The Angry Mountain (18 page)

I caught hold of her then. “You little fool! “I snapped, almost shaking her. “You come here for the truth. I give it you and you don't believe me.”

“Please, Mr. Farrell.” She took hold of my hands gently and pulled them away from her shoulders. “Why not lie down for a bit? I don't think you should be out here on the balcony. The glare—”

I started to say something, but she stopped me. “You mustn't excite yourself any more.” Her eyes looked at me sadly. “I'll let myself out.” Then she turned and went through into the room. I heard the door close. I was alone then with the knowledge that Sansevino was here in Naples.

I dressed quickly, packed my things and checked out of the hotel. Thank God Zina had suggested visiting this villa. I could forget things so easily with Zina. And they'd never find me there. I got a taxi and drove straight out to the Villa Carlotta.

Zina's big, cream-coloured Fiat was waiting at the door as
I drove up. Roberto was in the driver's seat, lounging over the steering wheel. He didn't smile at me. His eyes looked black and sullen and I had a sudden feeling that he hated me. The good-looking youth in the bathing trunks seemed to have become coarsened into a surly peasant.

I was shown into the room where I'd met her before. The powder-blue walls and furnishings seemed colder, more artificial. The view from the balcony was bleak and grey and the air was heavy so that my shirt stuck to my body. On a table in a corner was a photograph in a heavy silver frame— Zina in a white wedding dress, her hand resting on the arm of a tall, uniformed man with a drawn, leathery face. The door opened as I was putting the photograph back on the table. “You like my husband?”

I swung round. Zina, in a pale green silk frock covered with scarlet tigers, was smiling at me from the doorway. I didn't know what to say. The man looked more than twice her age.

She gave me a quick, angry shrug. “What does it matter? He is already a part of the past.” She smiled. “Shall we go?”

I realised then that it had never occurred to her that I should not come.

“You look tired,” she said as she took my hand. Her fingers were very cool,

“It's nothing,” I answered. “Just the heat. What's wrong with Roberto this morning?”

“Roberto?” An amused smile flickered across her lips. “I think perhaps he is a little jealous.”

“Jealous?” I stared at her.

For a moment she seemed about to burst out laughing. Then she said quickly, “Roberto is employed by my husband. He think he is my watch-dog and he does not approve of my taking handsome young Englishmen out to Santo Francisco.” She held the door open for me. “Come,” she said gaily. “I have arrange everything. We will have lunch at Portici and
then we have an appointment to keep with your American friend at Pompeii. Remember?” She wrinkled her nose at me. “I think it will be very dull. I ask him only because you are so stupid with me yesterday. But it does not matter. We have all the night.”

Outside Roberto was just putting my suitcases in the boot. He went round to the door and held it open. Zina paused as she was getting in and said something to him in Italian. She spoke softly and very fast. His eyes flicked to my face and then he grinned at her rather sheepishly. He was like a small urchin that has been promised a sweet.

“What did you say to Roberto?” I asked as I subsided into the cream upholstery beside her.

She glanced at me quickly. “I say he will have the whole afternoon to sit in a cafe and drink and slap the waitress's bottom.” She laughed at the expression on my face. “Now I have shock you. You are so very, very English, you know.” She slipped her hand under my arm and snuggled down into the leather. “Relax now, please. And remember, this is Italy. Do you think I do not know what a boy like Roberto wants? You forget I am born in the slums of Napoli.”

I didn't say anything and the car slid out through the big wrought-iron lacework of the gates and swung south down the Via Posillipo towards Naples. It was wonderful to feel the cool air on my face. Heavy clouds were banked up across the sky. It was oppressively close and the ash-heap of Vesuvius stood out almost white against the louring black of the sky. “Did you see Vesuvius last night?” I asked her.

She nodded. “For three nights it has been like that. From Santo Francisco we shall see it much more clearly.” She sighed. “Perhaps it is because of Vesuvio that the women of Napoli are like they are.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

She looked at me from under arched eyebrows. “Our passions are like that volcano,” she said huskily.

