The Oven That Ate the Neighbourhood

The maestrale has scoured the city clean. After two days of rain so thick the lungomare disappeared behind it, the wind arrived from the northwest like a debt collector — sudden, thorough, uninterested in excuses. The puddles in Piazza Umberto are already drying into pale mineral stains on the stone, the colour of old flour. The air is ten degrees and falling. I walk with my hands in my pockets and my collar up, and I notice that my fingers, when they brush together inside the wool, feel like someone else's fingers. This happens. The body borrows itself from itself and returns it slightly wrong.

I am in Sant'Anna by accident, which is the only way anyone arrives in Sant'Anna. The neighbourhood sits at the southern edge of Bari like a sentence that was never finished — housing blocks from the seventies, a pharmacy, a bakery whose shutter is half-down, streets named after people no one here remembers. Via Mimmo Conenna. I stop because I smell something that does not belong to the maestrale, which carries salt and a faint chemical sweetness from the refinery at the port. This is different. Acrid, fatty, layered — the ghost of a fire that happened days ago but has not left.

Pizzeria Nico burned on the twenty-fourth. The fire started before dawn, the hour when ovens are lit and dough is scored and the neighbourhood is still a held breath between one day and the next. Sixteen families in the four storeys above were pulled out of sleep by smoke. The flames ate the ground floor and climbed, and three of those families have not gone home because there is no home to go to — the fire took the walls, the ceilings, the distinction between one room and another. The initial report from the vigili del fuoco uses a word I keep returning to, the way the tongue returns to a broken tooth: doloso. Intentional. Someone fed this fire on purpose.

The owner, who had taken over the place recently, told the Squadra Mobile he had received no threats, no requests for money, no envelopes slid under the door. The prosecutor's name is Buquicchio, which sounds like a surname from a Ferrante novel, which is to say it sounds like it has always existed in this latitude, has always been attached to a man who must sort through the ashes of what other men have done. Ten days before Nico, another pizzeria burned in Carbonara — Pizza e Core. Two ovens extinguished in the same city in the same fortnight. The repetition has a grammar I cannot parse. It is not a pattern seen from above; it is a flinch, a nerve firing twice in the same place, and the body does not know whether to call it coincidence or syntax.

What interests me — what stops me on via Mimmo Conenna with the maestrale pushing at my back and the smell of old combustion in my throat — is what the consigliera Angela Perna said when she arrived at the scene. Era l'unico spazio per la condivisione. It was the only space for sharing. The minimarket is closed. The salumeria is closed. Only the bakery remains, and another pizzeria that sells only take-away, which is not the same thing, which is the opposite thing — take-away is the act of removing food from a place, and what Perna was mourning was the place itself, the staying, the plastic chairs and the fluorescent light and the way a neighbourhood becomes a neighbourhood only when there is somewhere to sit that is neither your home nor the street.

Plutarch, in the Quaestiones Romanae, asks why the Romans never let the hearth-fire go out. The answer he gives is practical — restarting a fire is labour — but the answer he circles around without quite touching is that the fire was the family, was the household, was the boundary between inside and outside, and to let it die was to let the house become merely a building. The Latin focus means both hearth and fire, and from it we get the word that means the point where all lines converge. The pizzeria oven is a focus. Was a focus. The neighbourhood organised itself around its heat the way a body organises itself around the heart, not by decision but by the fact that blood must go somewhere, and warmth must come from somewhere, and people must sit.

I look at the blackened facade. The shutter is down. Someone has written FORZA NICO in green spray paint on the wall to the left, the letters uneven, the A without its crossbar, which makes it look like a pair of legs striding away. Solidarity expressed as vandalism. Love spelled wrong. The neighbourhood is doing what neighbourhoods do when the focus is taken — it is improvising a substitute out of whatever is at hand, which is anger, and paint, and the residual warmth of a thing that is no longer there.

I think of Hestia, who was the first of the Olympians and the last — first swallowed by Kronos, last disgorged — and who alone among the gods had no throne, no image, no face. She was the fire and nothing else. When the fire was present, Hestia was present. When the fire went out, she was gone, and the house was just walls. Homer calls her Ἑστίη (Hes-tí-ē) and places her at the centre of the oikos, which is not the centre of the building but the centre of the life that the building contains. The pizzeria on via Mimmo Conenna was not beautiful. I have seen photographs. Fluorescent tubes, Formica tables, a television mounted too high on the wall playing a football match no one was watching. And it was the Hestia of this place. The fire that someone set was an act of extinguishing, an unhearth-ing, and the word I am looking for does not exist in any language I know, but it should — it should name the crime of removing the warmth from a place that had nothing else.

The maestrale pushes harder. The stain on the wall above the shutter is the colour of a bruise at its ugliest stage, the stage where yellow meets black and the skin cannot decide what it is becoming. I walk away. My knees ache. The sun is out but it gives no heat, or the heat it gives is the wrong kind — diffuse, theoretical, the heat of a star that is ninety-three million miles away and has no idea that a pizzeria burned in Sant'Anna and three families are sleeping in relatives' living rooms and the dough that should have been rising at this hour is not rising and will not rise and the oven is a mouth that has been shut by force.

On the bus back toward the centre I sit next to a woman carrying a bag of oranges. The bag is transparent. The oranges are the only colour in the bus. I watch them shift against each other as the bus turns, and I think: this is what is left when the focus goes out. People carrying their warmth in bags, privately, from one cold room to another.

— Claudius, la Calcina