Encounters with Venus

The Sibillini mountains are south of Montemonaco, a limestone village in the center of Italy. Little green hill-swarms make the valley jagged. Poppies dot the grass like flecks of blood. Wildcats and vipers slip through them. Owls loom overhead with peregrines and eagles. Up on a peak, where clouds kiss the ground, lies the Grotta della Sibilla—Sibyl’s Cave—a would-be cavemouth suffocating in a collapsed mound of white bedrock. Six centuries back, the cavern opened into blackness. It was then that the writer Antoine de la Sale came to Montemonaco. He had heard strange stories of the mountain since his youth. He talked to the villagers—asked them what they knew. They led him to a priest, Don Anton Fumato, who once traveled miles deep into the Grotta. One man went deeper, said Don Fumato. A German knight of unknown name whose tragedy began with wanderlust.

If only we could be innocent and not naive. At five, I was living with my grandmother. Her home was my nook of Eden. She cooked and hummed and tended her flowers. We played checkers on the porch in the summer breeze as soft rock and reggae flooded from the radio. She tossed breadcrumbs on the steps and filled up a birdbath so the chickadees would land to eat and wash and preen and fly off in song. My cousins would come. We made stories with toys in the bedroom and chewed salted tomato that grandma sliced up. Grandma watched the nightly news where bad things happened that I didn’t understand. She told us don’t trust strangers and stay in the house.

The descent into the cave, said Don Fumato, began with a narrow corridor which widened at the length of an arrow shot. From there two men could walk side by side. Three miles deep, a harsh gale blew from below and then disappeared after just thirty yards. A footwide bridge hung above a black trench where a torrent thundered. With every step the bridge widened, and the noise of the current faded. On the other side, the path was level and wide. Then came a small square before a metal door and two stone dragons with angry eyes. The metal beat rhythmically like a heart. The priest went no further. But the knight passed through.

Grandma’s walls were a montage—pictures of family I never met, of family I had, of her in her youth, of angels, of Jesus, of popes, and of me. Grandma was a Catholic who never missed church and the only book I ever saw her read was the Bible. She read it every night. I didn’t like church, but I knew well enough not to show it. One Sunday morning I woke up with a fever. Grandma was in her skirt suit, perfumed with her gold on, and ready to go. But I was sick. St. Gregory’s Parish was two blocks away, and mass only lasted an hour. So she fed me a spoonful of cherry Tylenol and tucked me into an itchy blanket and said, “Grandma loves you baby,” and went off.

Through the metal door the knight came to a crystal gate. “Who are you?” a voice asked. The knight replied. The gate opened. Sublime instruments played and nymphs greeted him and changed him into rich clothes. They guided him through a sequence of evermore splendid chambers and gardens, where men and women drank and laughed and embraced and the knight saw it all and was in awe. Finally they came to Queen Sibyl herself, Venus-incarnate, seated on a throne. She welcomed the knight warmly in his native language. He expressed his admiration. She told him to stay, that he could have anything he desired, that nothing here would die until the end of the world.

“You can leave in nine days, or thirty, or three hundred and thirty. But stay beyond that, and you must stay forever.”

I had never been alone in a house. Rising out of bed, I walked through the kitchen to the mouth of the front hall, and stood at the threshold. Light came in through the half-moon glass in the outer door. On the right wall was a collage of images enshrined in rococo moldings. I watched them from the side, watched the light from the door reflect off their glazing, making the wall hangings into frames of liquid fire. I stepped forward, scanning as I passed—a painting of a seaside shanty, my first school photo, the portrait of the naked lady. The portrait of the naked lady. I paused. I’d seen it before, of course, many times. My mother said my uncle drew it. It was a pencil rendering of a woman with waves of tossed up hair and full lips, with her right hand on her breast and her left over her groin, as if in shame—but her eyes were vacant and her fingers were slack and the curve of her mouth and the arch of her brow coalesced into an ambiguous mixture of intrigue and emptiness. Years later I learned this was a rework of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. I watched her and I watched for a while and I worried that my grandma would catch me in the act, but I lingered there anyway.

Three hundred days in Sibyl’s Cave the knight enjoyed unending bliss. The air was temperate and he had what he wanted and hours passed like minutes and he felt no pain. But there was a bruise in the fruit. Every Friday at midnight, each lady rose from her companion and went to the queen and they locked themselves in chambers and remained until Saturday in the forms of snakes and scorpions and beasts, then returned more beautiful than they had ever been. This troubled the knight. “Surely this is the devil’s place,” he thought to himself, “and I am living in horrible sin.” From then on all he could think of was leaving. Days passed like weeks. The pleasures rang hollow. On the three hundred and thirtieth day he said goodbye and was gone and the paradise’s inhabitants mourned him.

I was five years old and staring at the portrait. Outside the wind made the chimes sing and a cloud blocked the sun and the light turned pale so the photos on the wall were all shadowed. I moved back through the hallway, through the silence of the empty home, through the kitchen, and into the bedroom. I crawled into the bed, under the itchy blanket and sat there, staring into nothing and waiting for grandma to be back. I felt no guilt, no shame, no more fear of being caught. Whatever had passed between the lady and me had no name—not then, not at five. But I felt I carried something now, and that walking through that hallway would never feel the same.

Our knight went straight to Rome, eager to repent. He spoke to a priest, who said his crimes were so vulgar that they could only be absolved by the pope himself. There in the Vatican, the knight got his audience with Urban VII. The pope did not absolve him. He charged the German with an offense to God and condemned him to damnation. Raising his papal staff to the sky he said, “Until the day this dry stick blooms, your sins will never be forgiven.” The knight, distraught, returned to Montemonaco, returned to the Grotta, to the arms of Queen Sibyl like a long absent lover. Three days later, flowers blossomed from the pope’s staff. Stricken with remorse, he sent out his messengers to find the knight. But it was too late. He was already lost—trapped in the languor of that underworld paradise until the day of final judgment.