The Story of X: An Erotic Tale (18 page)

“Oh my God.”

“I stripped you naked.”

“You did, you did, and now you are fucking me, fucking me hard, and you are calling
me your little girl.”

“My little girl . . .”

“And I am helpless, you are in me . . .”

“In you?”

“Yes, yes. In me, deep inside me. Deep, deep, deep.”

“I am inside you . . .”

“You are inside me so deep, so deep. It is the only thing I can feel. Your cock deep
inside me. But mmmm—”

“Wait!”

“I can’t.”

“Carissima . . .”

I am barely able to speak. The machine is alive, and it is pleasuring me. Wonderfully.

“You are fucking me, hard, and it hurts, and I love it, love it, I love . . . I love
. . . I . . . I love it, I love it.”

“But not only this . . .”

“Mmmmmarc . . .”

“Press the other part down there.”

“Where? I . . . I . . . I don’t . . . Oh, yes—” I see. Yes, I see. He means my perineum.
And below. And even as I think this, the machine slips. It slips inside me. Anally.
I didn’t even move it.

“Oh.”

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER,
I dash into the bathroom, turn the tap and sluice myself with hot water.

The toy is washed and cleaned and in its box. I feel like locking the box away. It
is a little too exciting. But I am glad Marc gave me this. I’d rather have this than
a car.

Turning my face into the shower water I can’t help smiling. Good, this is good. Now
I rub myself down using this
divine
soap, which was a gift from Marc. He says it comes from a little monastery in deepest
Florence, the
Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Novella
; apparently the soap has been made by monks and nuns since the fourteenth century.

Subtly floral, discreetly sensual, handmade and skin-loving. The foam is scented clouds.
Sapone di Latte
! I use it everywhere; I probably overuse it, even though the bars must cost fifty
dollars apiece.

Thank you, Marc. Thank you for
everything
.

Cleansed and refreshed, I step into the bedroom, quite nude, with a towel turbaned
on my head, and for a second eye myself critically in my one good, floor-length mirror.
I pinch half an inch in front of the mirror: hmmm. Am I putting on weight? Is all
this divine Campanian food in all these glorious Neapolitan restaurants making me
fat
?

The bell rings. And as I pull on my dress, I decide I don’t especially care if I am
getting fat. This is probably because I
am not
getting fat. It is the miracle of Mediterranean life: I eat anything I want but all
the swimming in the sea, and most especially the sex, is keeping me reasonably thin.

The bell rings again. Instead of answering the intercom I run downstairs, barefoot
in my dress, with my hair still wet, and I open the door to the warm summer evening
air, and Marc is standing there smiling in his jeans and white shirt and I actually
leap
into his strong arms so that he is staggering back onto Via Santa Lucia, holding
me as I kiss him, with my ankles locked around the small of his back.

We kiss. I am acting like a seventeen-year-old. I do not care. I feel seventeen. I
am in love. The moon is high over Capri.

“Hello, X,” he says, as he puts me down on the ground.

“Hello, Marc,” I say. “I’m quite pleased to see you.”

He smiles.

“You liked the toy, then?”

“Those crazy Japanese. What are they like?”

“I got it so you wouldn’t be lonely.”

“Marc, I see you every day. You sleep with me
twice
a day.”

“But sometimes I have business. Anyway . . .” He gestures at his parked Mercedes.
“Tonight I want to show you something special.”

“What?” I am imagining a marvelous meal, perhaps the world’s greatest
tonno rosso
recipe, served on top of Mount Vesuvius.

Instead, Marc says, “The Cappella Sansevero.”

“But . . .” I say, stammering, and flustered—and excited. I’ve heard of the Sansevero
Chapel, of course; every serious visitor to Naples has heard of the notorious and
amazing Sansevero Chapel, every serious art historian in the entire
universe
has heard of Sansevero Chapel. “But it’s closed for renovation, Marc. It’s been closed
for years, no one knows when it will reopen; you can’t get in. I tried and tried . . .”

His eyes twinkle
in that way
.

“You are right . . .” He smiles. “But I am paying for the renovations.”

He is dangling one large key on a ring. Marc can get me into the Cappella Sansevero!

The drive takes all of three hundred seconds, from the ordinariness of my apartment
block to the doors of one of the most sacred places in human artistry. We get out
of the car and approach.

