Professor Huchro gave the keynote address at the conference in Grenoble. It’s an odd place perhaps for academics to gather to talk about Imperial Rome, but the university there offers excellent facilities, and the venue is popular because of the skifields close by.
The content of most such gatherings is predictable, even repetitious, and often location becomes the point of attraction. I’m not into winter playgrounds myself, but was interested when I read that Paula Huchro was to give a paper on the importance of sea power during the time of the Flavian emperors.
We’d met in our mid-twenties as assistants at a minor archaeological dig in Italy, had been colleagues there for six weeks. Before Grenoble I’d seen her only once again, fleetingly, at a symposium in Genoa. Paula is married, but keeps her maiden name, perhaps as a nod to feminism, perhaps more to pay tribute to her Polish origins.
I sat in the third-floor room of a modern wing of the university at Grenoble, next to Andrew Neiderer, reader in classics from the University of London, and listened to Paula’s address. A window cleaner worked from an enclosed seat that travelled on a bar attached to the outside of the building. No noise intruded. He was youthfully agile, did his job well and I could see snow on the mountains not far away. Paula was poised, authoritative, deserving of the respect she was accorded in her field. She was short, still inclined to plumpness, but her hair was much darker than it had been when she and I were young in Italy. It appeared quite natural, although it must have been dyed.
Anacapri was the first archaeological dig of which I was ever part. I was one of two PhD students funded to gain experience. The widening of a walled street had revealed the remains of a first century BC domestic shrine, and a midden, the use of which went back at least a century earlier. The site was close to Axel Munthe’s Villa San Michele, and the tourists going there would sometimes be attracted by our chatter and the signs of excavation, and walk up the cobbled slope to watch for a moment in the accosting sun. A canvas awning was stretched between poles to keep the glare from us as we crouched on the little terraces of stony soil amid the sectioning tape and pegs. The tourists soon tired of the meticulous sifting and scraping, the constant delay for recording, the lack of arresting discovery, and drifted back to the street that led to San Michele, where they could stand under cool arches and see the rich pickings of Munthe’s classical collection displayed to advantage on the very spot where once Tiberius had a villa.
The archaeologist in charge was only a few years older than me. Colum taught at the University of California, and his industrious talent almost matched his overweening ambition. A lanky, ginger-haired and freckled guy who refused to cover up, and whose body refused to tan: burn and peel, burn and peel, so that always there were overlapping lines of sloughing skin like pale tide marks on his reddened body. His acumen in scholarly matters was indisputable, however, and he bested me with condescending ease in any professional disagreements. ‘Good try, man,’ he’d say, ‘but you got a way to go yet. Keep taking the tablets.’ He did some digging at the excavation, but most of his time was spent site mapping and cataloguing.
I disliked Colum most of all because he was having sex with Paula, who was the other graduate student funded for practical experience. Her tuition was more personal and intensive than mine, and at night I was kept awake for a time by her head butting the thin wall between our cramped rooms in Capri harbour, down the winding, narrow road from Anacapri. ‘Come on, come on,’ Colum would exhort, as if impatient for her to follow suit in a card game.
She was then a short, fair girl who, because of Colum’s attentions, seemed to inflate during our stay, until dimples appeared on her cheeks and knees. Even her nose became a more dominant feature. Whether Paula’s weight gain was the consequence of satisfaction, or guilt, I was unsure. She said little during her work both night and day during the first weeks on site. Faustus and Alessandro, the two permanent team members, were puzzled, I think, at her reserve, given her almost immediate openness with Colum.
Paula and I usually worked together, and at first there was constraint between us because of her relationship with Colum, although that was never mentioned. I admired her knowledge, her industrious enthusiasm and persistence. Fieldwork has never been the aspect of classical studies most attractive to me, and some hot afternoons, cramped from sitting and crouching, and also a little bored with the precise discipline required in a dig, I would wander off and take a long break: have a beer at the café cum bar with a view of the chairlift. Well, we weren’t even getting paid. Paula didn’t accompany me: Colum would lift his sandy eyebrows as if to say, boys will be boys.
