In this world tiny things make me irritable and tiny things make me greatly happy. Like a stone in my shoe, like stars inside a chapel ceiling, or my high window in the night sky, its glass moon shape, and moonlight over arched doorways and ivory rooftops, moonlight making shapes seem profound and unearthly, but only for those who have a moment, this staggering light so secretive and brief and only for you and me.
Pompeii Book of the Dead
Thin walls divide the hotel rooms and one morning I hear a couple’s amorous sounds through the wall. The amorous voices are clearly not the older couple renting the room right now. These wall voices are younger and Italian.
Did this couple stride off the elevator naked? I hear absolutely no pause between the sound of their hotel door and the sounds of their sex.
Someday I will be spiritually perfect, will free myself of the physical plane, free of appetite, but right now I can hear the woman’s sounds in a bed just beyond my wall. My ear, my aroused listening, the membrane of the wall, the honeycomb rooms we curl within, our beehive brain with us living like a great guest inside, my blood rising with this strange woman so close to me, a woman so open and willing just past a wall so thin I could drive my hand through.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s illicit paramour, but perhaps she’d enjoy another friend when the first friend is done. Why not? We all want more than we have. Amore! The second orgasm may be more intense. That is, if she has a first. The man next door is very fast.
Can I whisper to her through the wall? Signora, excuse me, I can’t help but hear the revealing human sounds you make. And I have no one. So perhaps I’d be welcome?
Of course, you poor soul, come to me, she will whisper back in Italian, and somehow I will understand her language. Of course I will take you in, you poor, poor lonely teddy bear. First let me get rid of this skinny peon, this nonentity in a loud purple dress shirt — there, he is gone and I will float like a spirit to your room. And why would I not?
Here, put your hand here, and here, and here, brushing like a moving breeze, yes, yes, we have all the time in the world, a hundred years to each breast, let us live new lives in this beautiful Mediterranean bed, for bed is the poor man’s opera. To callipygian Aphrodite, to Apollo, to Bacchus, to Dionysus! To kiss a golden face, her red lips, and hear her soft song.
Hold your horses, am I going insane? Do I really think some woman will welcome a hand through the fucking plasterboard, a cock through the wall?! I’ve become a lunatic in Rome’s bacchanal opera, I am in a world that worships beauty, the body’s form, my eyes blinded by form and flesh, by smackwarm plenty, by amore, amore. My cousin’s bikini and Titan kisses a dish of butter and my brain is toast, Rome all flashing skin and bosom and eggplant and olive oil and tomatoes and tongues and lips in a contest with the grape-fattening heat. In hallways, rooftops, sidewalks, my God, the amazing skin my eyes take in around this mammose mammering holy city!
This city brings on the swell of memory, overwhelming memories of skin that gain power in retrospect: my girlfriend’s ponytail down her back when she came to visit in such hot weather, to walk under the sun by a cold sea where black ducks dove and a seal popped up its old-man skull to gaze at us, curious as we swam sandbars and gravel bars.
The vision of my girlfriend’s curved body and me at her side, laying a wet face cloth on her to cool her, laying on hands, this vision haunts me now. I want someone with me in my hotel room, have hit the point where I would pay, need to bite one of those big Italian bums I see passing every day. I have hungers, appetites, I crave food, drink, her letters, her mouth. Yes, I would pay right now. Of course I would pay. Does it not make sense?
All of the world’s money directed to gilt chalices and decanters of burgundy wine, money aimed at ghosts and stained glass and eyeless statuary, money to trifles, to hapless burgers and fries, to lottery and accident and hope. Hope and commerce are the way of the world. Why would I not join in, why would I not pay for a companion?
You really want to pay for a woman? God asks me this question and God dispatches the answer quickly. By train I travel to Pompeii and in Pompeii God tests my theory minutes after I arrive. In Pompeii I check in easily and bound out of the small hotel, thirsty and excited by a new town and the famous volcano over the glittering bay and sea views lurking for blue miles before evaporating into light haze, that milky horizon with no horizon.
The ruins of the old city also seem to stretch forever, roadside tombs and mausoleums and villas and walls and sand-coloured excavations. Pompeii is so many worlds, so many levels, a strange village below us, families caught like an underground zoo, mothers and children frozen in their poses, then a breathing world built just above their heads, busy footsteps on the dead’s ceiling, roads and tracks and our sweaty slum train’s noisy motion just one level above the digs, we live and move above their heads, wheels and engines rolling over graves.
What is it like to live in Pompeii as an ordinary town? Is it strange for the locals to know this shadow city below and to one side, this destroyed duplicate in the basement? I must ask someone. Like Las Vegas, like New Orleans, no visitor cares a whit about the real city. In Pompeii we want the visceral proof of someone else’s apocalypse, the tourist attractions of roofless ruins, ancient cafés and bedrooms and brothels and shops broken open to the sun and the old aroma of sulphur and fear. I wonder if locals resent this favoured twin, this magnet shadow so close to their heart.
And we are the same, that other place shadowing us here, the lost place we left and must return to, return to a questioning face and cheques written at the kitchen table and deep leaves raked past the backyard swing, a return to winter and shovelling a driveway and a new battery and heavy-duty windshield wipers, a return to providing and caring and staying put in one place. Will that cooler world stay put while I am absent?
