The Story of X: An Erotic Tale

by A. J. Molloy

  And each time my heart breaks open just a little more, and each time I realize, no, that cannot be Marc—but each time I also know that one day soon, I will make this penitential morning walk to Via Partenope and I will say “Buongiorno” to the news guy and I will hand over my coins and I will open the terrible pages of Il Mattino and then I will see Marc.

  Dead.

  FINALLY, ONE SOFT evening at the beginning of September when I am on the verge of dissolution, of turning into somebody I don’t want to be, when it is all too much, I walk the sunny and shady pavements of the Chiaia to The Palazzo Roscarrick. I am going to have one last attempt, and then—then what? Then what can I do? I don’t know.

  I turn the last corner, and as I do my heart breaks just a little bit more. The Palazzo Roscarrick is different: the door is padlocked. The windows have been closed and firmly shuttered. There is no sign of life. There is a big FOR SALE sign plastered on the wall.

  I don’t know what this means, precisely. Perhaps Marc is already dead, and it has been kept quiet. This happens quite a lot. Alternatively, it is possible he has fled somewhere, the South Tyrol, London, New York, Brazil, and he is selling the house, so he can hide away. But the sight of this lovely house boarded up and emphatically FOR SALE makes me want to weep, all over again, but the emotion in me is more terminal this time. I am despairing and desolate, but I am also resigned.

  I have accepted that he is gone from my life forever. Dead or departed. Does it matter? Now I suppose I have to save myself. Jessica was probably right: I am in danger, too. I have seen too much.

  I trudge back to my apartment and pick up my phone to call my mom in San Jose. She has been ringing me and e-mailing me for weeks, wondering if I am okay. Her maternal telepathy has obviously sensed that something is seriously awry, but she cannot quite ascertain what it is—for the good reason that I don’t want to tell her. I can’t tell her. Without her knowing about the Mysteries she would be utterly nonplussed, and there is no way I can reveal any of that, not because I am ashamed or embarrassed—quite the opposite—but because it is too complex, it is too much—and because I can’t bear to think about any of it, anyway.

  The phone rings in distant California. It picks up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Sweetheart!” There is a forced cheeriness in her voice. “Alexandra, darling, how lovely! How are you? The boys have been here asking all about you, and your father was just saying, just this morning, the—”

  I stop her in midsentence.

  “Mom, I’m coming home.”

  She pauses. Politely, and lovingly. She knows there is more to this than I am saying, but she is too kind to pry if I don’t want to tell.

  “Okay, sweetheart, Okay. Have you . . . finished your thesis?”

  “Yes, I’ve finished it. I want to come home now.”

  I am forcing back the sobs.

  “Okay, darling. Just let me know the flight number. We’ll pick you up at the airport! Your father will be so happy; we’ve missed you so, so much.”

  She chatters on for a while, then I say I have to book my flight and so I have to go, which I do. The phone call finished, I go online and book my ticket. For tomorrow afternoon. In less than twenty-four hours I am flying home and not coming back.

  The next morning, I pack up all my stuff. This doesn’t take long because I am leaving behind all the lovely clothes he bought me. When Jessica comes to my apartment to help me pack, I offer the clothes to her, but she shakes her head and I totally understand why, and then I feel guilty and somehow squalid and I say sorry.

  “Don’t be an idiot, X,” she says. “Let me come with you to the airport, let me help. Gonna miss you.”

  Her face is etched with sadness. Everything is inscribed with sadness. We get in the taxi and we duck and curve through the fuming Naples traffic. We pull up at the terminal and I check in for my flight. Jess hugs me so tight at the check-in desk, it is like she thinks she will never see me again, and then we wave good-bye. I walk through passport control and show my boarding card. This is it, I think. Good-bye, Naples. Not arrivederci, Naples. Good-bye. Farewell. Adieu. It is a cheap, cheap song that evokes the most powerful emotion.

