The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  “What was the scandal about?”

  “Oh, just another one of those old Caprese stories of degenerate foreigners made up of gossip and lies,” he says, turning back up the path.

  “You sound like you don’t approve of the locals.”

  “I guess I’m afraid of what they say about me—that I’m just another in a long line of eccentric foreigners come to live out his fantasies—or to escape the demands of Empire like our friend Tiberius.” He points upward and I see that the ruins of Tiberius’s villa have come into view—a mass of sun-struck brick and limestone crowning a high peak above us.

  “Why did you decide to build a replica of the Villa della Notte?” I ask.

  Lyros shakes his head. “Well, the funny thing is that I came upon the property here on Capri the same summer that I became interested in the ruins of the Villa della Notte. Except for some eighteenth-century looting of the site, most of the villa was unexcavated. I knew that left to the government the villa would remain underground for decades more, so I decided to fund the excavation. On the same day that I was shown this piece of property here on Capri the excavators found the map of the old villa and I saw that I could create a mirror image of the villa just across the bay. It just seemed like it was…fate. I suppose that sounds silly.”

  “People make decisions for smaller coincidences,” I say. “They just don’t usually have the means to take advantage of those coincidences on such a grand scale. At least your villa was built to advance the cause of knowledge. If I hadn’t been reading Phineas in the villa last night I wouldn’t have realized that his room corresponds to the one I’m staying in.”

  “Yes, you noticed that, too! You realize what it means, right? The trunk might still be there. I’ve asked the excavators to step up work on that room. If we’re lucky, we’ll find his trunk and the scrolls he brought with him. I’ve been thinking about what ‘philosophical treatises’ and ‘magical secrets’ Phineas might have brought back from the East…. Just think, he might have had an Orphic poem, an unknown dialogue of Plato, the lost writings of Pythagoras….”

  “That’s great…” I stop, feeling suddenly as if the breath had been knocked out of my chest.

  “Are you all right?” Lyros touches my elbow. “We can turn back. Tiberius’s villa’s been there for two thousand years. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “No, I’m fine, and I want to see it.” It’s just a coincidence, I tell myself, that Lyros has mentioned Pythagoras. It has nothing to do with Dale Henry or Ely. “This is where Tiberius lived out the last years of his reign as emperor, right?”

  “Yes, avoiding the intrigues and poisonings of the court at Rome.”

  “He certainly found an unapproachable fortress,” I say. “No one could sneak up on him here.”

  “That was the idea. There’s a story about a local fisherman who thought he’d gain the emperor’s favor by scrambling up the cliffs to present him with a fresh mullet. Tiberius was so alarmed that his sanctuary could be so easily breached that he had the man’s face slapped by the fish. Like most proud Caprese, the man responded with a joke. He said he was glad he hadn’t brought a lobster.”

  “Don’t tell me—”

  “Yeah—Tiberius ordered the man’s face to be lacerated with a lobster’s claw.”

  “Ugh.” I wince, remembering the passage from Phineas that I read last night. Calatoria had only slapped Iusta’s face with her hand, but no doubt she could have inflicted harsher punishments on her household slaves. We’ve reached the ticket booth to the site of the ruins, but John merely exchanges a wave with the man sitting in the shade of the little building.

  “Here.” Lyros leads me to the edge of the cliff beyond the booth. “Before we see the ruins—this is the Salto di Tiberio—the cliff from which Tiberius was supposed to have thrown his favorites once he had grown tired of them.”

  “According to Suetonius. Some scholars think Tiberius got a bad rap.” I’m trying to reassure myself as I look over the crumbling limestone ledge at the vertiginous drop into the blue sea. It’s not nice to think of anyone falling into that void. Yet it exerts a strange pull. I find myself taking a step closer to the edge, and am startled when Lyros grabs my arm.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I thought you were getting a little too close. Are you ready to see the villa?”