I stared at the mountain rising so quiet and serene above
the sea. “Do you think it will erupt again?” I asked.

“I do not know. You must talk to the scientists at osservatore. But I do not think they know very much. When you have seen Pompeii, you will understand how powerful that mountain is. It is unpredictable and terrible—like a woman with a love she must destroy in order to hold.”

We had lunch in a restaurant that had once been a private-house. The tall, scrolled rooms were almost Regency in architecture. It was just near Herculaneum, that other Roman town that had been buried in the ash of Vesuvius.

After lunch we turned inland from Portici, through narrow, dusty streets where naked babies sucked their mothers' breasts and old men lay like bundles of rags asleep in the dust. Then we were out on the autostrada roaring southwards with Vesuvius towering higher and higher above us to the left. Zina looked back several times and then ordered Roberto to stop. As we pulled in to the side of the road a big American car flashed by. I caught a glimpse of two people seated in the back of it, a man and a girl, and though they did not glance at us I had a feeling they were conscious of us. I turned to Zina. She was looking at me out of the corners of her eyes.

The by-roads connecting the villages pass either over or under the autostrada and not until Torre Annunziata is there a side road branching off the autostrada. There is a petrol station at the fork and the American car was there. I looked back as we shot past and saw it nosing out on to the autostrada.

Five minutes later we were in Pompeii. Hacket was waiting for us near the entrance to the ruins, his tiny hired Fiat almost lost in the crowd of coaches and souvenir stalls. Zina asked for the
Ruggiero
and we were passed straight through the turnstiles. But when we got to his office we found he was in Naples, lecturing at the University, so Zina showed us round herself.

Our progress was slow for Hacket was continually pausing to refer to his guide-book or to take a photograph. It was
oppressively hot and my leg began to ache the way it often does in England before it rains.

It was the sunken streets that made it so hot. Most of them are still just twenty-foot deep cuttings lined with the stone facades of shops and villas exactly as they were two thousand years ago. Zina showed us all the important things and as we followed her round she told us story after story, building up in our minds a picture of a voluptuous, orgy-ridden life in a Roman seaside resort in the days before Christ was born. But “though I saw the forum and the baths, the various theatres and the brothel with the penis sign outside and the indelicate pleasure murals above the cubicles, and the villa with the revolting picture at the entrance and the murals in the love room, it was the little things I remembered afterwards—the deep ruts worn in the stone-paved streets by the wheels of the chariots, the shop counters with the pots in which olive oil and other household necessities had been stored; the small bones still lying in the room where a child had been caught by the hot ash. It was an overall impression of a town suddenly halted in mid-flow of activity.

Walking through those narrow, rutted streets, the phallic symbol of good luck still clearly marked on the paving stones, the initials of lovers and of men in the cells of the prison still as clear as when they had been cut, it seemed as though only yesterday the Romans in their togas had been here in place of this motley crowd of camera-slung tourists speaking a dozen different languages.

But in the Terme Stabiane all these impressions were swept aside. After seeing the hot bath Zina took us back to the entrance to look at a mosaic. And it was there that we came face to face with Maxwell and Hilda Tu
č
ek. They didn't seem to notice me as they went straight through into the dim cavern of the baths. But I knew then who the occupants of the big American car had been.

Zina turned to me. “Do you tell your friends to follow us?” She was white with anger.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then why are they here? Why do they follow us from Portici?”

“I don't know.”

She stared at me. I could see she didn't believe me. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I think we go now. I do not like to be followed about. Is that girl in love with you?”

“No.”

She gave a quick, sneering laugh. “You do not know very much about women, eh?” We went out and turned left towards the forum.

As we went back down the narrow, sloping street with the chariot ruts, she slipped her hand through my arm. “Do not worry about it, Dick. Roberto will get rid of them for us. My car is very fast and he is a good driver.” She seemed to have recovered her spirits for she chatted gaily about the scene in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted. She seemed to have an almost frighteningly morbid interest in the scene and I remember the way she laughed as she said, “It happen so suddenly that men and women were caught in bed together and when they excavated they find them still like that. Can you imagine yourself in bed with a girl and then suddenly the room is full of hot sifting ash, you are suffocated, and there you are, in the same position, when a digger uncover your love couch two thousand years later? That is immortality, eh?”

