The Night Villa (16 page)

“I think you’ve strayed far from Phineas,” Lyros says, interrupting Simon before he can get to the Dale Henry shooting. Thank goodness, I think, looking over at Agnes who’s looking down at the untouched fruit on her plate.

“What I think is interesting,” Lyros continues, “is the mixture of Dionysian elements and the rites of Demeter and Persephone with this added native southern Italian touch of the sirens legend. According to Livy, the Dionysian rites, or bacchanalias, practiced in Rome during the second century BC were little more than nocturnal orgies in which young men and women were initiated into sexual rituals and, if they refused, sacrificed. They only accepted initiates under twenty because, as Livy puts it, ‘They were looking for young people of an age open to corruption of mind and body.’”

“You see,” Simon says, “you prove my point. That’s what the cults of today do: they recruit the young and the innocent.”

“You make it sound as if it was just about sex,” Agnes breaks in, her voice trembling with emotion, “and that Iusta was just being used. The rites were supposed to bring enlightenment to the initiate—”

“My dear,” Simon says, his calm voice breaking into Agnes’s agitation, “what makes you think Iusta was the initiate? And as for who is using whom…”

“I think that’s enough, Simon,” Lyros says. And then turning to Agnes, “I’m afraid the material you’re transcribing is upsetting, Agnes, but think of it this way: you’re giving voice to Iusta after two thousand years of silence. The picture of her that is emerging in Phineas’s narrative is remarkable. I think you’ll all agree after you read the section that Agnes has so sensitively transcribed today that Iusta is the real heroine of the piece.”

Agnes attempts a small smile to thank John Lyros, but she still looks distraught. “Yes, she’s really interesting, but so sad, too. I just can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to her…I mean, it’s only three days to the eruption.”

The anxiety in Agnes’s voice is so palpable that I find myself glancing toward Vesuvius on the horizon, as though we were living in the time of Phineas and Iusta and the volcano was about to erupt. The sky has grown so dark, though, while we’ve dined that all I can see past the dark sea are the lights that ring the bay and above them a denser cone of black that’s the quiet volcano. No trail of steam or glow of fire mars the peaceful scene. But then, nothing about the volcano’s appearance would have warned Phineas or Iusta back then, either. Did they both die in the eruption?

“Maybe she gets out,” George says hopefully, trying, I think, to cheer Agnes up. “The Herculaneans had a whole day to escape while Pompeii was being covered by ash. True, the ones who tried to escape by sea ended up dying in the boathouses by the marina because the water was too rough to launch a boat, but maybe Iusta was able to get on the road to Naples. We’ll just have to keep scanning the scroll to find out….”

George’s voice drifts off as he realizes what most of us must have already figured out: since Phineas was never heard from again after AD 79, he must have perished in the eruption, so even if the girl Iusta escaped, it’s unlikely that he recorded it.

The first thing I do when I get back to my room is open my laptop and connect to my e-mail. I stand, waiting for the file to download. When I open it I read the first line and sink onto the bed. Then, without changing out of my dress or even moving an inch, I read the second installment from beginning to end.

Many and varied were the pleasures I received from the girl Iusta on my first night at the Villa of Gaius Stephanus Petronius. I have always believed in Solon’s dictum “Nothing in excess” and so have ever endeavored to balance the delights of the flesh with the pleasures of the mind. I had not expected, though, to find the latter with a seventeen-year-old slave girl. So after we had taken our physical pleasures I asked her to light a lamp so that I might write. She complied and offered as well to retrieve writing materials from my trunk. It was when she was sorting through the scrolls contained therein that I realized that not only was she able to read both the Latin and Greek tags appended to each scroll, but she was also familiar with the authors of some of the works. She exclaimed over my collection of Pliny’s Natural History, explaining that the author himself had many times visited the villa from nearby Cape Misenum where he held command over the naval fleet. She was also most interested in my volumes of Strabo’s Geography and asked if I had traveled to all the places recorded by him.