  My flight leaves in two hours. I sit on an uncomfortable steel bench, sipping my macchiato from a plastic cup, and stare into the nothingness of the future, reading a desultory advertisement for Taurasi wine on a wall. I think about all the wines I have drunk. All the food I have eaten. I think bitterly about this sometimes violent, sometimes ugly place, with its beauty and wine and its history and its glory, its dolce vita. Amazing food and terrible cruelty.

  And then I think about the little snails they sell. The babalucci. I never ate them. It was a little too much.

  The babalucci. The babalucci!

  I stand up. Electrified.

  What am I doing? Why am I sitting here? Why am I staring at the wall?

  There is something I can do.

  I run back through passport control, almost screaming with impatience, and the security guards shrug and sigh, letting me back into the bustle of the airport proper; then I dash to the check-in desk and demand that they unload my bags. I am not going to America, I am not flying to California.

  I am staying. Because if Marc is still alive, somewhere out there, maybe there is some way I can save him.

  My fingers are trembling as I dial my cell phone. Gabbling the words, I ask for the number of a restaurant in Plati, Calabria.

  The languid woman at the end of the line gives me the number.

  “Due, due, sei, cinque . . .”

  I scribble this down on my boarding pass, then hang up and call the number. It is lunchtime. He will be there, he must be there.

  A wary voice answers. A young man’s voice.

  “Sì?”

  I stammer my words, as fast as I can. I tell him my name is X. Alexandra Beckmann. The girlfriend of Marc Roscarrick.

  Then I ask him if I can speak to Enzo Paselli.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THE OTHER END of the line goes much quieter. I can just about hear the noises of a restaurant: some waiters talking, the clatter of plates, someone gathering cutlery.

  Then a quavery, old man’s voice speaks to me from three hundred miles away.

  “Hello, Alexandra.”

  It is Enzo Paselli. I stutter a question, but he does not wait for me to get halfway there. He silences me with a terse little laugh, and then he says, “I know why you are calling me.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  I pause, for several seconds. Because now I have to ask the terrible question.

  “Enzo, please tell me. Is Marc Roscarrick alive?”

  Enzo does not answer. He just breathes. So I stare helplessly through the plate glass window of the airport at the gaggles of cab drivers. Two of them are arguing, arms folded, heads tilted back, chins jerked upwards and away—like Mussolini in a newsreel.

  Finally Enzo answers, “Yes, I believe he is alive.”

  The relief floods me like adrenaline.

  “How do you know?”

  He gives no answer. I persist.

  “Enzo, how do you know he is alive?”

  “Miss Beckmann, please. It is, as I have told you, my job to know everything.” His voice dwindles, I hear him speaking Calabrian to someone in the background. Ordering someone killed, or ordering more ricotta calabrese. Then he says, “What do you want me to do, Alexandra? You want me to save your boyfriend?”

  “Yes! Yes I do. Please, Signor Paselli. I know you run the Mysteries. I worked it out—you, the Camorra, the ’Ndrangheta, you control everything: the initiations, the kykeon, the rituals. That’s why you were at Rhoguda; it wasn’t just the truce with Marc.”

  I expect this speech
to unsettle Enzo Paselli, to give me some purchase, but his reply is as lucid and calm as ever.

  “But you are aware, Alexandra, what Roscarrick did in the Fifth—he has broken the code. The Camorra are going to kill him soon; he knows this, we know this. Because this is the way of all things—it is written, and it is inevitable. I am sorry.”

  “I will do the Fifth again! Let me do it! They can do whatever they want to me, Enzo, they can—” I am trying to control my words, my emotions are riotous. “I will do whatever the Camorra want. You can do this, you are the capo di tutti capi of the ’Ndrangheta—the Camorra are scared of you, as they are scared of no one else.”

  That’s it. That is my last bid. My terminal hope. My final gambit. Another silence. The taxi drivers are still arguing outside in the endless early September sun, the summer that never ends. Enzo Paselli clears his throat, and calmly says, “It is too late.”

  “Please!”

  “The sin is not really yours, Alexandra. You were, I am told, prepared to submit to the Fifth Mystery. Roscarrick broke the code. It is too late.”

  “But—”

  He interrupts me.

