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XII. BRIGANDS, SORCERERS, AND AVERNUS
The moment passes, and Amalthea slows, turning corners in a village built of huge blocks of stone bleached by centuries in the sun. The place appears to have no name, unless it is that which appears on the sign above the pharmacy: Foro di Nemi. You wonder if it is primordial, like the structures of the Cyclades, built by giants. Perhaps it is from a primordial time when the sun was a female god, surviving in modern shreds like the Shinto creator goddess Amaterasu, or the feminine gender of die Sonne, the sun, in modern German. In the town square, high up overlooking the blue-black crater lake in its green rim. One or two white, pillowy cumulus clouds drift through a powder blue sky. In the distance, the Alban Hills loom tight on the horizon. Smaller looking clouds drift pinkish in the late sunlight, casting shadows that glide like underwater fish over the far slopes.
In the tiny square, among red umbrellas and wooden tables, an old crone dressed in black stands leaning her chin in a forked walking stick, looking toward you. This is the old way of looking, by which the initiates can, at crosswalks by moonlight, see troops of ghosts passing.
"Strega," Amalthea observes dispassionately, and you notice she does not do what almost any other Italian would do instinctively. She does not cross herself or avert her eyes. She does not pause to stare, for she handles the car with sure, rapid motions. She does cast a frank, unafraid look on the old witch, who might be carved from wood, so little does she move. "She is only looking, not casting the malocchio, the evil eye."
"The old ways," Darwin says. "It’s the old religion, la vecchia religione. Are you comfortable?" he asks you.
You are belatedly dealing with the chill that races up and down your spine, and you suddenly have dry mouth, but you manage to shrug as if nothing troubled you. "I’m fine," you croak as the car abruptly downshifts with a whine of its engine and plunges left and right down a steeply descending gravel switchback. The road is reinforced with a low wall of bluish paving stones, and you imagine that trees will stop your plunge if the car were to leave the road heading toward the rippling waters far below. You notice birds flying in slow, sure motions so that their shadows flow over the tiny wind-waves glittering in the sun. You see how dark the water instantly becomes, inches below the surface, and you can imagine how cold it must be to swim in it.
The chill in the thick woods strokes your neck with fingers of wind. Your ears pop and your eyes seek adjustment, as mud-tinged olive blotches drift through your field of vision. You smell pines, loam, asphalt. You see an elderly shepherd walking along the roadside, with a stick in hand and an old black dog by his side. He wears a stained canvas bag over one shoulder, and carries a birding shotgun upside down over one shoulder. Ahead and behind are a dozen or more fat sheep with curly fleece the color of dark butter. The shepherd glances over his shoulder—a reddish, Etruscan face, with a smile that could be from a Veii tomb chamber—and you almost feel a need to cross yourself.
"Streghe," Amalthea says.
"You look pale," Darwin says, while he himself looks jaundiced, almost brown. He grits his teeth at some internal pain, and holds the seat-back with trembling hands as he seeks a more comfortable position. Still he has the strength and wit to tease you. "If you are already unnerved, we should go no further."
"Don’t be silly." You blurt out before you can stop yourself, in a voice you know is not your own: "I’ll be dragging you before long."
"Feet first?" Darwin is nonplused, while you are shocked.
"Streghe," Amalthea repeats more emphatically, with a humorless laugh. "That man we passed is a male witch, and a powerful one."
You wonder why you said what you did, and hold a hand over your mouth.
"The man we just passed. He spoke through you," Amalthea says. "That sort of thing happens a lot around here. He was mad at us for making his sheep nervous. He knew exactly how to rile at least one of us. Don’t worry, he was just playing."
Darwin added: "Pay it no mind. It’s just a playful thing, like the wind. The less you pay attention, the less it will exploit your fear."
"Children," Amalthea says, shrugging. You aren’t sure what she means, but the feeling of having someone in your head with you passes as the car briefly flits through a bright meadow on its narrow roadway, before plunging into ever blacker shadows. It seems that the woods here are alive, breathing with great green lungs, impatiently sucking in the dark air of night. By contrast, sunlight glows pink and white on the fat white birds beating heavy wings across the lake. Seeing the birds, Amalthea adds: "Malandanti."
"We’ll watch for them," Darwin says, folding his hands in his lap with patience and resignation. "She thinks they are evil doers who go forth in bird form. You think she is crazy?" He grins.
