Abroad (15 page)

“
Buon giorno
, Cesare,” Arthur said pleasantly.

“
Buon giorno.
”

“We came to see the caves.”

“Professor, you know there are no caves,” the farmer said. The rest of us shifted back and forth on our feet, afraid to make a sound.

“Don’t tease me, Cesare. You’ve been with me yourself.”

“Not with a crowd.” He gestured at us with his gun. Arthur reached into his back pocket, pulled out a billfold, and waved a twenty-euro note back and forth.

“Put that away,” Cesare said.

“These are Enteria students, Cesare. Very serious.”

Cesare peered at us. “Students.”

“Actually, no.
Scholars.
” Arthur held out forty euros this time.

Cesare put up his hand. “Just twenty. Only twenty.”

“For your trouble.”

“All right. There
is
one cave. But it is just dirt now. Your scholars will be disappointed.”

Professor Korloff gave us a sly look.

“All right, all right,” said the farmer. “Behind the old stable. You’ll see it. It’s just a little hole, and the cave is very small. They will think it’s nothing.”

“Perhaps.”

“Did you bring a lantern?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t touch anything.”

“Of course not, Cesare.”

“Tell them, too?”

“As I said, these are Enteria scholars.”

Cesare frowned. “The students are loud in Grifonia.”

“Not these students. These are serious people.”

The farmer laughed shortly. “Very young people. I know all about it. Well. The caves are in the back. I will bring some wine to the table under the trellis.”

Cesare disappeared back into the house.

“Such service,” Professor Korloff said. “Despises you all, but he gives you wine. Get it? It’s not the money, it’s the dance.”

“We’re not that bad, are we?” Anna asked.

“Not
you
, in particular, no—though I know nothing of your nightly activities.” Anna and I exchanged a quick glance. “But he’s not wrong. The student population has grown completely out of control. Grifonia, when Cesare was young, was a beautiful town. A quiet town. Mussolini had built the great University to show off Italian culture, and there wasn’t too much damage from the war. But, of course, it was poor, and students from other countries have, well, money. Get it? Now the place is clogged with jerks. It’s loud, too many drugs. A lot of the families moved out here. No, the old Grifonians are never going to like you. But being in Enteria sometimes helps.”

He took a final drag of his cigarette and flicked it away.

“All right. Let’s find that stable.” We followed Professor Korloff around the cottage across a small yard to a crumbling building out back. Ancient tools and sacks were visible through the holes in the walls. Behind it stretched a bare field, in the middle of which jutted a grassy mound, roughly fifteen feet in diameter.

“Our tomb, children,” he said, gesturing toward it.

Pascal and Anna instinctively took the lead. As we got closer, we saw what looked like a large, dark mouth, gaping into the ground. The opening, about eight feet below the level of where we were standing, was supported on three sides by girders, each made of a single, huge stone. From far away, because of the blond grass jutting off the top, the tomb almost looked like the head of a huge, yawning baby.

“This, believe it or not, is the site of one of the greatest recent discoveries in Grifonia,” Professor Korloff said. He kicked a stone down the path; it rolled down into the darkness as if guided by a magnetic field.

“A hundred and eighty-two years ago, an Italian excavator stumbled across this tomb here while looking for some urns. The Etruscans, we know, were great preparers for the afterlife—as extravagant as the Egyptians, nearly—building entire houses to live in once they died.”

He paused and looked up at the trees. It was the last day of September, and most of the leaves had turned, though the air was thick and hot as July. Sweat ran in rivulets down all our faces, save Anna’s. She remained mysteriously cool, her clothes spotless.

“Fortune hunters illegally gutted the thing and sold everything inside. Augusto Castellani bought most of it and put it in the Etruscan Museum, after picking off all the things he liked best. Nothing categorized, of course. It was a really rotten time for archaeologists. But the structure is still here, and I wanted you all to see it. To see how these people built houses that bloomed underground.”

He switched on his lantern and twitched his head toward the hole, indicating that we should follow. No one seemed eager. The pitch-black mouth looked less than inviting.

“Believe it or not, we’ll all fit. So, okay, come on.”