  “But what, Alexandra?”

  “I will do anything! Anything anything anything. Please . . . help me . . . help me.”

  He breathes in and out. I hear him speak in Italian to some minion, his tone is commanding. Then he sighs and coughs and speaks to me.

  “You would really do anything?”

  “Yes! Yes. Anything.”

  “But . . .” He hesitates. Painfully. And then he goes on.

  “Okay, Alexandra. Va bene, va bene . . . There is perhaps one thing you can do, which might alter things. There is one thing that might change the situation, perhaps to your advantage. But you will have to be very brave.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Sixth Mystery. You must do the Sixth.”

  TWENTY-NINE HOURS LATER I am sitting in my apartment once again. My mom has been told I have delayed my return by a few days, because of “things.” She has complained and inquired, with self-evident anxiety, but I have bluntly ignored her questions. Jessica is equally perplexed—but I have fobbed her off with fibs. She knows these are fibs but she is a good enough friend to let me lie openly to her, and to ask nothing.

  In return for my lies, she makes me a meal and gives me red wine. I love Jess. I love my mother.

  But how much do I love Marc?

  This is the question, because Enzo Paselli’s words, his warning words about the Sixth, are now on some repeating loop in my head. The Sixth is like no other Mystery. The Sixth is not erotic, it is dangerous. The Sixth can kill you. Very few initiates go on to do the Sixth, once they are informed of the dangers. But only the Sixth can provide true katabasis. The true release.

  What does this all mean? Am I going to die? Am I prepared to risk death if it means I can save Marc?

  Yes.

  I check my watch. It is 7 P.M. I stand and walk out onto my balcony, the apartment I was meant to have vacated. My landlord will be here tomorrow, to make sure I am gone, and tomorrow I will be gone. Enzo’s people are coming for me tonight.

  I stare. Twilight falls rapidly over Naples, turning everything hazy and opaque, like the sfumato of a Renaissance painting. Capri looks like the dream of an island on the mild and milky blue horizon. It is a suitably stirring and wistful sight.

  The doorbell buzzes. I go back into my apartment and press the intercom bell, then three good-looking and anxious young men are in my room. They say almost nothing. The youngest of them gazes at me with a tiny trace of pity—or something worse—and he graciously leads me downstairs. I am dressed in simple jeans and T-shirt and a black denim jacket; I am carrying an overnight bag. It feels totally ridiculous in my hand. Toiletries. Toothbrush. Lipstick. What am I thinking? I am not going for a weekend in some lakeside hotel.

  I am going to do the Sixth and Final Mystery of Dionysus and Eleusis. I am proceeding unto the real katabasis. Whatever happens in the next twenty-four hours will change me forever; it may kill me. But it might save Marc.

  Parked outside my block, on Via Santa Lucia, is a big dark blue van. I am assisted into the back of the van, which is furnished with blankets and pillows. One of the young men invites me to take a pill.

  “What is it?”

  He knows very little English. He answers, awkwardly.

  “For sleep. It make sleep.”

  I take the pill and the proffered bottle of mineral water. I swallow the tablet and liquid together and recap the bottle.

  “Now,” the young man says, lifting a black hood, which looks like a hangman’s hood.

  They are going to put this hood on me, of course. I yield to the blackness as the hood is slipped over my head. I am not uncomfortable; I can still breathe easily. Indeed, the sheathing and enclosing blackness is somehow comforting.

  The van pulls away; I can sense it moving. Here in the darkness underneath my hood, I can also hear lots of traffic, evening Naples traffic, rush-hour horns and big trucks braking, taxis and radios and rasping scooters, and then I hear faster traffic—seething and roaring. I guess we are on a freeway? And then the noises fade slowly away as the pill kicks in and I lean to the side on a big, soft pillow; I sleep and dream of Marc trapped under ice, knocking at the ice, gesturing desperately to me.

