Abroad (4 page)

“So what we do, everyone says, is have drinks here first. Then eat at Etrusco or get a kebab. Then to Malone’s, then to the Red Lion. That’s the track—every Thursday and Saturday night.”

“How do you
know
?” asked a heavy German girl.

“My friend Cora told me. She did Enteria here last year. She knows everything.”

“Or maybe we could try something different,” I said. Marcy’s ironclad, self-assured nature irked me. “Perhaps it would be better
not
to go where all the other students are going.”

“No, no. Cora told me. Etrusco, Malone’s, Red Lion. That’s the drill.”

And so we marched, from one mobbed student landmark to the other, ignored by the boys, who, seeing our practical, sturdy army advancing, instantly moved on. I had never witnessed a scene like that: thousands of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three spilling out into the street. I could barely hear for the chorus of voices ricocheting off the ancient stone—Italian, Spanish, French, English, Chinese. There were regular university girls in little dresses and Birkenstocks, boys in jeans and grubby shirts, and then the Italians themselves, dressed for a fashion runway, the girls walking with practiced ease on heels thin as needles. Our group seemed to pale even further among such plumage. Eventually we migrated to the steps of the cathedral, with at least five hundred other students and foreigners. Every ten minutes or so a thin, dusty man with red eyes would approach us.

“Ciao,
bellas. Spinello?
Hash? Zanopane?”

“What is that
last
one?” a Belgian girl asked. “Maybe we should get some.”

Zanopane.
The name sounded familiar to me.

“Don’t even joke,” hissed Marcy. “It’s this new thing, makes you out of your mind, and then it’s like, absolute
misery
the next day. And then you have to have more, or you’ll absolutely die. No
thank
you.”

The Belgian unsuccessfully tossed her frizzy chin-length curls. “It must be quite a high, then.
I
sort of think I want to try it.”

“Well, at least wait for the Enteria connection. There’s one every year, Cora says. But I’d stay off it if I were you. Cora told me the worst things about it.”

After an hour of nodding at Marcy’s readily crystallized opinions of Italian culture, I threw away my plastic cup and walked home, dejected. Surely there had to be more to my year abroad than this pantomime of discovery. In a fit of hope, I wrote an e-mail to Jenny offering help with her Italian, but after a couple of days of hearing nothing, I gave up and decided to make the best of things by joining the other students who chose to go on the Enteria orientation tours of key Grifonian sites.

Our guide, Loretta, was a plump, damp sort of person, perpetually perspiring even when we were in an air-conditioned room. I could not tell her age, though I guessed her to be ten years older than myself. Her brown eyes widened and snapped as she took us through our historical paces.

“All right.
Ragazzi
, look here. Here is an ancient monastery. In the nineteenth century, it became a psychiatric hospital.”

“Is it still?”

“Of course!” The march continued. “Here, we come to an extraordinary building, see? Etruscan stones. Please look.” We looked. “Above, this beautiful fresco of the Madonna,
con bambino.
See? Good.
Dai!
”

Loretta managed to show us little of interest to anyone unconsumed by a passion for the Madonna; by the end of her exhaustive tour of the cathedral, I’d begun to loathe the Blessed Virgin, with her superior stare, her resigned acceptance of her fate to look after a squawking baby she never asked for. Others must have felt the same way, for as the days wore on, the groups became smaller and smaller, until the only people left were myself, a French boy named Pascal, and an insular group of Germans I never got to know. I probably should have fallen off as well to do my own exploring, but then I’d always been almost constitutionally unable to shirk work. So I carried on, and at the end of those long, dull days I would look over my notes at the kitchen table, feeling bored and righteous. Hard as I tried to retain it all, most of the thin shell of information applied by Loretta fell away, leaving me more or less as ignorant as when I’d started.