Single file, we followed Professor Korloff into the tunnel, which was about four feet wide and eight feet tall. The slope went down and down and down, until we were at least fifteen feet below ground. I was the last, behind Anna, or so I thought—when I turned after going a good ways down the underground path, I saw a figure in the opening, standing in the light.

“Hello?” I called. My voice produced a horrible echo, not of my words but a low monotonous boom that coiled ominously down the passageway.

“You all right?” asked Anna.

“I thought we left someone.”

“What?” She went back a few feet and looked, then turned again. “No, there’s no one there. Probably just the farmer.”

“What if we get stuck down here?”

Our mixed speech intensified the low reverberation, which was now almost deafening.

“Taz, don’t be silly. Come on, it opens up ahead.”

She took my hand and pulled me about ten more feet forward to where Professor Korloff was standing with the others, shining his lantern so we could see. Anna was right. There, the tunnel gave way to a large hall about thirty feet long and wide, with four smaller rooms branching off its sides. My claustrophobia subsided as I stepped away from the group, exploring the space. The ceiling in the chamber was approximately fifteen feet high, allowing an air of spaciousness. The walls were stone—perhaps there had been paintings on them at one time, but they had been either rubbed off or worn away. There were benches carved into the walls, and at the front of the room was a large, bare altar, with the blurred stone remnants of some sort of creature staring down.

It was dark. I suppose that’s obvious, but it was a different kind of darkness from when a light is turned out in a closet, a bedroom, or even a cellar. Those places, at least at one time, were touched by the sun. No part of this tomb had ever been exposed, even once, and it never, ever would be. There was a constant dripping of something thick. A sucking of air in one of the corners. And of course the absence of all sounds from the outside—breeze, birds, cars, voices. Life.

“Here we are,” our professor said. “The Soeviis’ final home.” The echo had ceased, I assumed because of the shape of the room. “Not too bad. And it was a lot nicer. The walls would have been covered in frescoes and carvings of the family’s favorite items. Tools, pets. Things they wanted to take to the next life. Which, by the way, they were banking on. Obviously, this house wasn’t cheap to build.”

“How were they buried?” Pascal asked. “Are they in here somewhere?”

“No, Elvis has left the building, unfortunately. They were in sarcophagi, probably, though some may have been embalmed and laid out. The slaves were in urns in the smaller rooms. Everything, of course, was taken and sold. When I first came down here twenty years ago, I was really hoping I’d discover something—a miniature Tarquinia. But it’s not always about what you find, when you’re a scholar, but what’s possible
.
”

I made my way into one of the smaller chambers. Even this space seemed comfortably large to me. I ran my palms against the cold wall, resting my cheek there for a moment. I pressed my ear against the stone, as if an answer might come as to why anyone would build such a place. To prepare for death with such fervor. Closing my eyes, I pictured the place exactly as it had been—the shining walls, the coffins studded with jewels and glittering mosaics.

“You okay, Taz?” Anna said, stepping in behind me.

“Yes,” I said, embarrassed.

“A bit frightening, isn’t it?”

“Not to me.” Indeed, I felt the odd sensation of having been there many times before.

“Come on out,” Anna said. “He’s starting to talk.”

Professor Korloff lectured for a while on Etruscan death practices, and then brought us back above ground. I was the last out, leaving somewhat reluctantly, but when we emerged the farmer had some bottles of wine open on a plastic table. After a half bottle of wine each in the sun, the tomb was all but forgotten, and we trudged painfully up the hill. By the time we reached the gate to the city, any thought of the strange familiarity of the place had diminished to some pale shadow in a midnight dream. The sort that pricks you awake at the time, only to sink to the very lowest priority in the light of day.

Lucia, 12th century AD

Lucia Baglioni, daughter of noblemen. The Baglionis were a venomous family, everyone struggling for power. Lucia was proud of her clan, but the politics made her tired. Her father had promised her to her cousin Paolo, in exchange for a palace on the central
via
. But Lucia was sixteen, and she hated Paolo, with his oily skin and fat haunches.

She waited a few weeks, wondering what to do. Then, as the union grew nearer, she took her fiercest brother aside.

