The Story of X: An Erotic Tale Read online

  I nod. “Yes, I’ve seen them: politicians, billionaires. I saw them in Venice . . .”

  The words dry in my mouth, and the logic takes over.

  Politicians . . . Billionaires.

  Enzo Paselli.

  Of course. Of course! It is all revealing itself to me, all making sense. It is like the trapdoor has been opened to the tunnels below: and thus the secret labyrinth is exposed.

  I have solved the Mystery of the Mysteries.

  “Marc,” I say, “the mafias run the Mysteries, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” he answers. “I think so.”

  “The ’Ndrangheta. And the Camorra. They organize them and pay for the Mysteries. Yes?”

  “Very probably.”

  He looks a little defeated. But I am not. The logic of it all is dazzling. I stand up and I pace Marc’s silent and elegant bedroom. Working it through, talking aloud.

  “I get it, Marc. The Mysteries never died out—they became the mafias.”

  “Sorry?” For once Marc seems uncertain. He says again: “Sorry? What?”

  “Don’t you see, this is where the Mafia and the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta come from!” I go across to him and hold his handsome face in my hands and kiss him on the mouth, then I turn back and pace the room—left and right, left and right, walking, thinking, unraveling and talking.

  “Think about it, all that Spanish stuff is nonsense. The secret criminal societies of southern Italy descend from the secret religious cults of southern Italy. It has to be! They have the same codes of silence, the same oaths and vows of loyalty, the same emphasis—for the men—on blood and honor and violence. The same code of honor for men who want to stray once they are inducted.”

  “But . . . I don’t see why . . . I don’t get it.”

  “It’s obvious. We know the Mysteries survived, the same way Ancient Greek survived in Calabria, the same way the recipe of the kykeon was handed down in Greece for twenty centuries, but this is how they survived!”

  I stare at the darkness of the window. Still talking. “The historical evolution is obvious. The cults of the Mystery Religions, in their homeland of southern Italy, were driven into the shadows by the Christian faith in the fourth century A.D. But they weren’t entirely eradicated.” My eyes are wide. “They endured, became even more occult, even more secret, a glorious and heathen free-masonry of wild, violent, and compelling sexual ritual, laced with hypnotic drugs.” I am staring at the Andreas Gursky photos, I am bursting with mental energy. “And over time, these secretive sects, meeting in their secret places, became criminal and rebellious and organized. It would be a natural progression; they were already antagonistic to the Church, and the authorities, they needed money to finance the rituals, so they turned to crime, to robbery, extortion, kidnapping.”

  “It’s a splendid theory, X,” Marc says, shaking his head. “You’re probably right.” He stands and walks closer to me. “But it doesn’t matter this minute. What matters this evening is what the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta do now.”

  “I know what they do now!” I am almost shouting. “They get the rich and famous hooked on their sexy parties, they invite them to join, they initiate the powerful and the privileged—I’ve seen them, Marc, the ex-presidents, the great industrialists, the celebrities. And thus the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta gain influence and leverage over the elite; that is why the mafias are ineradicable, they are protected at the very top by the people addicted to the Mystery rites.”

  “But we are not protected, X.” Marc is standing close, and he is holding me by the shoulders, very, very hard. So hard it hurts. “Do you understand what I am saying? They are going to kill me. I have broken the code. They needed an excuse. Now they have it, and there is nothing I can do.”

  I gaze at him. Abruptly my intellectual euphoria dispels, it disappears to nothing—and I am left here in this bedroom with the man I love, who is telling me he is going to die.

  “But we can run away?”

  “Where?” He sighs, and sneers at the idea. “The Camorra will chase me down. You must have heard of Roberto Saviano?”

  “The journalist who wrote Gomorrah?”

  “Which was all about the Camorra. And he is still in hiding now, ten years later; the Camorra are chasing him across Europe. I don’t want to be like that, X, moving from safe house to safe house, little apartments in Milan, in Hamburg, in Madrid—running away all my life. Running from everything I love.” He looks at me, fiercely, and says, “I’d rather die. They will kill me. That is the end of it.”

