It would be redundant, excessively obvious, to say “the ruins of” wouldn’t it? My guide, Stefano, probably a closet fascist, said “Madame would you mind if I show you the red light district?” Could I have said no? I suppose I could have but I did not. I was still glowing from his earlier compliment: “Madame, you are very smart. You ask very good questions.”
It’s kind of embarrassing how glowy I got over that — I mean, I’m standing there in the shade and it feels personal and complimentary and in the same instant I know it’s part of the routine and he’s said it a hundred times and if it was personal what would I do anyway?
So I guess it must have been a short while later that he asked “Madame would you mind if I showed you the red light district?” My friend Meg had mentioned that: and there’s a brothel with a penis over the door!
So that when Stefano pointed out the phallic shape above the entrance, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Just prior to that, he’d shown me the stone bed outside the doctor’s office – and had explained in what I felt was prurient detail the durability of the stone (whereas ordinary folk had wooden beds or…what were the other substances? And the whores’ beds would have a mattress on top and I made some remark about how it was good to have the whore’s room right next to the doctor and he said well yes there were sexually transmitted diseases then, such as gonorrhea and others…..the little cell next to the doctor’s office looked dank and dark and small and I cringed to imagine the miserable existence lived there.) There was a lineup outside the actual brothel, so my guide very happily and jokily told me about the surviving frescoes which sort of offered a visual menu of what was on offer and by this time I wasn’t finding this very funny at all and I kept wanting to ask him if he’d ever seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the image of those terrible little tent cribs where the men just go in for some relief like taking a piss at a urinal and the cramped awful lives of those women….so inside the brothel it was these tiny little cells and people milling about and all I could do was feel sorry for those women who had to earn their living that way. Stefano pointed out how the women depicted in the menu paintings wore “bras” — more like a bandeau. I glanced at the images but it really just was ancient porn and I only wanted to get out of there.
What made me think Stefano was probably a fascist? Well, he began our tour by saying “I hope you don’t mind being surrounded by foreigners” and when I asked whether slave labour had built the town he remarked that slavery was actually a very good idea. In the course of our two hours together as well, he made comments about Africans and Chinese. And mentioned that he refused to do tours for anyone but English and Americans. And even they can be irritating, he said.
Visitors to Pompeii look at bodies in glass cases. (Meg had mentioned those, too. The pregnant woman, the little boy covering his face.) I saw five bodies all told. The first two cases early on, the skeletons visible where the plaster had cracked, the contortion — these were slaves. One with a thick belt around his waist. Probably his masters fled but left him chained up. I felt horrified, voyeuristic. These were people.
The last three skeletons were in a locked warehouse – the pregnant woman, the boy crouched in fear, and then the dog, poor contorted terrified thing. Still chained up. “Poor thing” I said, and Stefano grumbled everybody says that about the dog, not about the human beings. As we left the grounds I said, “maybe because with the people it’s just too close, the horror is too close, we don’t know what to say.”
Back in my hotel room, I paged through the WHERE magazine. Pompeii is of course a major attraction of the Naples area, and right there, top of the page, there’s that fresco reproduced, there’s that poor prostitute again, the one with the blue bandeau, taken from behind by a customer again. Bumholed for all eternity. What a humiliating immortality.
(For reasons which by now should be obvious, I won’t be illustrating this blog with any menu frescoes from the brothel. Though the truly curious can certainly find them with the click of a mouse.)
