The Night Villa (9 page)

So please do come! The villa on Capri has been built as a replica of the Villa della Notte and so, along with state-of-the-art multispectral imaging technology, is the perfect place to study the scrolls discovered there. The foundation’s boat, the
Parthenope,
can easily take you to the excavation site more quickly than the train will get you there from Naples, but if you do decide to take a room in Naples I would recommend the Hotel Convento on the Vomero—a fourteenth-century convent recently converted into an elegant hotel. I haven’t stayed there myself, so I can’t vouch for the rooms, but it has a lovely rooftop restaurant with a spectacular view of the bay and the atmosphere is quite interesting. I’ve included a link to their website below.

Vale,
John Lyros

I read this missive over twice, parsing each line as though it were written in ancient Greek or Latin, and study the pictures of the Hotel Convento, with its pretty whitewashed, majolica-tiled rooms, spectacular bay view, and rooftop pool. What I can’t figure out is why I am still hesitating. Everything is beckoning me to go—the research opportunity of a lifetime, a beautiful villa on Capri, and a handsome billionaire personally inviting me! What else could I require?

Or is it that I am waiting for something here?

As if summoned by the thought, I hear a footstep outside on the far side of the lawn where a tangle of coral vine has spread over the dilapidated garage. For a second I think I see a figure there in the shadow of the vine, silhouetted against the peeling paint on the old clapboard.

Then something beeps on my computer. I look down and see Agnes’s IM icon flashing next to the message: “You couldn’t sleep, either?”

When I look up a wind blows the coral vine aside and I see that the figure is gone. It probably wasn’t there to begin with.

I look back down to the computer screen and see that Agnes has added another line. “Have you decided whether you’re going yet?”

I click the reply box and type in, “Yes. I’ve decided, yes.”

A
lthough I’ve never enjoyed flying, the flight to Naples is worse than any I’ve ever experienced. Perhaps it’s because of my damaged lung. All through the long overnight flight I feel as if I can’t get enough air. I keep expecting the oxygen masks to drop. When I finally step out onto the tarmac in Naples and try to take in a deep breath I get instead a lungful of cotton wool.

A taxi strike has descended on Naples so I take a bus to the hotel. The bus is equally vacant of ventilation. I look around at the other passengers, wondering how they all stand it. The bus drops me two blocks from the hotel, which hadn’t seemed too far when I’d looked at the map, but when I get off I realize the blocks on the Vomero—the steep hill that overlooks the city and bay of Naples—are nearly vertical. Dragging my rolling suitcase, I feel like I’m scaling a wall. Then I pass the entrance to the Hotel Convento twice before I recognize it: the tall shallow building is hewn out of the same rough stone as the hill and clings to it like a mussel attached to a seawall. Inside, though, the walls are pearly white and trimmed with majolica tiles painted in the yellows and coral reds of tropical fish and the bright blues and greens of the Mediterranean sea.
Like a jewel box,
I think, wondering if the whole hotel is fashioned on such a small, precious scale. Even the reception desk is fitted into a shallow niche, which I imagine was once inhabited by the convent’s doorkeeper—the one employed to keep the nuns from escaping. It seems barely large enough to contain the small, neat man with carefully manicured nails and just the hint of a five o’clock shadow who introduces himself as Silvio, the concierge. When he’s checked me in he apologizes that the elevator is broken and offers to carry up my bag himself, and so I follow him up four steep flights of stairs. I keep trying to focus on how pretty and clean everything is—the stone floors, the white walls, the majolica tiles, and the perfect framed view of the bay from each landing. When Silvio unlocks the heavy oak door to my room I try not to show my disappointment that my room is the size of my study back in Austin. Well, what had I thought, I chide myself as I tip Silvio and dutifully exclaim
“Che bella!,”
that fourteenth-century nuns lived in Texas-sized ranch houses? At least it has air-conditioning—a small unit beneath the room’s one window.

When I lay my hand over the air conditioner, though, I feel only the slightest stirring. It could be the last breath of the last nun to die in this cell. “Is that the highest it goes?” I ask, my accent, which seems to gain strength the farther I get from Texas, twanging the still air between us like an out-of-tune violin string.

Silvio clucks his tongue and shakes his head. “Yes,” he says. “You Americans, you are always disappointed in the air-conditioning.”

“It’s not the air-conditioning,” I try to explain. “It’s the air. I need some and there isn’t any.”

Silvio smiles a sibylline smile and points to the window. “You can always open the window,” he says. “Ecco! You can see all the way to Capri.” Then he bows himself out of my little cell and closes the massive door behind him with the finality of a jail keeper.

