The Night Villa (11 page)

By the time we’ve completed the tour and begun the climb up to the modern street level, I feel as though the whole villa is infused with a spirit of corruption that I want to escape. No wonder Vitalis wanted to get her daughter out of here! I shudder, recalling that Iusta had ended up back in Calatoria’s clutches, and wonder if she were forced to partake in the villa’s depraved rites. Unless, I think as I fish in my purse for a few euros to give my guide, Vesuvius erupted before the rites could take place. I almost hope it did.

When I hold out a five-euro bill the guide shakes his head.
“Non è necessario, signora,”
he says.
“E stato una grande piacere fare conoscere questi misteri a una carissima amica del Signor Lyros.”

My face turns hot again. I remind myself that
carissima amica
may mean any dear female friend, not a girlfriend. I start to explain that I’ve never even met John Lyros, but the guide has turned to unlock the gates to the main excavations and is shouting a greeting to his colleague, who appears to be awakening from a nap. So I say my thousand thank-yous—
grazie mille
—and wave as I start the walk back to the train station. At the gate I turn back in the direction of the villa and glimpse the bay above the high tufa wall that nearly two thousand years ago sealed this town in its rock tomb. It occurs to me that Phineas Aulus might have come here expressly to witness the rites practiced at the Villa della Notte. He was, after all, a connoisseur of the exotic and the depraved. And now, I think as I turn my back to the sea, those mysteries lie curled tightly in on themselves within a charred papyrus roll, like a butterfly asleep in its chrysalis, awaiting the light of modern science to set them free.

I
buy a cold Aranciata at the station and sit by an open window on the train ride back, but I still feel as though I’m wearing the day’s heat like a winding cloth made out of the same green scum that coats the frog river. When the train stops at Portici, a voice comes over the loudspeaker announcing a delay. I can’t make out the reasons given—if any—or how long we’re supposed to be stuck here. Without the breeze generated by movement, the car simmers in the heat. I look around to see if any of my fellow passengers are bothered by the delay and to see if I can gather from their conversations any more details about its cause and duration, but no one seems the least bit surprised to be sitting here in a stalled train baking in the midday sun.

An old man takes out a salami and pares a thin circle off with his penknife. The smell of the garlicky meat makes my stomach rumble and I remember I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Two girls returning from the beach sleepily braid each other’s damp hair and the tropical scent of their suntan oil mixes with the garlic. Everyone else on the train—a pair of nuns, three elderly women who look enough alike to be sisters, and a half-dozen workmen—appears to be dozing. I close my eyes, hoping to pass the time in sleep as well, but the moment I start to drowse off a loud plaintive bleat startles me awake. I open my eyes and see that an accordion player has entered the car. As he pumps air in and out of the instrument, a small girl walks up and down the aisle holding out a grimy paper cup for money. Most of the occupants of the train ignore her; one man gives the girl a push and shouts
“Vai!”
The girl’s dark eyes narrow and she spits out a curse that, while I can’t understand it, sounds way beyond her years.

Not that I can really tell how old she is. She has the height of a seven-year-old, the walk of a preteen, and, when she curses, the face of an old woman. When she approaches me I see how her ribs emboss the thin, stained cotton of the T-shirt she wears as her sole garment. I reach into my purse to extract the five-euro note I was going to give to my guide when I hear a high-pitched keening coming from outside the train. A woman in a long dress, wrapped like a sari, is striding back and forth on the station platform, emitting short, sharp shrieks. I can’t identify the nationality of her garb, but I notice she has the same olive skin, lank black hair, and dark eyes as the accordion player and the little girl. Nor can I make out her language. She sounds like a seagull or, I can’t help but think, like what I imagine the sirens might have sounded like when they saw themselves turning into birds.

Her cries don’t draw the accordion player toward her, though. He folds up his instrument and swoops down on the girl, who’s still standing by my side waiting for her five-euro note. As the accordion player picks her up she shoots out her hand and I feel her little fingers clasp onto my wrist with a pincerlike grip.

