The Lupanar
Pompeii was greener than I had expected. This is because, I learned, of the way the volcanic deposits seep into and enrich the soil. In the late sixteenth century, before the ruins were discovered, the city was buried in a lush hillside. For generations, the Romans had relied on Mount Vesuvius and the arable land it fertilized. It’s a cautionary tale I’ve heard many times over: that which you hold onto will destroy you in the end.
I was told by an old man in a Neapolitan pharmacy that May was a particularly good time to visit Pompeii. The sun is out but the air is still cool, he said. In the dead of summer, when the sun is closest to the earth, he explained, the exposed ruins capture heat the way a bowl might fill with water.
I went with a boy I call the Economist. He is a writer in the sense that he has serious thoughts about urban spaces and city housing supply and then publishes them in newspapers. He is sometimes yelled at by people on Twitter who think his thoughts are bad or wrong. I am a writer in the sense that I think about words and how I like the way they sound. I put them on paper only sometimes and most often I delete them later. The Economist and I have loved each other since we were seventeen, and because of this I fear growing old.
He goes to school in Minnesota while I study in New York, and for half of the year we speak only by phone. On my college campus there are few things I know to be permanent. Everyone seems to come and go without any slight sense of attachment to the place where they study or to the people they study with. The Economist, however, has developed a life for himself in Minnesota, one that I find myself slowly fitting into. It’s a type of contortion I hadn’t expected to do so young: making space for myself in a world that’s not quite my own.
We met our tour group shortly after deboarding the train. In our group was an older couple who wore Wrangler jeans and walked with their pinkies interlocked. A mother and daughter, both in wool, stood to our right, peeling apart clementine wedges and licking the excess juice off their fingers. A family of four joined late with their grandparents. They spoke in British accents and whispered subtly to themselves about the tour guide’s low-cut blouse.
Basking in the sun on a stone wall turned to rubble was a cat I named Alice. By night she patrolled the cobbled streets. By day she found respite in the sun. As it began to rise to its midday peak, Alice resituated her body so that her fur shimmered in the new afternoon light. I reveled in her beauty. She slept soundly, knowing that all that had once been lost now belonged to her. I held the Economist’s hand and, with my fingernail, picked the dead skin that hung from his palm. Squinting from the dust, we talked about the ephemerality of sacred things and followed the tour towards a brothel that had once been buried in ash.
I traced my finger along the seams of the stone wall as the tour guide untangled the microphone from a loose thread in her pocket. “In order to find the Red Light district, we search for the special symbols that guide our way.” She pointed towards a penis-shaped stone hidden in the crack of the sidewalk. “A phallic GPS,” she said with a laugh.
On the inside, the brothel was cool and dark. Painted above each sex worker’s door was a diagram that advertised their individual specialties. Together, the paintings made up a type of sex menu. On one wall was a painting of a man behind a woman, naked and grabbing her hips. On another was a woman straddling a man between her legs, his arms resting on the bed and his mouth open, another of the two lazily on their sides. The tour guide explained that two thousand years ago, patrons—sailors and lonely types—could choose their service by pointing at the picture they liked best. The paintings remained intact, though the colors had faded. I peered into an individual den that was wet and moss laden. For the price of a bottle of wine, the patron got to fuck on a bed and pillow made completely of stone. Amidst the clicking of disposable cameras, I thought of all the women who had suffocated under piles of ash, their skin exposed, holding a man they barely knew.
House of Tragic Poet
The night before the Economist left for his semester abroad, I slept with him in his childhood bed. His suitcase sat on the ground beside us, spitting out clothes haphazardly through its snarling zipper-teeth. He rested his head on mine, and I traced a birthmark on his back with my finger. My jaw was sore from the weight of his face, but I would let him break it, I thought, if it meant I never had to let him go.
At four that morning, I took the Economist to the airport and then seeped into the boy-shaped dent that was left in the mattress. When I woke up once again, his mother had made me pancakes. I looked at the half-sipped cans of soda that cluttered his nightstand and grew jealous of the girl I was two days before and all that she had.
