The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Read online

  “Marc, why are you showing it to me now?”

  He comes close, takes my hand.

  “Because I want you to be inspired, carissima, to see the possibilities that lie within us all. And great art makes us more courageous—makes us stronger.”

  “Courageous?”

  “In a few days it will be time for the Third Mystery.”

  I say nothing. The chapel crypt is silent. The veiled Christ sleeps, as if about to wake. This is definitely too much; I want to get out. I am feeling claustrophobic. I have been trying not to think about the Third Mystery, I’ve been trying to live for the day, the hour, the moment—but now the Third Mystery is nearly here, and unavoidable.

  We ascend the stairs and exit the chapel. Marc locks the door, and I breathe the warm, muggy, garbage-and-lemon-scented air of Old Naples with relief. The Cappella Sansevero was amazing, but perhaps too amazing. I ask if we can take a stroll before getting back in the car; Marc happily agrees.

  Hand in hand, Marc and I walk down the cobbled and sloping Naples streets, past late-night food stores with naked lights showing stacks of dark, glossy eggplants, past fish restaurants where noisy nonnas eat on rickety tables in the street, guzzling prawns with Falanghina wine, just as the Romans did, in this very same place, two thousand years ago.

  As we approach the seafront, I turn to Marc.

  “Where is the Third Mystery? Where does it take place?”

  He does not look at me as he answers: “The Aspromonte. Calabria.”

  I shudder as if chilled by a dirty winter breeze. The Aspromonte?

  From my studies into the brutal Calabrian mafia—the ’Ndrangheta—I know the meaning of the name Aspromonte very well.

  We are going to the Bitter Mountains.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “IT’S AT LEAST five hours into the mountains,” says Marc, and he leans across the car and squeezes my knee. But not in a sexual way, more a reassuring way. “Though you wouldn’t guess it from the map.”

  “Sorry?”

  We are on the fringe of Reggio Calabria airport, in a battered five-year-old four-by-four. An old rented Land Rover. Marc has gone downmarket.

  “We need the car for the roads,” Marc explains, as he crunches the gears and winces at the noise. “The roads are hellish up there; a few kilometers can take an hour.”

  As he waits for a gap in the roundabout traffic, he nods in the direction of some dim, distant mountains, not especially high or dramatic, but possessed of a definite grim and brooding quality. Dark, forested, prohibitive, off-putting. These are the Aspromonte, the Bitter Mountains.

  He adds, as an aside, nodding down at the battered dashboard, “Plus, Calabria is quite a good place to be inconspicuous. This is not Ferrari country.”

  At last, Marc pulls out into the parade of Fiats and farming trucks, and we begin our long journey north and then east toward the heart of the Aspromonte. Progress is slow, the traffic is heavy, the roads are narrow. I roll down my window and stare out in some astonishment. I have, obviously, never been to Calabria before.

  We are at the very toe-cap of Italy, where the great Italian boot punts Sicily toward Spain, back into her Spanish and Bourbon past. And Calabria is not at all what I expected.

  But what was I expecting? I guess I was anticipating something like Naples. Something old and chaotic but charming and Italian and ancient, with palm trees and good gelati, and maybe just the odd horrid suburb and leery-eyed junkie to remind you of the lurking criminality.

  But here, the criminality does not lurk: it shines out. It is overt. The whole place exudes an air of desperate, helpless nastiness. Instead of the odd horrid suburb, there is town after town of intense dereliction and dismay—it’s the nice historic buildings that are the exception. Maybe there isn’t quite as much graffiti as Naples—but that’s because half the houses have been knocked down. Or only half built. Or simply left to rot.

  The ugliness is extraordinary. I have never seen a truly ugly Italy before.

  Marc gestures at one particularly dilapidated block of houses to our left, as the traffic forces us to slow.

  “It’s hideous, isn’t it? Hard to believe that you are in Europe; it feels more like Tunisia. Or Egypt. Or worse . . .”

  He is right. I stare at the grisly block of buildings as we crawl past: the bottom floor has some cracked and rudimentary tiling, upper floors are unplastered, and the flat open roof is home to seven rusting washing machines. Inexplicably.

