The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  When I finished transcribing our conversation, I still felt unsettled. Had I been rash in giving her the statue? Would she boast of the gift to her fellows and perhaps sell it in the marketplace for some worthless trinkets? The thought of the sacred object being so defiled disturbed me. I decided to take a stroll around the courtyard to clear my head.

  Even in the courtyard, the air was hot and stale. I walked out onto the peristylium in the hope of catching a sea breeze, but the night was so still that the sea stretched like a sheet of polished silver all the way from the shoreline to the island of Capraea, where even the straits beneath the Temple of Tyrrhena Minerva were becalmed. No sailor would need to pour a libation to the goddess there tonight. The only sign that the bay was not transfixed was the faint sound of water lapping onto the shore just below me. I leaned over the railing and listened to the sound until I thought I could hear voices in it. I thought of my drowned crew and shuddered. Then, as I listened, I realized that the voices were female and that they echoed as though they came from some enclosed space. The sirens, then, I thought, singing their song of seduction in their caves beneath the sea. I remembered what they sang to Odysseus as he listened, tied to the mast of his ship to resist their temptation: No life on earth can be hid from our dreaming, they sang, promising him all knowledge. How often have I listened to their song, tied to the stiff mast of my unbelieving to keep me from being lured too deep into the mysteries I sought to record and illuminate. I felt now that I stood on the brink—as I had before the gates of Eleusis or before the oracle of Delphi—of some great knowing. I felt the pull of that song like a whirlpool waiting to suck me in and for once I was tempted to untie myself from the mast, to let myself follow the song….

  I leaned so far over the railing that had the night not been still, had the faintest wind pushed at my back, I would have fallen from the peristylium and no doubt followed the sirens’ voices to the bottom of the sea, but just as I felt myself losing my balance I saw something that startled me upright. Below me something moved through the dark water, a long white sinuous shape that left in its wake a trail of sparks, as if it burned a path through the water like a star falling to earth. I saw that it was shaped like a woman and that its long, loose hair swayed in the current like seaweed. Had I really come face-to-face with a siren? Were the stories true? And if they were, was I truly ready to answer their call?

  Before I could decide the creature turned and began to swim back to the shore and when she stood in the shallows and shook the water from her hair I saw that she was no siren: she was the girl, Iusta. There must be an entrance to the sea at the bottom of the villa and she had slipped out for a late-night swim to seek relief from the hot night. As I watched, she turned back to the sea, and loosening something from her robes, which clung so closely to her form that I could see every line of her body, and singing a snatch of the song I had heard before, the words of which I still couldn’t understand, she tossed something into the sea. I couldn’t see what. Then she waded back to the villa and I lost sight of her as she disappeared under the peristylium.

  Now that I had identified the source of the singing and the identity of the siren I was no longer bewitched. Always it is the way: knowledge banishes superstition. But the emotions raised by the experience had left me worn out. I turned from the sea and made my way back into the courtyard. As I was crossing to my room I tread on something soft and, kneeling, found that the path had been strewn with flowers. I picked one up and held it in the moonlight to identify it. It was a poppy, the flower sacred to Demeter. I understood then that the rites had already begun.

  I close my laptop and put it on the chair by my bed. As soon as I move I realize that I have been sitting motionless for so long that my legs have fallen asleep. I stand up and feel a painful tingling coursing through my calves. I pace twice across the short length of my room, then open the door and walk barefoot out into the courtyard, trying to revive the circulation in the lower part of my body and, I realize, to shake the spell of Phineas’s words from my head. Why, I wonder as I complete my second circuit around the fountain, do I feel so entranced by this section? Is it because I was reading it in a place that resembles the setting of the original rites? Or is it because Phineas himself, usually the model of objectivity, seemed to be falling under the spell of the Villa della Notte?

