover that this was his experience, too.
I returned to Ariano frequently in the coming years, over Christmas or New Year’s or summer holidays, although it would be a long time before I told this story. Four, maybe five years. This time, my aunt Fara had also come to visit, and to mark the occasion my parents put on a huge luncheon and invited most of our extended family. Of all my aunts and uncles, Fara was the one I liked best and who came around the least. I was always saving up my stories for her, and although I had nearly forgotten the incident that day in the marketplace, at some point after the meal, as we all sat around talking in the shade of the plane trees, she asked if the market still took place on Wednesdays, and whether it was too late to stop by and pick up some Caciocchiato or if she should go instead to the supermarket, and that distant afternoon fell on me with all the weight of the present tense. Like the itchy palm that tells good fortune, I could feel the sweat-slick skin of his rough hand in my hand in his hand. In my hand.
Fara waited patiently for me to finish my story before saying —Oh, that’s Peppiniello. Everybody knows him.
I didn’t. So she told me the story of Peppiniello.
Nobody knows when Peppiniello was born, she said, and nobody knows who his parents were, although the people around here have their suspicions. All we know is that one night, some forty-odd years ago, someone abandoned a baby in the piazza at Ariano. Nevertheless, there was one point on which everyone seemed to agree: Peppiniello must have come from elsewhere. Only a foreigner would abandon a helpless child, just like that. Word spread into the towns and villages of the region, and word returned bringing news about several women and girls who had been pregnant, had carried to term, but were reported to have delivered stillborn right around the time that Peppiniello would have also come into this world, women who therefore, as if to add insult to injury, added my aunt in English, quickly became the prime suspects for the crime of abandoning the child in the piazza one night when no one was around. Since the buildings surrounding the piazza all belong to businesses or the church or city government, nobody knows how long the infant Peppiniello had lain crying and unknowing on the stones—the very stones that were under my feet, it occurred to me, when he grabbed my hand out of nowhere. Sometime before dawn, a man called Marco, one of the town drunks, discovered the wailing child. He carried Peppiniello in his arms as far as the convent at the edge of town, where the nuns took him in without their usual word of reproach for the inveterate sinner whom they knew so well. There Peppiniello grew into a boy and then a young man. His differences became apparent, the belated and arduous development of his motor skills and speech, but they had little impact on the course of his daily life as a child among the sisters, who loved and doted on him as if he were their own miracle child, immaculately conceived.
Almost as soon as he could walk, Peppiniello began to run away. He snuck out at night and during mass and at prayers and at mealtimes and ran the three and a half kilometers back to town. The nuns tried everything they could think of to prevent their beloved boy from leaving—they locked his door at night and sometimes during the day, they punished as only nuns can punish, with their gift for the imaginative and the baroque, but they could invent nothing to keep Peppiniello safely within the convent walls. Each time he ran away, a detachment of nuns went to fetch him and scoured the town until either they or someone else returned Peppiniello to the convent. Then came a day when he ran off and no one went to find him. He must have been around sixteen or seventeen then. Peppiniello spent the following two decades living on the streets of Ariano. He passed in and out of the hands of various local gangs, a few months or years with this one, then another, who used him as a distraction for committing petty crime or a lure for tourists’ hearts and pocketbooks, and they covered him in bruises and cigarette burns and mockery that Peppiniello sometimes understood and sometimes did not. He would run away from one gang only to end up with another that treated him more or less the same. In between, he slept out in the open on the street, or with a blanket when he had one, or in the grass of abandoned lots or under a lemon tree in the city park or on the old farms that surround the town. He got food wherever he asked for it, and the town’s citizens were known to drape blankets over his body while he slept on the stones and pavements of their beloved Ariano Irpino.
