The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  A silence descends over the table while Guilia and Theresa serve the Caprese salads. I imagine we’re all trying to think of something insightful to say, or that we’re embarrassed by Iusta’s nighttime visit to Phineas’s room, or maybe we’re all just enjoying our tomatoes, which seem to glow an even deeper red than usual in the purplish evening light.

  Agnes breaks the silence. “Well, I think it was awful that Calatoria sent Iusta as a present to Phineas…as if she were nothing but a…a…”

  “Piece of property?” Maria suggests. “That’s what she was to her, after all. You weren’t shocked that the girl would participate in a sexual rite, why are you so shocked that she was offered to the guests? At least she probably was tipped by the guests.”

  “You make her sound like a prostitute!” Agnes exclaims, her voice shaking. “Did you notice she was only seventeen years old!”

  “Seventeen would have been considered mature in Roman times,” Simon says, tearing off a hunk of bread from a loaf and using it to sop up the olive oil left on his plate. “We can’t judge the ancients by our own mores. And you needn’t turn it into a feminist thing. Calatoria could just as easily have sent Phineas a young male slave.”

  “You must have been disappointed that she hadn’t,” Maria says, smiling, but in John’s direction, not Simon’s.

  I look nervously toward the painter wondering how he’ll react, but he only smiles and licks the olive oil off his fingers. “And you, Maria, must have been disappointed that Iusta wasn’t really carrying a whip.”

  “I know I was,” Elgin says, winking at me.

  “So clearly it’s the sex part that everybody’s interested in,” Lyros interrupts.

  There’s an embarrassed silence while Guilia clears our salad plates and Theresa serves the pasta course—a thin spaghetti prepared with the delicious anchovy and eggplant sauce that I had for lunch yesterday.

  “You know,” I say, “I think this sauce is probably a lot like the Roman garum that Phineas says he ate his first night here—I mean his first night at the Villa della Notte.”

  John laughs. “There you go: a Phineas observation that’s not about sex. Brava, Sophie! Sophie and I were also discussing today the location of Phineas’s bedroom. She noticed from his view of the wall painting that Phineas must have occupied the same room, or rather the corresponding room, as hers.”

  “Yes, I noticed that, too,” George says. “Interesting that he was given a room off the main courtyard instead of on the lower levels where the rest of the household would have slept.”

  “It was probably cooler on the top level,” Maria observes. “I’m sure Dr. Chase’s room, for instance, is much cooler than ours are.”

  “Or maybe,” Simon says, ignoring Maria’s obvious resentment of the room allocations in the present, “Calatoria didn’t want Phineas to see what was happening on the lower levels.”

  “Yes, they were probably getting ready for the rites.” Elgin picks up a long skinny baguette and waves it in the air. “There would have been lots of naked slave girls running around in the halls.”

  “Well,” Lyros says, “whatever reason Calatoria had for assigning her guest a room on the top level, it has important repercussions for us.”

  “What’s that?” Elgin asks, breaking the baguette in half.

  “The scroll we possess, that we’re now reading from, was found in the middle of the courtyard, as though it had been dropped by someone fleeing the villa during the eruption. We haven’t known where to look for the rest of Phineas’s scrolls. Assuming that he didn’t leave the villa before the eruption, we now know where Phineas’s trunk should be—a trunk that apparently contained scrolls Phineas bought in Greece and Egypt—”

  “Bought?” Maria scoffs. “It sounds like he bribed temple slaves or priests to steal them!”

  “Well, however he came by them, they must have been pretty valuable for him to secure them in a wax-lined trunk and then worry about saving them in the middle of a storm,” Lyros replies. “I, for one, would dearly love to know what Phineas Aulus thought was so valuable. Tomorrow I’m going to direct the excavation crew to tunnel into the bedroom off the courtyard. I’m curious to see what Phineas had in his waterproofed trunk.”

  “I’m curious to find out what was on the lower levels that Calatoria didn’t want Phineas to see,” Simon says. “Perhaps there are more paintings.”

  “Do you think,” Agnes asks, accepting another glass of the deceptively mild Caprese wine from George, “that the mystery ritual actually included everything that’s in that painting? I mean, the sex and whipping and all?”