“Wait!” I say as the accordion player starts to carry her away. I find the five-euro note and press it into the girl’s other hand—the one not clamped onto my wrist.
“Per lei,”
I say, meaning, I suppose, keep this for yourself, but as I watch her carried off I realize how futile my gesture was. Of course any money she gets will go to the accordion player, and now I wonder, as the long-skirted woman sweeps into the car, whether the accordion player is even the girl’s father. The way the woman is chasing after them he might have snatched the child to use as a lure for begging, and now the girl’s mother is trying to get her back. Certainly the way she sweeps through the car, her skirts and long hair flying, her dark eyes flashing, makes her look like a mother whose child has been stolen from her. When I look down I almost expect to see her footprints seared into the train floor—Demeter’s feet scorching the earth—but instead I see something almost more surprising: she’s barefoot. And yet she’s striding through the car as surefooted as a general in riding boots, her gaze swiveling up and down to locate her lost daughter. When her gaze lights on me it’s like being swept by a searchlight.

“They went that way.” I point to the door the man left by. She turns and sees the accordion player and the little girl at the far end of the platform, begging from a group of tourists, and starts toward the door just as the train jerks to life and the doors begin to shut. She stumbles and nearly falls in my lap. For a second I feel the heat of her and smell some exotic oil in her hair, and then she’s gone in a flourish of printed cotton that beats the air like wings. She escapes through the door just before it closes, alighting on the platform with the grace of a dancer. As the train moves away I watch her turn toward the accordion player and the girl, but instead of approaching them she turns in the opposite direction and walks away.

What in the world?
I think, staring out the window until her figure disappears in the distance.
What was all that about?
Was she the girl’s mother, or was she another beggar protecting her turf? I play the scene over again in my head, searching for clues, but the events remain as elusive as the murals in the Villa della Notte. A modern-day mystery rite. I try to dismiss the whole thing from my head, but I can’t forget the woman’s cries or the look in the girl’s eyes or the way she clutched my wrist. At the memory of her touch I look down at my wrist and find the clue that unlocks at least part of the mystery: my watch is gone.

The trip back seems endless—perhaps because I no longer know what time it is, perhaps because each vehicle I board is a little hotter and a little more crowded than the last. By the time I get out of the funicular station, the street back to the hotel looks as steep as the slope of Mount Vesuvius. I trudge up the hill, listening to my lungs wheeze at every step. I’m almost there—I can see the hotel’s awning—when the edges of my vision begin to turn black. I put a hand on the wall and lean up against it, so if I faint I won’t fall into the street. The surface I’m leaning against is fluted marble, smooth and cool to the touch, one of two Corinthian columns that frame the entrance to a church, the interior of which looks cool and dim. I’ll just go inside for a minute, I reason, and sit in a pew until I feel better.

The church is tiny. Fewer than a dozen pews are on either side of a center nave lined with Corinthian columns. A shallow apse holds a small statue of the Madonna and child set in a niche and surrounded by candles. The floor is marble, too, so old and worn that there are grooves from where worshippers have knelt over the centuries. I imagine that it was built on the site of a Roman temple, as many early churches were, and I wonder if it belonged to the convent that’s now my hotel. The faded frescoes lining the deeply shadowed aisles no doubt tell the story of some saint’s life, but I’m too tired to look at them. Besides, I’d feel a little guilty acting like a tourist in a Catholic church, even though I haven’t gone to church since I was twelve. I had started complaining about going after my mother died. Around that time my grandmother told me I ought to thank God every day that we were Catholics because “your mother wanted to have an abortion but Grandfather and I forbade it.” That unwelcome piece of knowledge did not have its desired effect. I stopped going to church altogether. Maybe because I suspected that my grandparents’ religion might have saved my life at the expense of my mother’s.

I’m surprised at how restful it is here. I light a candle for Odette and one for Barry Biddle in front of the worn figure of the Madonna, and head back to the hotel, holding in my mind a picture of its rooftop pool—its circle of turquoise water beckoning to me like water in the Sahara.

When I ask for my key at the front desk, though, Silvio informs me that not only the pool but the rooftop restaurant as well are closed tonight for a private party.

“What do you mean ‘closed’?” I ask, my voice sounding dangerously close to tears. “The website promised a pool!” I sound like a spoiled child who’s been denied some treat, but I don’t care. “And where am I supposed to eat?”

“There are many excellent restaurants just a short funicular ride away.”

“Fuck the funicular,” I say, shocking both myself and Silvio. “I am never, ever getting on that glassed-in cattle car again. And look!” I hold up my bare wrist meaning to tell Silvio about my stolen watch, but he flinches as though I had been about to slap him. My hand drops of its own accord, all the fight sapped out of me, shame flushing hot through my face. “I’m sorry. I’m just really hot and tired.”