It was the discovery of the coin that brought us closer. We were sitting on wooden slats on the shallow terrace of the site’s level three, when her narrow trowel flipped out a denarius we later found had been minted by Sextus Pompey during his war with Octavian. An interesting coin to be there on the island of Capri. The day was unusual also: high cloud and a strong sea wind that puffed dust from Paula’s trowel into our faces.
I lifted my head in excitement, and was about to call out to others of the team, when Paula put a hand on my arm. ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Keep quiet about it.’ The excavation was a shallow one as sites go, and my neck was above the level of the cobbles nearby. Because of the thrill I felt, I expected Colum and Faustus, working not far away, to be caught up in awareness of it, but their faces remained down. ‘Just keep working,’ said Paula. She rubbed the coin a couple of times in her fingers, then slipped it into her pocket. She began the scrupulous, small-scale excavation again in the dry soil, and the wind ruffled the orange site tapes and blew grit as before. Just the passage of a little time made me an accomplice, and without conscious decision.
We finished early because of the wind, and Paula and I went to the nearby café and had small glasses of yellow limoncello liquor. Most of the tourists had already gone down the steep road to the harbour and the boats waiting to take them back to Sorrento, or Naples. Paula’s lover was our superior and someone I disliked. That situation created wariness between us, but by saying nothing of the find, she created new ambiguity.
From the café patio we could see the chairlift that took visitors low over the last gardens and up to the mountain lookout. I went up several times during my stay, and enjoyed the quiet, skimming ride as much as the view from the island’s top.
‘You won’t say anything about it, will you?’ Paula said.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What do you reckon it is?’
‘A denarius of course.’
‘Yeah, what period, though?’
‘I’m not going to take it out now. Let’s not even talk about it. You know what people are like round here. I’ll clean it up a bit when I get a chance and you can have a look at it.’
‘What about Colum?’ I said.
‘What about him?’ Paula showed no embarrassment.
‘Aren’t you going to tell him?’
‘He doesn’t own me,’ she said.
You could have fooled me. For the first time, sitting there in the cooling wind, I had a sense of her resolve and independence. Because she was short, quiet and plain, because she was pleasuring Colum at night, I’d assumed she was submissive, and reliant on others. How difficult we find it to avoid such superficial assessments. We didn’t talk any more of the coin that day, but it marked special knowledge between us, and a basis for friendship of a kind. Later, in the darkness, I heard her head, or knee, tapping on the wall again, and Colum’s exhortations, and knew their relationship more complex than he realised.
In my free time I went often to Villa San Michele to enjoy its spacious beauty, and examine the treasures Munthe had gathered there: Greek and Egyptian artefacts as well as Roman. Such views, too, and I could stand there and think of Tiberius looking out from that same place, feel thankful not to live in a despotic age. Torre was guide and custodian of the villa. He was as much interested in the dig as I was in San Michele, and we spent time together in both places, and time together in night restaurants drinking imported beer and limoncello. Torre was middle-aged and had the darker skin and stockiness of a southern Italian. Arabs, I later heard a professor from Milan call them. Torre had a central bald spot around which small curls lapped, and a fine voice, but he sang vacuous American pop songs instead of arias, perhaps to display his command of English. Often he spoke of going to the USA, where he imagined wealth awaited everyone. His cousin in Dayton, Ohio, had two cars and was a member of a country club. The cousin said he wouldn’t come back to Italy. It had too much of a past, he said, and not enough of a future.
I never went to Torre’s house, never met his wife, saw only one of his large family — a barely adolescent son. On the few occasions that he and I stayed drinking late, the boy would track us down, and Torre would get up without demur, put an arm around his son and they would begin the walk home. I don’t remember the son ever saying one word. ‘Buona notte, amico mio,’ Torre would say, and extend his free arm towards me as if about to make a declaration.