I open the window but all that does is let in the noise and fumes of traffic from the busy street below. I sit down on the edge of the bed and sink about a foot into the mattress. Picking up a brochure from the night table I read: “The Hotel Convento originally belonged to an order, founded by a Roman martyr of the late first century AD, of the Sepolte Vive.” It takes me only a minute to translate Sepolte Vive: buried alive. I seem to remember some Henry James heroine fleeing to a convent of that order after being betrayed by her lover. The Convent of the Awful Name, James had referred to it in that way he had of making the unnamed sound so much worse than the named. The order had practiced a fervid renunciation of the world, never going out or seeing anyone from the outside world, even sleeping in coffins. No wonder I couldn’t breathe in here; those nuns probably thought air was a worldly luxury.

I try to console myself by remembering that I’ll only be here for three nights. In the end I’d realized that it was foolish not to stay at Lyros’s villa in Capri. Still, I’d wanted a few days on my own in Italy before giving myself over to a summer of forced proximity with Elgin Lawrence. Tomorrow I’ll go to Herculaneum and visit the Villa della Notte—John Lyros had sent me a letter to gain admission to the closed site. The best thing I can do now is try to get a good night’s sleep.

Sleep, though, proves as elusive a commodity as oxygen in this cell of the buried alive. Every time I begin to drift off, I feel myself sinking into the too-soft mattress and I imagine myself entombed in its coils and padding. I leave the window open, but sometime around three a.m. all the cats of Naples begin a high-pitched keening. At least I hope it’s cats. If I were home in Texas I’d say that that chattering squeal could only come out of a possum, but are there possums in southern Italy? I don’t think so. And if it’s not possums and it’s not cats, then it might actually be humans making that sound.

When the cats (or whatever) leave off, I hear a sound like muffled weeping. It reminds me of the sound I heard in Ely’s childhood bedroom: his mother’s crying coming through the thin plasterboard. Only here the walls aren’t plasterboard, they’re stone several feet thick. If someone’s weeping, they’re not in the next room but buried in the walls. It must be the plumbing, I decide.

I finally get a few hours’ sleep before dawn and then the light creeping in through the window and the morning rush-hour traffic wake me. Surely a shower will revive me, I think, but the trickle of water in the Plexiglas-enclosed tube is barely strong enough to rinse the shampoo out of my hair, and the water leaves a sulfuric smell on my skin.

Breakfast is on the rooftop. I pick a table in the sun, which, even though it’s only eight, turns out to be already uncomfortably strong, and stare at the swallows careening over the bay. The curve of the coast is dotted with industrial buildings and tenement apartment houses stacked on top of each other like LEGOs. The cone-shaped silhouette of Vesuvius is insubstantial against the sky—a painted backdrop, a travel agency poster. Even after two strong cappuccinos and a plateful of sugary pastries, I can’t quite believe in it. Maybe when I get to Herculaneum, I’ll really feel like I’m in Italy.

Downstairs Silvio informs me that the cab strike is still on. He marks out a route to the train station on a map for me. It’s just a short funicular ride down the Vomero to the port and then a short bus ride to the train station where I can catch the Circumvesuviana train to Herculaneum. No problem, he tells me. And I believe him. The funicular can’t be bad, I reason. After all, there’s a song about it. I hum it—
Funiculì-funiculà
—down the hill to the funicular station. The sidewalk is littered with broken glass and a number of cars parked on the side of the road have cardboard taped over the places where their windows have been punched out. When I had checked the location of the hotel on a map, it had looked like it was on a street in central Naples, just a few blocks from the Spaccanapoli neighborhood and the Archaeological Museum and just up the hill from the port where the cruise ships docked and the ferry boats left for Capri and Ischia. But the curving road is carved into the steep cliff of the Vomero, high above and cut off from the rest of the city. It’s clearly not in the best of neighborhoods. I had envisioned myself walking to outdoor cafés in the evening, but now I realize that, without taxis, I’ll be pretty much stranded in the hotel after nightfall—the only lifeline to the rest of Naples the funicular.