That semester we communicated via WhatsApp, during which he told me about all of the Italian words he learned, the choir he joined, the food he ate. I wanted to know his stories and cherish the voice that was behind them, so I nodded along and sighed every time we lost connection. But all of the newness — the people, the country — made me feverish and irritable. I grew to envy the city and the life he was living there without me.
As soon as my semester ended that May, I boarded a plane to Milan. In the JFK airport, as I waited in line to scan my ticket and sipped a two-hour-old coffee, I met an art history student who planned to spend the summer in Florence.
“Have you ever been to Milan?” she asked. I shook my head and, flushed, glanced down. There I found that her socks were pulled up to her mid-calf and her cotton pajama bottoms were tucked into them.
“Be prepared to see the most beautiful women in the world,” she said. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
When I first arrived, we spent four nights in Milan sleeping in an American dormitory in Ticinese. The Economist still had to finish his semester, so as he sat at his desk, spine curled, sifting through an econometrics textbook, I spent the mornings watching Shrinking and complaining about the fact that Italy didn’t have HBO. Tangled in unwashed sheets, I thought about a friend from home who had been in a movie with Harrison Ford once, after he had already gotten old. I thought about how the friend and I, for no reason in particular, didn’t talk anymore, and how much I’d like it if we did. I had called him on a whim two years before on my way to a lunch date and he picked up, much to my surprise, his voice tired and unused as if he had just been sleeping. I remembered that I had sat outside the restaurant for an hour, my lunch date waiting inside. With swollen knuckles I clutched onto his stories of Hollywood glamor—of clubbing and making art—not because on the surface they were shiny, not because I even knew they were true but because he was telling them and he allowed me to listen.
In the afternoons, once the Economist was done with his classes, he’d walk me to the nearest old building and tell me about it. One afternoon, it was raining and hot and I felt sick in my raincoat. My cheeks flushed and my forehead damp, we walked from our dorm to the Basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore, the Economist a few paces ahead, his quick and eager legs carrying him just so that I could only interlock my index finger with his.
The San Lorenzo Maggiore was big and old, and the front plaza was made of concrete. On a brick wall Italian kids in black coats smoked cigarettes, drank spritzes from around the corner, and picked their gums. The back of the church was made up of a cluster of forgotten buildings and was bordered by a green chain link fence. Back in medieval times, when Milan was a walled city, the church was hidden in the back corner. It was built in the middle of the fifteenth century, but as time goes on, the Economist explained, facades crumble, domes collapse, and people have to build anew. Some remnants of a life long ago still stood: bits of the old colosseum stone could be found in the church’s foundation, and the columns, marble and white, still supported a brick archway, once built in the second century to mirror the now-fallen city gates. The columns look as if they are whittled toothpicks, trying their best to be strong, trying their best to do what was once so easy for them. We sat underneath the arch and I peeled off my raincoat. My armpits smelled of old rain and sweat. The Economist gave me a sip of his water as I whined about not having a sweatshirt. He handed me his cardigan and kissed my cheek, eager to catch my eye when he did so.
In Milan, I learned how to close my knees when I prayed and that a woman should never spit on the sidewalk. Across from the Duomo Di Milano, which took seventy-eight architects and six hundred years to build, there was a makeup store where beautiful girls in black explained how to contour your nose so it looked righteous and upturned. At the time, my jacket pockets were full of half-bitten fingernails, used Kleenex, and paper scraps. Despite this, the Economist held my hand tightly.
A woman with deep-set, unblinking eyes caught me in my wandering and demonstrated how to swatch a highlighter stick. I pretended to understand what she told me, mumbling sí each time she took a breath. The Economist crept towards the window as he examined the plaza ceiling and all of its gold intricacies, his fingers slipping through mine. The woman, suspicious of his disinterest, handed me a tube of lip gloss and told me how to apply it so that it’d leave a mark when I kissed him. I can’t say whether this is what it’s like in all of Italy because I’ve never been to all of Italy, but it reminded me of an essay Eve Babitz once wrote about a friend who used to shoot BB guns in her living room. “If there’s one thing living in Rome has taught me,” the friend told Babitz, “it’s to be a lady.”
