Director's Cut (19 page)

“A state allowance? You're not claiming that you've been sent here for reasons of state to enjoy the good life in Rome?”

“More or less,” says Maxim. He does his best to explain the Dutch social security system. It's not easy. The concept of unemployment benefits isn't the problem—of course, the government doesn't abandon its stranded herring gutters and curdled milkmaids—but the old man twice mishears the amount they are receiving. The ease with which they've conquered a ship of gold like that gives rise to an array of new questions. He is most confused by the news that they never had to be employed in the first place, but became unemployed immediately, on their last day of school, when, like Maxim and Gala, they started getting paid for nothing.

“You could also call her a mother who is not terribly concerned
about her offspring,” Sangallo demurred. “She throws some money at them and turns her back, washing her hands of the problem.”

It takes him a while to appreciate just how confident these youngsters are that they have a right to something they don't earn, never have earned, and have no intention of repaying, but once it's sunk in the astonishment on his face turns to increasing admiration. Smiling cautiously, then glancing from one to the other to make sure they're not pulling his leg, he bursts out laughing.

“An allowance from the state to do nothing? Masterful!” He slaps his thighs. “Only in the Netherlands!”

Sleeves rolled up, the farmer's wife comes out from behind her donkey to make sure he's not mocking her cooking.

“Not at all, woman,” shouts Sangallo. “I've just been told something amazing, an unforgettable joke. You missed it. I can't possibly repeat it. Only in Holland, up in the far north. What can you expect from a nation that chose to settle in a swamp?”

The woman washes her hands at the pump and starts to clear the table.

“Hold on, seriously.” Sangallo tries to keep a straight face but can't help chuckling, like a child who wants to hear a story it can't get enough of. “One more time: you get money every month and you don't have to do anything for it at all.”

“Well, you do have to sign for it.”

“An IOU!”

“No, just a form with a few questions about how you are and so on. You have to hand it in.”

“And then there's an interview where they ask you about your answers?”

“You put it in a mailbox outside the building, so you don't have to go to the trouble of coming at office hours. And if you can't make it one time … or maybe a bit longer, a few months, or half a year …”

“… you get somebody else to do it for you and you pocket the money!” guesses Sangallo. He is so overcome by the giggles that he has to walk over to the window for a breath of fresh air. “It's classic. This is, it's … I tell you, this is material for an opera, a comic intermezzo: tara-rom-ti-ra, the pranks of a shameless villain fleecing his master right under his nose. Pure commedia dell'arte: behind the count's back, the
servants put on his most beautiful clothes and lord it over his riches. Pantalone in the polder. Piddelee, piddelee, piddelipom. Ah, Rossini is turning in his grave.”

He pays the peasant woman for the meal, buying her wine and a woven basket of candied orange pieces, so sweet that the bottom is already in sight before the car has started heading south again.

“Les nouveaux pauvres,”
says Sangallo, his fingers touching Maxim's and Gala's as they try to scrape up the last crystalized droplets of fruit. “Cultural tramps, subsidized vagabonds. Traveling the world without a job and yet carefree. Beautiful, shameless people. That's how they do it, the new poor!”

Most of Vesuvius is hidden behind the clouds gathered on its slopes. They drive past Herculaneum, but it is closed for the holidays. They park beside the deserted supervisor's building—not out front, but around the back. Sangallo spreads a map out on the hood and decides to continue by foot over a donkey path. For a long time, it follows the fence, before turning off over extremely rough terrain. Sangallo explains that the tourist attractions are only a fraction of the archaeological treasures. On this side, where everything was buried under lava, there was more destruction than on the Pompeii side, which was buried under a rain of ash. But here too the grass grows over country houses, farms and basilicas, market squares, taverns, and theaters. The slopes they are walking over follow the roofs and terraces, galleries and domes of an ancient suburb. They leave the path for a roller-coaster route down steep declines and through unexpected pits, more and more slippery now that it has started drizzling.