  The next block is simply rubble: concrete pillars and broken bricks. Then comes a patch of litter-strewn wasteland. Then a tired food store, and another stretch of trashy wilderness. We pause at traffic lights.

  “Why is it like this? The ’Ndrangheta?”

  “Yes, of course. But also the earthquakes. They get terrible earthquakes here every ten years or so, which destroy entire towns. . . . It’s the poorest part of Italy; it is probably the poorest part of Western Europe.”

  Marc has one arm hanging out of the car, in that limpid heat, another draped over the wheel, steering it—from the top—with the bottom of his wrist. He is in dark jeans and a darkish blue shirt, with the double cuffs undone, exposing his muscled and suntanned forearms.

  It is an elegant and masculine pose, a classic pose even; I can imagine a Renaissance painting: The Lord Roscarrick in His Rented Land Rover, attributed to the School of Raphael, 1615. Marc would have looked great in seventeenth-century portraiture. But he looks great now. I gaze his way, quite happily. Contentedly. Remembering.

  We had remarkable sex last night. He has developed this trick of giving me committed and lavish oral sex, of pleasuring me that way for twenty minutes or so, slowly building up, and then, just for a second, when I am approaching the apex—the peak, the cliff, the sudden fall into oblivious bliss—he senses my near-to-the-moment arousal and rubs the dark sexy stubble of his chin where previously he had been licking me, and the sudden startling contrast between lushing softness and tickling prickliness sends me into an absolute paroxysm of orgasm. Last night, I actually had to grab a pillow and put it over my face as I screamed, with joy, and sheer glee.

  But Jessica still heard me. This morning, as we rose early to catch our flight to Reggio, she said, “Jesus, X. Why the hell have you got a werewolf as a pet? Someone is gonna complain.”

  Again, I look across the Land Rover at Marc, thinking how he confuses me, deliciously. Because he is not always this same unselfish and attentive lover. Sometimes he just grabs me and fucks me, quite roughly. He did that after we left the Sansevero Chapel. We got back in his car and drove to his palazzo and then we parked by the rear door, in the dark, and we got out—and suddenly he picked me up and turned me around and threw me over the hood of the car and lifted up my dress and yanked down my panties—snapping the elastic—and he fucked me from behind, over his beautiful Mercedes sports. It lasted all of three minutes. Three sudden and what-was-that minutes.

  It was a tiny bit shocking and frightening and very, very hot. Perhaps I shouldn’t find this sexy but I did and I do. Then he just zipped himself up, whistled a Neapolitan tune, and escorted me into The Palazzo Roscarrick like nothing had happened, like we had just stepped outside for a quick glass of prosecco. He allowed me to go and get some new underwear from a drawer in his bedroom. I used the moment to take myself to that fabulous bathroom and masturbate myself to orgasm, reliving that brief and bloodthirsty fuck over the car. I came in seconds.

  How many orgasms can I have? Can you have too many?

  Marc can be brutal, he can be loving; and I like the way I do not know what is coming next.

  But I don’t like the way I know nothing about the Third Mystery. Why is it being held in Calabria? Why here, in this benighted place?

  Spinning out of my reverie, I gaze through the window. I can see the ocean now, the Mediterranean, from
my passenger window. Even the sea looks decayed and depressing, despite the hot morning sun on this fine day in early July. Ten weeks have passed since I first met Marc. Ten weeks that have changed everything.

  “So . . .” I look back at Marc. “Tell me what you know about the ’Ndrangheta. For my thesis. Might as well do some learning if we are going to be driving for, like, ever.”

  He grimaces slightly.

  “I know what everyone else knows, cara mia. They are the most evil of the organized crime gangs, and these days the richest and most powerful. It’s estimated they control three percent of Italy’s GDP—that’s way more than Italy spends on defense.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes. And the ’Ndrangheta totally rule Calabria.” He waves at yet another crippled little village, and a concrete restaurant inexplicably situated in a field of weeds. “Some say that if Calabria was independent—which in some ways it already is—then it would be classed as a failed state by the UN. Rather like Somalia.”