  I nod and we start up the stairs that lead to the ruins, climbing past the vaulted cisterns that make up the middle of the villa and up toward the semicircular ambulatio, the columned walkway that crowns the peak. The climb is steep enough that we don’t talk, giving me time to get over my embarrassment at jumping when he had grabbed my arm.

  When I reach the top I’m panting. Even Lyros with his Himalayan hiking experience is breathing heavily. We stand looking out at the view of the strait that runs between the eastern point of Capri and the Sorrentine peninsula. Lyros waves his arm in the air, gesturing toward the water. “This view always reminds me of the view from the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion; it holds such a commanding presence over the sea, and while there’s no temple to Poseidon here, there was a temple over there on the Sorrentine coast—” he begins.

  “Sacred to Tyrrhena Minerva,” I finish for him. “The Athena of the Tyrrhenian sea, patron of navigators. According to Statius, sailors poured libations into the sea as they passed the temple to ensure safe passage through the strait.”

  “Ah, you know your Statius.”

  “Well, I boned up when I knew I was coming here. I thought of the passage when I read last night that Phineas lost his crew in this strait. He says he saw the whitened bones on the sirens’ rocks and poured a libation. Funny that he survived in a rowboat when his crew was lost.”

  “Which he calls a sacrifice to Poseidon, thus fulfilling the prophecy Calatoria received from the Sibyl the week before Phineas’s arrival, that ‘Poseidon will take back what is his.’”

  “Pretty convenient,” I say. “Do you think Calatoria made up the prophecy to make Phineas feel as though he had been fated to come to the villa?”

  John turns away from the view to look at me. His dark sunglasses hide his oddly colored eyes, but I can see by the little lines around his eyes that he’s narrowed them. “That’s an interesting idea. Why do you think she’d want Phineas to think he was fated to come to the Villa della Notte?”

  I have to think a moment. I’d thought at first that Phineas was the one who was trying to create the appearance that he was fated to come to the villa—Phineas who had staged his shipwreck so he could gain access to the villa’s library and secret rites—but something about what I had read last night had made me think that Calatoria had her own plans for Phineas.

  “It’s what she said about the rites requiring stamina and the way she let her lamp light up the sexiest parts of the painting. She needed a male participant for her mystery rites…and it’s the way she brought up the books Phineas had with him at the same time. Like she was offering him some kind of trade: the rare books he was carrying for a night of debauchery.”

  Lyros nods. “That’s an interesting theory. Calatoria did seem interested in those books. We’ll have to see what happens to them. One thing, though,” he says, looking away across the strait toward the Sorrentine peninsula. “Whoever planned his arrival at the villa, it’s kind of sad.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “If the shipwreck was intentional, it means Phineas’s crew were sacrificed on purpose.”

  The walk leaves me more exhausted than I’d counted on. When we get back to the villa, I take a short swim in the pool in the lower courtyard and then go back to my room for a nap. I only mean to sleep an hour, but when I wake up I see by a small majolica clock on the dresser that I’ve slept for two. I shower, put on the one dress I brought with me—a Mexican sundress I bought last year in San Antonio—and go out into the courtyard. In honor of my first post-rehab evening appearance, John Lyros has decided to have cocktails in the courtyard and dinner served on the peristylium overlooki
ng the bay. A buffet has been set up along the back wall and heaped with trays of oysters and other fresh seafood. Candles in seashells rim the edge of the fountain and oil lamps hang in between the columns, illuminating the wall painting Simon has been working on. It’s these half-finished figures that have drawn the attention of the party. The artist is in the middle of the group, flanked by Maria and Agnes, apparently enjoying pointing out each lascivious detail to the women, while George stands to one side helping himself to the oysters.

  “You’ve made it look like some depraved party,” Maria complains as I approach the group. “This innocent young girl looks almost as if she were enjoying what is happening to her. I’m sure that is not how it looks in the original.”

  “I’ve studied the original,” Agnes says. “And that is exactly how she looks…not that she’s enjoying herself, I mean…” Agnes stumbles, looking flustered, “but there’s this otherworldly look in her eyes…like she’s gone beyond the experience….”