But the griffin. The griffin I always remembered. The monster was everywhere: carved into rocks, staring at us from frescoes, leering down from marble buildings. Its head a screeching eagle, its body a lion—stone, overpowering chest and massive haunches straining to leap. Loretta insisted that it was a majestic animal.
Majestic
, she kept repeating, as if we didn’t understand. Yet it didn’t seem the right word to me. Sometimes on night walks I would visit a particular rendering in front of the palace, carved in the fourteenth century. This one had a neck so realistic the sculptor had captured its furious tendons; its beak and tongue were caught in stormy mid-hiss. A beast, I thought, forever waiting. I liked to stare at it, to run my hand along its cool ankle. As if I might be able to cause it to stir from its ancient sleep.

*   *   *

Two days after our orientation, I moved my things into Gia and Alessandra’s cottage. Upon waking there my first morning, all I wanted to do was stay in my new little room and nest. Yet I was wary of giving the Italian girls the impression that I was some homebody who would crowd them. And so, tossing an apple and a bottle of water into my purse, I reluctantly set out into the late-August heat.

A girl in a strange city. At first, the thought of going out alone left me squeamish, but as Jenny wasn’t answering and I didn’t yet know anyone else well enough to call other than the less than appealing Marcy, there was nothing to do but make the best of it.

I wandered timidly at first, hesitant to venture away from the few streets I’d committed to memory. At one corner, I peered down a dark set of stairs seemingly leading nowhere. Suddenly a woman emerged from the shadows. I stepped back, for at first I thought she was a shadow herself. She looked black with soot, as if thickly painted from head to toe. Her stooped figure was wrapped in a black shawl and long skirt, despite the heat. Her eyes, too, were jet, glittering brightly as a bird’s. I couldn’t make out if she was young or old. She looked at me intently, gliding forward.

“
Perso?
” she rasped.

Her obsidian face cracked into a wide grin, showing red gums. Behind her I saw nothing but a dead end.

“You get lost, you go up.”

She gestured to the sky, then vanished.

I squinted at where she had been standing, trembling at the thought that my dreams had extended themselves into the daylight hours. Yet what she said was true—the main piazza was, in fact, on the very top of the hill, meaning all roads sloping up would eventually lead to the correct place. Newly emboldened, I spent my morning darting back and forth into the city’s cracks like a hungry sparrow.

By eleven o’clock the temperature gauge on my phone read 36°C. My mother used to speak of techniques to survive lethally hot weather—staying inside during the middle of the day or wearing a wet cloth on the back of the neck—but none of these sensible precautions had occurred to me that morning. I was just about to step into a restaurant to take a second breakfast just for the sake of sitting in the shade, when I saw a sign reading
MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO
in front of a large stone building. Through the arched doorway, I could see a lovely green courtyard with twisting marble columns and a trickling fountain. Without further thought, I paid my four euros and slipped in.

The building, a former cloister, housed chamber after chamber of Etruscan urns, statues, tombs, and sarcophagi. Surprisingly, I was the only one there at the moment, and, as the guard appeared to be asleep, I took my leave to run my hand over the smooth stone of the displaced graves. The air inside was cool and delicious. I looked at the urns. The writing was indecipherable—Latin? No, Etruscan, according to the materials on the wall. I peered at the violent scenes depicted: a woman with a head of snakes, warriors tearing each other’s limbs, and the griffin, its beak thrust forward, its great claws splayed in warning.

There was one subject that appeared again and again, the meaning of which I couldn’t make out: a man carrying a struggling girl—sometimes small, sometimes a woman—to a rock. In one hand, he held a sort of bowl over her head. Around him, men and women were howling, their hands over their eyes. In one or two of the scenes, a knife was drawn.

I stared at the girl for a long time. After a while, I heard a group of heels clicking down the cloister behind me, as well as the voice of an Italian woman. I looked over and saw a rather efficient-looking signora in a navy summer suit, leading a wealthy-looking German couple who, I couldn’t help thinking, seemed a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information raining down upon them.

“The Etruscans … a savage people … life cheap and extinguishable … yet unheard-of sophistication … mysterious, complete disappearance … an aqueduct we could use even today…”

“
Scusa
,” I said after a while, hearing a pause in her commentary. The woman glanced over in that way only an Italian matron can, challenging, slightly annoyed, yet tolerant. She wore a large, expensive hat and looked pointedly at my grubby shorts.