  “How do the ’Ndrangheta do that? How can a mafia run an entire province?”

  “There are clans of them, ancient and impenetrable. They are fiercely hostile to outsiders, and fiercely loyal to each other, and membership in the ’Ndrang descends by blood. Thus they cannot be broken in the same way as the Mafia and the Camorra have been recently hobbled, by pentiti, by remorseful gangsters, plea bargaining.”

  “The houses . . . The towns . . .”

  “The ’Ndrang open hotels and shops to launder money. The prices they charge are so low, they drive all other businesses into bankruptcy. So the local economy is ruined and the only businesses left are ’Ndrang businesses. Therefore everyone in Calabria relies on them, is indebted to them, employed by them, enslaved by them. It is almost feudal. They also take EU money to build factories and roads, but all they do is start building, so they ensure they get the grants—then they quit. The roads are half built, the factories are half built, hence the utter sense of anarchy and dereliction.” He turns a rough and sharp left; we are now heading away from the sea, deep and direct, into the hills. “There is also a tax on houses in Calabria—but it only applies to completed houses. That’s why all the homes look half done, unpainted, and ugly, it is to avoid tax.”

  I feel I should be taking notes. This stuff is fascinating. I take out my pen and my notepad: I really am going to take notes.

  Marc laughs as I do this.

  “I admire your diligence, Alexandra Beckmann.”

  “Some of us have to do stuff, Lord Roscarrick, we can’t sit around punching the odd key on a laptop and making sixty thousand bucks a minute.”

  “It didn’t used to be that easy,” he says, and his tone darkens.

  But everything is darkening: the clouds are gathering, and the terrain is worsening. From a narrow but usable strip of tarmac, the road has turned into something close to a dirt path. The Land Rover rumbles over ruts. We pass large, gray, unpainted concrete villas, with big parked cars and dogs barking in the heat.

  “Here’s something you might find interesting.” Marc coughs some dust from his mouth. “Every September the capos of the ’Ndrangheta gangs—the clan-chiefs—gather in a remote monastic shrine not far from here, deep in these mountains. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi.”

  I am writing this down as best I can. The juddering of the car makes it difficult.

  “Go on.”

  “The interesting thing about this meeting at Polsi is that it has been going on for hundreds of years. And in the past, until a few decades ago, the meeting was”—he pauses, and searches for the words—“quite bizarre and carnal. The heads of the criminal families were known as the “chief cudgels.” The cudgels would lead the way from the nearest village, toward the distant Sanctuary of Polsi, followed by large crowds. The procession took at least two days; they had to walk thirty kilometers. The gangsters were followed by young women and old crones, all wailing and howling, and sometimes wearing crowns of thorns, with blood dripping down their faces; many would do the walk barefoot. But they also drank rough wine and feasted on roast goat, and they bellowed ancient hymns, and danced wild tarantellas all night—to the bagpipe and the tambourine. All night long they drank and gorged and fornicated among the oleander and the oregano. Drunk and crazy.”

  “So it is . . . Dionysian?” I ask.

  “Perhaps,” he says. “Dionysus the Greek god makes sense. Calabria was, of course, Magna Graecia in ancient times—this is where the Greeks made their greatest colony; Plato lived around here, as did Pythagoras.” He turns and smiles, distantly, handsomely, and shrewdly. Like he knows something I don’t. But then he always looks like he knows something I don’t.

  “Is that enough for your thesis? For now?”

  I am scribbling manically.

  “Yes, Marc. It’s fascinating. Amazing.”

  “Good,” he says, “because we need to think. I’m not sure where we are. . . . It’s somewhere along here, on the back road to Plati.”

  He is slowing the car, and squinting at a road sign. I gaze up at the road sign, too. And shrug. I’m not sure why he is bothering: the road sign is so peppered with bullet holes it is useless; all the names have been shot away.

  Bullet holes?

  Marc looks at the road sign, then at the map on his iPad. He sighs, shakes his head.

