Pompeii is reached from Naples by the Circumvesuviana, a small, gray, graffiti-covered train that looks like it was born in a subway of the Bronx. It charges around the Bay of Naples, through the sprawling conurbations that lie to the south and on to the resorts of the Sorrentine Peninsula, tunneling furiously through poverty and grandeur alike, as though it didn’t care for the difference between them. At the stations it flings open its doors, fuming with impatience: the passengers hurl themselves out and the train springs away, rattling helterskelter past high-rise tenements and Palladian villas, past fragrant glimpses of orange groves, ducking and diving between the volcano and the sea and never pausing too long in the purview of either.
It is very hot, so hot that the plastic bucket seats of the Circumvesuviana are painful to the flesh. If the train stops for more than a few seconds, a feeling of panic sweeps up and down the crowded carriages. At Pompeii we get out and walk along the dusty road in the sun, past the queue of air-conditioned coaches that are disgorging tourists from their sides. There is a little café next to the road, and we sheer off to sit beneath its shady vine and drink Fanta. From our dark corner we scrutinize the crowds. After two and a half months in Italy, we have the demeanor of outlaws when faced with our own kind. And these are the worst, these herds who drive around in coaches, looking numbly down on the world. They are not art lovers. They aren’t even really tourists: they are voyeurs.
There is a throng of people at the entrance, but it doesn’t take long to get our tickets. I have begun to understand that in Italy a crowd does not necessarily represent an obstacle to desire. Much of the time, people amass for reasons of their own. They queue because they want to, or because their relationship with the thing they are queuing for is insufficiently direct. Often the people standing in a queue will all be queuing for entirely different things. Then there are the people who can never believe that they are in the right queue, who continually ask their neighbors what the queue is for and send waves of unrest up and down its length. And there are those who seem to queue solely for the feeling of security it gives them, as though it is only in the queue that they are truly safe from another fresco, another Madonna, another Donatello head, about which they might be compelled to give an opinion, or fail to feel something they were told they should. The Italians respond to this dissociative behavior with the utmost cordiality. Nothing summons their compassion more readily than a devitalized tourist, and their sympathy grows in direct proportion to its object’s lack of charm. It is as though the thing they pity most in all the world is ugliness.
We pass through the gates and out into the cauldron of afternoon. The integuments of the ancient town, diagrammatic, skeletal, pure as bone, rise and extend in terraces all around: everywhere the force of extension drives toward its own vanishing point, for the town is flat, radial, starlike, with few upright walls to arrest the driving force of the straight line toward the horizon. The effect is ghostly: the volcano, so pyramidal in mass and shape, so grossly upright, lowers over the prostrated, map-like town. It is corpulent where the town is abstracted. It has devoured it, and left the bones. Yet there is something religious about the driving symmetry of the lines, the mathematical stepping and extending of the ruined terraces into space. There is a system, an order, a plan. The volcano is a mere beast. The plan, the mathematical essence of civilization, defies it.
The tourists are delighted with their new home: they stroll and chatter in the deep-ridged streets, they pass in and out of doorways, they minuet at corners and crossroads, now deferential, now proprietorial, as though they had donned its social hierarchy like a fancy-dress toga. The forum is filled with its rightful bustle; people come and go at the bakery and the baths. It is a shame they can’t live here, they seem to like it so. Sometimes, in a shady corner, a glass case is to be found with a rough gray shape lying inside: these are the casts the volcanic ash cruelly made of its victims, to immortalize their helplessness. They are crude and barely human; they are like primitive clay figures. Yet their blurred, blank quality is disturbing. It is somehow more embryonic than deathly. We stand around the glass cases sadly, as though their contents only needed our compassion to humanize them again. The inexactitude of the figures: how mysterious and elusive it is, when their pots and pans and egg poachers have come down to us unharmed. There is an atmosphere of guilt around them. The cases are shabby, and filled with grit. Could they not be resting on something more comfortable? They seem so unloved, lying there in their strangely unfinished, unborn state.
The day grows hotter; the volcano is cloaked in haze; in the distance the blue sea lies passive, recessed, a strange fluorescence pulsing on its surface. The crowds seem to grow more and more excited. They seem a little crazed. They seem overexposed. They rush hither and thither like children playing hide-and-seek. They barge and tread on one another’s feet. They shove and yell in the amphitheater, beneath the smiting sun. There is a group of German students, handsome and extravagantly dressed, who are following their professor around the ruins. They are tall and flamboyant and unreal-seeming, like actors on a film set, like people in The Great Gatsby. Their professor has a messianic appearance, in his white flannel suit. I notice them, for they ask to be noticed. Amid the heat and the ruins they have the carved, mocking quality of gods. Later, in the Villa dei Misteri, we see them again. The professor is chanting something in German, a strange, sonorous, interminable recitative that echoes all through the sepulchral rooms. Every now and again the students chant back to him in chorus. We cannot escape it, this mad Wagnerian oratory: the sound is sinister, almost frightening, as though a new cult were being hatched from the blood-soaked soil. We pass through room after room, taunted by the unbodied voices. Finally we come upon them, standing in the blood-red triclinium before the fresco of the Mysteries. The fresco shows a young girl being initiated into the cult of Dionysus. I might have found it beautiful had I been alone, for the girl’s mother rests her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and curls her fingers unconsciously around the tresses of her hair. The mystery and brutality of the pre-Christian world might have remained theoretical; the subject might have escaped me, as it generally does escape the art lover, in the face of the belief in art as an ultimate good.
The Catechism with a Young Girl Reading and the Initiate Making an Offering, North Wall, Oecus 5, c. 60–50 B.C. (fresco), by Roman
But the messianic master stands before it, chanting. He is terrible, exultant, malign. His students gaze at him with trancelike expressions. Their eyes are the blank, elliptical eyes of marble goddesses.
We have booked a room in Piano di Sorrento. The man at the door bows courteously at our arrival. He introduces himself: he is Paolo. He is so small and dapper and cool. We are so hot, and rimed with pumice dust. The door from the street, where the air-conditioned coaches thunder along the narrow road to Sorrento, was deceiving: behind it there is a garden, green and shady, with peaches growing on the trees.
All the same, we are a little shocked by the change of climate: by the heat, the frenzy, the crowded precipitate hillsides plunging down into the sea, the pell-mell succession of the squalid and the sublime, the feeling everywhere of cramp, of confinement, of the imprecision of desire meeting the exactitude of possibility. We go down to the beach at Castellammare to swim: it is so crowded on the narrow gritty stretch that the children have to sit on our laps amid the cigarette butts, and in the rubbish-strewn water it’s standing room only. The bus can barely squeeze back up the narrow road. The cars inch past one another, snagging on the hairpin bends. This is a world so vertical that the horizontal is a form of luxury. I sit on the bus with my eyes shut, dreaming of prairies, of my flat East Anglian childhood.