John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“Sure.” Chris explained that the nasty-damn powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had raped the newly unearthed ruins. “They took the major items. They took the emperor’s head.” But the Naples collection represented a kind of revenge. Once the foreigners had hauled off their booty, locals had a free hand with the smaller stuff.

“The real stuff,” Chris said. “The collection here, it isn’t about the emperor’s head. It’s a slice of life. Like, the toolshed, the table arrangements.”

“Arrangements,” Romy put in. “This sounds like Naples for sure.”

Romy, for sure. Ignoring the hoots of the construction workers, she’d been waiting on the steps when the family arrived. Her wisecrack drew a terrific laugh from JJ, rocking him out of the family lineup, freeing him from the need to come up with some sarky remark of his own. The older boy and the gypsy shared a soft kiss.

Once more the workers hooted and the cameras went off. What Barb noticed was how Kahlberg’s pale face grew heavy, and she knew how the man felt. The idea made the mother slip her fingers through Dora’s hair, at her hip, but there was no denying it: she had a pretty good idea what this officer was feeling. He had to stand there bombarded by static when the whole time the Off switch lay in easy reach. About the dell’Ovo escapade, too, Kahlberg had had to remain polite and aboveboard. He’d said no more than the obvious. We can’t have that, Mrs. Lulucita. Mrs. Lulucita, I’ve been assigned to this family by my superiors, and your safety is my first concern . Then too, the mother had to admit that, insofar as anyone had kept the attentions of the press under control, it had been Captain America.

Besides, this morning Kahlberg had no objection to Romy tagging along. You would’ve thought that his screaming fit outside San Lorenzo had never happened. Not that the liaison didn’t find a moment to slip in a nasty word about John Junior’s exotic crush. As the family climbed out of the van, Silky muttered to Barbara: “Knew that little skank wouldn’t have any trouble finding this place.” But otherwise he ignored the girl. On the museum steps, Chris and the Lieutenant Major jawed back and forth as though Romy weren’t there. Barb wondered if, by setting up a visit at the best-known tourist destination in town, the PR man were offering a truce.

Maybe the man was making changes. Actual changes…

Also the Lieutenant Major didn’t try to keep the gypsy from coming in, and once the little group was into the cool of old marble and high ceilings, Barbara’s concern shifted to Paul. She laid her fingers against his cheek, his neck, before he nudged away and a woman from the museum staff stepped forward with two photos to bless. Baby photos, these were, a little girl to judge from the color of her pj’s. One was for Barb and the other for the miracolino . Both Mother and Child were in demand now. Believers hadn’t failed to notice — of course they hadn’t — that before each healing la Mama Americana had said a prayer. Supplicants had reached out to Barbara outside her church and, after Paul got through shouting at her, along the sidelines of the children’s soccer outing up in the Vomero.

Now Paul handled the baby’s photo with the same efficient goodwill he’d shown since the first. The mother gave the quiet blessing she’d come up with: Una pregheria .

Meanwhile Kahlberg was handing over today’s documents, the authorizations signed off by officials from NATO and the UN relief. Checking the papers was a member of the security, in the standard grey blazer and red tie — though on second glance this rent-a-cop revealed a touch of the bad boy. The man had a stringy mustache and a jaunty set to his hips; he might’ve been a lounge singer. After he slipped the documents into his attaché (what else?), he put on a cheesy grin while Kahlberg introduced him, Umberto. After that the officer turned to Chris.

“Big shooter, Umberto here, he knows what’s in all the closets. He knows where the Nazionale keeps the bodies buried.”

The liaison was talking as if cameras had followed them inside. “You want to know what’s in the closet, around here? You want to, son?”

Kahlberg was sounding bad-boy himself, but he passed out the usual handful of study aides, and Umberto took one too. The NATO trooper who’d accompanied the family inside, off the steps, was left posted by the entryway. The family moved into the galleries with only plainclothes protection, and either Kahlberg or Umberto would offer occasional explanation among the initial ranks of statuary. Neither had much to say, in any case, and the visit felt more restrained, more subdued, than any the family had made before. This was one corner of Naples where people had something like American notions of personal space. Not that everyone was from the U.S. (though you saw the Stateside lumpiness, the go-to-hell vacation duds), and not that the other museum-goers could resist staring, what with the gypsy in her clingy pastel Capris, the Lieutenant Major in his dandy’s whites. The morning crowd also included four or five who approached Barbara and Paul. But by and large the Lulucitas circulated unbothered, and maybe having a guide besides Kahlberg made Chris confine himself to quiet asides for his brothers and sisters. Or maybe it was that they were all still kids — still prey to Museum Awe.

The statues on the first floor were incomplete, one way or another. Most lacked an arm or a nose, but the male figures were the worst off. None of them had a penis. The castration looked deliberate, in fact, as if someone had lopped off the cock with a chisel. The scar beneath their bronze or marble pubic curls, to Barbara’s way of thinking, made these men more alive. She could imagine them hurting. But then again, when it came to hurting, nobody could match the woman under the Farnese Bull. A tragedy depicted in full, big enough for a monument at Gettysburg, the Farnese piece erupted in crosscut spirals. Two nude wranglers fought with the maddened animal, men who appeared all the more reckless because they still had their male equipment, and five or six inches beneath the bull’s raised hooves there coiled a woman: bare-breasted, soft-bellied, shriek-wracked, raising an arm still pudgy with baby fat.

Eventually the family climbed to the next story. The clutter of kitchen shelves and bedside vanities, up there, was laid out in racks arranged by size. At one end you had an ear-stud for a girl, at the other a serving platter to go under a boar, so from a distance the display suggested open scrolls covered with writing that grew larger, louder, more demanding. Come closer and you might see the blunt end of a pin fashioned into the pouting face of a nymph head. There was copper, silver, jade, gold.

Barbara heard Romy check something with Chris. Most of the things here, they’re things for a woman, right?

The boy concurred, with a gesture that took in combs, jewels, vials of perfume.

Okay, for sure. Naples is a woman .

Naples was a metaphor, sure, an extrapolation — all the more diverting because the choice of comparison made no difference. Barbara could waste the whole day on such stuff; she could lose herself in another fairy tale. For wasn’t today the old story of her first descent into the city? Into the speaking grid, where the mother was forever rediscovering herself? Today the downtown had a more formal layout, the scroll effect, compared to which she and the children looked doughy and amorphous, like a lower order of being. The most exquisite of the household items was a blue wine jug embroidered with white coral. An amphora brought out for good company, its cameo decoration hugged the darker glass like vines of bone. Indeed many of the scrimshaw-style carvings were vines, grapevines, among which nuzzled goats and birds and babies. Human or beast, they went happily for the fruit, in a never-ending snack time that sprouted in coils from the plump drunk head of Dionysius. The god had a sloppy smile and greedy eyes, and he was antenna’d with the vineyard’s rootstock.