  “Oh, I certainly hope so,” Simon says. “This setting just screams out for a little old-fashioned S and M. You should read what the foreigners got up to on this very island.”

  “I don’t think that’s what Miss Hancock was talking about,” Lyros says, glaring at Simon.

  “Oh, but I’m sure Miss Hancock would find it interesting to know that the practices of the ancients she studies are not dead and gone.”

  “You mean like cults and sacrifices?” Agnes asks, her cheeks pinking in the glow of the sunset.

  “Exactly!” Simon crows, ignoring the increasingly angry glare of his host. It almost seems as if Simon is deliberately trying to tease Lyros. “You see, my dear, Capri has drawn to it many who sought to reexperience the golden age of antiquity—Axel Munthe, Norman Douglas, Friedrich Krupp…but Baron Fersen is my favorite. He came to the island at the turn of the century with his lover, Nino Cesarini, the son of a Roman newspaper vendor.”

  “Wasn’t the boy only fourteen?” Maria asks.

  “Fifteen,” Simon replies. “And believe me, I’m sure he was happy to trade his working-class life in Rome for the pleasure palace Fersen built for them.”

  “The Villa Lysis?” I ask, remembering that this was the story which Lyros hadn’t wanted to tell me on the walk up to Tiberius’s villa.

  “Yes, named for the boy to whom Plato explained friendship. Fersen had the villa built just below Tiberius’s villa because he had the idea of re-creating the atmosphere of the emperor’s sojourn on Capri.”

  “An odd role model,” Agnes points out. “Wasn’t Tiberius known for tossing people off cliffs? And didn’t you tell me, Professor Lawrence, when you took me to the Blue Grotto, that there were rumors that he molested boys there?”

  “Rumors,” Simon Bowles answers before Elgin, who looks embarrassed at Agnes’s mentioning of their excursion to the Blue Grotto, can. “But the part about the boys being sacrificed, well, Fersen did find that romantic. In fact, he heard a story about a favorite of Tiberius, a boy named Hypatus, whom Tiberius sacrificed to the sun god Mithras—”

  “There’s a gravestone at the Naples Museum with an inscription describing the sacrifice,” Elgin adds.

  “Yes, that’s how Fersen first heard about it. Somehow he conceived the idea that if Nino were truly faithful to him he’d be willing to sacrifice himself. Or perhaps the boy himself suggested the rite as a proof of his devotion.”

  “This baron sacrificed a young boy here?” Agnes asks, looking suddenly pale. Lyros’s instincts were right, I think; this is no story for a girl who’s so recently witnessed another sort of blood sacrifice.

  “No, no, no! It was only meant to be a symbolic sacrifice. A bit of harmless dress-up, really. Fersen was decked out as the Emperor Tiberius and Nino as the boy Hypatus—although I imagine that his outfit was rather scanty—and all their friends were dressed in Roman costumes as well. After a night of opium smoking, they paraded down to the Grotto Matermania, which Fersen believed was the site of an ancient Mithras cult. They lit incense and sang hymns and then at sunrise Fersen, brandishing a fruit knife”—Simon lifts his own arm, wielding a butter knife—“delivered the tiniest, symbolic cut.” He demonstrates by piercing one of the ripe plums that have been laid out for dessert.

  “Was the blood symbolic, too?” Maria asks drily. “Or did he bleed real blood?”

  “Oh,
I imagine there was a little blood,” Simon says, biting into the punctured plum, “but nothing more than what would occur while two schoolmates became ‘blood brothers.’ Unfortunately, a local girl spied on the whole thing and ran to tell the village—no doubt exaggerating what she saw. Rumors flew about the island, as they are wont to do, and before long the incident, referred to as ‘the deed in the grotto,’ had acquired so much prurient embroidery that Fersen and Nino had to flee the island—and all for a bit of playacting no more sinister than what you Americans get up to at your universities in your fraternities and sororities.”

  “We never sacrificed anyone at Tri Delt,” Agnes exclaims. “Not even in fun! And we certainly never smoked any opium.”

