I wake to heavy traffic under my window, my head still thick with dreams. On my way downstairs I pause on the landing opposite room 17 and feel a tug. But I know the easiest thing is not to think too much about it and just carry on downstairs, hand in the key and leave the hotel for good. Even if I don’t manage to locate Flavia, I won’t come back here. I’d find something better.
I walk across the city, stopping at a little bar for a cappuccino and a croissant. The air smells of coffee, cigarettes and laundry. Strings of clothes are hung out in the narrow passages like bunting. Moped riders duck their heads to avoid vests and socks as they bounce over the cobbles. Cars negotiate alleys barely wide enough to walk down, drivers jabbing at the horn to clear the way. Pedestrians step aside unhurriedly and there are no arguments or remonstrations.
The sun is beating down, but there’s a haze like sheer nylon stretched above the rooftops—dust in the air. I’m just heading west and climbing through distinct areas. The class differences show up clearly in the homes—the bassi, tiny rooms that open directly on to the street, and higher up the huge apartment blocks with their own gate and security—and in the shops and the goods sold in them. Only the dust is spread evenly.
As soon as I’m high enough to see Vesuvius behind me, I take out the photograph and use it to direct my search, heading always west.
It takes a couple of hours to cross the city and locate the right street. I make sure it’s the right view before starting to read the names on the bell-pushes. The building has to be on the left-hand side of the road because those on the right aren’t high enough to have a view over those on the left. I still don’t know if I’m going to find the name or not. Through the gaps between the buildings I can see Vesuvius on the other side of the bay. By looking ahead I’m even able to estimate the exact building, and it turns out I’m right. There’s the name—F. Sannia—among a dozen others. I press the bell without thinking about it.
When Flavia comes to open the door I’m surprised. Perhaps it’s more her place to be surprised than mine, but she stands there with a vacant expression on her face. What a face, though, what extraordinary beauty. She was good looking when we first met, of course, but in the intervening years she has grown into a stunning woman. I fear to lean forward and kiss her cheeks lest she crumble beneath my touch. But the look is blank. I don’t know if she recognizes me. I say her name then my own and I must assume her acquiescence—as she turns back into the hall and hesitates momentarily—to be an invitation. So I follow her. She walks slowly but with the same lightness of step that I remember from before.
As I follow her into the apartment, I’m drawn immediately to the far side of the main room where there’s a balcony with a spectacular view over the Bay of Naples and, right in the center at the back, Mount Vesuvius. Unaware of where Flavia has disappeared to, I stand there watching the view for some minutes. Naples is built on hills and one of them rises from the sea to dominate the left middle ground, stepped with huge crumbling apartment buildings and sliced up by tapering streets and alleys that dig deeper the narrower they become. The whole city hums like a hive and cars and scooters buzz about like drones. But the main attraction is Vesuvius. What a place to build a city: in the shadow of a volcano.
It’s a while before I realize Flavia has returned and is standing behind me as I admire the view.
“What do you want to do while you are in Naples?” she asks with a level voice. “You’ll stay here, of course.”
“You’re very kind. I meant to give you some notice, but I don’t think I had the right phone number.” I show her the number in my book.
“I changed it,” she says as she sits in one of the wicker chairs and indicates for me to do the same. “I’ve been widowed six times,” she says and then falls silent. “It’s easier.”
I don’t know what to say. I think she must have intended to say something else—made a mistake with her English—although she seems so gray and lifeless herself that the statement may well have been true.
We sit on her balcony for half an hour looking out over the city and the volcano on the far side of the bay, during which time I formulate several lines with which to start a fresh conversation but each one remains unspoken. Something in her passivity frightens me. It seems at odds with the elan of the city in which she lives.
But Flavia speaks first. “With this view,” she says slowly, “it is impossible not to watch the volcano, to become obsessed by it.”
I nod.
“My father was alive when it last erupted,” she continues, “in 1944. Now Vesuvius is dormant. Do you want to see Naples?” she asks, turning toward me.
“Yes, very much.”
We leave the apartment and Flavia leads the way to a beaten-up old Fiat Uno. Her driving is a revelation: once in the car and negotiating the hairpin, doubleparked roads leading downtown Flavia is a completely different woman. Here is the lively, passionate girl I knew in London. She takes on other drivers with the determination and verve she showed in my room overlooking the hotel car park when we took it in turns to sit astride each other. She rode me then as she now drives the Fiat, throwing it into 180-degree corners and touching her foot to the floor on the straights. She’s not wearing her seat belt; I unclip mine, wind down my window and put my foot up on the plastic molding in front of me. At one point—when I draw my elbow into the car quickly to avoid a bus coming up on the other side of the road—Flavia turns her head and smiles at me just as she did eight years earlier before falling sleep.
We skid into the parking place and Flavia attacks the handbrake. Once out of the car she’s quiet again, gliding along beside me. “Where are we going?” I ask her. Beyond the city the summit of Vesuvius is draped in thick gray cloud. Out over the sea on our right a heavy wedge of darkest gray thunderheads is making its way landward trailing skirts of rain. In the space of two minutes the island of Capri is rubbed out as the storm passes over it and into the bay.
“She must want to be alone,” Flavia says and, when I look puzzled, continues: “They say that you can see a woman reclining in the outline of the island.”
But Capri is lost behind layers of gray veils now and just as Flavia finishes speaking the first drops of rain explode on my bare arms. Within seconds we are soaked by a downpour of big fat sweet-smelling summer rain. My thin shirt is plastered to my back. The rain runs off Flavia’s still body in trickles. She seems impervious to the cleansing, refreshing effect that I’m enjoying. Dripping wet with rain bouncing off my forehead, I give her a smile, but her expression doesn’t change. “Shall we walk?” I suggest, eyeing some trees in the distance that would give us some shelter. She just turns and starts walking without a word so I follow. The trees—which I realize I have seen previously from Flavia’s balcony—conceal the city aquarium, housed in the lower ground floor of a heavy stone building. I pay for two tickets and we pass in front of a succession of gloomy windows on to another world. It’s so damp down there I feel almost as if we’ve entered the element of the fishes. My shirt clings to my back, getting no drier under the dim lights. Flavia’s white blouse is stuck to her shoulders but there’s no tremor of life as far as I can see. She stares unseeing at the fish, the sinister skate, and lugubrious octopus which regard us with an expression I feel but can’t put a name to. Because I’m beginning to feel quite anxious I hurry past the shrimps and seahorses—which I see only as a blur of commas and question marks—and I’m relieved to get back into the open air.
Flavia takes me to a restaurant she knows and I eat cousins of the creatures we’ve just seen in the aquarium. Flavia orders mineral water and oysters but then hardly touches them. My teeth grind on tiny particles of grit of shell in my sauce, but I don’t say anything because it seems to be a city-wide problem. The waiter’s black patent leather shoes are matt with a fine layer of dust.