  The room is silent. Marc walks a few paces, then stands there, in the middle of the bedroom, doing up his last cuff button.

  I protest. “Marc. Marc. We have to run, or do something, we must!”

  “There is nothing to do.”

  “You’re just gonna let them kill us?”

  “Not you. Me.”

  “Marc!”

  He sighs. Profoundly.

  “I had to stop the ritual. I couldn’t let them do that to you. You didn’t want that—you didn’t want that, in the vault, did you? What was about to happen?”

  “But I was prepared to do it. I agreed. And I don’t want you to die for me!”

  He shakes his handsome head again, and gives me that sad, sad, blue-eyed smile. He tucks his shirt into his jeans, leans, and does up his shoe laces. There is something awful and deliberate in the casual way he is doing all this. A man distractedly preparing for his own execution.

  Then he comes close to me and takes me in his arms and he kisses me deeply on the lips and says, for the first time, “X, the truth is, I also couldn’t bear to share you. I couldn’t watch that happening, watch you with another man. I have gone too deep. Too deep with you.” He kisses me again. “I love you, X. I love you more than I have ever loved any woman in my time on this earth. So if you die, my life is worthless. But if I die and you survive, I can die in some peace—knowing that you live. Which is why you have to go.”

  “No!”

  “Go. You will never see me again.”

  “Marc!”

  I am screaming. But someone is holding me. It is Giuseppe and another manservant, and someone else. Three men. They are lifting me. And I am screaming out, screaming at the man I love, as they pull me—as they carry me, fighting, struggling.

  “X, they will help you get away. So you will be safe.” He sighs, and goes on. “X. Per favore, ricordate di mi.”

  And his eyes are wet even as his expression is deathly calm. This is the last time I will ever see him. I know it. This is it. The men are carrying me out of the room.

  “No, no no no—Marc!”

  But the bedroom door is closed, and he is gone. And all I can hear are his final words. Remember me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  IF IT IS possible to be very gently ejected from a building, then that is what is done to me. Giuseppe and friends—with infinite care and tenderness—carry me to the front door of the palazzo and place me in the street, red-eyed, distraught, angry, and inconsolable.

  They offer to drive me, but I shake my head. And I stand there. Mute. Defiant. Simply refusing to move. Weeping.

  The door shuts in my face but I go right up to it and knock with the big ancient door knocker—no one answers, so I knock once more; again, no one responds. The fourth or fifth time I lift and drop the great brass handle, polished by centuries of visitors, rich and poor, noble and ignoble, Giuseppe finally and reluctantly opens the door. He sighs, and looks at me with real compassion, but he shakes his head.

  “I am sorry, X. I am very sorry. But you can never see the Signor again. It is his orders.”

  “But, Giuseppe, no, Giuseppe . . . please . . . please.” The tears are coming fast again. There are evening shoppers, passersby in the Chiaia, and they are staring, inquisitivel
y, at the blond American woman crying and yelling at the door of The Palazzo Roscarrick. Let them stare. What does it matter now?

  Nothing matters now.

  “Giuseppe, you have to do something! Tell Marc to change his mind; I want to be with him. Whatever . . . whatever happens. I want to be with him.”

  “Per favore. This is from Signor Roscarrick, so you can go away and be safe.” Giuseppe is trying to give me a big wad of money. I take the fold of notes and gaze at it in contempt, and then I literally throw it back at him: through the door, so there are fluttering fifty-euro notes everywhere, like orange confetti. Giuseppe does not flinch at my anger; he stoops and picks up one fifty-euro note. He presses it into my hand, folding my shaking fingers around the bill.

  “At least take a taxi home, signorina,” he says.

  Then he shuts the door and I know, somehow, it will not open again. Not ever. And certainly not to me. Despite this, I bang on it, fruitlessly, several times.

  After thirty minutes, the tears stop and the shock ebbs away. Deeper and darker feelings take over. So I hail a passing taxi and climb in. I ask for Santa Lucia, and look at the new, dark, empty space inside me, examine it, scrutinize it. Like a surgeon looking at a scan of a frightful tumor, like a jeweler looking at a terrible flaw in a gemstone.