From the dorm window that evening, I watched one big billow of smoke come from a chimney many miles away and expand across the horizon. It was black, darkening an otherwise blue sky. It had rained earlier. A gaggle of tourists tromped through a side alley and shook out their wet shoes that were soaked in puddle water. They carried cameras around their necks and never used them. They were laughing, patting each other on the back. A girl kissed a boy’s cheek. A man with a mustache scowled from the street as a woman leaned from her window and shook out an old rug. The Economist giggled at his econ textbook as he sat, hunched over the desk beside me. He had tried to kiss me, but I told him he smelled too much of cigarette smoke. I suppose I was really just jealous of how cool he looked in that moment, a cigarette lit between his fingers. I wrote in my notebook that night, I’m eating a brown banana and trying to not think of myself as a hungry person.
Street of Tombs
We visited Pompeii per the Economist’s request. We took a bullet train to Naples because after studying in Milan for four months, he had acquired a taste for old things. On the train, I looked across the table and watched the Economist’s unsipped coffee leak from its paper cup. My own cappuccino clenched between my thighs, I wondered if we continued to do this just to delay the inevitable, to leave a lingering mark on the other, to remind each other that we bruise just like all those who live outside of this world we’ve created. What would become of us if we allowed this to be our everything? Does my loving him age me in a way that’s irreparable? I thought about my fear of domesticity, and how I longed for it so deeply. I thought about the kitchen table we sat at in his childhood home, how it used to be a dark wood but is now a white polyvinyl that doesn’t stain as easily. He asked me once at that kitchen table why I could never finish my coffee, why I had to leave just enough for it to grow stale at the bottom of my cup. On the train, I handed him my nearly empty thermos and asked him to take the rest.
The Economist wore a collared shirt and read a book called Banking in a Capitalist Economy. The baby behind me spat up his food onto his mother’s sweater and I listened to his little chortle and gag as the mother dabbed herself with a napkin.Across from us sat a British man who resembled a parakeet. He wore a blue floral shirt and on top of his head, hidden within a thin crown of blond hair, rested a pair of thick, black sunglasses. I tried to read a book of essays I had found in an Italian bookstore, but, distracted by my closing eyes and sticky from the heat, I decided to instead look out the window. The essays were boring, about a British woman and her inconveniences. I read a line to the Economist and expected him to scoff. He listened intently, nodded along, and asked me to read it again.
“Some people don’t have much to say,” he said, his eyes back on his book.
A man in a Fiat cap and yellow ski jacket made eyes my way and I caught his stare in the window’s reflection. At this moment I wondered if I was beautiful. I watched the Economist take a sip of his coffee without looking up from the page he was reading, and I thought about how he is not used to seeing a pretty woman in front of him. He is used to seeing a woman free bleed in his pajama bottoms as she fries herself an egg. He is used to kissing a woman who smells of morning breath and onion. He is used to watching a woman lean over the bathroom sink and untangle a rats’ nest from her hair the morning after he fucks her.
Alone in a park once I called an old high school friend and told them how gross it made me feel to know that the people I love the most have seen me do ugly things.
“That’s the most beautiful part of any relationship,” they replied. “To know that people will love you through the thick of it.”
Terme Stabian (The Baths)
We arrived in Naples at lunch time. In a narrow alley, underneath a banner of Maradona jerseys and swallowed by a sea of tourists, we ate wet fried pizza that was shaped like a cone and filled with ham. I fell asleep that night naked and clutching my stomach. The following morning I rolled out of bed late, damp and tired from a hot night in an old hotel room. We were eager to fuck and hungry for breakfast, so the Economist left our room to scavenge for food and I ate a croissant I had stored in my bag from the morning before. Using the water that streamed from the shower head, I rinsed the almonds out of my mouth so he didn’t break out in hives when I kissed him. He returned from the cafe with a half-eaten sandwich and a crown of sweat dripping from his hairline. His mouth tasted like burnt coffee and bacon. By then, I was prune-ish and clean, so I rubbed the bar of soap on his back and massaged the shampoo through his hair until he was covered in suds. I left him to rinse and took the towel for myself. The bathroom was foggy from the steam so I wiped down the mirror with the back of my hand. My reflection was ugly and wet. I was reminded of a friend from college once, how she, in a cafeteria bathroom, analyzed my figure in the mirror and said she didn’t recognize my reflection.