I told Torre that I had difficulty getting to sleep in the cramped room in Capri, though not of the noises that were the cause. I complained of the heat, the lack of space and privacy, the fag of having to go up and down the hill each day. It was a relief when he allowed me, in the last few weeks of my stay, to creep into the villa’s kitchen, spread my rug on the pale tiles and sleep there. He gave me a key and his trust. His strict instruction was that I kip in no other room, touch nothing. I would wake in the morning with bright light glinting on the large, copper cooking pots, with the shelf of blue pottery, and a soft breeze through the open rooms. When Torre arrived to prepare for the day’s visitors, and we passed with a smile at the door, there would be no evidence of my stay.
Colum went to Naples during the third weekend to give a progress report to the museum director there, and it was then that Paula showed me the coin. On Sunday we went down to the harbour and had lunch in the Sarzano family restaurant, well away from the tourists and the promenade cafés that served the insalata Caprese applauded in the travel guides. The cramped Sarzano room lacked ambience and faced a modern concrete wall with no niches for lizards, no quaint gates, only graffiti and casually parked scooters that leaked oil onto the pavement. The oil lay drably until rain came, then awoke, spread glistening, rainbow wings. The wine was bad, but the seafood made all worthwhile, and the prices were reasonable. The waiter was young, thin, with full lips, but an insufficient moustache. He’d taken a dislike to me because I didn’t tip well. Waiters there assume all foreigners are rich.
Afterwards, Paula and I walked up to the little cemetery. So tidy, so obviously a place lovingly visited, with sealed photographs on many of the graves and plaques, and none of the vandalism so common at home. We sat on the stone step of the Vergotti family tomb and she showed me the denarius, no larger than my thumbnail, with the fine, raised head of Sextus Pompey on the obverse. We agreed it must have been minted about 40 BC. I have always felt a frisson of delight to hold history in the hand, and returned it with reluctance. ‘Highly bloody unprofessional, you know,’ I said. It was more envy than malice.
‘Oh, bullshit,’ she said. ‘I love it. You love it. You know it’s almost impossible to get anything out of the country legitimately now. And it would only end up in a drawer in the museum in Naples with scores of others, even more likely flogged off by some curator there.’
‘You’re right. Will you tell Colum before you go?’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘Not much, but then you do.’ The well-kept graveyard had little exposed earth, or grass, but walls of polished stone inset with photographs and inscriptions like large filing cabinets of the dead. But Paula’s enjoyment was to touch the silver coin, hold it openly for close inspection.
‘I like you just as much,’ she said.
‘Come off it. You’re sleeping with the guy. I was in the next room remember.’
‘Colum’s okay. The sex is okay too. The important thing’s the commendation I’ll get at the end of the stint, and maybe that’ll influence the examiners when I hand in my dissertation, and the universities I apply to afterwards.’
I was taken aback, not so much by the calculation in her behaviour, as by her honesty in admitting it. We all act in our own interest, but usually disguise it, even to ourselves. I was flattered that she confided in me, although she was sleeping with Colum. I felt male regret too, that ours was a confidence of colleagues, that it was Colum who came to her room in the dark, exposed the pale, fullness of her thighs, took habitual and firm possession. I told her righteously that she was bright enough not to need that sort of help.
‘My parents were immigrants from Poland: they’re poor. I’m not exactly a beauty queen, no friends in high places. Nah, I have to make it happen, or it doesn’t happen,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean shagging every lecturer I’ve had. I haven’t had the hard word put on me much actually, which shows the competition perhaps. But it hasn’t been easy. Even a doctorate doesn’t guarantee a decent position any more. I don’t want to end up for life in a polytech, or a teachers’ college, some provincial museum.’
Here was a realism foreign to me, and an unvarnished expression of it equally unusual. I had a sense of a background and struggle that made my own experience almost genteel. If she’d been confiding in me late at night after a good many drinks, I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but it was mid-afternoon in a quiet graveyard. We sat in the patch of shade at the entrance to the Vergotti tomb, and between buildings was a glimpse of the yachts and fishing boats of the harbour. And she was absolutely right. You did what you could to give yourself the best possible shot at the career you wanted.