The chapel is shrouded in scaffolding, and surrounded—protected—by the narrow streets
of Old Naples, the grand and battered heart of Naples, where old men with gray stubble
play
scala
outside tiny cafes with bright strip lighting, smoking and coughing and exchanging
their amiable insults.
A circolo sociale.

In the light of dusk, the glass wall shrines fluoresce with yellow electric candles
and red plastic flowers and leering, eerie statuettes. There are lots of smiling Holy
Marys, the patron saint of the Camorra.

As Marc reaches for the keys, a big blue Vespa emerges abruptly and suddenly from
a shadowed corner, and veers dangerously past me, carrying two laughing teen girls
in shorts and flip-flops, riding the bike without helmets, their sumptuous dark hair
rising and falling in the driven breeze.

I watch them disappear: their happiness, their laughter, their fleeting beauty. Now
they are gone; the old roads are almost silent. Washing hangs limply above. The bassi
are quiet. A man in a tiny room opposite, framed by his open window, sits watching
soccer on a stupidly bulky TV under a portrait of Padre Pio. His artificial leg sits
on the table in front of him as he chews provola cheese, rinds and all. Chewing with
his toothless mouth.

“Okay,” says Marc, disturbing my reverie on Neapolitan street life. “OK,
piccolina
, we can go in.”

He is opening the door to the Cappella Sansevero.

The first thing I see is a splendid, small, late-Baroque chapel, lit by one bare builder’s
lightbulb. Mops and brushes litter the scene, and new ocher brick dust is scattered
on the floor, but this debris can’t detract from the glittering, jewel-box beauty
of the ornately marbled chapel.

Marc tells me the history of the place, but I know it already.

“The seventh Prince of Sansevero, Raimondo, was born in 1710, into a noble Neapolitan
family which traced its lineage to the time of Charlemagne. He was said to be the
greatest intellect in the history of Naples, versed in alchemy, astronomy, sorcery,
and mechanics . . .”

I admire the painted ceiling as Marc speaks.

“The prince spoke half a dozen European languages, as well as Arabic and Hebrew. He
was head of the Neapolitan masonic lodge until he was excommunicated by the Church—the
slanders of heresy were later retracted.”

The floor is a dense and monochrome labyrinth of a mosaic; I know this is meant to
represent Masonic initiation. Why is Marc bringing me here? Does this place have something
to do with the Mysteries?

Marc concludes, with a sweeping and generous gesture, waving at this chapel he is
paying to restore. “The last years of Raimondo’s life were dedicated to building this
place—Sansevero Chapel—endowing it with statuary and images from the greatest artists
of the time. He wanted his chapel to be the beating heart of the Neapolitan Baroque,
infused with cryptic and allegorical truths.”

“It’s . . . very impressive.”

“Come,” says Marc.

I am feeling somewhat nervous. Because I know this room, sumptuous as it might be,
is certainly not
the
famous treasure of the Cappella Sansevero. That lies down a narrow staircase to our
right.

The antechamber is dark: Marc turns on the flashlight in his phone and we descend
this constricted helix of cool white marble. The stairs twist on themselves, confusingly.
I hasten after Marc’s light. At last we reach the dark and somber silence of the crypt.
And Marc’s flashlight shines on the terrible and amazing treasure of Sansevero.

The Veiled Christ—the
Cristo Velato
—of Sammartino.

It is mind-blowing. It is scary. It is indescribable. But I need to find the words
in myself, in my soul, to describe it. Otherwise I will have somehow failed; I will
have been revealed and rejected, I will be unworthy.

The sculpture shows Jesus in the tomb. But Sammartino, the sculptor, has draped the
dead Jesus, the dead-yet-awakening Jesus, with a soft, gentle, silken sheet, a death
shroud of linen, clinging to every contour,
yet it is made out of the same block of marble as the body
.

How was it done? How could you do this? Sculpt a perfect body then, at the same time,
sculpt a silken sheet in which to clothe it, the two becoming one? To this day I know
that art historians argue over the technique involved; some devotees believe it is
simply a work of magic.

“What do you think?” Marc asks.

“It’s marvelous,” I say, stammering a little. “No, it’s more than marvelous. It is
miraculous.”

And it is. The sculpture is
miraculous
. Perhaps the single most astonishing work of art I have ever encountered. Yet this
sculpture is also unsettling; there is something otherworldly about it, something
beyond human. It possesses an eerie perfection. It is too much.

“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.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE

“I
T’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.