  “The look you’re talking about is the result of the opium her masters would have given her. After all, she was a slave being forced to participate—”

  “But not all initiates were slaves. What about the paintings at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii? Scholars think she was the daughter of the household and the paintings are celebrating her marriage.”

  “Brava,” Simon rewards Agnes with a smile, “I can see you’ve studied the genre carefully. Didn’t I see you the other day at the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii looking at the frescoes there—”

  “What do you think, Dr. Chase?” George Petherbridge hands me a glass of chilled white wine as I enter the group. Agnes is blushing. I have the feeling George is trying to break up Agnes and Maria, and again I wonder what it is about Maria, aside from her general rudeness, that’s pushing Agnes’s buttons. “Do you think the girl chosen to play the role of the maiden in these rites was scared or honored?” George asks me.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered much,” I answer. “Apparently, Iusta lost her court case and became Calatoria’s slave, so she had no choice either way. I doubt, though, that she saw it as an honor.”

  “But you forget that she had been brought up in the house ‘like a daughter.’ Perhaps she was raised to consider it an honor to take part in the rites of the household,” a male voice from behind me says. I turn and see that it’s Elgin, in white slacks and a blue-and-white-striped tunic. The sun has turned his normally blond hair red at the tips, making him look even more devilish than usual. He holds up his glass of wine to me. “Sophie, so glad to see you’ve recovered. You gave me quite a scare.”

  My face goes hot remembering all I had told him in my delirium, and wondering what else I might have said that I don’t remember. I raise my wineglass to my lips to give me a moment to think. The wine is deliciously cool with a hint of sulfur—a local wine, then, from grapes grown in volcanic soil.

  “Thanks to you, Elgin,” I say. “It’s a good thing you came looking for me. Did you have a good time in Sorrento?”

  “Ah, Sorrento.” Simon Bowles nearly sings the word. “I adore the Hotel Excelsior Vittoria. One can still imagine Oscar Wilde trading quips in the salon and Caruso singing under the lemon trees. I myself spied Luciano Pavarotti there when I was staying with friends a few summers ago. Who were you staying with?”

  “No one you’d know.” Elgin turns to the buffet table to sample a piece of fried calamari. “An old acquaintance who has a house there. I stopped in Herculaneum this morning on the way back to see the villa. After reading the section of Phineas that Agnes was kind enough to send me last night”—he salutes Agnes with a fried sardine—“I wanted to have another look at the actual paintings.” Elgin moves toward the figure of the girl held down by the two sirens and peers at her face. The figures of the sirens are merely outlines, as is the figure of the god who approaches her, but the face of the supine girl and the face of the siren who holds the whip above her have been painted in. Following Elgin’s gaze back and forth between the two faces I see what Phineas saw his first night at the villa: the faces are identical.

  “Bravo!” Elgin says, turning to Simon. “You’ve captured it. They’re the same girl: one horrified at her part in the ritual, one reveling in it. What a brilliant way to suggest the dual nature of pain and pleasure. The dual nature of the feminine, one might say, where pleasure and pain—sex and childbirth—are so irrevocably entwined. So you see, ladies,” he turns to Maria and Agnes, “you’re both right. The girl Iusta was both honored and horrified to play her role in the rite.”

  Neither Agnes nor Maria seems to be paying attention to what Elgin is saying, though. Simon is whispering something into Agnes’s ear that is making her blush even more. Maria watches them with a prim, disapproving look. It must be hard, I think, to be the representative of the Church. I imagine she feels like a Christian martyr thrown to the lions.

  Elgin looks none too pleased that his efforts to play peacemaker have failed. In fact, he’s glaring at Simon and Agnes—jealous, I imagine, that the older man is flirting with Agnes. He drains his glass of wine in one swallow and then gestures toward the terrace. “And speaking of honors, I believe our generous host has prepared a lavish feast to celebrate Dr. Chase’s recovery. May I have the honor of escorting you in to dinner, Sophie?” He holds out his arm to me and there’s no way I can refuse it without seeming petty—and without Elgin thinking I’m avoiding him because of our past. And besides, I do owe him thanks for rescuing me from the Hotel Convento. As I take his arm I glimpse a smile from Agnes, who’s disengaged herself from Simon, and a frown from Maria. Another example, I wonder, of the dual nature of woman?

