Pompeii (19 page)
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VOLCANOLOGY
(SECOND EDITION)
Ampliatus’s banquet was just entering its second hour, and of the twelve guests reclining around the table only one showed signs of truly enjoying it, and that was Ampliatus himself. It was stiflingly hot for a start, even with one wall of the dining room entirely open to the air, even with three slaves in their crimson livery stationed around the table waving fans of peacock feathers. A harpist beside the swimming pool plucked mournfully at some formless tune.
And four diners to each couch! This was at least one too many, in the judgment of Lucius Popidius, who groaned to himself as each fresh course was set before them. He held to the rule of
Varro, that
the number of guests at a dinner party ought not to be less than that of the Graces (three), nor to exceed that of the Muses (nine). It meant that one was too close to one’s fellow diners. Popidius, for example, reclined between Ampliatus’s dreary wife, Celsia, and his own mother, Taedia Secunda—close enough to feel the heat of their bodies. Disgusting. And when he propped himself on his left elbow and reached out with his right hand to take some food from the table, the back of his head would brush Celsia’s shallow bosom and—worse—his ring occasionally become entangled with his mother’s blond hairpiece, shorn from the head of some German slave girl and now disguising the elderly lady’s thin gray locks.
And the food! Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes, and that all these sauces, all this elaboration, had gone out of fashion back in Claudius’s time? The first of the hors d’oeuvres had not been too bad—oysters bred in Brundisium then shipped two hundred miles round the coast for fattening in the
Sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow’s vulva served as a side dish, grinning up toothlessly at the diners. Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open, shitting as they went. (Ampliatus had clapped his hands and roared with laughter at that.) Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingos (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot and it had indeed tasted much as he imagined a maggot might taste if it had been doused in vinegar. Then a stew of nightingales’ livers . . .
He glanced around at the flushed faces of his fellow guests. Even fat Brittius, who once boasted that he had eaten the entire trunk of an elephant, and whose motto was Seneca’s—“eat to vomit, vomit to eat”—was starting to look green. He caught Popidius’s eye and mouthed something at him. Popidius could not quite make it out. He cupped his ear and Brittius repeated it, shielding his mouth from Ampliatus with his napkin and emphasizing every syllable: “Tri-mal-chi-o.”
Popidius almost burst out laughing. Trimalchio! Very good! The freed slave of monstrous wealth in the satire by Titus Petronius, who subjects his guests to exactly such a meal and cannot see how vulgar and ridiculous he is showing himself. Ha ha! Trimalchio! For a moment, Popidius slipped back twenty years to his time as a young aristocrat at Nero’s court, when Petronius, that arbiter of good taste, would keep the table amused for hours by his merciless lampooning of the nouveau riche.
He felt suddenly maudlin. Poor old Petronius. Too funny and stylish for his own good. In the end, Nero, suspecting his own imperial majesty was being subtly mocked, had eyed him for one last time through his emerald monocle and had ordered him to kill himself. But Petronius had succeeded in turning even that into a joke—opening his veins at the start of a dinner in his house at Cumae, then binding them to eat and to gossip with his friends, then opening them again, then binding them, and so on, as he gradually ebbed away. His last conscious act had been to break a fluorspar wine-dipper, worth three hundred thousand sesterces, which the emperor had been expecting to inherit.
That
was style.
That
was taste.
And what would he have made of me, thought Popidius bitterly. That I—a Popidius, who played and sang with the Master of the World—should have come to this, at the age of forty-five: the prisoner of Trimalchio!
He looked across at his former slave, presiding at the head of the table. He was still not entirely sure how it had happened. There had been the earthquake, of course. And then, a few years later, the death of Nero. Then civil war, a mule-dealer as emperor, and Popidius’s world had turned upside down. Suddenly Ampliatus was everywhere—rebuilding the town, erecting a temple, worming his infant son onto the town council, controlling the elections,
even
buying the house next door. Popidius had never had a head for figures, so when Ampliatus had told him he could make some money, too, he had signed the contracts without even reading them. And somehow the money had been lost, and then it turned out that the family house was surety, and his only escape from the humiliation of eviction was to marry Ampliatus’s daughter. Imagine: his own ex-slave as his father-in-law! He thought the shame of it would kill his mother. She had barely spoken since, her face haggard with sleeplessness and worry.
Not that he would mind sharing a bed with Corelia. He watched her hungrily. She was stretched out with her back to Cuspius, whispering to her brother. He wouldn’t mind screwing the boy, either. He felt his prick begin to stiffen. Perhaps he might suggest a threesome? No—she would never go for it. She was a cold bitch. But he would soon be warming her up. His gaze met Brittius’s once more. What a funny fellow. He winked and gestured with his eyes to Ampliatus and mouthed in agreement, “Trimalchio!”
“What’s that you’re saying, Popidius?”
Ampliatus’s voice cut across the table like a whip. Popidius cringed.
“He was saying, ‘What a feast!’ ” Brittius raised his glass. “That’s what we’re all saying, Ampliatus. What a magnificent feast.” A murmur of assent went round the table.
“And the best is yet to come,” said Ampliatus. He clapped and one of the slaves hurried out of the dining room in the direction of the kitchen.
