The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (25 page)

“A car accident.”

He looks my way. His eyes are narrowed. Blue and narrowed—fierce and skeptical.

“A car
crash,
in the hills above Capua. She had been off to score from some dealer. God knows why.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is enough heroin in Scampia for all the world—there is more than enough smack
in Naples—but anyway she went all the way to Capua, I don’t know why, and she scored.
And on one of those hills, above Capua, at midnight, the brakes
failed
. They just stopped working, for some reason no one has fathomed. Serena was coming
down a hill and then she—she went over the edge . . .”

A small orchestra has started up outside the cafe across St. Mark’s Square. The music
is jaunty and jubilant, light opera, precisely the wrong music for this somber moment.

I can see where this is going. I drink from my own Bellini, and think, and then I
ask
the
question.

“You don’t think it was an accident?”

He does not react, not visibly. But in the depths of his blue eyes I can see the glitter
of pain.

“I am pretty sure it was
murder
. I got the wreck of the car analyzed again and again, by the best people in Turin,
and they all said the same: they couldn’t find any reason why the brakes had suddenly
failed. The brakes were fine. The car was new, an Alfa, her family had bought it for
her. She wasn’t even going that fast, thirty kilometers an hour. She wasn’t stoned,
either; her drugs were untouched. She was sober, for once. The postmortem showed it.”

“So who killed her?”

“Probably her father, which is why the Naples police wouldn’t investigate properly.
He was too powerful.
Untouchable
.”

The music stops, horribly.

My words are faltering.

“But why? Why would her own father do that?”

“Because she was shooting her mouth off. Denouncing him in public. Stoned and drunk
and telling the world what he did.”

“But . . . his own daughter!”

“He had six kids. He could afford to lose a daughter.” Marc sighs and runs his fingers
through his dark, dark hair. He downs the last of his drink. “X, look, I don’t know
for sure. Maybe I am totally wrong, maybe it was another
Camorrista,
maybe it really was an accident, but this is what I strongly suspect. Someone from
her family did it. Certainly her father was a malevolent influence. And a serious
killer. He
is
the Camorra.”

“That’s why you hate them?”

“It’s one of the reasons. So when I inherited Serena’s money, I decided to put it
to good use, start a business in Campania and Calabria, something that would be honest
and yet profitable, show it could be done, something to defeat the mafias, something
to
beat
the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta.”

I begin to see. I begin to understand. I put my hand on Marc’s.

“Marc . . .”

“The death of Serena killed my father, too,” Marc adds, almost casually. “He loved
Serena; she was funny and lovable, even if she was flawed. A few months after she
died, he had a heart attack.” Marc withdraws his hand from mine abruptly. “And there
we are; now you know it all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“It’s not a story I wish to dwell on, X. And also, crucially, I have no proof. No
proof that the Camorra killed her, let alone her own
Camorrista
father. It is all supposition, it is all games and masks, games and masks. And here
we are, in the city of masks.”

He sits back, his expression grave. And I want to kiss him. And the horses rear on
their podium above St. Mark’s Cathedral, forever trampling over some unseen foe.

I am at peace. I know it all now, however troubling. The final wound is healed.

T
HE NEXT DAY
we fly to Naples, because Marc has business at home. All the regular flights are booked,
so he has chartered a private jet. Jessica and I walk across the concrete to the waiting
plane. I am childishly excited: I have never been on a private jet before. Jess is,
however, strangely subdued. All our time in Venice she has been giggly and happy,
obviously smitten by Giuseppe. Now she is mute.

Why?

Finally, when we get on board, when Giuseppe and Marc are at the front of the plane
and talking business, Jessica touches me on the arm and nods significantly—without
speaking—like she wants to talk in private. We sit in the back as the plane takes
off.

The engines are noisy. No one can hear us. Giuseppe and Marc are conversing up front.

“What is it?” I say.

“Giuseppe got drunk last night. And he said something.”

“What?”

“He was really out if it, X, totally banjaxed. He doesn’t normally drink much—I think
I am a bad influence.”

“Okay . . .”

“And then he just let it slip, he was barely conscious. I bet he’s forgotten he said
it.”

Her face is uncharacteristically somber, this is something serious.

“And . . . ? What is it?”

