The Night Villa (10 page)

As the road descends and then curves to the right, the view of the sea vanishes. Below me is a row of patrician houses topping the marine wall. Built to catch the sea breeze, they are now sunk below ground level, their sea views blocked by a wall of tufa. I pass the Porta Marina that leads into the town and find the offices of the Scavi Acheologici behind the gift shop and ticket booth. Two gray-haired men—one mustached, the other clean-shaven—are playing a game of cards over a metal desk, their chairs angled toward an ancient rotary fan, frosted bottles of Aranciata sitting in wet rings by their sides. I present my letter of introduction from John Lyros to the man with the mustache and he passes it to the clean-shaven one. He takes out a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses, unfolds them, fits them on the bridge of his nose, and squints at the paper like a suspicious border guard. Sweat trickles down my back, my mouth watering for some of the orange soda, as I try to cobble together the Italian to ask where I, too, can buy a cold Aranciata. The dust-engrimed paddles of the fan stir the paper in the man’s hand, but I am, maddeningly, just out of its cooling reach.

After examining my paperwork twice, the clean-shaven man looks over the rims of his eyeglasses at his mustached comrade. Lifting his bushy eyebrows, he says something I can’t make out. A heated exchange follows that I imagine goes something like this: “You take her.” “No, you! I took the last one.” “Your ass, you did!” “Go to hell!”

The mustachioed gentleman loses. With barely a glance in my direction he picks up a set of heavy keys from an ashtray on top of the desk and brushes past me uttering the single word
Vieni!
Although his posture is indolent, I have to hurry to catch up to him at the back gate behind the office. He unlocks the gate that marks the boundary of the public excavations and we cross a narrow street where laundry hangs off the balconies of apartment buildings and a group of barefoot children are taking turns crowding onto an ancient Vespa to ride it up and down the street. It throws up a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes that hangs in the still air like a small mushroom cloud—like the cloud Pliny described as crowning the peak of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, AD 79. I check my watch and see it’s half-past noon. No wonder the custodians were so disgusted to see me. It’s time for the afternoon
riposo.
Only an idiot—or an American—would go out in this noonday sun.

“Mi dispiace,”
I begin as my escort unlocks a series of padlocks on a high chain-link gate posted with
Ingresso Vietato
signs and topped with concertina wire. But I can’t figure out how to finish the sentence. The heat seems to have settled behind my eyes, like a wall between my brain and the rest of my senses, impeding any dialogue between the two. “Perhaps it will be cooler down below,” I say aloud in English. My escort laughs, whether from the futility of the hope or the hopelessness of him understanding, I’m not sure.

As we start down the steep path into the pit that holds the Villa della Notte, he seems to take pity on me—or maybe he’s given this tour so many times before that the guidebook speech is automatic.
“Ecco,”
he says, pointing to the water dripping down the tufa wall that borders the path,
“Uno dei due fiumi di Ercolano che è stato deviato per consentire gli scavi di questa zona.”
He’s telling me that the river was diverted to make way for the excavation. He points out where pipes are fitted into the wall. I remember that Herculaneum was built on a promontory between two streams—a situation that made it scenic and cool in the summer, but that ensured its doom when Mount Vesuvius unleashed its final ground surge and volcanic matter flowed down the mountain following the streambeds. At the bottom of the stairs we pass over a metal grate that covers the ill-omened stream. My guide points into the ditch and says,
“Ecco—i rani.”

I look at the green stagnant water, trying to remember what
rani
means, and then the guide kicks a pebble into the ditch and the viscous surface stirs, the green scum writhing like a snake and then breaking into a roiling mass.
“Rani,”
he repeats, chuckling and kicking in some more pebbles. Is
rani
Italian for some mythological creature—a scylla or a medusa—I wonder? And then I remember.

“Frogs,” I say out loud. Identifying the slimy inhabitants of this underground river does little to reassure me. Wasn’t the River Styx full of frogs? I feel as if I have descended into the underworld and I recall that according to mythology the house of Night is indeed in the underworld. “There also stands the gloomy house of Night,” Hesiod wrote, “ghastly clouds shroud it in darkness.”

