I watch Flavia as I eat and she stares out of the window at the teeming rain. When she moves, it’s with an incredible slowness that sets up a tension in me. Her stillness makes me want to protect her. She must have suffered so much, like a tree that’s been buffeted by so many storms it’s been stripped of leaves and twigs, but still stands, proud and defiant. I want to reach across and touch her cheek in the hope she might soften and smile, but such a deliberate act seems reckless. The worst thing would be if she remained indifferent to my advance.
As I continue eating, however, I’m filled with desire for her. I want to take her to bed and hold her and stroke away the years with her thin layers of clothing.
The feeling grows throughout what remains of the day. We go to a couple of basement piano bars and a club where crowds of strikingly beautiful people spill out on to the street. The atmosphere of intoxication and sexual excitement does nothing to spark Flavia into life. She simply trails her fingers through the dust which seems to coat the tables in every bar we go in.
Only in the car does she come alive as we race from one venue to another, bouncing down noisy cobbled escape routes and diving into alleys thin as crevices. The car’s headlamps startle cats and in one hidden piazza a huddle of unshaven men emerging from a fly-posted door. “This is a dangerous quarter,” she says, pointing at streets I remember from my first night. “Camorro. Our Mafia. They kill you here as soon as look at you.”
Way past midnight we end up in a park above the city on the same side as Flavia’s apartment but further round the bay. “This newspaper,” she indicates piles of discarded newsprint lining the side of the road. “People come here in their cars and put the newspaper up to cover the windows. Then they make love.”
I look at the vast drifts of newspaper as we drive slowly around the perimeter of the park. “Why?” I ask. “Because they live at home? It’s their only chance?”
She shrugs. “They do it in the cars then throw the newspaper out of the window.”
“And what a view they have,” I say, looking across the bay at the brooding shadow of Vesuvius.
Back home again she retreats inside her shell. The sudden change throws me. I want to touch her, sleep with her, but suddenly it’s as if we’re complete strangers. She sits on the balcony staring at Vesuvius and I bring her a drink. As I put it down, I place my other hand on her arm and give it a brief squeeze. She doesn’t react, so I pull one of the wicker chairs round to face hers and sit in the darkness just watching her watch the volcano. The moon paints her face with a pale wash. I can see the shape of her breasts under the white blouse and as I concentrate I can see the merest lift as she breathes. Otherwise I might have doubted she was still alive. “Do you want to go to bed?” I ask.
She just looks at me. Inside me the tension is reaching bursting point. When Flavia gets up and walks to her bedroom, I follow. She undresses in front of me. The moonlight makes her flesh look gray and very still. I undress and lie beside her. She doesn’t push me away but neither does she encourage me in any way.
When I wake in the morning, she’s gone. The pillow on her side is still indented and warm to the touch. I wish I’d done something the night before, but her terrible passivity killed my desire. A night’s sleep, however, has returned it to me. If she were here now, I’d force her to decide whether to accept or reject me, either being preferable to indifference.
I get dressed and step out on the balcony. The top of Vesuvius is covered with cloud. The air over the city is hazy. On the little table there’s a note for me from Flavia. She’s had to go out for the day and can I entertain myself? I’m to help myself to whatever I want. She suggests I visit Pompeii.
The Circumvesuviana railway trundles out of the east side of Naples and skirts the volcano, calling at St Giorgio and Ercolano, the sun beating down on the crumbling white apartment buildings. I avoid the modern town at Pompeii and head straight for the excavations. German tourists haggle over the entrance fee. I pay and go through, detaching myself from the crowd as soon as I can. They saunter off down the prescribed route armed with guide books from which their self-elected leader will read out loud, peculiarly choosing the English-language section, as they pass by the monuments of particular note. The same man—he’s wearing a red shirt which bulges over the waistband of his creamy linen trousers—carries the camcorder and will listen impassively to anyone who suggests they operate it instead. They’re a distraction from my surroundings: city preserved to a far greater degree than anything I had been expecting. I wander off into an area of recent excavations where I’m alone with the buzzing insects and basking lizards that dart away at my approach. The heat is overpowering and after a quarter of an hour threading my way through dug-out paved streets bordered with shoulder-high walls and great swathes of overflowing undergrowth I have to sit down for a rest. I look up at Vesuvius, a huge black shape jiggling from side to side behind the thickening haze.
A bee the size of a fat cockroach lumbers toward me, buzzing like a whole canful of blowflies, and I have to duck to avoid it. Even when it’s gone, I can still hear it, as if I hadn’t managed to get out of the way quick enough and somehow it got inside my head. The sun, even through the dust in the air, amplifies the noise and cooks my skull so that everything inside it rattles like loose beans. Off down a long straight street to my right I recognize the party of German tourists standing to attention as they listen to the man in the red shirt with the stomach, the camcorder and the guide book. His words are just a low hum to me amid the constant buzz in my ears. My limbs tingle as if electricity is being passed through them, then they go completely numb and the buzzing gets slower and even louder. At the far end of the long straight street the Germans have frozen in position. The man in the red shirt is in the act of raising the camcorder to his eye, a woman in a wraparound top and shorts is caught in the act of leaning backward—not ungracefully—to correct the fit of her smart training shoe. The air between them and me is thick with shiny dust, glittering in the golden sunshine. The tiny particles are dancing but the figures remain petrified.
Suddenly they’re moving but in a group rather than individually. They are shifted silently to one side like a collection of statues on an invisible moving platform. It’s as if they’re being shunted into another world while I’m left dodging the insects in this one and I want to go with them. Maybe wherever they’re going there won’t be this terrible grinding noise which is giving the inside of my skull such a relentless battering.
By the time some feeling returns to my arms and legs the German tourists have completely disappeared. I stumble over the huge baking slabs, trying to escape the punishment. Pursuing the merest hint of a decrease in the noise level I turn in through an old stone doorway and begin a desperate chase after silence: over boulders, through tangles of nettles and vines where enormous butterflies make sluggish progress through the haze. As the pain levels out and then begins to abate, I know I’m heading in the right direction. A couple more sharp turns past huge grasscovered mounds and collapsed walls where lizards the size of rats gulp at the gritty air; the noise fades right down, the pain ebbs and warm molten peaceful brassy sun flows into my bruised head. I fall to my knees with my hands covering my face, and when I take them away I’m looking directly into the empty gray eyesockets of a petrified man. His face is contorted by the pain he felt as the lava flowed over him. I’m screaming because the man looks so much like me it’s like looking in a mirror and a lizard suddenly flits out of one of the eyes and slips into the gaping mouth. The pain is back and this time it doesn’t go way until I black out.