  “You’re saying your American fraternity brothers never wear togas or ingest illegal substances?” Simon asks.

  “Well, maybe the boys over in Sigma Alpha Epsilon. There was that horrible hazing incident last year,” Agnes admits.

  “There you go.” Simon slaps his hand against the table so hard that he upsets the demitasse that Guilia has just put in front of him. “We’re all hungry for ritual, to experience something beyond the banality of everyday life, to stand outside of ourselves—isn’t that what you saw in the initiate’s face, Miss Hancock?—to experience, literally, ecstasy. That’s what all these crazies that you read about in your American newspapers are looking for. Come now, your own native Texas has been full of such incidents—that chap Whitman who shot all those people from some tower, those deluded children in Waco, and just recently—”

  “I think you’ve strayed far from Phineas,” Lyros says, interrupting Simon before he can get to the Dale Henry shooting. Thank goodness, I think, looking over at Agnes who’s looking down at the untouched fruit on her plate.

  “What I think is interesting,” Lyros continues, “is the mixture of Dionysian elements and the rites of Demeter and Persephone with this added native southern Italian touch of the sirens legend. According to Livy, the Dionysian rites, or bacchanalias, practiced in Rome during the second century BC were little more than nocturnal orgies in which young men and women were initiated into sexual rituals and, if they refused, sacrificed. They only accepted initiates under twenty because, as Livy puts it, ‘They were looking for young people of an age open to corruption of mind and body.’”

  “You see,” Simon says, “you prove my point. That’s what the cults of today do: they recruit the young and the innocent.”

  “You make it sound as if it was just about sex,” Agnes breaks in, her voice trembling with emotion, “and that Iusta was just being used. The rites were supposed to bring enlightenment to the initiate—”

  “My dear,” Simon says, his calm voice breaking into Agnes’s agitation, “what makes you think Iusta was the initiate? And as for who is using whom…”

  “I think that’s enough, Simon,” Lyros says. And then turning to Agnes, “I’m afraid the material you’re transcribing is upsetting, Agnes, but think of it this way: you’re giving voice to Iusta after two thousand years of silence. The picture of her that is emerging in Phineas’s narrative is remarkable. I think you’ll all agree after you read the section that Agnes has so sensitively transcribed today that Iusta is the real heroine of the piece.”

  Agnes attempts a small smile to thank John Lyros, but she still looks distraught. “Yes, she’s really interesting, but so sad, too. I just can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to her…I mean, it’s only three days to the eruption.”

  The anxiety in Agnes’s voice is so palpable that I find myself glancing toward Vesuvius on the horizon, as though we were living in the time of Phineas and Iusta and the volcano was about to erupt. The sky has grown so dark, though, while we’ve dined that all I can see past the dark sea are the lights that ring the bay and above them a denser cone of black that’s the quiet volcano. No trail of steam or glow of fire mars the peaceful scene. But then, nothing about the volcano’s appearance would have warned Phineas or Iusta back then, either. Did they both die in the eruption?

  “Maybe she gets out,” George says hopefully, trying, I think, to cheer Agnes up. “The Herculaneans had a whole day to escape while Pompeii was being covered by ash. True, the ones who tried to escape by sea ended up dying in the boathouses by the marina because the water was too rough to launch a boat, but maybe Iusta was able to get on the road to Naples. We’ll just have to keep scanning the scroll to find out….”

  George’s voice drifts off as he realizes what most of us must have already figured out: since Phineas was never heard from again after AD 79, he must have perished in the eruption, so even if the girl Iusta escaped, it’s unlikely that he recorded it.

  The first thing I do when I get back to my room is open my laptop and connect to my e-mail. I stand, waiting for the file to download. When I open it I read the first line and sink onto the bed. Then, without changing out of my dress or even moving an inch, I read the second installment from beginning to end.