“Is your nose crooked?” she asked.
How terrifying it is to learn that the way you see yourself is warped and unreliable. In the hotel bathroom, I leaned into the mirror and told this to the face that stared back at me, just quietly enough so as to not let the Economist hear.
Forum
Outside the brothel my nose was dry and so I fished a tissue from my pocket. When I realized it was bleeding, I thought of a boy from my high school choir and how I gave him a tampon once to stuff in his nostril. The tampon had expanded and fallen onto the ground, leaving a mark on his stole and a dark, red stain on the concrete. Old blood now came out in thick, dry clots and I plugged my nostril with a wad of toilet paper, the tip twisted into a point. I sat on the sidewalk, applied pressure to the bridge of my nose, and watched the khakied tourists move in slow hoards. They held onto each other, taking heavy, intentional steps through the cobble stoned roads, their earpieces dangling lazily from their necks. I tilted my head and allowed all that was in my nose to drip down the back of my throat.
The bloodied tissue stuffed into my waistband, I walked through the old market square, stone pillars half-standing and their innards exposed, and scribbled thoughts in a notebook I kept in my back pocket. I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget the way the sun burned our backs and made our eyes water, or the way the ground, beaten down by thousands of tourist footsteps, had once been stone and marble but now coated our shoes in dust. I wanted to remember our tour guide, the way she punctuated each sentence with a suggestive hm and a wink.
The Economist put his hand in my pocket and asked me what I was writing. I looked at the lovers that held hands as they lollygagged through the market square, and I wondered if this too, was a sacred thing.
Via di Nola
In Portland, the summer before we left for our fall semesters, I asked the Economist if he felt like an adult. He said yes without thinking. We were driving home from a family dinner, and the evening sun glared on his windshield and blurred our vision of the road ahead of us. I sat in the passenger seat and rested my hand on his knee as he navigated the highway. I had seen other people’s parents do this before, and it felt appropriate given the circumstances. I asked him if he thought other people saw us as adults too. He nodded. Examining the highway’s curvature, I thought about how when I drive, I tend to hold my breath until I’m comfortably on the exit-ramp. I thought about how I linger too long in the right lane, how I leave too much distance between my car and the one in front of me. I looked at the Economist. He looked calm behind the steering wheel. I wondered how long it takes to feel comfortable on the highway, how long I could ride in the passenger seat. What does it mean to feel like an adult, and can I ever get there? Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe, I was afraid that growing up meant we’d grow out of each other.
Bakery
The Economist quickened his pace so as to not fall too far behind the group. The tour guide was explaining how the Romans prepared grain to make bread, and the Economist wanted to run his open palms along the commercial mill. It was made of porous lava and was the shape of a headless woman. Next to the mill was a stone water fountain on which a man’s face was engraved. Out of the man’s mouth, water used to pour. On either side of the face there were smooth divets in the stone that were the size of thirsty hands, worn by the thousands of fingers that at one point had clutched the railing, leaned in, and taken a drink from the man’s mouth. The Economist stroked the stone with an eager grin on his face and waited for me to take a picture.
Through the glare of my phone’s camera lens I watched the spiteful way Mount Vesuvius loomed over the torn city, still throbbing from its last eruption eighty years ago. The poppies, oblivious to the mountain’s glare, were grateful for the blue skies that lingered overhead. They had been waiting for the sun just as I had been. I thought about the weather, about May turning into June. I wondered what it meant to constantly live on the cusp of something. Were these poppies in just as much motion as I was? Did they ever try to see themselves in the grass that surrounded them?
