“She wanted to rub your back, and this cracks up your nerves?” Patrice asked when I told him about what had happened in the study with Vera. “I am not understanding.”
“It was weird,” I said. “She’s old enough to be my mother.”
This was technically true, although a universe stood between Vera Grant and my actual mother, who made the Oedipus complex a ludicrous formulation.
“It is wonderful, when they rub your back,” Patrice said. “I am in heaven with this, but it’s too seldom.”
“Is nobody rubbing your back these days?”
“I don’t tell you my private acts. I tell you very little, Alexi.”
He had taken to calling me Alexi for reasons known only to himself. Everyone took liberties with my name, assuming I would accept, even delight in, any form of recognition, however skewed. But I said nothing about it. It was always easier to hold my tongue.
Patrice had taken a day off for us to visit the Blue Grotto together. It was one of the few major landmarks of Capri that had escaped our scrutiny. In previous weeks, we had picked over stones at most of the twelve ruined villas of Tiberius and picnicked in the mossy purple coolness of the Matromania Cave, where “bizarre and unnatural rituals have been performed over many centuries,” as Grant explained with relish. The village of Anacapri had become familiar, with its whitewashed maze of shops and houses, its intersecting footpaths lined with rosy bricks and overhung with vines. We’d hiked to the peak of Mount Solaro, with its vertical prospect of the Marina Piccola and the Tragara (the Villa Clio like a brilliant white dot in the distance). The cone of Ischia in the middle distance had grown as accustomed as the Faraglioni, which gave the illusion of following us wherever we went, visible from various points on the island. Patrice was fond of giving lectures, and I knew he’d have prepared a mini-lecture about the Blue Grotto, confecting a hodgepodge of facts and myths lifted from guidebooks and odd conversations.
“Giovanni will take us in the boat to this grotto,” Patrice explained. “I know you will like Giovanni because he is wonderful man, with eloquence of his limbs. He is thinking of so much, but you wouldn’t guess it. His fàccia, she is impassivity itself.” How could I argue with that, or understand it? As usual, Patrice put himself in charge of my education, working to ensure that my opinions didn’t vary from his.
Giovanni proved easy to like, though I could not visualize the “eloquence of his limbs.” He had inherited from his grandfather an old-fashioned motor launch that he used to circumnavigate the island several times a day with tourists in the high season. “He speaks English but not so well,” said Patrice, the pot calling the kettle. In keeping with many Capresi in the tourist trade, Giovanni had a firm command of a minuscule vocabulary. Like so many on the island, he could provide a monologue about the primary tourist sites, complete with names and dates, but if you asked him a direct question, his expression froze. “I am not so much English,” he would say.
Patrice had settled well into life on Capri. He was now established in what amounted to a garden shed annexed to the parish house of a colorful priest, Father Aurelio. The church itself, Santa Caterina, stood nearby: a pink-washed chapel that could seat perhaps thirty worshippers at a time. It nestled in a grove of tall cedars just off the Tragara, unobtrusive except when a bell clanged in its campanile to mark the hour.
I had seen Father Aurelio before, his white cassock flowing as he crossed the piazzetta. He seemed perpetually hurried, as if racing to administer the last rites to some expiring parishioner. I had been told, by Patrice, that Aurelio was a published poet, and that his work was “in the tradition of Rilke,” who had lived on Capri in 1906 in a small house in the garden of the Moorish-style Villa Discopoli, not fifty yards down the path. (Aurelio was, in fact, a translator of Rilke’s poetry, although his translations had only been published locally, in Naples.)
“You will meet Father Aurelio later,” Patrice said in a hushed tone meant to convey his awe and respect for the literary cleric. “I told him you are poetic, too.”
“That’s an exaggeration,” I said. “I can hardly call myself a poet. I’ve written very little, and published nothing.” An unexceptional poem against the Vietnam War—written just a few months before Nicky was killed—had appeared in my college literary magazine, prompting an invitation from SDS to join its ranks. (This supposedly well-organized league of student radicals had somehow lost track of the fact that I had been a member for the previous fifteen months.) But that surely did not count. I was, at best, an aspiring poet, an ephebe.
“It is your youth that prevents you as a poet,” Patrice said, with lofty incoherence. “Achievement will follow.”
His blithe confidence in me, based on nothing, was less than reassuring. I had begun to feel fraudulent and unaccomplished, especially beside Rupert Grant, whose pen rarely paused during waking hours. “The secret of writing a novel,” he said when I confessed my feelings of intimidation, “is steady attention. You must focus, Lorenzo. Let everything, all the petty distractions, dissolve—pay attention only to what gathers before you—on the page.” When I asked him about a remedy for writer’s block, he said wryly: “Lower your standards.”