  And who wouldn’t have, if the original was anything like this modern restoration? The courtyard is full of the scent of the night-blooming jasmine that circle the fountain like a ring of stars. Inside this circle, the goddess Night seems to brood under her starry veil, her arms half raised, palms turned up to the moon, as if she were about to perfom a rite to raise the spirits of the underworld. Uneasy under her gaze, I walk out onto the peristylium and stand at the railing looking down at the sea. It’s quite a lot farther down than it would have been from the villa in Herculaneum, but John Lyros told me that there are steps leading down from the lower courtyard to the sea, just as there apparently were in the original villa. I wonder what he made of this section, and if anyone else feels so…disturbed by it. I turn back to the villa, thinking about the six other people who have read the same passage that I have. It’s almost as if we are all engaged in the preparation for some rites, as if we are all partaking of the “little mysteries,” the ritual that prepared initiates for the greater mysteries.

  I shake the idea off and decide that it’s a lingering effect of the pneumonia, not some kind of mass hysteria, that’s gotten to me. Before I leave the terrace, a sound from below draws me back to the railing. I half expect to see a midnight swimmer, as Phineas had, but instead I see two dark shapes silhouetted against a white outcropping about one third down the steep slope. The sound I’d heard was pebbles falling into the sea—one of the figures is pitching them one by one over the cliff into the water below. When he turns sideways I can see by the round slope of his belly that it’s Simon. The other figure is tall and slim—Elgin, I think at first, but then I hear his voice raised and I realize it’s John Lyros.

  “That’s absurd,” Lyros says in an irritated pitch that carries up to the terrace. I hear the low bass rumble of Simon’s reply, but I can’t make out the words. But again I can hear Lyros’s reply.

  “You’ve filled your head with these Caprese stories of cults and sacrifices. This isn’t the Villa Lysis and I can’t allow that kind of talk to get around.”

  Of course, I think, Lyros was angry at Simon for telling those stories at dinnertime in front of Agnes. I lean over farther to see if I can catch what Simon says next…and remember what Phineas had written about almost losing his balance and falling over the parapet. I have a strong sensation that someone is behind me, someone who would only have to place a hand on my back in order to push me over.

  I spin around and for a moment catch the flash of movement in the courtyard. Then I realize it’s only the moonlight reflecting off the bronze statue of Night.

  I look back down over the railing. Simon and Lyros have vanished.

  Serves me right for eavesdropping, I think, taking a deep breath to calm myself. I should be in bed instead of imagining cultish conspiracies.

  As I make my way back to my room, though, I see that I may not have imagined that someone was in the courtyard. In Night’s outstretched right hand, which only a moment ago was empty, there is now a bright red flower. I lean over the water to take it and see that it is, indeed, a live poppy. The flower of Night and the underworld. I suddenly have the same sensation that Phineas describes: the rites have begun.

  The next morning I carry the poppy—kept fresh overnight in a half-filled bottle of mineral water—downstairs to the lower courtyard and casually lay it down next to my plate at the breakfast table where Simon, George, Agnes and Maria are gathered.

  “Ah,” Simon exclaims, looking up from his eggs and sausages, “Papaver Somniferum. The flower of sleep and forgetfulness. Where did you find it? I haven’t seen any growing at the villa.”

  “I found it in the courtyard l
ast night…after I finished reading the Phineas section.”

  “Of course,” George says, “just where Phineas finds it. Someone was playing a little joke on you.”

  I look around the table. Agnes is engrossed in reading a letter and Maria is stirring her coffee and staring into space. After a minute, she notices me looking at her. “Perhaps Dr. Lawrence left it for you,” Maria suggests. “He is your admirer, no?”

  “No!” I say a bit too vehemently. Agnes glances up from her letter looking puzzled. Maria smiles and taps a manicured fingernail beneath her right eye.

  “Ah, I’ve found you out,” she says. “I suspected there was something between you two when he went running off to find you in Naples.”

  “Who?” Agnes asks. “Something between who?”

  Maria sips her coffee and shrugs.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Elgin and I are colleagues.” I don’t even like him very much, I’m tempted to add, but that would only add fuel to Maria’s flame and seem petty after Elgin rescued me from the Hotel Convento. “Besides, I don’t see Elgin going out flower picking late at night. It must have been someone who had read the Phineas earlier than the rest of us though—” I look at George and he shakes his head.