A group of men in overalls has taken shelter beneath a tarpaulin strung between trees, waiting for their coffeepot to bubble above a gas burner. One embraces Sangallo. His name, Professor Baldassare, is not the only thing that reminds them of an old-style conjurer: he wears a monocle, has a Vandyke beard, and is followed by a blond assistant in a miniskirt. Beaming, she skips around him in the mud and hands him his props when he asks for them: umbrella, map, timetable, ballpoint, sketchbook, pointer. Hop-la!

They descend a short ladder to the excavations. Among the discoveries the professor points out, Gala and Maxim recognize an alley and
the counter in front of the window of what was once a bakery. Next door, a stone phallus adorns the wall, a sign that this complex—which the professor has dubbed the House of the Bread Virgin—was once a brothel. They are standing on the round roof of what seems to be the most important discovery. The professor cannot mention it without beaming. The bathhouse, almost intact, must have been attached to the brothel. The concrete that has been hacked free from the lava is still covered with chunks of marble, and the rain is washing off the last clods of soil. The mud drips down the walls and over the petrified door, whose iron locks melted during the disaster in the year 79. Star shapes are slowly emerging in the damp cement beneath their feet. Inside, the bathers saw these stars illuminating planets on the ceiling of the dark steam bath, up to the moment that the lava filled the airholes and sealed the room in time.

The professor drums up his team. Grumbling, they leave their shelter and step out into the bad weather, where they meticulously follow the instructions of his assistant, who has put on a glimmering plastic rain hat for this number.

“Why are they working on Christmas?” asks Gala.

“In Italy, the past swallows an enormous amount of money. There are too many treasures and not enough cash, which gets distributed between two departments. First, the official one, from the government, which watches over and exploits excavated monuments and must make a profit, if only to pay its staff. So it's always in search of new star attractions, like an amusement park. Baldassare heads up its rival. It's made up of serious academics, a small but fanatical army who do their research as discreetly as possible. The government department tries to steal Baldassare's grants, but every cut just makes him more inventive. Officially, he works with archaeology students from foreign universities, but unofficially he works with grave robbers and bounty hunters. Their illegal expeditions carry out important preliminary work that is beyond his official ambit. He constantly struggles to keep them on his side so that the real treasures don't fall into the hands of the art collectors the professional grave robbers really work for. If he didn't cooperate, the damage would be much worse. As soon as everything's drawn up and recorded, he fills the site in again, before the government can turn it into
an archaeological theme park. So he does his most important work when there are few prying eyes around, days like today …”

It clears up. The clouds part and reveal the volcano's quiet summit, but the improvement in the weather does nothing to accelerate the excavation.

“Sangallo's right,” Gala says a little later. To kill time, she and Maxim are walking through the vineyards on the slope. “Is it humanly possible to be happier than we are right now?”

“I don't know. It feels like we're working our way toward something, but our lives are actually at a standstill.”

“Happiness is never agitated. Don't you think? Whereas sorrow never stops.” She hesitates. “Maxim, … this morning, what was that all about? Geppi hoping we wouldn't be back too soon.”

“She rents out our bed.”

“Our bed?”

“When we're not there, she rents it out.”

“That's disgraceful.” She laughs indignantly.

“Probably by the hour.”

“And you let her?” she argues. “That's a great idea.”

“We're living there for next to nothing, I can hardly complain.”

“We have to look for something else.”

“We can't afford anything else. Don't worry. It's just the mattress. The sheets are clean. For some reason, she's decided we're going on a trip.”

Gala sits down. She closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun. Maxim does the same.

“Gianni asked me.”

“What?”

“Yesterday morning at the market. All of a sudden he showed up on his
motorino
. Asking if I wanted to take a trip.”

“With him?”

“Who else? I don't know. It took me by surprise. I didn't hang around, I just walked away.”

“What a rogue.” Maxim laughs.

“But what's it supposed to mean?”

“You're beautiful. This is Italy. All the men want to take a trip with you. Don't worry, I won't let you go …”

Gala looks at him.

“Never?”