“Not all,” I replied, but when I saw the disappointment in her eyes, I added, “but many. My interest is in recording the religious rites in each land I visit. I have spent long months traveling to remote temples and sanctuaries only to find that the rite I wished to observe was some time away and so have been forced to wait.”

“It is fortunate then that you arrived here when you did…” she began, but then, blushing deeply, she looked away.

“It’s all right,” I reassured her. “Your mistress has told me about the rites practiced here and invited me to be a part of them, which I accepted as an honor. You also, I believe, have a role in the rites?”

She nodded and answered with lowered eyes. “It is what I have been raised for.”

“Ah, it is indeed a rare honor.” She lifted her eyes, which I noticed then were the color of amber, and looked at me strangely. “Is that why your master has taught you to read?” I asked.

“I believe that is one reason. My master was most generous. He believed that if I were to take part in the rites I should understand them. And so I have read the story of Demeter and Persephone in Homer and Ovid and of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Strabo and Pausanias. But of course not much is written about the rites performed there as they are kept in secret. Have you been initiated?”

“I have. It was the most sublime experience I have ever had. I cannot, of course, divulge what happened in the inner sanctum, but you are familiar, perhaps, with the little mysteries that occur outside the sanctuary?”

“I have read in Plato that the priestess Diotima compares the lesser—or little—mysteries to the physical experience of love and the greater mysteries to spiritual love, from which I believe is meant that the lesser mysteries are the physical manifestation of the rites: a reenactment of what happened to Persephone when she was seized by Hades and brought to the underworld and then how her mother rescued her and how by the maiden’s own carelessness she yoked herself to the underworld by eating six pomegranate seeds. And I understand that by recreating these physical rites we seek entry into the deeper spiritual mystery of death and rebirth, just as the physical act of love leads to new life.”

She looked up when she spoke of the physical act of love and I confess it was I, an old man who has traveled the world and seen its many marvels, who blushed. It was then that I became afraid that affection for this girl might cloud my objectivity during the ceremony to come.

“You can hand me the ink cake,” I told her, “and that untagged scroll there—not the ones at the bottom, they must not be disturbed.” I saw her fingering the tags on one of the scrolls that I had recently obtained on my travels, but then her attention was drawn to a little terra-cotta statue I had purchased in Alexandria. “But I see you are interested in the statuette. You may take it out and look at it before you go.”

She removed the small statue and held it up to the light, turning it around in her hands so that the light fell on the rounded curves of the goddess and her child. “It’s Isis, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Queen of the Nile and the Heavens, suckling the infant Horus. Why don’t you keep it. Perhaps the contemplation of it will help you to feel less afraid of the coming rites.”

She seemed genuinely startled by my offer. “No…” she stammered, “you are much too generous…. I…”

“Please, as a token of my appreciation for tonight.” She colored deeply then and I was afraid that my clumsy words had made her feel like a prostitute. “It is not often I have the opportunity to converse with a goddess,” I said, trying to put her at ease with a little joke.

She looked from me to the statue and then bowed her head. “I will treasure it,” she told me. Then, rising to her feet, she bowed again and left the room.

I wrote this account then as I knew I would not be able to sleep until I had recorded my impressions of the remarkable Iusta. I noted her somewhat naive interpretation of the little mysteries. Plato did not mean, I am sure, to equate the rites with something as banal as the physical act of love—he was simply making an analogy. That said, as unformed as her thinking might be, it was still remarkable for one of her age and sex, and that it might be the first time that the
actor
in a mystery rite has voiced her opinion of it!

When I finished transcribing our conversation, I still felt unsettled. Had I been rash in giving her the statue? Would she boast of the gift to her fellows and perhaps sell it in the marketplace for some worthless trinkets? The thought of the sacred object being so defiled disturbed me. I decided to take a stroll around the courtyard to clear my head.