I’m expecting, I think, something like the cable cars of San Francisco, but instead the funicular turns out to be a sort of vertical subway. The station is underground in a windy, steeply sloping tunnel where a crowd of bored commuters—schoolgirls and laborers, office workers and shopgirls—talk a fast, slurry Italian and cheerfully ignore the nonsmoking signs. A sudden gust of wind roars up from the depths of the tunnel and the metal cable that runs along the middle of the tracks leaps to life like a subterranean serpent awakened out of the bowels of the earth. My eyes are fastened downhill, but the funicular descends from above in a series of glass boxes that look way too small to accommodate the waiting crowd. I’m damned if I’m going to wait underground any longer for the next one, though, so I push on with the rest of them—these Italians apparently having no boundary issues with private space when it comes to public transportation. I end up wedged into the armpit of a man wearing a soccer jersey, behind a man in a business suit whose copy of
La Repubblica
flutters against my head, and an old woman who comes up to my navel.

The car—the
cell,
I can’t help thinking, the cell of the dying nun set in motion—plunges downward, its lights flickering off just as we hit the tunnel. We spend most of the descent in impermeable blackness. I close my eyes and try to ignore the squeezing sensation in the left side of my chest, like a hand that’s reached in between my ribs and yanked out what remains of my injured lung. I swivel to get my face out of the soccer fan’s armpit, but as I turn my hip rubs up against something hard. I realize that the man behind me, the one in the nice business suit, has an erection.

I open my eyes at the same instant that the lights go on and the businessman smiles at me, as if I’d just said something clever to him. He makes no attempt to move. I can feel the acid of two cappuccinos bubbling in my stomach, threatening to erupt, and then, mercifully, the train lurches to a stop, the glass doors slide open, and the crowd spills out.

It takes me a half hour to find the bus stop—the map Silvio gave me having only a tangential relationship with the layout of the streets around the port. The Castel d’Ovo squats between the port and the funicular station cutting off through streets. The streets that do run around it are a maze of construction barriers and deep pits. I turn down one street that’s blocked by a mob of angry men shouting
“Sciopero! Sciopero!”
The striking taxi drivers, I realize.

Finally, I find the right bus to the train station and then, what feels like hours later, the train to Herculaneum. The Circumvesuviana is blessedly uncrowded compared to the funicular and the bus, but still un-air-conditioned. Once it moves, though, a breeze blows in through the open windows. When we’ve cleared Naples I can even smell a hint of salt air coming off the bay. The teenage girls who get on in Portici—once a favored resort of the Bourbons and now part of the urban sprawl clustered at the foot of Mount Vesuvius—are clearly headed for the beach. Neon-colored bathing suit straps slip down their tanned shoulders. They fish in their net bags for suntan lotion and rub each other’s backs, chattering a bright stream of Italian out of which I catch stray phrases that flash in the air like tropical birds.
“Pensi che Gianni venga stasera alla festa?”
which I translate to “Do you think Gianni will be at the party?” and
“Mannaccia, mi sono venute le mestruazione!”
which I think means that she’s mad she’s got her period. Things teenaged girls might say anywhere. I find myself wishing I were on my way to the beach, too.

When I get off at Herculaneum, I smell the salt wind blowing up the street that slopes down to the bay. As I walk down the street, following signs for
Gli scavi,
I see the blue bay in the distance. I can even make out a misty shape on the horizon that might be Capri, and I imagine Phineas Aulus sailing through the straits between Capri and the tip of the Sorrentine peninsula, his ship tossed by a fierce sirocco—a wind that locals claim has sometimes brought rains of blood. Did he make a libation to the Minerva Tyrrhena, whose temple stood above the straits as a protection to sailors? Did he think this shore would be his last sight? Had he deliberately planned to set down near the Villa della Notte with his waterproof trunk? And where was that waterproof trunk now? Still buried in the tufa that entombs much of the villa? Was Petronia Iusta buried there, too?

Since seeing Iusta’s name in Phineas’s journal I’ve wondered what I hope to find at the villa. Of course I want to know what Phineas has to say about Iusta and whether she’s at the villa as Calatoria’s slave. The repetition of her name suggests that she made some kind of impression on him. For now, though, I’ll be satisfied to see where she spent her last days.

At the main gate to ancient Herculaneum, I tell the guard that I have an appointment with the archaeological office to see the Villa della Notte. The guard, an old man with lines so deeply engraved into his weathered face that his cheeks look like the droopy folds of a hound dog, waves me in with the back of his hand, a gesture less welcoming than dismissive. He doesn’t tell me where to go, but I’ve studied the map of the excavation and know that I have to keep walking toward the sea and then turn right. The Villa della Notte was just outside the city walls, and outside the gates of the public part of the excavated city, overlooking the sea. I follow the broad elevated road that runs beside the excavations. Below me I can see the ancient town of Herculaneum in a neat grid, many of its rooms open to the sunlight, while some roofs are still intact.