Abroad, p.12
Abroad, page 12
Pascal and Anna instinctively took the lead. As we got closer, we saw what looked like a large, dark mouth, gaping into the ground. The opening, about eight feet below the level of where we were standing, was supported on three sides by girders, each made of a single, huge stone. From far away, because of the blond grass jutting off the top, the tomb almost looked like the head of a huge, yawning baby.
“This, believe it or not, is the site of one of the greatest recent discoveries in Grifonia,” Professor Korloff said. He kicked a stone down the path; it rolled down into the darkness as if guided by a magnetic field.
“A hundred and eighty-two years ago, an Italian excavator stumbled across this tomb here while looking for some urns. The Etruscans, we know, were great preparers for the afterlife—as extravagant as the Egyptians, nearly—building entire houses to live in once they died.”
He paused and looked up at the trees. It was the last day of September, and most of the leaves had turned, though the air was thick and hot as July. Sweat ran in rivulets down all our faces, save Anna’s. She remained mysteriously cool, her clothes spotless.
“Fortune hunters illegally gutted the thing and sold everything inside. Augusto Castellani bought most of it and put it in the Etruscan Museum, after picking off all the things he liked best. Nothing categorized, of course. It was a really rotten time for archaeologists. But the structure is still here, and I wanted you all to see it. To see how these people built houses that bloomed underground.”
He switched on his lantern and twitched his head toward the hole, indicating that we should follow. No one seemed eager. The pitch-black mouth looked less than inviting.
“Believe it or not, we’ll all fit. So, okay, come on.”
Single file, we followed Professor Korloff into the tunnel, which was about four feet wide and eight feet tall. The slope went down and down and down, until we were at least fifteen feet below ground. I was the last, behind Anna, or so I thought—when I turned after going a good ways down the underground path, I saw a figure in the opening, standing in the light.
“Hello?” I called. My voice produced a horrible echo, not of my words but a low monotonous boom that coiled ominously down the passageway.
“You all right?” asked Anna.
“I thought we left someone.”
“What?” She went back a few feet and looked, then turned again. “No, there’s no one there. Probably just the farmer.”
“What if we get stuck down here?”
Our mixed speech intensified the low reverberation, which was now almost deafening.
“Taz, don’t be silly. Come on, it opens up ahead.”
She took my hand and pulled me about ten more feet forward to where Professor Korloff was standing with the others, shining his lantern so we could see. Anna was right. There, the tunnel gave way to a large hall about thirty feet long and wide, with four smaller rooms branching off its sides. My claustrophobia subsided as I stepped away from the group, exploring the space. The ceiling in the chamber was approximately fifteen feet high, allowing an air of spaciousness. The walls were stone—perhaps there had been paintings on them at one time, but they had been either rubbed off or worn away. There were benches carved into the walls, and at the front of the room was a large, bare altar, with the blurred stone remnants of some sort of creature staring down.
It was dark. I suppose that’s obvious, but it was a different kind of darkness from when a light is turned out in a closet, a bedroom, or even a cellar. Those places, at least at one time, were touched by the sun. No part of this tomb had ever been exposed, even once, and it never, ever would be. There was a constant dripping of something thick. A sucking of air in one of the corners. And of course the absence of all sounds from the outside—breeze, birds, cars, voices. Life.
“Here we are,” our professor said. “The Soeviis’ final home.” The echo had ceased, I assumed because of the shape of the room. “Not too bad. And it was a lot nicer. The walls would have been covered in frescoes and carvings of the family’s favorite items. Tools, pets. Things they wanted to take to the next life. Which, by the way, they were banking on. Obviously, this house wasn’t cheap to build.”
“How were they buried?” Pascal asked. “Are they in here somewhere?”
“No, Elvis has left the building, unfortunately. They were in sarcophagi, probably, though some may have been embalmed and laid out. The slaves were in urns in the smaller rooms. Everything, of course, was taken and sold. When I first came down here twenty years ago, I was really hoping I’d discover something—a miniature Tarquinia. But it’s not always about what you find, when you’re a scholar, but what’s possible.”