Even in the courtyard, the air was hot and stale. I walked out onto the peristylium in the hope of catching a sea breeze, but the night was so still that the sea stretched like a sheet of polished silver all the way from the shoreline to the island of Capraea, where even the straits beneath the Temple of Tyrrhena Minerva were becalmed. No sailor would need to pour a libation to the goddess there tonight. The only sign that the bay was not transfixed was the faint sound of water lapping onto the shore just below me. I leaned over the railing and listened to the sound until I thought I could hear voices in it. I thought of my drowned crew and shuddered. Then, as I listened, I realized that the voices were female and that they echoed as though they came from some enclosed space. The sirens, then, I thought, singing their song of seduction in their caves beneath the sea. I remembered what they sang to Odysseus as he listened, tied to the mast of his ship to resist their temptation:
No life on earth can be hid from our dreaming,
they sang, promising him all knowledge. How often have I listened to their song, tied to the stiff mast of my unbelieving to keep me from being lured too deep into the mysteries I sought to record and illuminate. I felt now that I stood on the brink—as I had before the gates of Eleusis or before the oracle of Delphi—of some great
knowing.
I felt the pull of that song like a whirlpool waiting to suck me in and for once I was tempted to untie myself from the mast, to let myself follow the song….

I leaned so far over the railing that had the night not been still, had the faintest wind pushed at my back, I would have fallen from the peristylium and no doubt followed the sirens’ voices to the bottom of the sea, but just as I felt myself losing my balance I saw something that startled me upright. Below me something moved through the dark water, a long white sinuous shape that left in its wake a trail of sparks, as if it burned a path through the water like a star falling to earth. I saw that it was shaped like a woman and that its long, loose hair swayed in the current like seaweed. Had I really come face-to-face with a siren? Were the stories true? And if they were, was I truly ready to answer their call?

Before I could decide the creature turned and began to swim back to the shore and when she stood in the shallows and shook the water from her hair I saw that she was no siren: she was the girl, Iusta. There must be an entrance to the sea at the bottom of the villa and she had slipped out for a late-night swim to seek relief from the hot night. As I watched, she turned back to the sea, and loosening something from her robes, which clung so closely to her form that I could see every line of her body, and singing a snatch of the song I had heard before, the words of which I still couldn’t understand, she tossed something into the sea. I couldn’t see what. Then she waded back to the villa and I lost sight of her as she disappeared under the peristylium.

Now that I had identified the source of the singing and the identity of the siren I was no longer bewitched. Always it is the way: knowledge banishes superstition. But the emotions raised by the experience had left me worn out. I turned from the sea and made my way back into the courtyard. As I was crossing to my room I tread on something soft and, kneeling, found that the path had been strewn with flowers. I picked one up and held it in the moonlight to identify it. It was a poppy, the flower sacred to Demeter. I understood then that the rites had already begun.

I close my laptop and put it on the chair by my bed. As soon as I move I realize that I have been sitting motionless for so long that my legs have fallen asleep. I stand up and feel a painful tingling coursing through my calves. I pace twice across the short length of my room, then open the door and walk barefoot out into the courtyard, trying to revive the circulation in the lower part of my body and, I realize, to shake the spell of Phineas’s words from my head. Why, I wonder as I complete my second circuit around the fountain, do I feel so
entranced
by this section? Is it because I was reading it in a place that resembles the setting of the original rites? Or is it because Phineas himself, usually the model of objectivity, seemed to be falling under the spell of the Villa della Notte?

And who wouldn’t have, if the original was anything like this modern restoration? The courtyard is full of the scent of the night-blooming jasmine that circle the fountain like a ring of stars. Inside this circle, the goddess Night seems to brood under her starry veil, her arms half raised, palms turned up to the moon, as if she were about to perfom a rite to raise the spirits of the underworld. Uneasy under her gaze, I walk out onto the peristylium and stand at the railing looking down at the sea. It’s quite a lot farther down than it would have been from the villa in Herculaneum, but John Lyros told me that there are steps leading down from the lower courtyard to the sea, just as there apparently were in the original villa. I wonder what he made of this section, and if anyone else feels so…disturbed by it. I turn back to the villa, thinking about the six other people who have read the same passage that I have. It’s almost as if we are all engaged in the preparation for some rites, as if we are all partaking of the “little mysteries,” the ritual that prepared initiates for the greater mysteries.