She turns my way.

“You know there is a Sixth Mystery?”

“What?”

Jessica nods, and looks at the front of the plane, where Giuseppe and Marc are laughing
and joking.

“There is a
Sixth
Mystery. It is frightening and scary and very dangerous, and a big, big secret. That’s
all I know. At least that is what Giuseppe
implied
.”

I am nonplussed. From the moment of revelation and final certainty at Florian’s, I
am all at sea again. Why wouldn’t Marc tell me about this? Is he still lying? Why
is he lying?

Why?

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

“H
E REALLY DENIES
there is a Sixth Mystery? Still?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm . . .”

Jess is standing before me in my Santa Lucia apartment in
Napoli,
assessing me in my new McQueen minidress. It is short, rose and black, and very pricey.
And I am wearing no panties. Under orders.

I am getting used to couture, and a lack of underwear; I am not getting used to all
the Mystery of the Mysteries.

Tonight is the Fifth. I thought it was the Fifth and Final, but Jessica has sowed
that germ of doubt.

I have twice confronted Marc with this question: I first asked him when we landed
back in Naples, two weeks ago. Marc dismissed it at once emphatically: “There is no
Sixth Mystery.” I asked him again two days later and he was even more adamant. And
yet, ever since, I have noticed a definite frostiness between him and Giuseppe, a
stiffness and a distance. Before they had been positively fraternal, joshing and amicable;
now I sense a tiny wince of disapproval whenever Giuseppe is mentioned, or simply
present.

Jess and I discuss this now as she makes me take a final turn in my dress.

“What can we do, X?” she says at last. “You’ll find out soon enough. But be careful,
sweetheart, be bloody careful.” She steps back, nodding like the approving mother
of a bride in her wedding gown.

“You look lovely. Knock-out! You’re gonna give that old goat Dionysus a heart attack.”

I laugh. Uncertainly. Then I stop laughing and I feel a surge of passionate anxiety.
The Fifth Mystery. The katabasis. I am properly scared.

Jessica reaches out to take my hand and holds it and says, “Are you sure you want
to do this, X? You can stop. You can stop right now.” Her friendly brown eyes meet
mine. And mine are wet with near tears. “We can go to Benito’s and drink Peroni and
argue over pizza margherita and pretend none of this ever happened.”

The idea is momentarily seductive. Just wipe it all away. Pretend the entire summer
was a dream, from that moment almost four months ago when I first saw Marc at the
Caffè Gambrinus. But if I do that, I extract Marc from my life, and that concept is
monstrous. An abomination. He is part of me, woven into my soul: Plati and all. And
if I erase the summer I erase the Mysteries, and I adore the way they have changed
me. I prefer the person I am becoming: more open and confident, more adventurous,
more playful.

I squeeze Jessica’s hand and shake my head.

“Thought not,” she says.

Outside I can hear a car honking. It is Giuseppe with the silver Mercedes that was
nearly mine; when I reach the sidewalk he wordlessly opens the door and drives me
the short distance to the narrow street at the heart of Old Naples, via dei Tribunali.

He parks outside a church. The Chiesa de Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad
Arco. St. Mary of the Souls in Purgatory. I know of this notorious Baroque church:
I’ve gazed at it many times as I walked the narrow pavements of Tribunali. But I have
never quite had the stomach to go inside before, thanks to its macabre reputation.

The exterior is off-putting enough: as Giuseppe opens the car door, I climb out—my
high heels slipping a little on the rough piperno cobbles—and look at the three polished
bronze skulls that sit on stone pillars. Repressing an inner shudder, I say, “
Grazie,
Giuseppe.”

He nods graciously, but there is a slender trace of contrition in his demeanor. Is
this because he is ashamed of having let slip the truth?

I’m not going to find out yet. Giuseppe turns and climbs back in the car, and the
Mercedes rumbles away, watched by the local kids hanging languidly on their Vespas
and the man in the newsstand selling
Oggi
and
Gente
.

I have to go inside the Church of the Souls in Purgatory. Guarding my fears, I ascend
the shallow steps and press open the door. A small crowd is waiting inside; Marc is
there in his usual dinner-jacketed finery. He is frowning. Even
he
looks a little grim and on edge. This doesn’t help.