‘But you’re a bloody good student, aren’t you,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise. You deserve the best opportunity.’ On several occasions she’d shown understanding and knowledge superior to my own, but I was too proud to admit that. Perhaps I wasn’t God’s gift to academia after all. I had a quick, unbidden sense of how we looked together there, talking on a stone step in the cemetery. Myself tall, gawky, the lucky one of the family, my grandmother said: the spoilt one, Pops said. Paula, dumpy, with a face like a beachball under her large hat, and dangling a water bottle between her knees. Just for moment I saw us from the outside, as you see a photograph of exact replication, yet with the knowledge it has fallen into the past.
‘You don’t always get what you deserve, though,’ she said. ‘It’s a different world for a woman.’
‘Right.’ But I wondered if men enjoyed as many advantages as she supposed.
During those last few weeks we achieved an easy comradeship at the dig. Colum was content to command her nights, and paid no special attention to her during the day. I don’t think the reason was subterfuge. I found it preferable to be sleeping in the villa, and so not reminded of their amours by the noises through the wall. At night in the Villa San Michele there was just the sliding scuttle of lizards, occasional scooters far off, or soothing whispers of the wind from the sea.
Paula and I didn’t discuss the coin any more. She never again quite approached the honesty expressed in the chapel cemetery, but we would talk often of our dissertations, our academic ambitions, our love of antiquity and the local food. She continued to put on a bit of weight, but I made no mention of that.
At the beginning of our final week together there was a night cloudburst that caused water to run into the excavation, and Colum asked Paula and me to spend the next day in the office cataloguing material from the midden. The office consisted of two rooms and a primitive lavatory washroom he had rented in a private home close to the site. The owner was old Signora Deluca, who spoke no English, but was always watching from the doorway when any of us were there. Despite her inability to understand what was said, she seemed to enjoy the company, and would laugh when we laughed, click her tongue admiringly when some shard of pottery, or a bone from a long-forgotten banquet, was lifted to the light.
Paula and I talked more than we worked, and all three of us ate Neapolitan sugar biscuits, Signora Deluca taking mere presence as a right to be included. Perhaps because it was a day so out of normal routine, perhaps because our time in Anacapri was coming to an end, Paula opened up more about her family. The room had green, wooden shutters, and as she talked the bright sunlight shimmered through them, and the sounds of other people’s lives drifted in from the street. Her father had been a surveyor in Poland, but made political enemies, and emigrated. His qualifications weren’t recognised in Australia, and he had to work as assistant to a carpet layer. Neither of her parents understood English well. I asked her if she spoke Polish, and she did so as a reply. ‘I won’t tell you what it means though,’ she said. And when we laughed so did the old lady, putting gnarled fingers to her mouth as if she recognised some indiscretion in the words.
‘I bet you’ve never felt different like that,’ Paula said. ‘Going to school, or other kids’ homes, and knowing all the while that you’re not the same. Spending so much time copying what the others do, picking up on what they think and do, and yet always you’re different.’
‘I’ve never thought much about it.’
‘You don’t have to, that’s the thing. My parents were defeated by it, by the need to remake themselves, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I had a shitty time at school too. I think that’s why I loved history: the escape from where I was.’
‘Ehi, aspettami,’ wait for me, called someone from beyond the green shutters.
‘Varsity was a lot better,’ said Paula. ‘Conformity isn’t a doctrine there. It’s everyone for themselves, and I prefer that. I stopped trying to be like other people.’
‘It gets very competitive at uni, though, don’t you think. A sort of ugly intensity to do well, especially at post-grad level.’
‘I don’t mind competition,’ Paula said. Her appearance was so little a reflection of her character — an unlined, almost cherubic face and soft body. She was so much shorter than me that when we stood together I looked down on the stack of her short, blonde hair, or the stitching of her floppy hat. ‘History’s chock full of competition, isn’t it, and the price of failure was a bloody sight more serious then.’
‘The Romans were a violent people,’ I said. Paula smiled, and Signora Deluca rattled like an autumn tree, and gurned at each of us in turn.