I made my way into one of the smaller chambers. Even this space seemed comfortably large to me. I ran my palms against the cold wall, resting my cheek there for a moment. I pressed my ear against the stone, as if an answer might come as to why anyone would build such a place. To prepare for death with such fervor. Closing my eyes, I pictured the place exactly as it had been—the shining walls, the coffins studded with jewels and glittering mosaics.
“You okay, Taz?” Anna said, stepping in behind me.
“Yes,” I said, embarrassed.
“A bit frightening, isn’t it?”
“Not to me.” Indeed, I felt the odd sensation of having been there many times before.
“Come on out,” Anna said. “He’s starting to talk.”
Professor Korloff lectured for a while on Etruscan death practices, and then brought us back above ground. I was the last out, leaving somewhat reluctantly, but when we emerged the farmer had some bottles of wine open on a plastic table. After a half bottle of wine each in the sun, the tomb was all but forgotten, and we trudged painfully up the hill. By the time we reached the gate to the city, any thought of the strange familiarity of the place had diminished to some pale shadow in a midnight dream. The sort that pricks you awake at the time, only to sink to the very lowest priority in the light of day.
Lucia, 12th century AD
Lucia Baglioni, daughter of noblemen. The Baglionis were a venomous family, everyone struggling for power. Lucia was proud of her clan, but the politics made her tired. Her father had promised her to her cousin Paolo, in exchange for a palace on the central via. But Lucia was sixteen, and she hated Paolo, with his oily skin and fat haunches.
She waited a few weeks, wondering what to do. Then, as the union grew nearer, she took her fiercest brother aside.
I want you to kill Paolo, she said. While you are hunting. Make it look like an accident. For me.
Lucia’s brother was torn. He was fond of his sister, but his alliance with Paolo gave him great power. While they were hunting, instead of fulfilling his sister’s request, he told Paolo of her plan.
Both men, as noblemen, were members of the Compagnia. Additions to the ledger were now quite precious. A truly good death meant the highest prestige.
Three days later, in the earliest hours of the morning, Lucia’s brother came into her bedroom. He grabbed her wrists. Still half-asleep, she didn’t fight. He kicked open her shutters and threw her three stories down into the street.
Intruders! Paolo screamed behind her, waving the phantom murderers away.
The next day Paolo made the entry. Lucia’s brother witnessed.
Lucia Baglioni, served a good death by her brother Diego Baglioni. Saved from eternal loss of virtue by raping thieves.
Lucia Baglioni, sixteen years old, 12th century AD
12
Friendships, and marriages for that matter, are often a simple result of geography. Babs and I, for instance. We were lifelong friends only because she lived around the corner from me in Lucan. Our parents, before my father left for Dublin and my mother slipped into self-created illness, were weekend friends, the type who take their babies to the pub together to pass the long Sunday afternoons. Babs was the type of girl who constantly had a fuzzy nest on the back of her head, as she only thought to brush the hair she could see in the mirror. Her palette consisted of all the colors of the rainbow: green-and-red Christmas tights with a bright-blue spring dress, red pants with a dung-colored sweater. She could have hardly been more different from my tight-lipped, hair-bow-matching-the-ankle-socks youthful form.
As we grew to plotting age, I was the one with all the plans. I always played the queen, while she was the hired help. So when she burst into my room breathless one morning when we were nine, her cheeks burning red, I sat up in my magazine-littered bed in mild alarm.
“I have an idea,” she said, plopping down on my bed.
“What?”
“We’ll make a time capsule. I saw it on the telly. You put things in a box, toys and notes and candy and things, and then you close it and—”
“Who’s it for?”
Babs stopped, confused. “For?”
“The candy. Is it a present?”
Babs’s face broke into a crooked smile.
“It’s for you, silly!”
