A City Without Roofs

 

Our tour guide, Antonio, waits outside, smoking a cigarette, while we snake our way through the bathhouse. It is one of the only buildings left in this fire-blasted town that still supports a roof. Tired of standing in line, which is all we’ve been doing since we got here, I slip out the way we came in and attempt to make small talk.

First I ask Antonio if I can bum a cigarette. Handing one to me he says that it’ll be three Euros. His face is stern, and I’m not sure if he’s serious or not until he laughs and says something in Italian, which I can’t quite make out, but that let’s me know he’s only joking.

“So how many languages do you speak?” I ask. Earlier in the day, I saw him chatting with a woman leading a group of Canadians, and recognized what sounded to me like French. And then, when we were heading up the hill, towards the forum, he stopped to speak to another tour guide, and I was certain that this time they were speaking German.

Standing next to me now, Antonio rubs his chin. The hair in his beard is the color of ash, and when he takes his hand away he inspects his fingers, as if expecting to find them layered in soot.

“Six or seven,” he finally says.

“That’s incredible,” I say, thinking of all the years of Italian I’d taken, never practiced, and by now forgotten.

“Eh,” he says, waving a dismissive hand.

I start to tell him about our last stop, in Capri, about our tour guide there, thinking stupidly that they might know each other. But I can tell he isn’t really listening.

A dog passes along the cobbled street, and Antonio whistles a single low note.

The dog turns, recognizes him and hobbles over, panting.

“Ciao Paolo,” Antonio says, scratching the dog behind the ears as it wags its white tipped tail. Just then my wife comes out of the bathhouse, shielding her eyes from the sun and looking for me. It’s strange to call her that, my wife. We’ve only been married a few days. This is our honeymoon. A Mediterranean cruise. Her idea. I wanted to stay in a seaside hotel that served generous rum drinks and had a king-sized bed. But it’s Kelly’s first honeymoon, so I let her have her way.

Antonio is giving the dog a drink from his canteen when she spots us, saunters over, and takes a drag from my cigarette.

“When in Rome,” I say.

“We’re in Pompeii,” she says.

“Close enough.”

She frowns, and then stubs the cigarette out against a wall of stone.

I can tell by the way Antonio straightens, suddenly forsaking his fury friend, that Kelly’s endowments have peaked his interest. She’s wearing a pink tank top that leaves little to be imagined. I introduce them and Antonio kisses Kelly’s hand with a flourishing bow. Ignored, the dog wanders off to sleep beneath a cypress. He circles a few times before curling up in its dark needle of reprieve.

The sun is high and there is little shade in this roofless city.

When the rest of our group gathers, Antonio flicks away his cigarette and leads us up the street, noting that the flecks of marble pinned between the larger stones were to guide carriages by moonlight.

He and Kelly are chatting, and I listen to their conversation as I follow them up the hill, sweat gathering on my brow. He tells her that this is his last day on the job, that he’s retiring.

“Congratulations,” we both say—almost in unison.

He nods but doesn’t say anything.

We pass the forum again and the market, where the bones lay suspended in their plaster casts. He told us before about how they found hollows in the ash, how they filled the hollows with plaster in order to create corporeal forms from ghosts.

I ask him where we are going now and he winks and says, “The Brothel.”

A minute later, Antonio stops and shows us the first of the phalluses. It’s carved into a cobblestone and he tells us that it points in the direction of the brothel.

“They get bigger as you get closer,” he tells Kelly, and she giggles, covering her lips with slender fingers.

Inside the brothel, Antonio shows us the various positions painted above each room. I can’t help but notice that the rooms are like prison cells, and that the beds are made of stone.

“A la carte,” he says, garnering a few chuckles.

At the end of the tour he thanks us all for sharing the day with him, and he says he’ll miss us because his wife no longer laughs at his jokes. Of course, we laugh at this, but I can tell, in a way, he’s serious. And later that day, crammed into our little room with its single porthole window, as Kelly and I work our way through the various positions depicted on the brothel’s walls, I find myself distracted, thinking about the roofless city, the people living there all those years ago, the ruin of their lives little more than a mild curiosity for us today. And then I think about Antonio waking up tomorrow morning and having no place to go, no audience for his jokes, sitting in silence across the breakfast table from a wife who no longer finds him amusing.

“What’s wrong?” Kelly says to me, turning her head away from the porthole we’ve both been facing. The Mediterranean sun is hot and white as it splashes over her and sets ablaze the dew of our exertion, highlighting her dampened upper lip, the protrusion of her clavicle, and the slickened ridge of her back.

“Nothing,” I say.

But the truth is that I worry about what will happen when Kelly stops laughing at my jokes, or worse yet, I stop bothering to tell them.