Paula left one day before me to travel to Rome, and from there fly home to Sydney. Colum drove her down to the harbour after a farewell lunch in our usual café. Faustus, Alessandro, and the three of us. Colum said the lunch would mark the end of stay for me as well as Paula, though naturally his comments in respect of her contribution were warmer and of greater length. Colum gave us both a photograph taken on site — he seated on level one with the Italians, and Paula and I below on level three — and an envelope containing a testimonial. Mine was temperate, but not vindictive. Colum saw me as neither rival, nor equal. As he spoke of us, he rubbed his sunburnt arms, and pale shreds of skin wafted away. Less than ten years later he died of a stroke while in Arles to advise on the preservation of the Roman amphitheatre there.
I could see people ascending the mountain in the quiet chairlift, one by one borne up over gardens and low walls towards the lookout. Once I’d seen a naked doll in the grass below, spreadeagled like a murder victim and with discarded clothes nearby. Once a man with hairy shoulders washing his upper body from a blue basin at his doorway.
So the parting between Paula and myself was quite public and routine. A quick hug at the car door, my cheerful contribution to the waving, and the shouted good wishes, as she was driven away. I remember wondering where she was carrying Sextus Pompey, and which of her scholarly attributes Colum had chosen to praise in his report. Her sun-bleached hair and round face were visible at the window for a moment and one hand held up in acknowledgement. ‘An American girl comes next week,’ said Faustus, and he caught my eye, gave a quick smile.
That last evening Torre came to the villa, and I gave him a bottle of good Umbrian wine for his kindness during my stay. He insisted we drink it together, although he wasn’t able to stay long. We stood at the end of the open walkway and looked down on the harbour where the sharp outlines of the day were being replaced by the soft feathers of dusk, and the yellow lights were gaining strength. The breeze from the fading expanse of ocean was insistent and pleasant; sea birds were noisy on the mountain. Torre said one of his daughters was ill and getting worse, and although he made an effort to show interest in our farewell, his concern was with his family. ‘Come and see me when you come back to Capri,’ he said, but his free hand was opening and closing in a small agitation. He told me he’d miss our evenings together, but when I said I’d better pack for the next day, he left quickly. It was as it should be — family first. Our passing acquaintance would soon be forgotten on his side, but I’ve remembered his goodwill and desire to better himself in America. He left his glass on the wall with wine still in it, and I finished it, standing alone in gathering darkness.
I slept well that last night in the kitchen of the Villa San Michele, and in the morning made my own way down to the harbour and caught the small ferry to Naples. The six weeks at the Anacapri site had been a busy passage, gone almost before it could be fully grasped, yet the experience unpacks itself often in recollection. Years later I visited Munthe’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and read his book which had been a phenomenal success in its day. ‘I want my house open to sun and wind and the voice of the sea, like a Greek temple, and light, light, light everywhere,’ he said. The sad irony was he became blind at the end.
Munthe wrote of spring at San Michele: myrtle and honeysuckle, hyacinths and crocuses, tortoises and Minerva owls. I saw none of those, but I did see skylarks coming back to the mountain above the villa, morning light on mottled marble pedestals which held the classical busts he had so lovingly collected, and I looked down from his rotunda to the startling blue of Capri harbour. I had been alone at night in that much-loved house, woken in the spacious kitchen of pale tiles, blue pottery and burnished copper, lightly touched and wonderingly observed artefacts whose beauty was given lustre by antiquity.
Some of all that came back to me as I listened to Paula Huchro, and the window cleaner worked himself soundlessly out of sight so that the mountains behind Grenoble were unobscured, the dark pines a uniform cover until the snow at higher altitude. Later I would sit with Paula and three other colleagues with glasses of pinot gris, and discuss points arising from her address, before the conversation moved on to Cicero, that eloquent old braggart, yet how loving to his daughter. There would be passing mention of our time together at Anacapri, and our even shorter meeting at the symposium in Genoa. ‘Oh indeed,’ she’d say, ‘Dr Malcolm and I go way back.’ She would smile and meet my eye, but nothing would be said of Sextus Pompey, nothing said of burning Colum and the thinly partitioned rooms in the harbour of Capri, nothing of the Vergotti family tomb above the harbour, nothing essential of our former selves.