Pompeii is a hard town. After a long day at the ruins, back in Napoli, you lie down exhausted. Through the blinds, the late light makes braille patterns on the wall. San Domenico Maggiore rings the Angelus. A dog barks.
Like most tourists, I dreamed of the dead city. It is said that when the dreamer does not appear in his own dream, then the dream is genuine. Events pass before you as if you were an invisible guest; voices come from nowhere. Yet such dreams are not prophetic—they do not beg interpretation, there are no symbols to decipher, no future to foretell. Whatever you learn there, you learn because it will do you neither harm nor good. You simply know something and that is all. Upon waking, you are left with have the uncanny sensation that someone just left the room but has promised to return.
Now I can assure you that the records, scholars and history books are all wrong about Pompeii. The evidence is either doctored or falsely attributed. Not two thousand out of twenty, but only six people actually died in the conflagration. Everyone else was evacuated but these few souls who stayed behind for their own particular reasons. One dying afternoon in a small rented room on Via Toledo, while asleep, I was allowed a vision of the truth. Like all cities, Pompeii has two gates. At the entrance of one of them
Coaches rattle down the streets from the villa districts. Cartwheels clank, a dull orderly roar, shouted orders and long insults. In some areas, people load up donkeys; in others, they take only the clothes on their back. But things proceed with an admirable efficiency. City employees conduct the traffic. People look angry, depressed, but never hysterical. Acquaintances chat, sell their belongings to their slightly wealthier neighbors, haggle and gossip and settle old debts.
In a tavern at the end of town, Quintus and Marius, long suspected of having an illicit relationship, pass a jug of Falernian rotgut back and forth. It is not the nature of their bond, which was never frowned upon in Pompeii, as the graffiti in the men’s brothels clearly shows, but the fact that Quintus was a midget measuring less than three feet and Marius was an almost eight-foot-tall dancer which made them a laughingstock. This city can be crueler than anywhere. But the tavern is full of wine skins and vats and pots and all the regulars, most of whom harassed the two men relentlessly, hurriedly fled when the earth first trembled. Cowards. Quintus and Marius are delirious with happiness and are going nowhere. Knowing it will never get any better than this, they elect to remain and perish, leaving behind a tab of monstrous proportions and trashing what is left of the dive. Quintus leaps up on a table and then leaps farther up into Marius’ waiting arms. They giggle in triumph, rubbing noses. The city has thrown away its keys. Even the crimson sky is theirs.
Cassia, wife of the fat merchant Pulmentius Porcius Calcae, sits in the garden of the House of the Tragic Poet. All around, the murals her husband had commissioned blaze with their wild ochres and golden yellows, flashing to life in concert with the convulsions of the volcano. Porcius was an utter philistine, never read poetry and never loved anyone. The mural painter, Octavian, was loved by Cassia. Like Porcius, he left her. Here are her last thoughts: It isn’t for you, Octo, that I do this. You were not so bad as men go—pleasant, and with some stamina; kindly occasionally and rude enough to be funny upon occasion, which is better than being unkind. Now I am waiting for Death to make me a mirror—finally, after all this racket and all these weak men and stupid, hairy women. You are an excuse, Octo. Even Death and Hades are excuses. Which is why, unlike the city in its brightness, this darkness of my darkness, this waiting which is Pandora’s waiting, soothes the wound in my decision. Alone at last, when my skin opens wide, I will go forth to meet Isis who will greet me as a sister. She was always the god most worthy of veneration. Like me, a stranger in a strange land.
Decimus the Bum, nicknamed Desiccates, as in desiccated, sits by the roadside. These morons are finally leaving. For one moment, he thinks, I will be the emperor of this place—this city which has eaten me alive, and whose violence is both the snakelike politics of the day and the iron clubs of the night. I am the last witness to yesterday’s crimes and the first to honor the coming debris. I will outlive everyone. My bones will tell the story of the countless shames these bastards put upon me: how I loved Marcella the Whore and how she couldn’t because she had to work and I was broke; how even other vagrants stole from me; how I drank a legion’s grappa off the marble bar before they beat me. But I saw a raven sitting on a four-columned tomb. It was no dream. With Fate so obviously grumbling like a great stomach above us, why try to read next year in the guts of an ox? See them scurrying out of town now, lice draining from a floating carcass… this city which despised me but now loves me because everyone else has forsaken her.
The one-eyed African conscript, Scipio Mencius, watches the eruption reach its inevitable climax. This isn’t the anger of these peoples’ winebibbing gods, he thinks. It is merely a bright stream of donkey piss lighting up an ignorant place which first held me captive, then made me clean the toilets for three denarii a month at the House of the Faun (where I also got the unfunny nickname, Commodian). Three months ago, the rabbits all left and the birds so I knew the city was doomed. I am staying because I want to make sure that Pompeii is totally obliterated, that no last-minute reprieve is granted by those ghastly frauds up in Olympus. Homer says that nymphs called sirens lured sailors to their deaths, the unlucky of the seas. I know of legends much older, but with similar beings and similar promises. So I sit and wait and I listen to this song of promises, hearing it echo from the rich man’s halls to the lowest alley, the song the same everywhere. And I am singing along with it and singing with the breeze, hungry for meteors, a grin on my face like a tiger’s.
The ex-Consul Strabismus Ovidius, who has fallen into alcoholism due to loneliness and memory, stands on his roof. Crocked, he watches the molten rivers surge down the slopes. With arms outstretched, he addresses a senate of overflowing gutters and broken furniture below: All my friends have gone. I have stayed too long at the fair, so why not till the end? Now I see the old days clear as ice. I see my companions laughing down the lane. Running after, I join them. We giggle at the graves and make eyes at the red girls, mine wandering like my mind. That was youth. I hear the footsteps of adored ones above me in my cold mansion, and the songs of artists in the streets and children playing and the language of mice. This city, which will soon be pebbles and lava, is bitter and airless and its sad brutality seems made only for me. You say I am victim of my own fears? If so, then who invented the inventions which I fear, the real shades and the calendar of tragedies? We lived a struggle in the dark. One of us stayed, if only to celebrate his singular pain as the smallest part of a great ordinary madness. Who’s left? My shadow, the moon and the wine, warm as swords, thick in summer. No one places a kindness on me. Now that you have gone, there are only vague immaterial forms for company, images I conjure up of you, night after night, under the volcano. These outlines will be the last thing I see before the flood burns out my eyes. It will be a celebration. Dying wipes my shadow from the white tiles like you once brushed the hair from your face.
Last thought of the failed artist, Ahenobarbus: That great statue is awful. It won’t last a year. Give me another day and I’ll be done with my masterpiece. Even though it is only one foot tall, it will dwarf Hyginos’ fucking centaur.
Photos by the author.
Well, that was absolutely wonderful. Thanks for sharing it. I hope you are right about dreams. I sometimes inhabit the consciousness of another person in my dreams, a person who is not myself and whom I might not even know in real life. I think this tendency comes from a lifetime of reading mostly fiction. You get used to thinking someone else's thoughts, I suppose.
Lovely piece of writing. Thanks for sharing it.