That’s where he was when, a few years ago, he must have been in his early forties, a rich lady found Peppiniello on the streets, walking around and taking the hands of strangers, filthy and, to the lady’s eyes, nearly naked save for a t-shirt torn out at the arms and a pair of stained short pants held up with a length of barbed wire. My aunt told me the woman’s name, but I will call her only “the rich lady” because she is so fabulously wealthy that she is well known in that country and will be identifiable to many, especially to the people of Campania, where in addition to be being rich she is best known for constructing a residence for disabled children on the site of a foreclosed olive farm outside of Ariano. It seems her daughter had been born with some fairly severe issues and, when the rich woman was unable to find a place in Rome suitable for her precious namesake to live her life and develop to the best of her abilities, she built one from scratch out in the countryside and staffed it with locals, a state of the art facility with a swimming pool and stables and a printmaking studio that housed the disabled children of the country’s rich and famous. The rich lady ordered her driver and bodyguard to load Peppiniello into her bulletproof sedan and then the four of them drove all the way back to Rome where, according to my aunt, the lady, her driver, and the bodyguard shuttled Peppiniello between hospitals and clinics, where he underwent many tests—what tests I did not ask—and after several days of this, they returned with Peppiniello and set him up in the residence she had constructed, where thereafter she covered his room and board at what is, even for the wealthy, considerable expense. That’s how my aunt told the story: the woman took him to the city, took him to the residence, but I supposed there are other words to describe it. If I hadn’t met Peppiniello before hearing his story, I might have said kidnapped, or I might have said saved, but I knew better, or at least I thought I did.
By all accounts Peppiniello was happy in his new home, with a room of his own in a bungalow shared with several other residents, one of whom was the rich woman’s daughter, a farm and animals to tend, but only if he wanted, a warm bed, and three meals a day from a menu designed by a famous chef in Rome. But soon Peppiniello began to run away again, always finding his way back to the town. In this case, escape would be closer to the truth, for the residence is surrounded by a cement wall nearly ten feet high with a gate that is manned by guards 24/7 and locked at night. Nevertheless, he kept disappearing, and whenever a member of the staff realized he had gone, someone would have to drive into town where they knew, sooner or later, they would find him. Nobody ever figured out how he managed to keep escaping—again, there were suspicions, largely directed at the girls on the staff—nor why one day he simply stopped running away.
At this point, I thought I knew where the story was headed. But then instead of going where I thought it would, it just ended, and after a time when it seemed nobody knew what to say, my aunt turned to my mother and asked her about my grandmother’s medallion of the Virgin. It seems that whenever she was in town and visited my grandmother, my aunt checked her jewelry box, which she had done again just yesterday only to find that the medallion was missing. As she spoke of this necklace, a blue-winged bird appeared in the air between us and lit upon the table. The bird, which I think is called giandaia, made a few cautious hops and, to judge by its swiveling head, thought a series of quick thoughts about the table crumbs until a kind of clock went off in its mind and it flew almost straight up into the air. Nobody seemed to have seen this but me.
III.
I have given it much thought, but I still cannot say why I went to him. Only that I felt a kind of implacable need. Something like regret, but in reverse, if that makes any sense: as if the future were calling my name in the same implacable tone that regret uses when it hounds us from the past. The way vendors in the market hawk in the morning hours, when it still seems possible that they may sell out early and head home satisfied, that they may enter into another week of hardship with a little victory under their arm. I must admit that I am a little like the townspeople from my aunt’s story. I have my suspicions about why I did what I did, but I also know that they are most likely misplaced, at best a search for meaning where there is none, and at worst the sort of violent impulse cultivated and purged by the ancient practice of scapegoating.
I went to find Peppiniello on my very next trip to Ariano. The ostensible purpose of this visit was to introduce my boyfriend Paul to the place where I had grown up and for him to meet my extended family. I had come half a dozen times without him, and finally Paul had made it clear that if we were to progress any further in our relationship, I either had to open my past to him or abandon any idea of a shared future. My parents had met Paul once before, a few years back when they had come to the United States; it was their first trip out of Italy since their honeymoon, and I knew they had saved a long time for it, even though they lied and told me that my father had won some money playing the lottery. He was always “playing the numbers,” as he called it, but only the regional lotto in Napoli because according to him all the others were corrupt and prejudiced against southerners, but he had never won a penny, and no one in our family believed that he ever would, least of all my father. Almost as soon as we arrived, I took Paul to the residence the rich woman had built. We landed on a Tuesday evening, took a train from Napoli and then a taxi to my parents’ house, where we had expected to have a midnight snack and some wine with them and maybe my brother, but when we opened the door we found a large contingent of family waiting there to meet my fiancé, as they called him. Aunts and cousins grabbed my hands and kissed me, but I could tell they were only making sure that their eyes had not deceived them: no ring. We waited a long time for everyone to leave so that we could go to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the living room.