“Buona sera
, X
.”

He kisses me on the forehead. I turn, and see that Françoise, accompanied by Daniel,
her boyfriend—her
amant
—is also in the small gathering. So she is doing the Fifth in Naples. This reassures
me a little. Françoise and I nod and smile encouragingly at each other. Traces of
anxiety are visible in her eyes.

But there is no time to talk: already we are being led to some stairs at the side
of the church. I know from my research where these stairs lead. Now I have to repress
even deeper fears.

Downstairs is the hypogeum, the terrible and frightening crypt of Santa Maria della
Anime del Purgatorio—the crypt where the ancient Neapolitan cult of skull worship
can still be seen in all its macabre and enduring glory.

The steps are steep, and I sigh with slight relief when we reach the stones of the
basement floor. Then I look around. And shudder.

The entire chamber is stacked with shrines, glass boxes and open chests containing
human skulls and bones. There are skulls with necklaces dangling, and skulls with
candles flickering before their hollow eyes.

The cult of skull worship was abolished in the sixties by the local Catholic hierarchy,
but here it continues, as forcefully and heathenly as ever: many local people—young
and old women, mainly—come here to pray to their own special and favored skulls, to
make offerings to skeletons, to light candles in front of the sightless dead, to plead
for luck or fertility or cancer cures or just because this place is so hideously compelling
and intense.

“Are you okay, X?”

Marc places a gentle hand on my shoulder. I lie and say, “Yes.”

“We go down from here.”

I follow his gaze and see that our guide, a short, oldish man in spectacles is lifting
up a trapdoor.

Evidently we are descending from the crypt of Santa Maria of the Souls into deeper
Naples, the great and famous labyrinth that is Naples Underground,
Napoli Sotterraneo
.

The city is built on tuffaceous and easily excavated rock. So people have been digging
holes and wells and tunnels and cellars in these environs for thousands of years;
add in the many millennia of dense settlements that have simply been
piled
on top of each other and it means there is probably as much Naples belowground as
there is above it: the city sits on a mirror image of itself, an identical and opposite
undercity, like a church poised above its own reflection in a Venetian canal.

As the guide flaps open the trapdoor, he turns to us and says, “
E ’piuttosto un lungo cammino. Potrebbe essere necessario eseguire la scansione . . .”

It’s a long way. We might have to crawl
. I take a deep breath of foul air and let Marc assist me down the steps into the
darkness.

“Grazie.”

Then we walk, crawling and squeezing, following the torch of the guide, scrambling
our way through
Napoli
Sotterraneo,
with its hundreds of miles of damp cisterns and secret chapels and old charnel houses
and entombed Roman theaters and musty Bourbon dungeons. We pass shrines of the Mystery
Religions—turned into warehouses used by Camorra smugglers, for storing drugs, liquor,
tobacco, and guns. Many of the Mystery Religions did their rites in secretive underground
places around here, just as the mafias do their business in the same sequestered places
now.

The parallels are apt.

And as the air gets mustier and damper, older and nastier, I start to think.
To connect it all up
. I see the lineage, like spotting the resemblance to a distant and famous ancestor
in a modern descendant.

“Ci siamo quasi . . .”

It seems we don’t have far to go. Another narrow tunnel zigzags into a huge echoing
cistern, built, Marc tells me, by the ancient Greeks. Marc is carrying his own flashlight
in his phone—he flicks it this way and that and I stare. The cistern, now empty of
water, is enormous. I gaze, in nervous wonder, at the mighty arches, the high, rocky
ceiling, the grandiose and beautifully carved walls, a hundred meters tall or more.
It is like the achievement of a long dead race from a more advanced planet.

“Avanti.”

We walk on. The air is hot and somehow thin. I am feeling light-headed and have yet
to drink the kykeon. Will there be kykeon? I hope yes, I hope no.

The journey continues down an even narrower corridor of Greek bricks and bare rocks.
Damp, fusty, dismal, and dubious.

“Just a few more minutes,
carissima
.”

Marc’s arm is comforting around my shoulder; I am not feeling especially solaced.
I am truly scared now. We are so deep underground, so deep in the forgotten tunnels
of
Napoli Sotterraneo,
undertaking the
way beneath the Earth
.