“Of course, signora, you Americans are often unprepared for the heat. Why don’t you take a nice cool shower and then have something to eat?”

I bite back the temptation to tell him I’m not an American, I’m a Texan, and I know from heat. Let him come to Austin in August and see how he does! Instead I nod meekly and say, “Yes, that sounds lovely. Something light. I’m sure I’ll feel better once I’ve taken a shower and gotten some sleep.”

I go upstairs to my airless cell, strip off my soaked clothes and take a long, cool shower. The water’s chill doesn’t penetrate the layer of heat under my skin, though. By the time I’ve brushed out my wet hair, I’m sweating again. I put on my lightest cotton T-shirt and lie on the bed. I’ll just take a nap before dinner, I think, and then maybe I will brave the funicular. The thought of being stuck in this cell all night is almost more unbearable than the thought of going out again.

When I open my eyes again I see by the window that it’s completely dark out, which means that it must be past nine o’clock. I can’t tell exactly what time because there’s no clock in the room and my watch is gone. It’s probably too late to get room service, which is okay, because I’m not hungry, only very, very thirsty. I get out an aqua minerale from the mini fridge and gulp half of it down in one long swallow and then lie back down in the fleshy embrace of the overstuffed mattress and feel myself being sucked into a tunnel of flesh-colored tufa. It’s as if the rock that covered ancient Herculaneum had turned liquid again and swallowed me whole.

I fall into a deep sleep and land in a room painted red as a beating heart, its walls covered with figures from the Villa della Notte: Demeter, Persephone, Hades, Dionysus playing his lyre, and the three winged sirens. Hades wears a suit and tie, his face speckled with unshaved stubble. With flaming footsteps, Demeter walks toward Dionysus and seizes the instrument in his hand. It’s not a lyre; it’s an accordion. When she squeezes the accordion it makes a sound like an animal being slaughtered, a keening of wild cats…

I open my eyes to the room at the Hotel Convento and hear the sound coming from outside my window. I get up to close it, lingering for a moment in the faint stir of air playing over my soaked T-shirt. Had I gone swimming after all? I wonder. I can’t remember. My whole body aches as if I had swum the length of the Bay of Naples. My lungs feel as if I’ve inhaled dirty seawater, and the air in the room ripples as if even now I’m underwater.

I start back to the bed, but find myself on the floor. It seems like too much trouble to get up and, besides, I notice that the majolica tiles around the base of the wall are decorated with little figures: a miniature version of the murals of the Villa della Notte. No wonder John Lyros recommended this hotel, I think, lying flat on the stone floor so that I can see the tiles better. And of course I see now why the air-conditioning wasn’t necessary—the floor is deliciously cool! I lay my cheek on it and feel waves of cold emanating up from the stone. Why, it’s like a Roman bath! There must be cold water running underneath to cool off the room. I can hear it, flowing like a river beneath me, carrying me along. The figures in the tiles fly by now, like dioramas in a Disney ride: Hades steals Persephone; Demeter ravages the earth, demanding vengeance in sacrifice; her daughter’s companions turn into winged sirens; and they in turn sacrifice a young girl. They hold her down as the god approaches. I feel their wings beating the air above me, pressing the air out of my chest like a giant bellows, their bony hands sharp as birds’ beaks pecking at my wrists.

Later in the night someone changes the temperature of the water beneath the floor. It’s hot now and the water seeps through the tiles. It soaks my T-shirt and my hair. If I don’t move soon I’ll drown. When I open my eyes, though, I’m distracted by the pictures on the tiles. They, too, have changed. They tell the same story only with different actors playing the main roles. Hades, I see with little surprise, is now played by Elgin Lawrence. I’d always thought that with his high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and pointed ears he looked like a blond Satan.

The next time I open my eyes it’s light. Hovering above me is a woman with the same dark eyes as the beggar on the train, only now she’s dressed in a maid’s uniform. Then beside her appears Elgin Lawrence who tells the dark-eyed woman something and she leaves, shouting someone’s name as she goes, the sound of her voice getting smaller and smaller as she runs down the hall. I close my eyes again and press my cheek against the floor. I feel Elgin’s arms around me and although I realize that he may take me to Hades, I don’t fight. I’m cold again and his arms feel marvelously warm.