You shake your head, determined not to be rattled by this irrational chatter. "Maybe they think we are malandanti. Bad spirits, as opposed to benandanti, good spirits (mal-, ‘bad’ or ben-, ‘good’ + andanti, ‘those who walk’). Maybe they are crazier than we are. Anything is possible. You asked me to keep an open mind, and I wish to respect your request. I only ask that you don’t abuse my patience."
"Forgive me," he says, lowering his head a second. "I forget that you are here because I chose you, and I believe I chose well."
Amalthea chimes in: "It’s all what you make of it, mostly. Things go bump in the night, but that’s no reason to think it’s anything more than the wind."
"The old gods are still alive here," Darwin says looking out over sunlit boulders amid trees whose opposite side is black with moss and darkness as night emerges from its slumber, and the day tiredly settles itself down to sleep. "It is comforting in so many ways, if you understand what I mean."
"It’s the old way of looking at things, before men painted their own faces on those of gods, rather than the other way around," Amalthea says as she shifts on sharp corner. Already you see the destination: a house of sharp angles and high, narrow black windows, situated in a permanent canyon of shadow by the lake’s winking waves. As inevitably as the house approaches along the ancient road—and you do see basalt pavers peering out through thinly applied asphalt that has melted many thousand times in the summer heat and congealed once again under a dusty skin—just so inevitably you give yourself to what is to come.
Darwin enumerates on the fingers of one hand, ticking off with a long finger of his other hand: "The old deities, their names are here in the air. Aplu, for Apollo. Nortia, or Fortuna. Losna, for Luna (the Greek Diana). Faflon or Fuflun, for Bacchus. Fanio, or Faunus. Tuscan names, Italian names, Latin names, Greek names, all meaning roughly the same thing. Every one of the old spirits is still here, though the city people tried to drive them into extinction and kill their followers." By city people you know he means the ancient cults that came to Imperial Rome on the highways and ship routes of commerce— Christians, Mithraists, Isis worshippers, Mani cultists from Persia, Gnostics in all their variety from Greece, Jews from Judea. By followers you know he means the pagani, the country folk.
How real this all seems, compared to jokes you and your classmates made in long ago Latin classes. You had no awe of the dark forces earlier Christians dreaded as Rome eclipsed into the Middle Ages, bathed in the sulfurs and magic of alchemist alembics under various constellations and moon phases. You could not imagine the hysteria that led to burning of witches—silly old ideas during those long afternoon exercises with amo, amas, amat. You were amused by Renaissance renderings (racy, but sanitized) of effeminate looking nude men frolicking in a Sabine raid that looks more like the sleazy orgies of a Heliogabalus than the rough genocide perpetrated by escaped slaves with scarred faces, flinty eyes, and iron hands—desperate escaped slaves, criminals, wanted men, price on their heads, stop at nothing, land-locked pirates, who ended up fathering not only bastards by their stolen women, but fathered history’s greatest empire. And even they were younger than the old religion whose numina dwelt in the groves, the roadsides, the crossings, the isolated farmhouse, the unmarked grave of a murder victim crying out for peace and justice.
Amalthea pulls into a clean new concrete driveway, stops the car, and jerks the brake up with a loud rasping noise. "We have just enough time," she says.
You look at the house, remembering that cold place in the Roman street where the old woman watched from above, but Darwin prods you on the arm. He is already half out of the car. "Come along, we don’t have much time. We won’t be going into the house."
It all goes so quickly now. In the blink of an eye, it seems, the center of your gravity shifts.
A huge shepherd dog with long shaggy black hair jumps around behind a steel fence, barking noisily back and forth to warn some unseen someone. You are reminded of the wild wolf that danced around the entrance to hell as Dante walked forth in the confusion of the dark period in his life, to meet Virgil and begin the journey that people still read about today, though it was recorded in that foreign world of medieval Siena with its Guelfs and Ghibellines. Then again, don’t you have your progressive and backward parties today? Does anything change?
The three of you walk down a path into the woods, obliquely away from the water and the house. There is no real path, just the faintest shimmering trail of moonlight on dark pine needles and desiccated leaves. Overhead, the tree crowns are pitch dark like the far reaches of outer space, and twinkling with fireflies, or are they the myriad tiny stars in whose whirling arms fate spells out the fortunes of all living creatures? All around you are the tall tree trunks like pillars from a moonlit temple. Ahead of you, darkness beckons as complete as if you were entering a cave, like that where Virgil took Dante by the hand, or that in which the Sibyl led Aeneas into the Orphic underworld.
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