  This new, searing heartbroken sadness, I know, is going to be with me for a long time. It may be here for keeps; it is moving into the apartment, it will be sharing my home, my life, my conscious hours, it will be there when I wake up, it will be there when I go to sleep: because this is the terrible and abiding sadness of losing someone you love, someone who was so much more than any friend could ever be.

  And then, one day, when I wake up, the sadness will actually speak, and it will say: Today is the day. And then I will turn on the TV or buy the Corriere della Sera and I will learn the inevitable news: Marc Roscarrick, the molto bello e scapolo Lord Roscarrick, is dead.

  Killed by an assassin. Shot on the Via Toledo by some seventeen-year-old junkie from Secondigliano on a sky blue Vespa; shot for a bounty of one hundred bucks. And then the sadness will develop, then it will seep into my bones, it will grow into my soul.

  “Grazie.”

  I pay the cabbie, but as I do he looks at my tear-blotched face and, in that gentle, kind, very Italian way he says, “Signorina? S’è persa? Sta bene? Posso aiutarla?”

  He wants to help. He is concerned. I just shove the entire fifty-euro note in his hand and turn and run into the apartment. Climbing the stairs, I slam the door shut and start crying again. Maybe I will cry myself to death; literally dehydrate.

  My tears and sobs are obviously loud, because pretty soon I hear a quiet knock on my door and Jessica’s tentative voice.

  “X? What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “X? You’re crying—what’s wrong? You sound terrible. Open the door.”

  I am sitting—practically slumping—on the floor of my stupid apartment in stupid Santa Lucia in stupid Naples and I am numb with grief. I don’t know what to do or say or think. I look at my balcony and I wonder, for a moment, how easy it might be to just walk across the room and climb on that balcony railing and then gaze at Capri in the moonlight and then—it would be so easy—I might just accidentally slip and fall and then the sadness would be banished.

  I come to alertness with a startling sense of shock. This is dangerous. I have to calm down; I need to talk to someone. Jess is outside.

  Standing and wiping the tears from my face, I open the door and Jess is there, wearing white jeans with a blue top and a big, sad, patient and forgiving smile—but when she sees my face she says, “Oh bloody hell, X. Bloody, bloody hell.”

  “Jess . . .”

  I stand back wordlessly and Jess comes into the room. She turns to me and we hug for half a minute and then she makes tea—a British cup of tea—in my stupid little kitchen where Marc kissed me and stripped me that night, that first glorious night.

  No, I have to stop these thoughts. They are soldiers trying to breach the castle, aiming to force their way in. If I let one through, I will be overrun and conquered. Then I am lost.

  Jess hands me a mug of tea, and sits on the floor beside me. The mug shows a picture of the Amalfi coast. It reminds me of my mom: where she went on her holiday all those decades ago. My mom. Maybe I could call her. I want my mommy. My heartbreak is so engulfing, I want my mother.

  “Come on,” Jess says, sipping from her own hot tea and staring me deep in the eyes. “Time to fess up, X. Tell me everything.”

  I take a big gulp of the tea even though it is scalding. I force the tears back down my throat, and then I put the mug on the floor and look at Jess—and I tell her everything, or at least, everything she needs to know. I tell her Marc broke the code of the Mysteries. I tell her the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta run the Mysteries. I tell her that the Camorra are now coming after him. And then, gulping some more of the tea and trying very hard not to cry again, enough crying, enough crying, I tell her that he has banished me, exiled me, forsworn me, because he believes he is a marked man, destined for assassination, listed to die one day soon. And therefore he wants me away, safe, and out of the picture, forever.

  I stop talking.

  Jessica shakes her pretty head and I can see anguish in her eyes, too.

  “Oh God, poor you,” she says, without a hint of her usual sarcasm. “Poor Marc.”