Pack on my back, I walk the layers, the strange ruins and excavations open at my feet. Why am I so fascinated by Pliny the Elder and his fiery demise in Pompeii? I travelled to Pompeii because of Vesuvius the volcano and the excavated ruins, but also because Pliny sailed here to his death.
On a morning just like this the sky grew dark and the sun stood still; a volcano woke the vineyards and all of this life was buried deep, left to sleep so long, an entombed amphitheatre and villas and cobbled avenues, cowering families caught on their broken plates, mothers clinging hard to babies, suffocating in seconds, lamps extinguished, then discovered by chance after so much time asleep, ladders and lanterns down into holes and villas dug out and exposed once more to the harsh sun and tourists like me, an ancient roof peeled back like a convertible, sun inching forward into the rooms a crimson ribbon at a time, the living come to walk the long avenues of the dead, the living and dead come to visit each other on this shore.
Near my hotel in Pompeii I spy a café called Irish Times. Nothing Irish about the café, but in this heat it offers cold Italian beer. In the interior shadows they pluck a beer from a dark wooden icebox and I walk out into electric white southern light. Tiny tables out front, but someone is at each table.
A woman at one of the sidewalk tables looks at me with bright eyes. She has long curly hair, a pleasant face.
“Come stai?”
“Bene, grazie.”
I point to an empty chair at her table.
“May I sit?” I ask her, with a mix of sign language and English and Italian.
She motions to sit.
Both of us face the sunny street, our backs to the shop windows. I check newspapers and a map, happy to be in Pompeii in a pleasant café with a cold beer.
I took a fast train to Naples and changed for Pompeii, away from the others, having fun on my own. Hercules lived near here, Spartacus, the Sirens and grottoes, Pliny’s naval fleet was across the bay. There are no tourists around, other than me sipping at a cold bottle. And I am not one of those who pretend they are not a tourist — I know what I am. Locals glide by me and children play by the tables, perhaps Pliny’s descendants.
In front of my family home the moving van opens its padlocks and doors. I am glad I missed being there for the moving van. My separation arranged and lawyers and bankers consulted minutes before I hurried to the airport. Waiting for a crucial fax from the big city, waiting to sign the papers and then I can flee, roar off to the plane at the last second, and I almost missed my flight. Later I hear about my banker also getting separated, it is a virus you can catch, it has gone viral.
“Three hours,” the Italian woman says, looking at me. I think that’s what she says.
“Oh really,” I mutter, smiling stupidly and turning back to my newspaper.
What does she mean? Non capisco. This woman at the table has beautiful eyes. It is a sunny day and curly-haired children line up for cold gelato from the café. Are those her kids? The same curls. A dark-featured man talks on a cellphone at the curb. Is the man with her? Three hours, she said. Did her husband keep her waiting for hours while he talks at the curb? Yes, that is a long time.
I return to my newspaper and my Peroni (Birra Superiore).
Across the bay at the naval base at Misenum, Pliny the Elder spied a massive cloud rising high, the cloud taking the shape of a tree. Pliny took swift galleys to Pompeii to help old friends stranded on the shore of the bay, to help them escape. He died here, gave himself to the people.
“Thirty euros,” she says.
I look up, look into her face.
A woman beside me at a café table is talking of money. Is this what I think? Non ho capito, my Italian is very poor, I lack language, lack the secret code.
Thirty euro, thirty pieces of silver. This as a possibility should not surprise me. Venice once had twelve thousand registered prostitutes. A few blocks away from our table are ruined frescoes of Roman orgies and cunnilingus, and ancient shop entrances boast their good-luck charms of erect penises, and pictures of Priapus, the minor god of gardens and fertility, Priapus proudly weighing his giant cock, balancing it on a scale like avoirdupois, goods of weight, his cock stuck out in front of him like the neck of a goose.
But what if she is not one of them, what if I am misunderstanding her? This scene is so public — a sunny street, kids tasting sweet gelato. Is that her man there at the curb on a phone? I am on my own, no one knows where I am and I could be punched in the face over a woman’s honour, beaten or stabbed over an insult.
“Thirty euros?”
“Sì,” she says, so calmly.
“For you?”
Again she says yes, as if all is obvious, life so simple. I can have a person for the price of a few coins. But I don’t know what to do.
The woman with curly hair speaks to me again. It sounds like quindici, or is it dieci? Fifteen, or perhaps ten, or is it nineteen? I’m lost. Why would she say an odd number like nineteen? I wish I knew for sure what was happening. She seems to be bargaining, dropping the price rapidly. Did she take my words for you as a ploy, an insult? I don’t want to insult anyone, I just arrived, I want to wait at least a few days before insulting anyone.
It seems very inexpensive to own a person for a few hours, if that is what she means. How long since I touched anyone’s skin? I complained so much about that in Rome. But what if she is discussing the temperature, the stock market, the ages of her children? Why did I not try harder to learn Italian from that CD in the car? Perhaps I’m like the fishermen who refuse to learn to swim so as to drown quickly, as swimming only delays the inevitable.
