The Night Villa (38 page)

I
,
Petronia Iusta, free woman, do set down this confession of my free will having come to the end of a long, but not blameless, life. We are admonished to confess our sins in church. This is the way of the light, Barnabas tells us. But while I have confessed to many individual sins—idolatry, unlawful copulation, even murder—I have never told my full story. I know that having omitted this duty in life, I have condemned myself to an eternity of darkness, nor do I trust that this accounting in silence and darkness will alleviate my sentence. Rather, I give these words as an offering to the Holy Mother and entrust them to her vessel for safekeeping. Let her, another woman, judge me as she will and hold or disclose these words as she sees fit.

I was born of a freed woman in the household of her former master, Gaius Petronius Stephanus, but since I was a child I was told that I was free because my mother had been freed before my birth. In gratitude for her manumission and in the hope that I would gain the advantages of wealth, my mother allowed me to be brought up in the household of the Petronii. I was treated as a daughter by Gaius Petronius, who taught me to read and write in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was given free rein of his copious library. All was well until I was ten years old and Gaius’s wife, Calatoria Vimidis, finally brought forth her own children. She began to resent my place in the household and to see me as a usurper of her children’s birthright. Quarrels with my mother ensued and my mother chose to leave. She wished to bring me as well, but Gaius and Calatoria wished me to stay—Gaius out of genuine fondness, I believe, but Calatoria out of a wish to thwart my mother and to use me as a nursemaid to her own children. My mother had to bring suit in the courts to wrest me from the clutches of Calatoria and luckily she won.

My mother and I prospered in the business of raising and selling oysters and we lived in peace for seven more years—like the seven years of fat foretold in the Bible by Joseph—but then calamity befell us. My mother grew suddenly ill and died. I have always suspected that she was poisoned, as a slave of Calatoria’s was seen leaving our house just before my mother fell ill. Suspicious as well was the fact that Gaius Petronius died soon after. Her husband’s funeral pyre was hardly cold when Calatoria Vimidis brought a suit that claimed me as her lawful property—along with the property of my mother, which I had inherited. She claimed that I was born before my mother’s manumission and therefore I had been born a slave. As witness she called on a slave of her own household, Telesforus—the same slave whom I suspected of poisoning my mother. He testified that I was born before my mother was freed. Later, I discovered that Telesforus had been given his own freedom in exchange for this lie, as well as a share in my mother’s fortune, taken from me along with my freedom. Although I fought this judgment in the courts of Rome, I was eventually returned to the custody of Calatoria Vimidis. I confess that from that time on I harbored in my heart a hatred for my mistress and the determination that I would do anything to be free again.

I was given an opportunity to gain my freedom by agreeing to take part in a pagan ceremony. I was not forced to engage in this ceremony, but chose of my own free will to play a role in order to obtain my freedom even though my role included tricking and stealing from my mistress’s guest, Phineas Aulus, and engaging in lascivious seduction. Phineas Aulus had in his possession a valuable scroll written by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras that my mistress wished to own—but not to pay for. In return for stealing this scroll from Phineas’s room, I was promised a document attesting to my freedom, but when I presented the scroll to Calatoria she said I would not have the document until after the rites. Afraid that Calatoria might still go back on her promise, I decided to steal the document, which I knew she kept in the same hiding place as the scroll, and enlisted the help of Phineas Aulus.

When I had obtained the letter and the scroll, I took Phineas back to the chamber where I knew he would be brutally slaughtered. I could, at that moment, have told Phineas the truth and saved him, but an evil thought had come into my head, namely that I could leave with the rare scroll and use it to buy myself a life of comfort. I left him in that chamber to die.

I made my way to the surface by following at each turning the “better” sign and shunning the “evil” one, but at each crossing I could not help but feel I was choosing evil and fleeing the good. When I reached the last crossroads—the one marked by the faces of Night and Day—something kept me from turning down the final path to the surface. I would like to say it was the voice of God that turned me back, but that would be untrue. I heard a voice, but it was the voice of my mother reminding me of what I had been named for—justice—and that I would be betraying my name if I left Phineas Aulus to die.

I hurried back down the tunnels afraid that I would be too late. I could hear the voices of Calatoria and her maenads, wild in their lust for blood, approaching the Chamber of the God. When I neared the entrance to the chamber, I saw a man enter. It was Telesforus, who had poisoned my mother and betrayed me. I knew that his job would be to subdue the victim before the women arrived. I followed him and as he raised a cudgel to bash in Phineas’s brains I drew out of my bag the iron bar that I had left for Phineas to open the door to his chamber, and which I took with me when I left him there to die, and brought it down on Telesforus’s head.

May God forgive me for the sin of killing that man. Although I told myself it was to save Phineas, I knew in my heart I did it in vengeance for the wrong he had done to me.

Phineas jumped up from his bed and demanded to know what was happening.

“Calatoria and her women are coming to destroy you,” I told him. “Quick, change clothes with this man. We’ll put him in your place. In this dim light, the women won’t know the difference.”

Phineas, although trembling with fear, obeyed me. I expected at any moment that Calatoria and her women would come swarming into the chamber, like ants swarming over their prey. And indeed we escaped only moments before they arrived. We ran up the tunnel marked with a lyre in the dark, because, as I told Phineas, we couldn’t risk any of the women seeing a light. At each turning I felt along the wall for the mark that would tell me which way to go, knowing always that if we made the wrong turn we would plunge to our deaths. Behind us we could hear the wild cries of the maenads as they fell upon Telesforus. Although I had hated him, I hoped now that I had killed him so that he would not be aware of what was happening to his body. I imagined that I could hear the crack of his bones and smell his blood. So distracted was I by these images of his dismembering that when we came to the last turning I couldn’t for a moment remember which way to go.