  Many and varied were the pleasures I received from the girl Iusta on my first night at the Villa of Gaius Stephanus Petronius. I have always believed in Solon’s dictum “Nothing in excess” and so have ever endeavored to balance the delights of the flesh with the pleasures of the mind. I had not expected, though, to find the latter with a seventeen-year-old slave girl. So after we had taken our physical pleasures I asked her to light a lamp so that I might write. She complied and offered as well to retrieve writing materials from my trunk. It was when she was sorting through the scrolls contained therein that I realized that not only was she able to read both the Latin and Greek tags appended to each scroll, but she was also familiar with the authors of some of the works. She exclaimed over my collection of Pliny’s Natural History, explaining that the author himself had many times visited the villa from nearby Cape Misenum where he held command over the naval fleet. She was also most interested in my volumes of Strabo’s Geography and asked if I had traveled to all the places recorded by him.

  “Not all,” I replied, but when I saw the disappointment in her eyes, I added, “but many. My interest is in recording the religious rites in each land I visit. I have spent long months traveling to remote temples and sanctuaries only to find that the rite I wished to observe was some time away and so have been forced to wait.”

  “It is fortunate then that you arrived here when you did…” she began, but then, blushing deeply, she looked away.

  “It’s all right,” I reassured her. “Your mistress has told me about the rites practiced here and invited me to be a part of them, which I accepted as an honor. You also, I believe, have a role in the rites?”

  She nodded and answered with lowered eyes. “It is what I have been raised for.”

  “Ah, it is indeed a rare honor.” She lifted her eyes, which I noticed then were the color of amber, and looked at me strangely. “Is that why your master has taught you to read?” I asked.

  “I believe that is one reason. My master was most generous. He believed that if I were to take part in the rites I should understand them. And so I have read the story of Demeter and Persephone in Homer and Ovid and of the Eleusinian Mysteries in Strabo and Pausanias. But of course not much is written about the rites performed there as they are kept in secret. Have you been initiated?”

  “I have. It was the most sublime experience I have ever had. I cannot, of course, divulge what happened in the inner sanctum, but you are familiar, perhaps, with the little mysteries that occur outside the sanctuary?”

  “I have read in Plato that the priestess Diotima compares the lesser—or little—mysteries to the physical experience of love and the greater mysteries to spiritual love, from which I believe is meant that the lesser mysteries are the physical manifestation of the rites: a reenactment of what happened to Persephone when she was seized by Hades and brought to the underworld and then how her mother rescued her and how by the maiden’s own carelessness she yoked herself to the underworld by eating six pomegranate seeds. And I understand that by
recreating these physical rites we seek entry into the deeper spiritual mystery of death and rebirth, just as the physical act of love leads to new life.”

  She looked up when she spoke of the physical act of love and I confess it was I, an old man who has traveled the world and seen its many marvels, who blushed. It was then that I became afraid that affection for this girl might cloud my objectivity during the ceremony to come.

  “You can hand me the ink cake,” I told her, “and that untagged scroll there—not the ones at the bottom, they must not be disturbed.” I saw her fingering the tags on one of the scrolls that I had recently obtained on my travels, but then her attention was drawn to a little terra-cotta statue I had purchased in Alexandria. “But I see you are interested in the statuette. You may take it out and look at it before you go.”

  She removed the small statue and held it up to the light, turning it around in her hands so that the light fell on the rounded curves of the goddess and her child. “It’s Isis, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Queen of the Nile and the Heavens, suckling the infant Horus. Why don’t you keep it. Perhaps the contemplation of it will help you to feel less afraid of the coming rites.”

  She seemed genuinely startled by my offer. “No…” she stammered, “you are much too generous…. I…”

  “Please, as a token of my appreciation for tonight.” She colored deeply then and I was afraid that my clumsy words had made her feel like a prostitute. “It is not often I have the opportunity to converse with a goddess,” I said, trying to put her at ease with a little joke.

  She looked from me to the statue and then bowed her head. “I will treasure it,” she told me. Then, rising to her feet, she bowed again and left the room.

  I wrote this account then as I knew I would not be able to sleep until I had recorded my impressions of the remarkable Iusta. I noted her somewhat naive interpretation of the little mysteries. Plato did not mean, I am sure, to equate the rites with something as banal as the physical act of love—he was simply making an analogy. That said, as unformed as her thinking might be, it was still remarkable for one of her age and sex, and that it might be the first time that the actor in a mystery rite has voiced her opinion of it!