I want you to kill Paolo, she said. While you are hunting. Make it look like an accident. For me.

Lucia’s brother was torn. He was fond of his sister, but his alliance with Paolo gave him great power. While they were hunting, instead of fulfilling his sister’s request, he told Paolo of her plan.

Both men, as noblemen, were members of the Compagnia. Additions to the ledger were now quite precious. A truly good death meant the highest prestige.

Three days later, in the earliest hours of the morning, Lucia’s brother came into her bedroom. He grabbed her wrists. Still half-asleep, she didn’t fight. He kicked open her shutters and threw her three stories down into the street.

Intruders! Paolo screamed behind her, waving the phantom murderers away.

The next day Paolo made the entry. Lucia’s brother witnessed.

Lucia Baglioni, served a good death by her brother Diego Baglioni. Saved from eternal loss of virtue by raping thieves.

Lucia Baglioni, sixteen years old, 12th century AD

12

Friendships, and marriages for that matter, are often a simple result of geography. Babs and I, for instance. We were lifelong friends only because she lived around the corner from me in Lucan. Our parents, before my father left for Dublin and my mother slipped into self-created illness, were weekend friends, the type who take their babies to the pub together to pass the long Sunday afternoons. Babs was the type of girl who constantly had a fuzzy nest on the back of her head, as she only thought to brush the hair she could see in the mirror. Her palette consisted of all the colors of the rainbow: green-and-red Christmas tights with a bright-blue spring dress, red pants with a dung-colored sweater. She could have hardly been more different from my tight-lipped, hair-bow-matching-the-ankle-socks youthful form.

As we grew to plotting age, I was the one with all the plans. I always played the queen, while she was the hired help. So when she burst into my room breathless one morning when we were nine, her cheeks burning red, I sat up in my magazine-littered bed in mild alarm.

“I have an
idea
,” she said, plopping down on my bed.

“What?”

“We’ll make a
time
capsule. I saw it on the telly. You put things in a box, toys and notes and candy and things, and then you close it and—”

“Who’s it for?”

Babs stopped, confused. “For?”

“The candy. Is it a present?”

Babs’s face broke into a crooked smile.

“It’s for you, silly!”

“Babs.” I patted her shoulder, trying not to be too condescending. “That is so … I don’t know. Okay, it’s stupid. Why would I give myself candy I already
have
?”

“Taz! We’ll bury it somewhere. Or put it somewhere safe. Then in, like, fifty years, we go get it again.”

“The candy will go bad, you daff.”

“Fine. Twenty years.”

“I’ll be twenty-
nine.
” It was utterly unimaginable.

“Well, even if you forgot about it, I’ll be there to tell you to go open it.”

“Yeah, but what if we’re not friends?”

Babs’s face fell. She actually looked like she might cry. I felt a bit of a thrill.

“You think we might not be?”

“I don’t know. It’s a long time from now.”

“I’ll
find
you,” Babs cried. “We’ll
be
best friends. I’ll
tell
you to open the box.”

There was no arguing with her. We spent the next hour trying to decide what to give to ourselves at twenty-nine. In Babs’s box: four Cadbury bars, a Sinead O’Connor CD, a copy of
Go Ask Alice
(we’d shared it and hid it from our parents), and a picture of her dog, Barth. In mine: a shell from our summer trip to the sea, a bag of pickle-flavored crisps (I wasn’t certain they’d still exist when I was twenty-nine), and that day’s
Lucan Times.
We both also wrote letters to ourselves on my purple lined stationery.

Dear Me: (meaning Ms. (Mrs.????!!) Tabitha M. Deacon)

Hi. I can’t believe you are twenty-nine. But you are me, so I guess you can believe it. I hope you are married, because you are really really old. I also hope you have a cat because Mum would never let us have pets. She can be really awful sometimes but it’s just because of stupid Da. Do you still love Leonardo? Maybe he’s who you are married to. Anyway, this is dumb. This was all Babs’s idea. Have a good day, and give everyone my love. If Fiona is still being mean, tell her she still looks like an arse pillow. Also, I hid ten pounds behind the bookshelf. If you need it.