  I am on a frozen lake and Marc is in the deadly water, trapped, and I am hysterically trying to save him. I ask a passing man, a Spanish man, to help me, but the Spanish man is bleeding from the mouth. He grimaces and shrugs, pointing at his mouth, and he walks away. I can do nothing. Therefore Marc is dying under the ice—dropping, twirling into the sapphire deepness—falling away into starlit freezing space.

  I wake up. How many hours have we been driving? Three? Five? Six? Ten? We could be anywhere in Italy: from the Alps to Sicily. We could be in France or Switzerland. The hood is still over my head. I lift myself into an upright position and I say, through the cloth of the hood, “I am thirsty. I need the bathroom.”

  I don’t know who I am talking to. I sense there are other people in the back of the van with me, but I don’t know who.

  A disembodied voice replies. “Ten minutes, you must wait just ten minutes.”

  This is not the young man of before. It is an older voice; the English is more confident.

  The man is also right. Ten minutes later the van stops and I hear the rear door being opened. I am bundled out, still in my hooded darkness, and hurried across some road, and then I sense that I am in a big, echoey building. But where?

  The hands guide me down several flights of stairs; I stumble in my blinded state but the hands hold me firm, steering me left and right and left again. I sense old corridors. This is a stone building; it has the aroma of an ancient place—a castle? A monastery? What is this?

  Then I am pushed into a room and a door slams shut, and the hood is removed. Enzo Paselli is standing in front of me, accompanied by a young woman.

  He looks into my eyes and shakes his bald head, making his jowls droop and shiver. His skin is so deeply lined. He seems incomparably old; like Italy herself. Then he turns to the woman at his side, and says, in English, “Give her food and drink, then get her ready.”

  Enzo disappears before I can ask any questions.

  Only the young woman remains; she is dressed in white. Of course. She hands me some mineral water in a bottle and I drink. Her gentle smile is compassionate and patient as she watches me quench my thirst. But maybe not that compassionate: when I ask her what is going to happen to me, she says nothing.

  I gaze around.

  Only now do I realize what a remarkable room this is: an enormous vaulted ballroom, or medieval hall, entirely decorated with frescoes on every surface. Yet there are no windows.

  The frescoes look early Renaissance
, or even late medieval: crowded with allegorical and religious scenes in vivid and tumbling colors, Christ and his angels. Saints and Madonnas. I am too confused to work it out. The floor is patterned with cold black-and-white mosaics. There is one item of furniture in the room. Behind me. A big wooden bed with red quilts of silk and cotton.

  “Sì,” says the girl. She evidently speaks no English. With a brisk gesture she mutely hands me some new clothes to wear—a very plain, sleeveless black cotton dress and no underwear at all—and points at the distant wall, where I notice a small door.

  I have no choice. I must obey; I must complete the Sixth. So I cross the enormous vaulted room and I step into a large, clean, modern bathroom and change my clothes: removing my jeans and sneakers and showering quickly. Before I put the dress on, I stare at myself in the mirror of the bathroom: at my twenty-one-year-old face, less round and innocent than it was. How very much older I feel than that young woman who came to Italy in the spring. I maybe have a few gray hairs.

  Marc Roscarrick, where are you? Are you alive?

  Gathering my courage, I don the dress, brush my teeth, and step back into the grandness of the great hall. The girl is still there, waiting in silence in the middle of this absurdly huge space. She is dwarfed by the immensity. And she has a metal cup in her hand.

  “Kykeon?” I ask, walking toward her.

  She half shrugs, half nods, and thrusts the cold metal cup into my hands.

  I take the cup and drain it to the end. The taste is much more bitter than before, much less pleasant. But I drink it and wonder. Now what? What are they going to do to me? I know this intoxicant works very quickly. So I sit down on the bed and wait as the girl departs, crossing to the only other door. Shutting it behind her.

  Two or three hours pass, or so I imagine: I have no way of really telling the time. No clock, no watch. No cell phone. Is it morning yet? How long were we driving? The thoughts in my head meld with the dreams and the drug and the sadness and the whirling images of the frescoes on the ceiling. The Holy Ghost descending. A dove and a saint. The resurrection of Christ. Penitent sinners weeping.