  I ask, perplexed, “Surely you must know the way? You’ve been to the Mysteries before.”

  He answers without looking at me.

  “I only know Calabria because I worked here, remember, importing into Reggio and Crotone.”

  “So . . . ?”

  His reply is brisk. “I’ve told you before—the Mysteries happen across Italy, and often in England, France, Spain. There are several going on every summer simultaneously. People weave in and out of them. You’ll meet someone at the Second Mystery who was inducted in, say, London; then you’ll meet them again at the Fourth Mystery, not knowing where they were for the Third. It all adds to the mystery.”

  I sit in the stationary car, slightly openmouthed. For the first time I get some sense of the scale of these Mysteries. Who organizes all this?

  I turn to Marc.

  “You chose to come to this particular Third Mystery? In horrible Calabria? Why?”

  “I was curious. And I need to do some business.”

  “What business?”

  “Nothing serious.” He glances down at the iPad. “I think our destination is about twenty kilometers beyond this next village. We can ask here, to make sure. We really do not want to get lost in the Aspromonte.”

  We rattle for a few minutes down the rubbled road, then we pull a series of very tight ascending curves, climbing a steep mountain. Perched on top of this mountain is a village, which, by Calabrian standards, is adorable. A venerable stone church crowns a dome of huddled old houses. The streets are cobbled; the old men sit on their benches in the hints of breaking sun.

  Italy as it should be.

  Yet, when we climb out, I get the strangest feeling. There are children yelling at soccer balls in the street, and young mothers shouting out of bougainvillea-framed windows, and a fruit-seller leaning over his produce and arguing affably with some old woman.

  But they are speaking Greek. Not Italian.

  Marc smiles at my astonishment.

  “Yes, it is ancient Greek, Grico, from the time of the Hellenic settlers. The language never quite died out in these really remote valleys.”

  I stand here, in the hazy sun: an American utterly dwarfed by the ancientness of Europe. I am listening to the language of Plato and Pythagoras, spoken by the very descendants of Plato and Pythagoras.

  Marc is gesturing and chatting with some locals in Italian. So they are also bilingual, which makes sense.

  Retreating from the scene, letting Marc do his thing, I walk
over and sit on a bench—and yawn. The drive has been very rough. I am tired; my limbs ache. A long day already. The old man next to me turns and smiles. And speaks ancient Greek.

  I nod and smile hopefully at this son of Socrates, and his incomprehensible words.

  Oh, Italy. Oh, Europe.

  “Okay,” Marc calls, returning from his task. He opens the car door and jumps in, and gestures for me to do the same. He seems invigorated. “I was right,” he says, switching the engine back on. “Just twenty more kilometers. On the back road to Plati.” He points into the darkest valley, incised into the most malign mountains. Of course it would be that way: the most sinister direction.

  I sit back. And try not to fret.

  But this is difficult. It may just be “twenty more klicks” but the last leg of the journey takes us another two hours, driving past landslides, sliding through washouts, climbing horrible unpaved hills. At last I see a town around the next vertiginous corner of pine tree and slender beech.

  As we enter the “town,” the sense of horrible revelation grows apace. All the ancient and modern houses are derelict. All are grisly shells, with dark, cracked windows and doors cruelly twisted on hinges or simply kicked through.

  “My God,” I say. “It’s a ghost town.”

  Marc nods.

  “Rhoguda. It was finally abandoned in the nineteen fifties. Too many earthquakes. And too many witches.”

  “But . . .”

  “The Mystery will happen in the Bourbon castle, up there on the rise.”

  I shade my eyes to see: an immense, austere building—somewhat like a nunnery, half a kilometer beyond and above the town.

  I turn and look at Marc. I have suddenly realized.

  “This is where I am going to be flagellated, isn’t it? This is where I will be whipped?”

  He says nothing, just steers us toward the lofty castle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  RHOGUDA CASTLE CAN’T ever have been beautiful, but it must have once been awe-inspiring: it is still enormous, frowning, military—and austere in that Spanish-Italian style. Just like the palace of Caserta.