Nothing gathered before me except life itself, which I found distracting beyond what Grant could imagine. I was desperate for the kind of physical affection that had eluded me so far. Ardent sex with a woman I loved seemed a far, impossible shore. Worse yet, a channel of icy waters seemed to stand between me and that dream of landfall. Holly now occupied that place in my fantasy life, and I convinced myself that she and I would eventually sail away together. We would live in England, perhaps, and have several children and a thatched cottage. Our books would both achieve a surprising level of popularity for works of remarkable complexity and depth. Whenever possible, I hovered beside her on the grounds of the Villa Clio, but could not connect. Most of the words that passed between us were perfunctory or functional: “Would you pass the salt, please?” or “Has the rain stopped?”
I loved her particular scent. Until now, it had never quite occurred to me that each human being exuded a distinct smell, as idiosyncratic as a fingerprint. In Holly’s case, it was a maddeningly erotic smell, and the slightest whiff edged me toward despair. Once, in Grant’s study, while she was working at a desk in the corner, I bent over her shoulder and pretended to read what she had written. But I could not read the words. I could only fill my lungs with the smell of her, imagining what it might be like to bathe in, linger over, suck in, devour, and become that fragrance myself.
I tried to explain my situation to Patrice, looking for the relief that comes from sharing these agonies, but he was unsympathetic. “This Holly, she belong to Rupert Grant,” he said, “and you, too, belong to him. Change your mind, or trouble will arrive, and you will not be happy.” As usual, Patrice appeared to speak with the wisdom of the ages, as though he’d seen it all before. “I am feeling your anger to Grant,” he said. “You have competition there. Only this is dangerous. Believe me.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“But I am so sure,” he said.
Giovanni waited at the Marina Grande, lounging on the aft deck of his boat in a canvas chair. He was a wiry young man, walnut-skinned, with hair that fit like a black skullcap. His eyes were cobalt blue: an oddity, given the skin and hair. His gaze moved rapidly from me to Patrice, with facial tics that suggested an underlying anxiety. We spoke Italian with him, though Patrice and I were confined to a simple vocabulary and a tight, rubbery coat of syntax that shed complexity like rain. As we put-putted in the motor launch toward the famous grotto, we listened to his canned speech—a recitation that, during the high season, he repeated dozens of times each day.
As Giovanni explained, the cave had been known to the Romans, who lined its ledges with statues. Local fishermen were aware of its existence for centuries, but its reputation traveled beyond Capri when two young Germans, both of them painters, swam into the cave in the summer of 1826. Amazed by their discovery, they returned the next day with a cauldron of pitch, which they lit to view the interior. The flames spun light off the sandy white bottom, and the silvery-blue water became a strange and living thing that swung from side to side. The walls shimmered, blue-vermilion. The presence of an altar and marble figures against the far back wall of the cave added to the sense of radical enchantment, and the myth of the Blue Grotto was born—at least in Giovanni’s account.
“Tacitus,” he intoned, switching to English in a voice suitable for a loudspeaker, “was the largest Roman historian. He inform us that Tiberio would take the small boys and girls to the Blue Grotto, where he engage in sexual practices. Afterward, he would strangle them.” Giovanni gestured dramatically, as if wringing the neck of a chicken.
Patrice gasped. “I have not heard of this,” he said, “the strangulation. Such bad news!”
From the research I’d been doing for Grant, I knew that what Tacitus wrote about Tiberius had long been in question. He’d been scorned, by Napoleon no less, as “a detractor of humanity.” While twenty or so lines about the emperor’s late orgies enlivened the Annals, they were also typical of what Roman audiences expected to hear about a tyrannical ruler by a writer of this rhetorical school. Tacitus baldly contradicted himself elsewhere in the same narrative, calling Tiberius “a man admirable in character whom his people held in great esteem.” When Suetonius later drew on this material for his own inflammatory passages, he introduced them by saying “they are scarcely fit to be told and still less to be believed.” Well before the appearance of the Annals—written eight decades after the emperor’s death—accounts of his life by his contemporaries never mentioned any scandalous behavior. Philo, for example, claimed that Tiberius lived a “clean and pious life on Capri, an example to all.” Even Plutarch, that severe advocate of conventional morality, wrote of the old emperor’s “dignified solitude during the last years of his life.” That could not have included the strangling of small children whom he had just molested.