An elderly nun walks past us, leaning forward as if her huge shoes are snowshoes and she crosses some windy tundra or white taiga. Her shoes are so large she must drag them along rather than lift each foot. I understand her: the shoes do not fit the nun’s tiny feet, but they are the best shoes she has ever held and she wants to make them work, and in this the tiny nun is like me.
My room in the small family hotel — can I waltz in with a strange curly-haired woman from the street? The son or daughter or mother would see us traverse the lobby with its polite wicker furniture and blind dog from Asia Minor. Would they know her? The Italians say to not trust a woman with curly hair. Beware: ogni riccio un capriccio — every curl a caprice.
Should I take the leap? Why not? This is very possible, this is interesting, an adventure, I’m in an amazing foreign country and a woman has offered herself to me, one of the linen-lifting tribe, one of the seraglio. I know my eyes crinkled in stupid amusement when I first understood her offer. It’s exciting, exotic, it’s possible.
But then my cautious side touches the brakes and I regret my initial levity. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m laughing at her, that she is amusing. What if she has a man waiting to roll me for my tourist cash and bank cards? What of the promise of disease?
1. Yes, an adventure.
2. No, this is trouble.
One or two: which number is true, which number is me? Is there even a singular mind? How many voices and voters make up a brain, how many rivals, how many factions and gangs? How many cells clamber in the riotous Balkan parliament in my head?
I flirt with the Croatian maid, I flirt with the cryptic Spanish woman, I stare at my cousin’s form, I stare at every waitress. Then a woman and I share a tiny table in Italy, in Europe, on the planet, and for a handful of euros I can do certain things to her for an agreed time. How perfect it no longer seems.
No, I say, No, grazie. I say it several times, trying to be nice, trying too hard to be polite, that I am grateful for something, her attention, not wanting to insult her. Grazie. No.
Pliny the Elder sailed to the shore in a fast cutter, rescuing citizens from the hellish volcano, the air getting worse and worse until he couldn’t breathe, a saviour overcome at the shore by sulphurous gases. Pliny died a hero. Or so I thought.
Because of this woman in Pompeii I find I do not believe what I believed. I find I cannot just buy someone, despite thinking I was fine with the idea, the theory, find that I cannot pass across a sum of money and have my way. I want a travelling companion, want to be comfortable, stay in touch, want a girlfriend, or my cousin drinking sour San Pellegrino Limonata at the Hotel Europa.
How old-fashioned it turns out I am, how straightlaced, that I need some simpatico conversation, some connection (these Digby scallops are to die for), touching a knee, a neck, an ear, and talking of singers we like (you lent me Veedon Fleece, remember?). Not a simple transaction with a stranger; I need a complex transaction.
I sound like a moony schoolgirl: it should be special. I’m as bad as the whining teens on exchange in Rome with their puppy-love crushes and swooning. I have had love and affection and kindness and talk and all it did was break my heart. Special, not special, what is the fucking difference?
Disease crossed my mind (the canker galls the infants of spring), or I could be robbed, a trap for a traveller laden with euros, cankers and thieves everywhere. Pompeii has a bad rep; my guidebook says quite seriously to see Pompeii, but to not stay there.
This woman seems accepted by the locals in a way I am not; those running the café must know her if she frequents their tables. They don’t drive her away from their tables, they don’t spit on her the way my cousin was spit on miles to the south.
The café woman walks away, looking hard at her phone, leaning forward toward the square eye of her screen. Is the screen a handy prop or does she really have a pressing appointment? Her eyes are changed, her face no longer friendly. I’ve seen that look before, that strange sea change. And the town changes with her.
A man with cropped hair sits down to show me his hands, his mangled hands. A refugee from Tunisia, he crossed the desert and then he floated in a jammed boat to the island of Lampedusa, now beset with refugees. In Italy he tried to obliterate his own fingerprints, he burnt his hands, perhaps with acid, afraid the police would ship him back south. The authorities have his fingerprints registered.
Will I give him five euro?
No, my nature is not generous. Perhaps the nun’s shoes will fit him. Go ask her.
These encounters with this woman and the man with the burnt fingertips have thrown me, my mood altered. I was so happy to arrive here a few moments before, but I am edgy now, walking an endless alley with cash on me, waiting to be jumped by lurking strumpets and stoned thieves. Finally I find a way out of this maze and immediately spy her at a table in front of another café. I nod to her and keep walking toward the ruins just outside of the city.
Now my world seems strange and dangerous. What if the guidebook is right about Pompeii: a world full of foul deeds and sneaking mischief, a mousetrap, miching mallecho, a cold beer and a knife needling between the ribs. All around the bay the Nuvoletta-Polverino cartels open suitcases and sell groceries, garlic, hash, relics, leather coats and high-fashion gowns, moving bricks, ecstasy and cocaine in the northern suburbs, stolen antiquities and jewels in the narrow lanes.
Beat-up trains move and stop in bleached grass and iron stations blotted with graffiti, so many trains, so many stops, Vesuvio de Meis, Scavi di Ercolano, Madonna dell’Arco, Torre Annunziata.
Knife Party at the Hotel Europa Page 19