“Here,” says the guide ahead of us, in English. I can see lights, albeit subdued.
The tunnel opens out into a series of large vaults, lit by bare torches and blue lanterns.
There are many people here, already assembled, drinking wine and talking. But the
mood is entirely different from anything in the other Mysteries. The music is very
simple and churchy: plainsong or Gregorian chants, or something even more archaic
and Greek. And sad. And insistent.

Marc looks troubled. He is frowning very profoundly. I squeeze his hand to comfort
him
. He forces a smile.

We are guided into one of the low vaults. It has a curved, arched ceiling, like the
inside of a large airliner, but made of damp stone. Narrow shelves of rock line the
side, where people are standing and looking down.

Flaming torches illuminate the half cylinder of vaulting. They flicker and gutter,
showing macabre reliefs on the inwardly curved walls, presumably dating back to the
time of the earliest Mysteries in southern Italy, maybe the third or fourth century
B
.
C
. The stone friezes are delicate yet primitive, and they show men being tortured.
A man having his throat slit. Another man being sodomized. A third man is being crudely
stabbed in the back with a knife. The man grimaces and blood spurts from his wound.

I remember the strange scar on Marc’s shoulder. So that is, probably, one mystery
solved
. The curved scar—a knife wound—must be his symbol of initiation into the Mysteries,
like the tattoo on my inner thigh.

Reaching down I squeeze Marc’s hand again. It is moist with perspiration. He is obviously
worried: I have not seen him like this before. My own anxieties are tightening. What
is going to happen to me?

The music rises to a singular intensity, a chorus of plain and unadorned voices, lamenting
and maudlin, even discordant. But it is very distinct: I wonder if there is a choir
somewhere in the neighboring vault—there are so many cellars and dungeons, and vaults,
so many Dionysian temples interred by time.

“Drink,” says a girl, thrusting a cup into my hands. She is not wearing a white tunic;
this time it is plain and unredeemed black. But she seems to play the same role as
the girls in all the other rites: the handmaidens of the Mysteries.

I look at Marc for support, or advice, but he has already grabbed his metal cup and
drained the liquid to nothing. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and disdainfully
gives it back. There is something odd again in his demeanor—this is not the gracious,
smart, aristocratic Marc I know and love. It is a different man. The inner anger is
more obvious.

“Marc, are you all right?”

He waves my question away with a gesture.

“Just watch,
cara mia
. I think you just have to watch. For now.”

I turn and watch. A woman is being selected from the crowds. It is Françoise. There
are three or four other girls that I recognize: my sisters of the Fifth, my fellow
initiates. But Françoise has been chosen first.

We are all standing on the raised stone terraces at either side of the large barrel-vaulted
chamber. Françoise nods and walks, slowly and dutifully, in her black dress, down
some stone steps and then along the sunken, central, navelike space, to the end of
the chamber—where I now see, on the terminating wall, that there is a large, primitive
mural of a Greek or Roman soldier slaughtering a bull. But the soldier isn’t just
killing the bull; he is brutally raking a knife across its throat, so the blood spurts
from the terrified animal’s neck. The triumph of man over beast? Or the triumph of
cruelty over kindness?

A middle-aged man is standing beneath this horrible wall painting. He is holding a
silver bell, which he now rings, and he says, in English, “Do you agree to submit
to the Fifth Mystery?”

Françoise replies hesitantly. “I agree.”

“Then the first ritual can begin. Kneel.”

She kneels.

“Pray to Mithras,” he commands.

She puts her hands together uncertainly. And bows her head in the direction of the
mural, of the man slaughtering the bull. The master of the Mysteries rings the bell
again. Françoise turns to face him as he instructs her.

“Now turn around and lie on your back.”

The liquor from the metal cups is beginning to affect me. But it is not like the wines
of Capri or Rhoguda, or the kykeon of the Fourth, it is a bludgeon of intoxication
by comparison. I feel drunk, in a heavy, yet aggressive way; as if I would like to
fight someone. It is not good.

I turn to Marc. I can see, even in the flame-lit shadows of the Mithraic vault, that
he is experiencing similar sensations: he is grinding his teeth, like a man suppressing
violence.

“You must be shared with Mithras and Dionysus,” says the man with the silver bell.
“Lift up your dress.”