“Two faces of women,” Phineas said after he himself had felt each mark. “One appears to be smiling. Shouldn’t we go this way?” He began walking down that path, but I pulled him down to his hands and knees so that we could feel along the ground for any sudden drops. We had only gone a few feet when I heard a sound behind me that made my blood freeze.

“So you have betrayed me after I raised you as my own. You are no better than your mother.”

I turned around and saw Calatoria standing above us—her long hair matted with blood and gore and her dress ripped from her shoulder so that one breast was bare. I thought that it, too, was stained with blood. She held a torch in one hand and a short sword in the other.

I think, though, that what shocked me the most was the look in Calatoria’s eyes—not anger or madness, but hurt and disappointment. Had she really thought of me as a daughter? But in the very next instant I saw that her eyes were fixed on the scroll sticking up from my bag.

“That is my property,” she screamed. And I realized that while Calatoria might think of me as her own, I was just another piece of property to her—and of less value than the roll of papyrus in my bag.

I withdrew the scroll from the bag before she could reach it and held it over my head. I had realized that the path Phineas and I had chosen was the wrong one. The figure of Night was the one who had been smiling. Just past where we crouched lay the pit.

As Calatoria dropped her torch and lunged for the scroll I let it drop from my hands. For a moment some errant draft caught it and seemed to hold the scroll aloft in the air. As Calatoria’s fingers touched it, she, too, seemed suspended in midair. Her foot touched the edge of the pit and she groped in the air for purchase. She spun around and her arms reached for me. I still could have caught her.

May God forgive me for not saving her.

She fell backward into the pit. When Phineas picked up her torch and held it over the pit we could see her staring up at us, her mouth and eyes wide open and her hair writhing around her head like a nest of snakes. A gorgon. When I close my eyes at night it’s that face I see. I am afraid that when I close my eyes for the last time it’s the face I’ll spend eternity with.

“We have to go,” Phineas said. His words came as though from a long way away even though he stood at my side and spoke in my ear. “Can’t you feel the ground shaking? It’s getting worse.”

I realized he was right. I turned to him and saw he was still staring into the pit. The scroll. He was staring at the scroll. But then he shook himself like a man waking from a bad dream and looked at me.

“It’s caused enough death,” he said and then, taking my hand, he led us out of the wrong path and into the right path and up to the surface.

At first I thought we had reached another dead end. There was no light at the end of the tunnel and no freshening breeze. Our torch flickered and gasped in the noxious air. It’s just that night has fallen, I thought as we came out of the tunnel, but I had never seen a night such as this one. We came into the open but the air was full of smoke and foul vapors. When I looked up there were no stars in the sky. Instead above us the slope of Vesuvius was covered with patches of fire. The top of the mountain was engulfed in a boiling cloud of smoke. It was what I imagined Hades would look like. Perhaps we really had taken the wrong turning.

“The worst of the cloud is still in the east,” Phineas said, “but it is moving this way. We have to find the road to Neapolis. You said it was close.”

I turned to him and saw he was covered with soot and I realized that a fine layer of ash was falling from the sky covering everything. I looked around me, but could find no familiar landmarks. Everything had been transformed. I closed my eyes and tried to picture where we were.

“The coast road should be to our left,” I said, pointing in that direction.

Then he said, “Listen. Can you hear people?”

It was hard to hear anything over the moans and rumbles of the mountain, as though from a living beast, but I thought he might be right. Footsteps, voices, the frightened neighing of horses—all came through the thick smoke. He took my hand again and we stumbled through the dark until we began bumping into others. I almost wished we hadn’t. The people we met looked like the shades of the dead, stumbling along and staring out of their ash-stained faces with wide, horrified eyes. I half expected to meet Calatoria and Telesforus among them and I began to believe that we ourselves were already dead. All night we marched with that legion of the dead. At one point, there was a louder roar from the mountain and turning around we saw a wave of fire moving down the slope toward the lights of the town. A wind blew in its wake, a wind that felt like the breath of Hades himself. I felt the hairs in my nose singe and the spit in my mouth evaporate. Then the lights of Herculaneum were gone.

We turned our backs on the dead city and trudged on through the night, through the smoke and ash. I never let go of Phineas’s hand because I was sure if I did I would be lost. When we reached Neapolis, he pulled me away from the crowds and we walked up a steep hill to a temple. When we reached the steps of the temple we turned around and saw the sun rising over the ruined ash-covered land, rising above the coast of Surrentum, touching the isle of Capreae and the water of the bay. I was amazed that the water was still blue and that the swallows were still alive, swooping through the bright air of a new day.

Phineas left me on the steps of the temple to find water. While he was gone, I took out the statue he had given me of the goddess Isis, queen of heaven, and I brought it into the temple. I saw then that the temple was dedicated to Demeter, the mother who was willing to destroy the earth looking for her daughter. I gave the statue to her and prayed to her for forgiveness. I prayed that I might start anew and I prayed for Phineas, too, that he and I might find a new life together.

And this I confess, too, that I still pray to her, along with the mother of our Savior. Even while I have spent my life dedicated to this new religion I still pray to all of them—Isis, Bona Dea, Demeter, Cybele, Astarte, and even Baneful Night, most dreaded of goddesses, but who carries in her arms Sleep and Death who give us peace at last. The temple that gave us shelter that morning has become a church and Phineas, after living as my husband for many years and converting to the new faith, has been dead these ten years now. The community of women I have lived with will go on and I begin to suspect that they will remember my name, but they won’t remember how I came here. How I was saved in the end by one fallible man’s love. That is a story I can trust to no man or woman living, so I entrust it to the dark in the hope that one day it might make its way back into the light, as I and my beloved were allowed to do, stumbling along a dark road, holding each other’s hand.