“Babs.” I patted her shoulder, trying not to be too condescending. “That is so … I don’t know. Okay, it’s stupid. Why would I give myself candy I already have?”
“Taz! We’ll bury it somewhere. Or put it somewhere safe. Then in, like, fifty years, we go get it again.”
“The candy will go bad, you daff.”
“Fine. Twenty years.”
“I’ll be twenty-nine.” It was utterly unimaginable.
“Well, even if you forgot about it, I’ll be there to tell you to go open it.”
“Yeah, but what if we’re not friends?”
Babs’s face fell. She actually looked like she might cry. I felt a bit of a thrill.
“You think we might not be?”
“I don’t know. It’s a long time from now.”
“I’ll find you,” Babs cried. “We’ll be best friends. I’ll tell you to open the box.”
There was no arguing with her. We spent the next hour trying to decide what to give to ourselves at twenty-nine. In Babs’s box: four Cadbury bars, a Sinead O’Connor CD, a copy of Go Ask Alice (we’d shared it and hid it from our parents), and a picture of her dog, Barth. In mine: a shell from our summer trip to the sea, a bag of pickle-flavored crisps (I wasn’t certain they’d still exist when I was twenty-nine), and that day’s Lucan Times. We both also wrote letters to ourselves on my purple lined stationery.
Dear Me: (meaning Ms. (Mrs.????!!) Tabitha M. Deacon)
Hi. I can’t believe you are twenty-nine. But you are me, so I guess you can believe it. I hope you are married, because you are really really old. I also hope you have a cat because Mum would never let us have pets. She can be really awful sometimes but it’s just because of stupid Da. Do you still love Leonardo? Maybe he’s who you are married to. Anyway, this is dumb. This was all Babs’s idea. Have a good day, and give everyone my love. If Fiona is still being mean, tell her she still looks like an arse pillow. Also, I hid ten pounds behind the bookshelf. If you need it.
Love always, Taz
October 16, 1994
The papered box was, thirteen years later, found by the police. They came to search my room at home, thinking perhaps the reason for my murder had to do with a stalker or a spurned lover, someone who came all the way from the green hills of Lucan.
You can imagine how the Irish cooperation with the Italians went. The officers were vaguely excited, as it was a famous case—in the tabloids and all that. But the drive from Dublin to Lucan backed up, it was raining, and my mother, who was still heavily in shock, forced them to sit down to an incredibly awkward cup of tea.
Apologetically, the officers came into the room, opening drawers with gloved hands, looking for letters, notebooks, anything that might give them a hint as to who might have wanted me dead.
“I’ve got something,” the younger one said finally. He was standing on a chair, looking on top of the closet. Carefully, he slid it off the shelf. Sitting together on the bed, just as Babs and I had all those years ago, they bent their heads over the papered box.
“Boyfriend notes?”
The other shook his head. They lifted the lid and sifted carefully through the candy and rocks. The elder picked up the two envelopes, marked:
To Tabitha Deacon, from Tabitha Deacon, to be opened in 2014.
and
A note for the future from Babs. Open in 2014!!!
Neither officer said anything for a moment.
“Might as well—”
“Yeah.”
My mother had come up the stairs and was silently watching them through the doorway. They read my note, then put it down. Then they read the other.
Another pause.
“Mrs. Deacon…” the elder officer said.
“Yes?”
“Who is Babs?”
“A friend. They are—were—friends.”
The officer handed her the note.
Dear Tabitha,
You are a real arse sometimes. Remember how you didn’t want to do this time capsule? Now you’re glad, see? Arse. Love you anyway.
Babs
My mother stared at the note for a full minute. The officers shifted on their feet. Finally she put the letter back in the envelope.
“So this is nothing…” the younger officer said.
“They were nine.”
“Yes…”
“Please.” My mother’s voice was low. “I’m still here, do you understand?”
The men just stared at her.
“It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s never supposed to be this way. We go first. Do you see? But I’m the mother and I’m still here.”