Our tour guide walked us through a residential square and told us about the unfriendly rich man who used mosaic tile to ward off unwanted guests, the baker who used his storefront as a billboard for propaganda, and the old merchant who spent most of his time with women other than his wife. Their houses were kept behind black gates. Where floors once had been, clusters of poppies grew amongst tall, green grasses, swaying lazily in a half-hearted breeze. I leaned over the railing and breathed it in. There was something comforting about the newness of it, a reminder that something beautiful could grow amidst crumbling ruins. Next to the gate, on a wall covered in moss, people had carved their names. Some had written promises to each other: Lucy+Cameron, Jill and Steve 4ever. Amidst the decay, the wall itself stood as a promise that some things were built to last.
Antiquarium
Before visiting the ruins, I had only ever speculated about what death might look like. Now, in glass cases, it was presented before me. After the volcano erupted, hot embers rained down on Pompeii, caving in roof tops, burning store fronts, and covering corpses in thick layers of ash. After centuries, the bodies decomposed, but the ash calcified, creating hollow casts of the corpses. Their last moments before death are now immortalized for all to see, their bodies preserved in plaster and kept in boxes. Nearly two thousand years later the people of Pompeii, their bodies small and thin, remain frozen in their struggles against death, in their attempts to save the people they love, in their last gasps for air. In one case lay a woman curled into herself, her arms wrapped around her knees, as if she had been rocking back and forth before she had finally suffocated. A mother clutched her baby with two arms and kept it tight to her chest. A man lay sprawled on his back, his arm extended towards another who lay face down on his stomach. It was then I learned that the scariest part about death is the fight against it. Paralyzed by a sudden desire to grow old, I started to cry.
Garden of Fugitives
The only known eyewitness account of Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 AD is from Pliny the Younger. It was its first eruption in seven hundred years. Staying in a home across the bay, his curiosity was first piqued by the cloud that lingered over the mountain. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, set sail to investigate. He brought along warships in case they’d need to help as many escape as possible. Pliny the Elder choked on smoke and died on the shore from asphyxiation. Pliny the Younger stayed home and wrote. In a letter, he called all that was left “a most beautiful country in ruins.”
Thermopolium
That night in Naples, after returning from the site, the Economist and I stumbled upon a corner market. There, he and I drank Maradona Spritzes which were Aperol Spritzes dyed blue. The man behind the counter examined our weary eyes and unfolded a table and a couple of chairs. In doing so, he turned his storefront into a bar for two. His son brought us a bowl of crackers and a candle. He stayed for a while, asking us about the States, if we had ever been to Naples, Florida, if California was as beautiful as the pictures suggested. The Economist nodded along, trying to squeeze in some Italian words himself.
“I’m picking up maybe sixty percent,” he told me through a smile, his eyes round and blinking.
Through the narrow streets, children on Vespas weaved through the shoppers that lollygagged in front of the shopkeeper’s counter. A woman in a blue bathrobe came up to our table to ask for money. When I unzipped my wallet, the shopkeeper’s son waved her along. She moved slowly. A group of college boys from Canada stopped by for a case of beers, and the shopkeeper set a table for them. They told us that they had just graduated university, that they were traveling north up the western coast and that this was their first week on the road. They laughed from their chests the way businessmen sometimes do when they’ve just made a lot of money, and I wondered if they’d ever seen death happen in front of them.
When we had finished our Maradona Spritzes, the sun had set, and I asked the Economist to dance. He accepted, reluctantly, eyes shifting between the shopkeeper and his own feet. The shopkeeper’s daughter-in-law saw the two of us swaying to whatever was playing through the overhead speakers and told her husband to put on something we could move to. The Economist, his eyes now meeting mine, gripped my hand, and together we swung self-consciously through the grocery aisles, careful not to step too far into the road or nudge the group of Canadian boys behind us. The family danced along. They brought us another bowl of crackers. They refilled our Spritzes.
That night, we walked through the city with tongues stained blue. I thought about how many times in a row I could live this same day without growing tired of it: drinking myself into oblivion, jumping over day-old puddles, together missing the train and catching the next.
***
Artwork by Luisa Roth
