One morning while “footing,” as the Italians called it, I thought I was experiencing a hallucination: Rounding an upgrade and coming down upon a stretch that opened to a vast field bordered by a corridor of umbrella pines, before me lay encamped Garibaldi’s army, that is, about two hundred movie extras dressed in period costume and shakos, lolling about the misty greens, with muskets in hand, for a Franco Nero production! On yet another morning, on my way back to the academy from an all-night party, I saw Aguirre himself — Klaus Kinski, standing in front of the Pantheon in an open raincoat whose fabric he began flapping like a bird’s wings, as he turned in circles, obviously stoned out of his mind, in a glory over the gilded sunlight passing like honey over the square.
Though I liked to keep to myself, I loved going on what amounted to the guided tours — or “walks”—that the resident classicist in charge, Russell Scott, who somehow always reminded me of Stan Laurel, conducted to key spots in Rome; and when the academy made an autumn field trip to archeological sites along the Amalfi coast and below — from the baths of Baie to Paestum — I loved every moment of it and found Italy never less than breathtaking, even on the bleakest days.
During that trip, I became quite friendly with our bus driver, and in the evenings, while most of the fellows stayed at the hotel, he, an older man, and I would find the local social club (usually in a tavern) and play the Italian card game of scopas—I forget how it worked now, but playing it well depended on keeping track of numbers, particularly combinations involving the number seven, and since I was good at basic math, I tended to win every time, confounding him. He was another one of those salt-of-the-earth Italians with whom I felt perfectly at ease, and in the small towns we visited, I found myself, without quite knowing why, drawn to the paesani and their way of life — of course, now I realize that in them I saw something of my campesino father.
On that occasion, I roomed with Professor Scott, who told me that I had a propensity for talking in my sleep on those nights, in a jumble of Italian, Spanish, English, and (apparently) some Portuguese (so he said), some other side of me, expressing an almost confident feel for languages, coming out. (On those same evenings, I also got into the habit of composing little quasi-poetic bits, mostly easy rhymes about my day’s observations: One that I remember, about a mythological painting in the Naples museum, went: “Aphrodite in her nightie feeding Aries tasty berries.”)
And breathing all that fresh myth-ridden air scrambled my brains as well. In one of those towns by the southern coast, I had another of my ecstatic moments, for going out to look at the stars one evening, I got caught up by the moonlight’s play upon the horizon and imagined (or saw how people could imagine) the likes of a towering Neptune rising out from under the shadows that went mysteriously swirling under the surface of the restlessly churning “wine-dark” sea. At an academy dig in Tuscany, an Etruscan-Roman-Lombard site known as Cosa, I watched a white mare and a stallion frolicking in a meadow, the late morning light doing strange things to their forms, and saw how easily some imaginative ancient could have taken them from a distance to be centaurs. At the edge of a Bronze Age Garden of Eden called Filotosa, in Sardinia, I saw a field of olive trees and under each a netting of white upon the ground, on which, among the olives that dropped, the peasants, their caps pulled down over their brows, slept as peacefully as if they had always been part of a timeless dream, that spell following me everywhere.
Back in Rome, I spent many a morning in the forum, hanging around classicists and developing an interest in archeology, so much so that in the coming years, for some six seasons, I’d devote my summers to digging out trenches and hauling wheelbarrows of fangi e sassi by the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, in the area sacra, an ongoing excavation supervised by the aforementioned Russell Scott. (If you don’t think a place can be haunted, then I suggest you go prowling through the Roman forum at six thirty in the morning, when the very upturned stone and marble columns seem to ooze spirits — mists literally rising from the corners of long-abandoned villas (at least they would for me). In fact, once the word got out that this Hijuelos was a soft touch when it came to digs, I moonlighted on several others, up in Cosa and in Campania to the south. I was so smitten by the notion of seeing the ancient world that I decided to visit Egypt in the winter. I was in Cairo when the army went into revolt and burned down several Giza hotels, among them one not far from where I had stayed. Later, I made it up the Nile to the island temple of Philae where Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, was said to have drowned himself; and although I fell deathly sick from a stomach malady along the way, by my journey’s end, with Karnak and Abu Simbel and other such marvels behind me, I felt, archeologically speaking, gloriously fulfilled.
And yet, at the same time, throughout those touristic travels, as I went jogging along the dusty palm-lined roads by the Nile in the early mornings, or crawled up a narrow shaft into the antechamber of the Great Pyramid, I had a nagging premonition that something sad had taken place back home, a strange and inexplicable feeling that accompanied me back to Rome. And this, unfortunately, came true. On the evening of my return, I walked up a hill toward the Academy’s back gate, where I bumped into one of my favorite fellows, Josefina, a Sardinian princess, who happened to be a classicist. After we had chatted a bit I made my way through the gardens and the villa complex itself. In my room, I sat down on my bed, when, wouldn’t you know it, the telephone rang. It was about ten thirty on a Sunday night, the world so still. One of my old neighborhood friends was calling me from New York.
“I got something bad to tell you,” he said. “Tommy Muller-Thym’s dead.”
“Oh, man — what happened?”
“Well, you know he had some bad stuff going on with his liver, that’s all,” he told me. “Went out alone and blind in a house upstate.”
The details of our reminiscences about him — as a gifted, funny, and super-bright dude who should have had a good life — aside, the loss of him killed both of us, but what could one conclude except that some things “just bees that way,” as my friend put it.
It took me a long time to get over that; and, though I knew he was gone, I brought Tommy’s jive spirit with me, wherever I went. That next summer, when I traveled all across Turkey visiting archeological sites, the most splendid of which, if one should care to know, were that of mystical Efes, where Saint Paul preached in the amphitheater; Sardis, with its collapsed temple to Saturn; the ruins of Pergamum; and, to the east, Nemrut Dag, the fantastically strange mountain tomb of one of Alexander the Great’s descendants, Antiochus I, whose summit — forgive the tourist-guide speak — afforded one an incomparable view of the rolling steppes of Asia, Tommy came along with me. Then, of course, with time, his presence, as with so many memories, faded — though I am glad that he is with me again, as I write these lines down now.
Okay, so you must be wondering what all of the above has to do with the fact that, at the same time, squeezed out here and there, I had been working on my novel about Cesar Castillo, who, as it turned out, had a brother named Nestor; well, the answer is this: absolutely nothing, except in the sense that such travels and interests set free another part of my heart and soul, which, until then, had been almost entirely bottled up. And that, in a phrase, helped me with the writing of it.