  “It wasn’t me! I drank so much wine at dinner I was asleep by ten. Nor would I have any idea where to find a poppy. They certainly don’t grow in the garden here.”

  “I bet it was Mr. Lyros.” Agnes puts her letter down and furrows her brow. “He read the section as soon as I finished transcribing it before dinner and he’d know where to find a poppy. And he’s so into re-creating the atmosphere of the original Villa della Notte. He wanted you to feel like the events in Phineas’s book are happening here, now.” Agnes picks up the flower and holds it to her nose, inhaling its spicy scent.

  “Careful,” Simon warns. “You know what happened to Dorothy when she ran through the poppy field.”

  Agnes looks up at Simon and I fear that she’s going to get upset again as she had last night when Simon recounted the story of Baron Fersen and started talking about American cults. Instead, she smiles sweetly at him. “That’s my favorite part of the Wizard of Oz,” she says. “When they all fall asleep until the snow wakes them up. I never thought of it being about drugs, though. I mean, it’s a children’s story.”

  “So’s Alice in Wonderland,” George points out, “and there’s all that hookah smoking and tablets that say ‘Eat me.’ Drugs have been a source of religious and artistic inspiration for millennia.”

  “Like the oracle of Delphi,” Simon adds. “They think the fumes that came up through the cracks under the temple brought on hallucinations. And there are poppies carved into the gates of Eleusis. The initiates no doubt ingested opium to prepare themselves for the rites.”

  “I bet opium was part of the rite performed at the Villa della Notte,” George says.

  “Of course,” Simon says, “the girl playing the part of the maiden would have been given opium as well. So you see, Miss Hancock, you needn’t have worried so much about Iusta’s role in the ceremonies. She would have been so insensible from the drug that she wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

  “You think that makes it all right?” Agnes drops the poppy as though she’d suddenly noticed an insect on it. “That she was drugged? I suppose you think roofies and date rape are okay, too?”

  George and I exchange looks, both of us surprised, I think, at Agnes’s irritable tone, but Maria looks up from her breakfast genuinely confused. “Roofies? Date rape? I don’t know these terms. Do rapists make a date with their victims in your country? On a roof?”

  Agnes’s eyes widen and I’m afraid she’s going to throw something at Maria or Simon, but instead she bursts into tears and runs from the courtyard. Simon turns to watch her go.

  “What?” Maria asks in response to a glare from George. “What did I say wrong? The girl is a bit hysterical, no?”

  “Yes,” Simon says, turning back to the table and helping himself to a cornetto. “She seems quite overwrought. She seems to take this whole business personally.”

  “You might want to remember that a month ago Agnes’s ex-boyfriend shot and killed two people and then himself right in front of her,” I tell Simon. “You’d take it personally, too.”

  “Perhaps the Phineas material isn’t helping,” George says. “She does seem to identify with Iusta, and that’s bound to get more disturbing the way things are going. I think I should give her the morning off and transcribe the next section myself. Maybe you could talk to her, Dr. Chase, take her to the beach or into town for some shopping or something.” George’s long thin fingers flutter in the air as he conjures up these feminine diversions. I can see he’s genuinely concerned about Agnes but that he feels out of his depth.

  “I’d be happy to talk to Agnes,” I say, “but I ought to check with Mr. Lyros before I leave the villa—”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary,” Maria says. “He and Dr. Lawrence left for Herculaneum early this morning to oversee the excavation of Phineas’s room. I imagine they won’t be back until dinner and I don’t think there’s much work here for you. Perhaps you should look at the shops in town,” she says, eyeing my madras skirt and tank top as though they came from the Salvation Army. (The skirt, in fact, was from a thrift shop on South Congress Avenue.) “Or go to the beach. You could use some color.”

  I smile, hoping to hide my chagrin at Maria’s critique of my wardrobe and complexion. “You know,” I say, “I think I’ll do both. Thanks, Maria. Have a good day in the lab.”