  She goes quiet and stares at the night sky outside the window. The faint crackle of fireworks can be heard, like gunshots in the distance; probably some Camorra gang in the Spanish Quarters celebrating the release from jail of one of their own.

  “You know,” she says, wistfully and quietly, “I heard a story the other day about the Spanish Quarters. How they got their name.”

  I say nothing.

  She goes on. “You remember that street in the middle of the Quartieri, Vico Lungo del Gelso? Gelso meaning mulberries . . .”

  I say nothing.

  She goes on: “It got its name from the Spanish soldiers, who stained their uniforms by lying with local girls on the grass, making love.” She looks at me. “The grass was strewn with mulberries . . . That’s what stained their clothes. That’s where the name comes from.”

  Jessica looks down at her tea. I can see tears on her face, too.

  “This means Giuseppe and I are finished too, of course.” She lifts and sips the tea and shakes her head and says, “Brruh. Enough, enough, enough.” Then she leans and pats me on the knee. “We have to be strong.”

  “Strong?”

  A helpless shrug.

  “Well, stronger. It’s horrible, X, I know, it’s totally bloody horrible, but if it is as bad as Marc says, if he really is . . . If they really are . . . Well, I mean . . . You know how relentless the Camorra can be.”

  I nod. Desolately.

  “If he really has broken some terrible law,” she goes on, “Then they will . . . they really will . . .”

  “Shoot him.”

  “You are better off out of it. You really are. He is doing the right thing, a good thing, the noble thing. Because you are also in danger, X, serious danger.” She sighs heavily. “However depressing it is, however heartbreaking, Marc is doing you a favor: he is trying to save you from, well . . . from God knows what.”

  “But, Jess,” I say, looking deep into her soft brown eyes. “Jessica . . . I love him.”

  THE NEXT WEEKS are weeks of total bleakness. Every morning I wake and there it is: the sadness. There is sadness in my cappuccino, sadness in my macchiato, sadness in my espresso; there is the taste of sadness in every cake I eat, the sfogliata, the bigne, the baba; there is sadness in the cheap shellfish I have for supper, the fasolari, the maruzielle, the telline.

  And the taste of this sadness is the taste of pure bitterness. It ruins e
verything. It sours the world. It is a black sun shining down on all Campania.

  Sometimes I try to see Marc, despite it all. I walk in my lonely way down the Chiaia and up to the great big door of The Palazzo Roscarrick, the door I first knocked on when I came here months ago, when he smiled and joked, and I saw the staircase for the cavaliers; but this time when I knock either no one answers or a servant I haven’t seen before briefly opens the door, stares at me, then shuts the door again without a word.

  Other times I call his cell phone. Maybe thirty times in two hours. Then the cell phone number dies for good and a brisk, automated female voice tells me in Italian, The number you are calling is no longer available. I write e-mails that go unanswered. Eventually these e-mails are pinged back, telling me that this e-mail address is now defunct.

  So then I write letters, long letters in freehand, on tear-stained paper, and these letters, just like the e-mails, elicit no reply, and eventually they are returned unopened. He won’t even open a letter? Not even a letter?

  Even worse than this rejection is the tension I experience every morning when I walk to the newsstand on Via Partenope and I say “Buongiorno” to the newspaper guy and he looks at me and says “Buongiorno” and he hands me my daily copy of Il Mattino.

  I don’t want to read this paper. I hate this paper, but it is the best paper for reporting on Neapolitan crime: it is brave and remorseless in the way it covers the endless victims of petty turf wars in Scampia, drug slayings in the Forcella, and if I want to know if anything has happened to Marc, then this is where I will first see it recorded. And confirmed. And photographed.

  So every day I walk back to the apartment, flicking feverishly through the inky pages, staring at pictures of men sprawled outside dingy cafes in Miano, with blood running from their bodies like they are leaking black oil; or sitting in cars in Marigliano with uncannily neat black gunshot wounds in their foreheads; or simply discovered as stiff and lifeless bodies in the endless piles of Neapolitan garbage in the Centro Storico. And as I scan these images I think, Is that him, is that Marc, is that how it ended, is it all over?