Popidius managed to force a smile. “I for one have left room for dessert, Ampliatus.” In truth he felt like vomiting, and he would not have needed the usual cup of warm brine and mustard to do it, either. “What is it to be, then? A basket of plums from
“Oh, it’s not yet time for dessert, my dear Popidius. Or may I—if it’s not too premature—call you ‘son’?” Ampliatus grinned and pointed and by a superhuman effort, Popidius succeeded in hiding his revulsion.
O, Trimalchio,
he thought,
Trimalchio . . .
There was a sound of scuffling footsteps and then four slaves appeared, bearing on their shoulders a model trireme, as long as a man and cast in silver, surfing a sea of encrusted sapphires. The diners broke into applause. The slaves approached the table on their knees and with difficulty slid the trireme, prow first, across the table. It was entirely filled by an enormous eel. Its eyes had been removed and replaced by rubies. Its jaws were propped open and filled with ivory. Clipped to its dorsal fin was a thick gold ring.
Popidius was the first to speak. “I say, Ampliatus—that’s a whopper.”
“From my own fishery at Misenum,” said Ampliatus proudly. “A moray. It must be thirty years old if it’s a day. I had it caught last night. You see the ring? I do believe, Popidius, that this is the creature your friend Nero used to sing to.” He picked up a large silver knife. “Now, who will have the first slice? You, Corelia—I think you should try it first.”
Now, that was a nice gesture,
thought Popidius. Up till this point, her father had conspicuously ignored her, and he had begun to suspect ill-feeling between them, but here was a mark of favor. So it was with some astonishment that he saw the girl flash a look of undiluted hatred at her father, throw down her napkin, rise from her couch, and run sobbing from the table.
The first couple of pedestrians Attilius approached swore they had never heard of Africanus’s place. But at the crowded bar of Hercules, a little farther down the street, the man behind the counter gave him a shifty look and then provided directions in a quiet voice—walk down the hill for another block, turn right, then first left, then ask again: “But be careful who you talk to, citizen.”
Attilius could guess what that meant and sure enough, from the moment he left the main road, the street curved and narrowed, the houses became meaner and more crowded. Carved in stone beside several of the squalid entrances was the sign of the prick and balls. The brightly colored dresses of the prostitutes bloomed in the gloom like blue and yellow flowers. So this was where Exomnius had chosen to spend his time! Attilius’s footsteps slowed. He wondered if he should turn back. Nothing could be allowed to jeopardize the main priority of the day. But then he thought again of his father, dying on his mattress in the corner of their little house—another honest fool, whose stubborn rectitude had left his widow poor—and he resumed his walk, but faster, angry now.
At the end of the street, a heavy first-floor balcony jutted over the pavement, reducing the road to scarcely more than a passageway. He shouldered his way past a group of loitering men, their faces flushed by heat and wine, through the nearest open door, and into a dingy vestibule. There was a sharp, almost feral stink of sweat and semen. “Lupanars” they called these places, after the howl of the lupa, the she-wolf, in heat. And “lupa” was the street word for a harlot—a meretrix. The business sickened him. From upstairs came the sound of a flute, a thump on the floorboards, male laughter. On either side, from curtained cubicles, came the noises of the night—grunts, whispers, a child’s whimper.
In the semidarkness, a woman in a short green dress sat on a stool with her legs wide apart. She stood as she heard him enter and came toward him eagerly, arms outstretched in welcome, vermilion lips cracked into a smile. She had used antimony to blacken her eyebrows, stretching the lines so that they met across the bridge of her nose, a mark which some men prized as beauty, but which reminded Attilius of the death masks of the Popidii. She was ageless—fifteen or fifty, he could not tell in the weak light.
He said, “Africanus?”
“Who?” She had a thick accent. Cilician, perhaps. “Not here,” she said quickly.
“What about Exomnius?” At the mention of his name her painted mouth split wide. She tried to block his path, but he moved her out of his way, gently, his hands on her bare shoulders, and pulled back the curtain behind her. A naked man was squatting over an open latrine, his thighs bluish-white and bony in the darkness. He looked up, startled. “Africanus?” asked Attilius. The man’s expression was uncomprehending. “Forgive me, citizen.” Attilius let the curtain fall and moved toward one of the cubicles on the opposite side of the vestibule, but the whore beat him to it, extending her arms to block his way.
“No,” she said. “No trouble. He not here.”
“Where, then?”
She hesitated. “Above.” She gestured with her chin toward the ceiling.
Attilius looked around. He could see no stairs.
“How do I get up there? Show me.”
She did not move so he lunged toward another curtain, but again she beat him to it. “I show,” she said. “This way.”
She ushered him toward a second door. From the cubicle beside it, a man cried out in ecstasy. Attilius stepped into the street. She followed. In the daylight he could see that her elaborately piled-up hair was streaked with gray. Rivulets of sweat had carved furrows down her sunken, powdered cheeks. She would be lucky to earn a living here much longer. Her owner would throw her out and then she’d be living in the necropolis beyond the Vesuvius Gate, spreading her legs for the beggars behind the tombs.
She put her hand to her turkey-throat, as if she had guessed what was in his mind, and pointed to the staircase a few paces further on, then hurried back inside. As he started to mount the stone steps he heard her give a low whistle.
I am like Theseus in the labyrinth,
he thought,
but without the ball of thread from Ariadne to guide me back to safety.
If an attacker appeared above him and another blocked off his escape, he would not stand a chance. When he reached the top of the staircase he did not bother to knock but flung open the door.