“
Sì?
”

“Can you tell me what this image is?”

She turned to her charges. The husband, a stout man about ten years older than my father, was observing my legs with keen interest.

“Iphigenia,” she said. “Stabbed as a sacrifice to Artemis.”

“Why?”

The guide looked pleased at the opportunity. “Ah, this is a famous story. Agamemnon killed a deer in Artemis’s sacred forest, so she stole his wind when he sailed to Troy. A prophet said the only way to start the wind again was to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. And so…”

“They slit her neck on the rock.”

It was another voice—British, educated. Young, yet commanding. I turned around expecting to see a boy. But it wasn’t a boy. He looked my age, but someone with so fierce a face—a beautiful, terrible face, with a nose proud as a hawk; wide, kind lips; and deep-set eyes that glittered in the shadows—could be nothing but a man. He was very tall. I wanted to go closer. It felt as though by being near him, I myself would grow more delicate.

“Agamemnon was being punished, and Iphigenia was his daughter. It was the greatest sacrifice.”

The man was still looking at me intently, which left me feeling not altogether unpleasant.

“Yes, that’s right,” the guide said, beaming. She obviously liked the looks of this well-dressed, tall stranger much better than mine.

“So her father killed his daughter himself?” I asked. “To please the gods?”

“You are too interested in this gory story,” the German said, catching my eye and winking.

His wife studied her guidebook, ignoring us both.

“This is a very prevalent image in Grifonia,” the guide pressed, struggling to regain control of her charges. “You may see Iphigenia in several of the squares, in the base of the ruined temples, in the palace…”

“Why?” I asked.

“There’s the theory that women were sacrificed in Grifonia,” the British man said, looking at the urn. “For fortune in war, or crops. Sacrificed to the gods.”

“A theory based on nothing,” the guide snapped. “What, you have credentials?” She lifted her badge, as if to show her superiority. “There is no proof. And certainly it would be pre-Etruscan. A tribal practice, if at all.”

“It’s all stories!” the German erupted. And then, almost pouting: “Though this is not a happy one.”

“It’s true,” the wife said, finally looking up at him. I was surprised to see she was perhaps only three or four years older than I was. “It’s a sad, complicated story. Much too complicated for you.”

I turned to say something clever to the stranger, but he had retreated far down the hall now, rather deliberately alone, it seemed. I fought a pang of disappointment as he turned a corner and disappeared.

“No, not for me, these myths,” the German said, pulling his tie, as if he had decided something important. “No one knows what they are for certain. And however they end, somebody dies.”

The guide gave a tight smile, but I could see now that she liked him even less than she liked me. It hardly mattered. Siesta was approaching, and the museum, aside from us, was now completely empty. With a final half nod, the trio turned and graciously retreated; I was left in the cool unquiet alone with Iphigenia’s ghost.

Adriana, 1st century BC

Adriana Soevii, the daughter of a baker. The Soevii house was built in the shadows of an alleyway, so that no sun would ever fall near the already smoking ovens. It was Adriana’s job to knead and bake the flat tablets of bread. Her brother pounded the grain. Her father made the purchases from the farmers and kept the accounts. Her mother, a pretty woman, went from house to house, taking the orders, although there were rumors that she performed other services as well.

The baker wasn’t rich, but he had a good house, comfortable and clean. He was shrewd, and never gave away bread, even to needy soldiers during the beginning of the famine.

And then, the famine went on. Sometimes, at night, Adriana’s father would come down to find thieves trying to break into the kitchen. He ordered a stronger bolt for the door from the ironsmith down the way.

It was a year free of rain. Dust filled in the sky and the grain seedlings withered in the ground. By the end of the winter, people were hungry, and the stores of grain were all but depleted.

On a hot spring day, Adriana propped the door open, waiting for a certain boy to visit, even though her father told her not to.

The boy didn’t come, but a thief did. He was quick and thorough. He grabbed Adriana by the shoulder, then shoved a dagger in her side and turned it clockwise. She watched her blood pour onto the floor as she struggled for breath. She could feel the cold iron inside her, could see an organ spilling out. Finally blackness came and the man filled his bag.