I turn away from the dead river to where the guide is now pointing.
“La Villa della Notte,”
he says. No ghastly clouds shroud it, only stagnant, greenish air through which I squint at the far wall of the ditch. It’s hard to make out the lines of the building emerging from the tufa like a body trapped in rock. It reminds me of Michelangelo’s “Captives”—those half-finished statues in which Titans struggle against the imprisoning rock—and I recall that in Hesiod’s version of the underworld the Titans are indeed chained to the subterranean rock as punishment for rising up against Zeus. I make out a number of gaping holes on the first level, then the diamond-shaped pattern of
opus sectile
on the wall of the second level, and, on the third, a row of columns that would have lined the peristylium that faced the sea, but which now face the blank wall of tufa. And although I know that the villa rests on the same ground it always did—that it’s the ground that’s risen around it—I have the feeling that the villa has been cast beneath the earth, just as the Titans were, as punishment for some unspeakable transgression.

I’m gasping in the pea-soup air as I follow the guide across the bottom of the pit, my ears ringing so loudly I’m unable to hear what he’s saying. He points at the gaping holes near the ground and I assume he’s telling me about the tunnels the eighteenth-century excavators dug until they found something worth taking. I nod stupidly at whatever he says, and parrot the stray words I catch:
i tombaroli, i ladri
…Presumably he’s talking about how the original tunnelers were no better than thieves and tomb raiders. I wish I had thought to bring water. As I follow him up a steep flight of crumbling steps I feel my ears pop, like a diver surfacing too quickly. I close my eyes and try to imagine what this seaside terrace would have felt like on any day before August 24, AD 79. I try to feel the cool sea breeze fanning the terrace and hear the splash of a fountain from the inner courtyard, but all I hear is the croaking of frogs and all I feel is the smothering cloak of fetid air covering my nose and mouth.

“Attenzione, signora!”
my guardian cries as I trip over a loose stone and stumble head first onto the peristylium.

My bare knees bang down hard onto the stone floor. What little breath I had flies out of my lungs like a swallow swooping out of my mouth. For a second I don’t know if I’ll be able to take in the next breath. Everything goes still around me as if suspended in time. I’m facing the far left wall of the courtyard where I see pale and ghostly shapes flitting across its deep red surface. Pompeian red: the color of the Roman underworld. In a flash I take in the struggling form of a girl being pulled into a chariot—Persephone seized by Hades—her mouth open in a soundless scream, and on the far right, her companions, their mouths gaping in horror. The whole scene appears wreathed in black like a mourning tableau, but then I realize it’s my vision that’s dimming from lack of oxygen. I put my hand on my chest and gingerly, slowly, take a shallow sip of air. It’s like trying to drink tea that’s too hot. I feel as though the air might burn up what’s left of my lungs. It occurs to me that
this
is how many of the residents of Herculaneum died, choking on the poisonous gas let loose in the eruption.

My guide whacks me on the back and the air gusts into my lungs and out and in and out again. I cough and splutter until my throat is raw and my chest feels hollow. The guide offers me a sip of water from a metal canteen, which I take gratefully. He sits on a toppled column like he has all day, as if all visitors to the Villa della Notte came to it this way: on their knees and gasping for breath.

When my breathing has returned to something like normal, I get up and approach the wall painting. I feel light-headed and feverish, but no longer care. Although I’ve seen digital images of the Persephone frieze, they didn’t capture the shock on Persephone’s face, the lust in Hades’s eyes, or the horror of her companions. There’s also a feature to the story I’ve never seen depicted before. Grieving Demeter, leaving in her wake a trail of dead vegetation and scorched earth, strides toward her daughter’s three companions, who cower in fear before her. In the next frieze the three women rise into the air, transformed into shrieking bird-women. Demeter has turned them into sirens as punishment for their negligence.

It’s a rather unconventional telling of the myth, but not nearly as unconventional as the subjects on the back wall of the courtyard. I’m sure I’ve never seen pictures of this wall painting.

“E stato reinvenuto…. recentemente?”
I ask, pointing toward the back wall. This must be the part of the villa only recently excavated.

“Sì, l’estate scorsa.”
Last summer.
“Non si possono fare foto, signora. Capisce?”
he adds, “Signore Lyros says no photos.”

