We found porn at Pompeii. In touring the famous ruined city, our guide brought us to an actual ancient brothel. Up on the walls, frescoes still remain depicting various couples engaging in sexual acts. Surprising and explicit sexual acts. My wife and I were a bit astonished. And impressed. Also, we discovered a rather large penis carved into the stone ground around the corner from the brothel, a phallic arrow traffic sign pointing the way to the house of pleasure. Then later we found yet another penis carving on a wall on the other side of the city. The tour guide assured the group that these pagan perversions were actually considered good luck charms in antiquity. I always figured those things brought trouble, not good fortune.

Our peculiar guide spent an inordinate amount of time with us inside the brothel. She stood just below a certain naughty fresco depicting two very agile and flexible lovers, entwined in bed, and told us stories of life that exhaled throughout these rooms, these corridors, these cobbled roads. My mind began to wander away, back to 79 CE when Vesuvius, the monolithic monster towering just beyond Pompeii, erupted and twenty feet of ash and pumice descended upon the inhabitants. It’s conceivable that there could have been patrons right here, engaged in some Roman hanky-panky, suffocated by the volcanic gas, right where I now stood. Cast and frozen by the tephra, preserved for centuries. A cheeky discovery awaiting the unsuspecting archeologists down the line. I felt the awkwardness resonate across time.

There is a story there for someone to tell. Engorged in great ecstasy, in the shadow of angry Vesuvius, within the bordello walls. Convenient lovers end up locked in death eternal. In the midst of our life we are in death. Etcetera. It’s the story the Russian artist Karl Brullov told in his painting The Last Day of Pompeii (1833). Lost in their decadence, these are the brothel patrons emptying into the roads of Pompeii, as the sky bleeds red, turns to black, and columns fall and the breath of Vesuvius swallows all. It reminds me of the story Malcolm Lowry told in his novel, Under the Volcano. A book about a broken man’s fight against and eventual succumbing to the forces of this world designed to destroy him. It’s inevitable. No amount of stone penises will protect you. Nothing good will come from living under a volcano. I mean, isn’t that obvious? Now we take guided tours and construct stories amidst the arrogance and defiance of the ancient people of Pompeii.

After the excursion across story and time, my wife and I wandered around an open-air market. Meandering from table to table, sweating beneath the hot honeymoon sun and Vesuvius out in the distance. An over-sized and ornate ring seized my wife’s attention. Silver and studded with elegant stones and colors. It leapt out from the surrounding trinkets and ornaments, and I could see that she had already cemented her mind. This ring would be hers.

“Oh you like?” an ancient voice sopping with the beautiful song that only comes from an Italian trying to speaking English. “Very beautiful!”

It was then we noticed the beyond-elderly woman who tended to the table of jewelry. Short hair of silver crowned her rotund face, which was the color of the red clay that once formed the tiles of all the roofs of Pompeii. She had spotted leather skin that bunched into crinkles and furrows at her thick wrists. She was clad entirely in Sothern Italian black. The cloth of the Mezzogiorno. She was both tiny and massive, magically simultaneously. She could not have been five feet tall. She could have been more than twice that around. I don’t know. Squat, like the broken columns dotting Pompeii. She might have existed on this spot, behind this table, for epoch upon epoch, like the statues we just saw guarding the remnants of temples. Her left eye suffered a cataract and when she smiled only the right side of her face tugged at her mouth. Her coarse laughter was the sound of time being crushed beneath the will of God. My wife and I later, with much love, referred to this woman as our Strega Nonna, our grandmother witch. Strega Nonna, from that story I read back in my childhood.

It became clear immediately that our Strega Nonna had almost used up her sum total of English. My wife speaks no Italian, and I know only a fraction more than the bad words I overheard my family use when I was a young. Language was not going to stop my wife from getting this ring, and for a bargain. And so the negotiation in fractured language commenced.

“Quanta?” I might have asked.

“Quaranta euro,” Strega Nonna answered.

“What did she say? How much?” My wife asked me. Her eyes increasing to match the sight and size of the ring.

“40 euros. I think.”

My wife will never pay the first price asked. She is an expert negotiator. I always pay the first price asked. I am a terrible negotiator. My wife abandoned translation and spoke directly to Strega Nonna. She spoke in California English. She spoke of the ring’s beauty. She spoke of our wedding day. She spoke of our honeymoon in Italy and our home in Los Angeles. She spoke of a thousand other things. Strega Nonna sang in Neapolitan Italian. She sang of her piccolo jewelry stand. She sang of rings, and necklaces, and altri gioielli. She sang of her family that came from the clay and left in the clay. She sang for a thousand years.

My wife and Strega Nonna concluded their spellbinding colloquy with laughter and embraces. My wife’s arms tight around Strega Nonna’s stout shoulders. Strega Nonna’s dappled callous hands around my wife’s back. That is what my wife does. Within minutes of meeting her you are swiftly swept up and away. Across the ocean of language, for a true bond requires no translation.

“You, you are Italian!” Strega Nonna declared in fractured English.

My wife laughed and said, pointing to me, “Nope, he’s the Italian!” She gave Strega Nonna the newly agreed upon 20 euros and Strega Nonna called me closer to her with a hook of time-worn and weathered finger. She whispered a story to me. My wife had lived right here, in Pompeii, two thousand years ago. That she was the most beautiful woman in the whole city. The noble men all lined up at her feet. That even Venus was jealous of her, and that is why she commanded Vulcan, the god of fire, to ignite Vesuvius. To destroy the city. To bury it like treasure.

She put a small card in my hand. “For you. For you, Italian. For good luck.” It was a holy card. On the front, a painting of the Madonna, cradling and infant Jesus, with two other people kneeling before her. On the back it reads: Nostra Signorina del Rosario di Pompeii, Ovunque Proteggimi. Protect me always. I keep the card in my wallet for good luck. Better than a stone penis. And although I am sure that Strega Nonna has given a holy card to every tourist customer she has brokered with for a century, this is not the story that I want to tell.
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Daniel Buccieri has taught history in the Los Angeles Unified School District for eleven years. He is a National Board Certified Teacher, a member of the UCLA Writing Project Advisory Board, and a 2011-2012 LAUSD Teacher of the Year. Buccieri graduated from the University of California, Riverside with a Bachelor’s degree in history and from the California State University, Dominguez Hills with a Master’s degree in education. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, his newborn son, and his cat. Buccieri’s writing has been published in the Still Points Arts Quarterly and in the UCLA Writing Project Anthology.