In the morning, my mother asked me if we had plans, and I said yes.
—It’s time for Paul to meet my old friends, I said.
My mother raised her eyebrows: —Really? Equal parts disbelief and delight.
I had never been to the residence. I didn’t even know where it was, and I wasn’t going to ask because I didn’t want anyone to know where we were going. No one except Paul, that is, and even he I didn’t tell until we were already in the car and driving. He took it with good humor, I guess, saying only that he didn’t have anywhere else to be. My aunt had described the residence as being about ten kilometers outside of town, and not counting a few very old and bad cart tracks that a rich lady would never suffer herself to be taken down for very long, there were only three good roads leading into and out of town. First we tried the road north, in the direction of Frolice, where the tent city of migrants on the outskirts of the city soon gives over to endless rows of olive trees rising toward the slopes of the mountain. I watched the odometer while Paul looked out the window. We drove ten, twelve, then twenty kilometers, but saw nothing resembling the walled compound from my aunt’s story. So we tried the other direction, where we found it, a mere eight and a half kilometers beyond the old petrol station where a little jungle of wild mastic and oleander watched us from behind broken windowpanes.
The stuccoed walls of the compound reached almost all the way to the road, but the metal gate was open. Inside was a small gravel parking area reserved for visitors and, beyond that, a long two-story building with a walkway down the middle that served as a sort of entry point into the facility itself. Within the shade of the covered walkway we found a pair of security guards sitting and talking in mismatched wooden chairs. The guards stood. One of them picked a clipboard off the ground.
—Good morning, I said.
—Good morning.
—I’m here to see Peppiniello, I said.
—And you are? asked the guard with the clipboard.
—I’m family.
—What is your name?
I gave a false one. The guard asked to see some identification, which obviously I could not give.
—I left it at home, I said.
At this point, the guard might have let me in—wouldn’t Peppiniello be happy to have a visitor?—or he could have told me to go home and get my identification and return, but instead he said:
—Only family and the guests of family are permitted to visit.
Then I saw Peppiniello. At least I thought I did. The entrance to the residence was designed so that from where we stood, one looked down the open walkway and saw, at its end, a sort of formal garden with gravel paths and fig trees and plots of what looked like fennel and herbs. Peppiniello had walked into this picture of the garden framed by the walkway’s terminus.
—Peppiniello. Peppiniello! I shouted and waved my hand high in the air. A guard turned to see who I was yelling at and clicked his tongue. I wasn’t even certain at the time that it was Peppiniello, and I felt a little embarrassed at how I jumped and waved and carried on. But it might have been. It looked just like him. I called his name once more and this time Peppiniello, or whoever it was, looked up. I could see no expression on his face. I waved and smiled and said, It’s me! and he waved back and then disappeared down a gravel path.
—You have to leave now, said the guard.
—Mille grazie, said Paul, and he took me by the hand and pulled me away.
On the drive to the city center, Paul asked what I had planned to do if they had let us through.
—I don’t know, I said. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of it. I had, often. I just couldn’t think of what to do.
I parked the car by the wall of the old Norman castle and took Paul around the city center. It had been years, and there was no market today, but I was able to show him Via Guardia and its housewares and black-market goods sold year-round in a street out of time under the sea. I think I found the yellow door. We walked for hours that day, got lost and found our way and then lost it again. I stopped at several abandoned lots where I pulled my hand from Paul’s to point and said, He showed me this. And this. I think he showed me this. Maybe it was this one. I think he showed me this.