* * *
We were still best friends, Babs and I, even after all those years. She had grown somewhat pretty, in an off-kilter sort of way and morphed into a hipster, even, wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. She had been in New York for a science conference, and had bought them there. She had never visited Italy and couldn’t relate at all to my stories of Jenny and the B4. It was the first time we’d faced a real distance between us, and it was becoming a problem.
“Why does it matter if you sleep with men or not?” she asked when she called the day after the hike to the tomb. “It sounds like you’re having a nice time with them, but this advice is very odd.”
“It’s about power,” I said, parroting Jenny. “It’s about staying ahead of feelings.”
“No, that doesn’t really make sense either. There’s nothing powerful about being … a…”
“Slut?” I said.
“Taz!” Babs’s tone was disapproving, and it irritated me.
“I just think you’re not understanding the situation.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Maybe,” she said. “I just worry about you. Are you certain you’re all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Maybe Mum’ll give me some Christmas money to come over. It’s only the first of October. I can ask. I’ll try. I really will.”
I hung up, an odd feeling in my belly. The cold truth was, I didn’t want Babs to visit. For one thing, I was certain Jenny wouldn’t like her. For another, I knew what she would bring with her—the baggage from my past. And what if she happened upon the fact that my new friend was a drug dealer? One who passed herself off as “small time,” but who now had me translating for her either in person or on the phone at least three times a day?
But the very thought of not wanting Babs around was a betrayal. I certainly didn’t like Jenny and the girls better. It was just that, at the moment, they seemed to understand me more.
I sighed, restless, and tried to work. As I sat there, thumbing through my book on Etruscan stone reliefs, Claire came out of her room, fresh from an afternoon nap. Due to her increasingly frequent absences, this sort of meeting was becoming more and more rare.
“Oh, good! You’re here. I never see you.” She rubbed her eyes. She had a waitressing job that often had her out late. “Hey, I need a coffee. Let’s go to our place.”
It bothered me, the way she ordered me around sometimes, but I was glad for distraction that day. “Our place” was a little café just steps from the cottage, an unexpectedly pleasant spot with a lovely patio looking out at the busy street and the basketball court. Grifonia had surprisingly few good cafés like this; even the Italian spots were usually filled with loud foreign students looking for “authenticity” who took the tables and forced the locals to the sides. But the owner ran a tight ship, shooing out loud and disrespectful clients. The bar gleamed; the espresso maker hissed with cheerful resilience; glasses clinked with the confidence of an expert barman doing his job.
We were sitting outside. It was British weather—the air was crisp and smelled of burning wood; the sky was sharp blue. “Isn’t this coffee like no other coffee in the world?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Well. I hear the coffee is also pretty good in Turkey. Finland maybe.”
“Taz. You’re so fucking literal.” She picked up the tiny cup, sniffed it, and put it down again. “It’s hell on the stomach, isn’t it? I’m so jonesing for a latte right now, but the Italians say it’s disgusting to drink milk after noon.”
I looked down at my cappuccino. Claire loved to proclaim herself an expert on Italian culture, even, sometimes, to our Italian flatmates.
“Now.” She leaned forward, stirring her espresso. “Tell me again about your home. I want to know all about it. Like, everything.”
I smiled politely, a bit disheartened. I often felt, when fielding Claire’s questions, that she was looking for a specific answer I was never going to be able to give.
“What is your house like? Is Lucan one of those cute Irish villages with leprechauns and crap?”
“It is rather cute. But it’s just a suburb. We’re getting swallowed by the malls and the sprawl.”
“And your house?”
“Oh, a very normal house. Four bedrooms. Fuzzy carpets.”
“Taz, come on.”
“What?”
“Is it a happy house?”
I looked out at the square. The same woman was always there: thick but small, dusty, visibly strung out. Her outfits varied—today she wore a too-short yellow dress. She could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. At one point in her life she had probably been what Jenny would call “a shag-worthy girl.”