Suetonius nevertheless adored all disreputable bits about the emperors, though his carelessness undermined his accounts. (Professor Lorimer once reminded my class at Columbia of Quintilian’s observation that “a liar must own a wonderful memory.”) Suetonius, when he wrote about Caligula, mentioned that the younger man had to “hide from the stern and moral gaze of Tiberius by disguising himself in a wig.” Would a young man need to hide from the gaze of a pervert and child molestercum-strangler? Even Juvenal, a lover of scandal, wrote breathlessly about the “tranquil old age of Tiberius, who lived on Capri surrounded by learned friends and astronomers.” So what could one believe? How was it possible to sort through the distortions of history? Wasn’t history itself a kind of fiction?
These questions rumbled through my head as I listened to Giovanni’s monologue, but I kept silent. He was obviously pleased with himself, and he—and Patrice, too—might have misconstrued any qualifications I offered. (“Do not be interrupting when he make his speeches,” Patrice had warned me. “He is too sensitive.”)
We rounded a point, anchoring in purple water beneath a large, overhanging bluff encrusted with seagulls. The water itself was strangely quiescent, too smooth for its own good. Giovanni gestured toward an entrance in the cliff wall that looked no more than a few feet high. “You swim into that tunnel,” he said, in Italian, explaining that he himself didn’t like to swim. “Only if necessary do I swim,” he added, lighting a cigarette. “I hate the water so much, I should have been a fisherman. They really hate the water.”
Patrice and I slipped into our bathing suits.
“You are good with swimming, no?” Patrice asked me, nervously. He looked pathetic in his suit, so thin and wan, like a hipless adolescent.
I assured him that he had nothing to worry about on my behalf, and we launched ourselves from the port side of the boat, falling backward over the rail. I noticed that Patrice held his nose when he jumped, and that he swam with his head high, like a dog.
Although it was mid-May, the water felt chilly on this side of the island, more so than on the Piccola Marina side, with its southerly exposure. I swam steadily toward the tunnel, using an overhand crawl, assuming that Patrice followed in my wake. After a surprisingly brief passage through the tunnel, I found myself afloat in a vast tub of light, the water like a large jewel, many-faceted, a cool wet fire. Shadows played off the roof and walls of the cave, and I whooped, thrilling when my cry was quick to bound and rebound, glancing off the grotto’s countless angles. Several minutes passed before I realized that Patrice had not appeared in the cave beside me. At first, I felt more puzzled than frightened. It had, after all, been a short swim from the boat to the entrance of the grotto through calm water.
I shouted, “Patrice! Patrice!” The name tripled in size, pinging off the walls. Getting no response, I swam back toward the entrance, my head above water, searching. I recalled some giddiness in his laughter when we talked about swimming into the grotto, and understood that now as fear. I can’t say how long I looked for him, but it seemed like a painfully long time. Two minutes? Maybe ten?
I discovered him at the entrance to the tunnel itself. Still vaguely thrashing, he was a foot beneath the surface, but sinking. I plunged, grabbing his hair with my left hand, pulling him up. He tried to fight me off, but it was all gesture, a self-destructive instinct I could not fathom. Having been trained as a lifeguard, I had no problem in getting him to a ledge at the side of the tunnel. Weak as a whippet, he did not resist after that initial flourish.
“I am drowning,” he said, water dribbling from his lips, in a reedy voice as we sat on the narrow ledge.
I pounded him between the shoulder blades to facilitate breathing. “You were drowning.”
Patrice eventually pressed his back to the wall, sucking in slow breaths. “You have saved me, Alexi,” he said, hoarsely. “I owe my life to you.”
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“I am your servant,” he said.
The severe disjunction between what he probably meant and what he actually said forced a grin from me. I claimed (falsely) that I had merely assisted him. “Just a hand,” I said, “I gave you a hand.”
“He is not just giving a hand,” Patrice said. “I owe my life to your marvelous swimming.”
Unsurprisingly, he had lost all curiosity about the grotto, so we abandoned the site, swimming back to the boat, with Patrice preceding me by a few yards. At one point he rested in the water, putting a hand on my shoulder for support, telling me again that I “was the hero of his life.” Back on deck, he explained to Giovanni that our exploration of the Blue Grotto would have to wait until he had regained his confidence in the water. “I am without courage,” he said. “The water have defeated me.”
We docked in a cove nearby, then climbed a flight of stone stairs to an olive grove, where Giovanni reached into a cloth bag he had carried and produced fruit and cheese with a vaguely cool bottle of white Corvo, a dry Sicilian wine. Patrice was mute, still traumatized by the episode in the grotto; he sat with his back against a rock, devouring a hunk of cheese, with a bank of wildflowers above his head: blue lobelia, clusters of blood-bright amaryllis. He seemed Pre-Raphaelite, a pale and insubstantial figure painted by Rossetti. Both Giovanni and I studied him intensely, savoring the food and wine, saying nothing. It was as though a brush with mortality had whetted our appetites, sharpened our senses to a point of painful acuteness.