  It takes me a while to find Agnes’s room in the maze of what would have been the slave quarters in the original Villa della Notte and now houses the staff of the Papyrus Project. It’s a tiny room with whitewashed walls that Agnes has decorated with postcards from tourist sites around the Bay of Naples: the lovely yellow-robed Flora from Stabia, the portrait of a young Pompeian matron holding a stylus to her lips that’s in the Naples Museum, a dancing maenad from Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries. Interspersed with these images of graceful Roman women are views of the Swiss Alps. Agnes is lying on her bed, still clutching the letter she’d had at breakfast. Of course, I realize, it’s from Sam. I’m about to ask her if that’s what had upset her when my attention is drawn to a small plaster statue on her nightstand.

  “I’ve seen this before,” I say, picking up the statue of a mother holding a child.

  “Isn’t it sweet,” Agnes says, sitting up and smiling at the statue. “It’s called the Madonna della Mare. The Madonna of the Sea. I bought it at a little shop near the ferry in Naples. The old woman who sold it to me said it was a copy of a statue in a church in Naples and that people prayed to it when they or their loved ones were taking a sea journey. Look, she’s wearing a crown shaped like waves. I don’t usually like Catholic things, but she doesn’t look like any other Catholic saint I’ve ever seen. She has the sweetest smile.”

  I look into the face of the little figure and see what Agnes means. The face is simply carved, almost primitive, and her smile is enigmatic, as if she held the secret to all of life’s mysteries. “I think I saw the original in a little church near my hotel in Naples,” I say, looking down at Agnes. Although she’s trying to smile, I can see from her red eyes that she’s been crying hard. “Speaking of the sea,” I say, putting the statue carefully down on the nightstand, “get your bathing suit. I’m dying to get in the water.”

  After I’ve changed into my bathing suit, terry-cloth cover-up, and sandals I meet Agnes back in the lower courtyard. The stairs to the beach start on the north end of the courtyard and descend several stories belowground. It feels like we’re going into a catacomb.

  “Mr. Lyros says that the stairs are part of the original plan of the Herculanean villa, only it’s not clear where they went. When I read the section of Phineas yesterday I thought that maybe they led to an underground grotto, or nymphaeum, with access to the sea. That would explain how Iusta appeared in the water beneath the peristyli
um. I bet that’s where the rites took place.”

  “An underground sanctuary to represent Hades,” I say, “perfect for reenacting the abduction of Persephone into the underworld.” Concentrating on the scholarly puzzle keeps my growing anxiety at bay as we descend deeper underground. I’d never been troubled by claustrophobia before, but since the shooting and losing part of my lung, I’m finding it hard to breathe in enclosed places. The stairwell is amply lit by shell-shaped sconces set into niches, the walls are newly plastered and dry, the steps carved from cool, white marble, but still, I feel uneasy. I focus on the top of Agnes’s head below me—on her blond ponytail that bobs up and down as she trips lightly down the stairs. With the yellow bow of her halter bathing suit top at the nape of her neck, her orange UT T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops she certainly doesn’t look anything like a girl descending into Hell.

  “And if the underground grotto had access to the sea,” I continue in my professorial mode, “then the women playing the sirens could have come and gone through the water. I bet that would have made for a dramatic effect.”

  “Kind of like the old mermaid show at Aquarena Springs in San Marcos,” Agnes says, glancing back over her shoulder at me. “Did you ever go to it before they turned the theme park into a nature center?”

  “Yes,” I say. An image of my mother, her eyes sparking green in the murky underwater light, appears in my head. “But I’m surprised you’re old enough to remember it. It closed down in the early nineties.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard people talk about it. You know how Austinites are always going on about the good old days.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “it can get kind of annoying, like you’ve missed out on something.” Something about Agnes’s answer strikes me as evasive and I wonder if it was Elgin who told her about the Mermaid show, and whether he told her the story I told him about my mother and the mermaids on the boat ride to Capri. The idea of him sharing that intimate bit of my history with Agnes makes me flush with shame. I’m glad that Agnes isn’t looking at me—and that she drops the subject when we reach the bottom of the steps.