In the fleeting instant in which they are nothing but each other's eyes, Maxim's head becomes a tumult, two scenarios playing out at high speed. He doesn't want to consider either one.

“… unless you want to, of course,” he answers, because what do you have left if you put beauty in a cage?

When they return, the camp is deserted, the pan boiling away on the burner. Everyone has hastily assembled in front of the bathhouse. Five strong men are attempting to pry open the door with a lever. Exhausted workmen are relieved by students who follow the professor's instructions, taking measurements and using scalpels and fine brushes to try to enlarge the gap between the door and the wall. It budges. Dust billows out of the chinks they've scraped open and swirls to the ground. For a moment, the door yields, then jams again. Each time it moves forward a little, it immediately sinks back into place, as if a rival team inside were pulling just as hard. The past refuses to let go, but the present is stronger. Unexpectedly, the grinding of stone on stone is followed by the sound of a powerful suction. Gala grabs Maxim's hand. She feels the change of pressure in her ears, just as she does with the onset of the epileptic aura that precedes her seizures. Maxim feels the same. Others reach for their ears too, briefly, or they swallow like people in a train that has raced into a tunnel. Then, as if the other team has given up, the door shoots forward with unexpected ease. The men stumble and fall, the petrified door atop them.

The first air escapes. A gust caresses Gala's hair, dry and poisonous in her throat. She gasps as if she's about to cough, drinking a full draft of the second wave, the air that wetly flies into freedom, soft as a sigh of relief, sweet as candied orange. Immediately afterward, as everyone present is sniffing for more of the same, this storm too has evaporated, the atmosphere calmed. In this stillness, Gala and Maxim look at each other, openmouthed, beaming with amazement. And then it happens. Emerging calmly from the bathhouse comes the smell of oleander, rolling warmly through the December air until it rises and is scattered.
Swirling through its midst comes eucalyptus and a dash of rose oil mixed with the powerful sting of birch, as penetrating as if the lids have just been removed from the pots of salve. Fearing that the slightest movement will disperse the shimmering cloud surrounding them, they stand motionless, but Gala sees that Maxim has closed his eyes, hand on his chest, head thrown back. Then come the perfumes, essences of geranium, honeysuckle, and vanilla, an acrid flood of musk. When these have been liberated, they fleetingly perceive the unmistakable hint of human sweat, as dull and dead as flakes of skin, sebum, and talc, immediately followed by oils, at first as soft as milk and then, sharper, sourer, the tang of fruit. Grasses arise, spicy, light as lilies, heavy as camomile and lavender. A few minutes after the capsule is opened, everything is gone. Only a little lavender, lingering close to the ground, wobbles up occasionally, as the people slowly begin to move. Sangallo stands immobile among them.

Inside, the bathhouse turns out to burrow deep under the hill. There are three large rooms, each filled for the main part with a basin—the hot, warm, and cold baths, separated by a series of cells for relaxing or dressing, all hurriedly abandoned. A stand that was knocked over. Earthenware salve pots in a niche. Lids lying broken on the ground. The outside light hardly reaches the second room, but even there the marble soaks it up and emanates a gentle glow. Some of the decorative panels have come loose from the walls. Earthquakes have caused damage. In two places where the ceiling has collapsed under the weight of the soil, roots push in from every direction, but as they wander through the rooms, Gala, Maxim, and Sangallo see them as they were. Their footsteps echo dully off the domes and round walls.

Gala lies at the edge of a bath to try to absorb the experience. Maxim goes over to sit beside her. They don't need words. They are both seeing themselves from a distance, not only experiencing the moment but seeing themselves in later years looking back upon it. Aware of themselves, of one another, breathing in that beauty, their diaphragms moving up and down to the same rhythm, just as when they're asleep. Watching themselves from somewhere in the distance, seeing how small they are there on the edge of the bath, they feel they should be weeping, crying, but they can't.

“You could touch her,” says Sangallo, from the doorway. No one
knows how long he's been watching. He whispers conspiratorily. “Why not? Just for a moment. Two bodies touching. Just for the image. The idea. In the interest of science.”