As we went out through the gates I looked back. There was nothing to be seen of Pompeii except the burnt grass of what looked like a rabbit warren. It was all below the level of the ground. Behind and above it the ash slopes of Vesuvius had a grey sheen and at the very summit a little puff of vapour showed, like a miniature atomic explosion.

Hacket was also looking up at Vesuvius. “Must be a fine sight out here at night,” he said. “Guess I'll drive out and have a look after it's dark.”

Roberto drove up and Zina held out her hand. “Good-bye,
Mr. Hacket. Now you have seen Pompeii I think perhaps you respect our little volcano, eh?”

“Believe me, Countess, I've immense respect for it—and for you, too,” he said with a slow smile. “I certainly appreciate your kindness in showing me round. Good-bye, Mr. Farrell. Be sure to take it easy now.”

As we drove away he was rummaging in his bulging pockets for candy to give to a ragged, importunate urchin. Zina was very silent on the drive back to the autostrada. As we approached the turning to Torre Annunziata she looked back and then spoke rapidly in Italian to Roberto. He nodded and put his foot down on the accelerator. Behind us I saw the black and chromium of Maxwell's car. I felt angry then. It was ridiculous to be followed like this as though I were some sort of a criminal.

We turned left and swept down towards the leaden mirror of Naples Bay. Roberto knew his way and we roared and slithered through the narrow streets, in and out between the trams, siren blaring and children scattering. Then we were climbing out of Torre Annunziata, across the railway line, over the bridge that spans the autostrada and along the dusty road to Boscotrecase with the bulk of Vesuvius hanging right over us.

Just beyond Boscotrecase Roberto stopped the car. We sat and waited. Two carts, one drawn by a white buffalo and the other by a horse whose bones pierced his hide, passed us. But no car. Zina gave an order to Roberto and we drove on.

“We go as far as Terzigno and then we turn left,” Zina said. “Santo Francisco is the village above Avin. The villa we are going to is just off the road between the two villages.”

The road was narrow and the sides of it were coated in a film of white dust. Dust rose behind us in a white cloud. The country on either side was flat, with vines and oranges. Away to the right the ugly tower of Pompeii's modern church thrust its needle-like top over the trees. It reminded me of the campanili of the Lombardy Plain.

It was past five when we reached the villa by a dusty track that ran dead straight through flat, almost white earth planted with bush vines. The villa itself was perched on a sudden rise where some long-forgotten lava flow had abruptly ceased. It was the usual white stucco building with flat roof and balconies and some red tiling to relieve the monotony of the design. It was built with its shoulder to the mountain so that it faced straight out across the hard-baked flatness of the vineyards to the distant gleam of the sea and a glimpse of Capri. As the car stopped the heat closed in on us. There was no sun, but the air was heavy and stifling as though the sirocco were blowing in from the Sahara. I began to wish I hadn't come.

Zina laughed at me and took my hand. “Wait till you have tasted the vino. You will not look so glum then.” She glanced up at the mountain, which from where we were standing seemed crouched right over the villa. “To-night I think it will look as though you can light your cigarette from the glow of her.”

We went in then. It was very cool inside. Venetian blinds screened the windows from the sunless glare. It was like going into a cave. All the servants seemed there to greet us—an old man and an old woman with gnarled, wrinkled faces, a young man who smiled vacantly and a little girl who peeped at us shyly from around a door and pulled at her skirt which was much too short for her. I was shown to a room on the first floor. The old man brought up my bags. He pulled up the Venetian blinds and I found myself looking up to the summit of Vesuvius. A little circle of black vapour appeared for an instant, writhed upwards and then slowly dissolved, and as it dissolved another black puff appeared to replace it. “
Le piace il Lachrima Christi, signore?
” the old man asked. He had a soft, whining voice.