So Lyros hasn’t made the find public yet. I recall that for her paper Agnes had to write to him for the barest descriptions of the wall because he said he didn’t want any pictures published before the entire wall was excavated. I notice that portions of the wall are still covered with tufa. From what I can see of it, I can imagine why he’s keeping it under wraps.

In the first frame, a young girl kneels before a trunk—the trunk itself is painted with another rendition of the Rape of Persephone. Above the kneeling girl are the three winged sirens. One carries a
liknon
and one carries a
thrysus
—the traditional basket and wand of Dionysian revels that Agnes had mentioned in her report—but I don’t recall her mentioning the object held by the third siren. She brandishes a phallus-handled whip that is arched in the air like an angry cat’s back, about to descend on the girl’s naked shoulders. In the next two scenes the girl is helped to disrobe by the three sirens and then bathed. The bath she is helped into is shaped like a sarcophagus and adorned with scenes of maenads—female worshippers of Dionysus—dancing and running through the woods in pursuit of some horned animal. Or perhaps, I think, leaning closer, it’s a man, wearing a horned mask. It could be a rendition of the scene in
The Bacchae
in which Agave chases and dismembers her own son. Waiting in the next frieze is a naked man with pointed ears sprawled on a couch and holding a lyre, a wreath of grape leaves around his head. From his pointy ears and lascivious grin I would guess he’s supposed to be Dionysus.

When I get to the next scene my face goes hot. I suddenly become aware of the warm fetid air, the croak of the frogs, and my mustachioed escort standing quietly behind me. It’s not that I haven’t seen Roman erotica before. There’s a whole room of it in the Naples Archaeological Museum (Gabinetto Segreto, as it’s referred to: the Secret Cabinet). But I’ve never seen an example so brutal.

The girl from the previous scenes lies spread-eagled on a couch. Her arms are held by one of the winged sirens while the other two each hold one of her ankles. Dionysus is climbing onto the edge of the couch, his penis curved like a saber, aimed at the girl’s exposed vagina. The girl’s eyes are rolled up in their sockets, her mouth open in a scream, but the sirens only smile down at her, their wings beating the air into a lather of white down. For a moment I hear the sound of their wings, but then I realize it’s the sound of blood rushing in my ears.

“Il resto è nascosto.”
The guide gestures toward the right end of the wall, still covered with the putty-colored tufa. The rest remains hidden.

“Bene,”
I say, meaning
Okay, I’ve seen enough,
but when the guide laughs I realize he thinks I mean that I’m glad the rest of the story is still covered. Am I? Then why is it so hard to look away? Why is it that the longer I look at the girl’s face the harder it is to tell what I read there: pain, pleasure, fear, knowledge? Or some stranger mixture of them all?

“I Misteri,”
I say primly, trying to regain a bit of scholarly distance and save face in front of the guide. After all, I know all about mystery rites, from the veneration of the phallus in the Dionysian rites to the ritual whipping in the Lupercalia and the castration of the Galli in the rites of Cybele. By AD 79, most of those rites would probably be more symbolic than actual. The presence of this mural doesn’t necessarily mean that such scenes were reenacted here at the Villa della Notte.

Still, I suddenly want to be far away from the villa—out of this tufa pit—and back at my hotel in time for a dip in that rooftop pool, to wash away the heat I feel rising off my skin.

“I’ve seen enough,” I try to explain to my guide.
“A me questo basta.”
But he either doesn’t understand or he feels obliged to do the whole tour. He proceeds to show me around the courtyard, pointing to the circle that marked the center fountain and the plinth where the statue of the goddess Nyx would have stood.

“A Napoli,”
he says, by which he means that the statue of Night is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. I’m almost glad. I’d rather not have that gloomy goddess’s eyes watching as the guard continues the obligatory tour, pointing out wherever a fragment of painted fresco still clings to a wall. Most of the images seem innocent enough at first—playful cupids riding horses and pulling carts—but when I look closer they’re strangely suggestive. In one the tiny cupids are riding sea horses. Charming enough until you notice one is actually copulating with his mount. In another a winged woman offers a bunch of grapes to a cupid, but if you look closely the grapes appear to be shaped like miniature breasts and one of the cupids is reaching out to pinch the woman’s breast.