  As Elgin leads me from the courtyard out onto the terrace, I glance back to the painting on the wall. The problem with Elgin’s analysis, though, is that the girl Iusta could only play one role at a time. I can’t help but wonder which one she played with Phineas.

  It is that time of evening when the sky shifts from indigo to violet. In sympathy, the sea has darkened to purple—a color that could earn the Homeric epithet “wine-dark.” Lights are just beginning to come on around the shoreline, like beads being strung, one by one, on a curved diadem crowning the amethyst brow of the bay.

  John Lyros is leaning against a column looking out at the view. He turns and I’m startled again by his eyes, which have absorbed all the purples in the landscape. They seem to darken for a moment when they fall on my arm linked to Elgin’s, but then he smiles broadly and opens his arms wide, welcoming us all to dinner but also, it seems to me, welcoming us all into the capacious embrace of the bay. Sinus Cumanus, the Romans called it. The Sibyl’s Bay. But sinus also means bosom or lap and tonight it feels like this landscape is a living being, a siren luring us with her beauty.

  John moves to the head of the table set up lengthwise along the balustrade and holds out the chair to his right. “Dr. Chase must have a seat with a view for her first night dining al fresco,” he says.

  Maria, who had been heading for that seat, shrugs her bare shoulders. “Va bene. I’ve seen the view a million times. I don’t mind sitting with my back to it.” She skirts around Lyros and takes the seat on his left.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of looking at this view,” Agnes says, sitting one seat away from me—leaving Elgin to take the place between us. Simon Bowles takes the chair at the end of the table, opposite Lyros, shaking out his napkin with a flourish, and George Petherbridge sits down next to him leaving an empty seat between him and Maria, positioning himself directly across from Agnes.

  “Is someone else coming?” Maria asks, eyeing the empty chair as though it were an open sore.

  “No,” Lyros says, his brow creasing with annoyance, “they’ve gotten the number wrong.” He rings a bell and the housekeeper, without coral necklace, I note, appears and scowls at the empty seat and then at each one of us as if clearly we must have murdered one of our own in order to explain the discrepancy between the number of people and chairs. Then s
he does something truly odd; she shouts her own name: Guilia. Just when I’m beginning to wonder if the housekeeper’s alternating moods can be explained by a split personality, Guilia’s duplicate appears. As she clears the extra place setting, I notice that she’s wearing the coral beads and when she catches me staring at her she smiles.

  “Twins!” I say when both women are gone. “I thought they were the same person, only sometimes she smiled and sometimes she didn’t.”

  John Lyros laughs. “Guilia’s the one who smiles and Theresa is the one who doesn’t. You see, one lost her fiancé in a diving accident—”

  “The one who doesn’t smile?”

  “No, Guilia, the one who smiles, is the one who lost her fiancé. Theresa never had a fiancé. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” Simon Bowles quotes, tilting his wineglass toward Agnes. “Eh, Miss Hancock? I’m sure you’ve left a trail of broken hearts back in Texas.”

  “You think Theresa is jealous that she never even had a fiancé?” Agnes asks, pointedly ignoring Simon’s remark and looking around the table.

  George nods eagerly. “Maybe she was secretly in love with Giulia’s fiancé….”

  “Maybe she killed the fiancé….” Elgin suggests.

  Maria tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Perhaps Theresa is bad-tempered because she works harder. She’s always cleaning up after Guila’s mistakes—like missetting the table tonight.”

  I’m about to ask how she knows who set the table when John laughs. “Well, I only hope that you all train your keen investigative eyes on the behavior of Phineas, Calatoria, and Iusta with the same fervor. You’ve all had time to read the first installment by now. What do you make of it?”