It was wondering about when and why attitudes had changed—and the quest for a solution—that had brought me to the land of the Roman emperors. There was a time when relations between older and younger men—far younger than I was interested in—were considered the norm. In Greek and Roman times. Now, in today's world, it appeared that it wasn't men having relationships with men that was condemned as much as the age span involved. The homophobia came centuries later. I had had eighteen-year-old male lovers both in New York and London—I was thirty-nine, knocking on middle age—and I was derived for taking lovers less than half my age to the point that I was seeking somewhere else to live again. I was a professional writer; I could live most anywhere and continue my work. Perhaps in Italy, the land of the Roman emperors . . .
I had been at the doors of the Naples National Archeological Museum when they opened that Saturday morning just to be able to go stand in front of the sculpture they have there of Antinous, the young lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian, for some minutes—to see a young men loved by an Emperor so much that he made him a god. Just the thought of being in the area where the young man who was anointed by many as the god of homosexuality and the love of a man for him met his emperor lover aroused me to a state of ultrasensuality.
The way Antinous had been rendered in sculpture helped me see why Hadrian worshipped him. Hadrian himself had been loved and bedded by the Emperor Trajan when he was a young man. There was a time in the Greek and Roman world when this was considered normal and was not remarked—certainly was not condemned and persecuted. In truth, the emperor Claudius had been mocked in his time for not having a young male lover. Males of the upper classes were mentored and bedded by older, important men before they became men themselves. Although Antinous, as depicted, was a handsome young man, there were no answers in his marble visage for my quandary. What was wrong in an older man loving and making love to him?
From the museum I had taken a boat out to the Isle of Capri in the Bay of Naples and gone to the villa of the emperor Tiberius, the Villa Jovis, and sat in the ruins and considered his more lurid relationships with young men. He had taken it to extremes, but he had made it the fashion—or at least tolerated—in his time. I wasn't interested in the extremes Tiberius went to. I just wanted to make love to a small, supple, narrow-hipped, willing eighteen-year-old youth. I wanted to hold him close in my embrace, smaller and more delicate than I was, and watch the expression on his face as a big-cocked older man entered him and the two became one. I wanted him when he still had some innocence and a yielding, young body.
I don't know why I had come to Italy and gone on a pilgrimage of men who had loved young men and not been persecuted for doing so. But I did. I had to go somewhere; I couldn't live in the States or England anymore. I was too well known there and too old. Pursuing men half my age invited derision and detraction from what I wrote. Returning to Naples from Capri, rather than spending the night there as I planned, I got in my rental car and drove further south, down the Tyrrhenian Sea coast of Italy on the E45, down to Salerno and then on a road hugging the coast closer until I got hungry. It was early afternoon and it was getting hot in the unconditioned air of the rental car interior. I turned off the highway onto a secondary road and drove to the coast, looking for a restaurant.
I arrived in a small, old harbor town, stepping down steep hillsides on three sides into a beautiful little harbor cove, with idle fishing boats bobbing lazily on the northern side tied up to narrow wooden piers and a sandy beach running around the southern curve of the cove. It was a Saturday, and the commercial activity in the village was scarce and languid. I'm sure that in centuries past the fishermen went out every day to catch their fish, but those days were gone. The Mediterranean had become so overfished that commercial fishing no longer was permitted on the weekends. Now the fishermen took naps on Saturday and Sunday, and more power to them. At that point of the day I would welcome a nap as well. It would be nice to have someone to nap with, of course.
All of the houses were either ocher painted or white washed, with red tile roofs. Very picturesque. I had seen no sign telling me what the name of the town was, and the buildings tumbling down the hillside to the water were set so close together, separated by cobblestone paths, that I had to park the car at the top of the hill and walk down. Surely there would be restaurants down in the harbor, I thought.
There
were
a couple of restaurants there and I picked one with an outside terrace facing the water from where I could watch the activity among the fishing boats, as bare-chested men cleaned them, as well as a group of young men playing a game of soccer on the beach on the southern side of the cove. I was close enough to see the forms and faces of the beautiful older teenage youths and young men and share their joy at the play. They played in just shorts and sneakers, their sleek, beautiful bodies moving like a troupe of synchronized dancers. One older teenager, in particular, a beautiful, sultry, dark-haired young man of perfect form, looked up at me occasionally and smiled shyly. My body betrayed its interest in him.
I took a long time at my lunch, not wishing to move on as long as there were so many beautiful young men moving so gracefully on the sand. I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly four in the afternoon. I had no idea where I was driving from here. The Isle of Capri had been my last programmed stop before driving on down the peninsula and switching to the other coast, to Brindisi, where I had read there were other villas where Roman emperors had kept, trained, and played with their young male lovers.
I decided that this was as good a place to stop for the night as any other. I had passed a small hotel on the upper slopes of the town on my way down the narrow and steep cobblestone pathway to the harbor from where I'd parked the car. I stopped at the hotel on the way back up to the car park. Yes, they had a nice room, with a balcony, overlooking the harbor, the black-clad wizened old woman at the reception desk said. It had its own bath too, she added, which, considering the pride with which she said it, made me think that private bathrooms in hotels along the coast in villages tucked away like this weren't necessarily the norm. I felt lucky I'd found such a room available for the night.
After viewing the room, clucking to the old lady about how nice it was, and paying for the night, I climbed back up to the rental car, made sure it was parked where it wouldn't inconvenience anyone, and retrieved my small suitcase. I had left Rome that morning before dawn for the drive down the coast, and the heavy, but delicious, fish meal had made me drowsy, so I stripped naked; laid down on the bed, with the French window to the balcony open to what little breeze there was coming up from the sea; languidly masturbated to the fantasy of dancing among the young soccer players on the beach with all of them gathering around me to watch me cover the one I was interested in. In my daydream I was rising and falling on him, watching the dreamy, yielding expression on his face at the taking, until I achieved a release both in the dream and in the hotel bed. Then I slept the contented sleep of the dead until after dark.
It was after nine when I left the hotel and went back down to the harbor, to the same restaurant, for dinner. Candles were set out on the terrace dining area and similar lights sparkled throughout the harbor village and cascaded down to reflect in the water of the cove. It was all very lovely.
I was surprised to find that the waiter was the beautiful young man I had seen playing soccer on the beach in the afternoon—the one I had smiled at and who had smiled back at me, frequently looking up to the terrace at me and, at least in my imagination, had been batting his long, dark eyelashes at me—the one I had fucked in my dreams while napping that afternoon. Perhaps he wasn't batting his eyelashes then, but he did now as he waited on my table. Nineteen-year-olds, which I gauged the waiter to be, were my fetish and my downfall. As I watched him move about the restaurant terrace, I hardened up again and fantasized laying him on top of one of the unoccupied restaurant tables.
A young man, possibly twenty or twenty-one, was sitting on a stool in the corner of the terrace, playing a guitar and softly singing what must be Italian love songs or lullabies. He too was smiling at me and batting his eyelashes. He too was a beautiful, sultry, dark-haired young man. I wondered if all of the men of this remote—almost hidden, at least for me—village were this beautiful. I saw no reason not to accept that they were. I felt the stirring inside me—the need.
The young waiter's name was Paulo, and he took every opportunity to speak with me, using his limited English, trying to improve his knowledge of the language, which was sufficient for the purpose. I encouraged any contact with him. We exchanged what little background information we could, given Paulo's limited English. I did manage to ascertain, as I had gauged and hoped, that Paulo was nineteen—just. I saw him go to the guitarist and overheard the word "American." It was clear that being an American was earning me some cachet with these young men. It wasn't long before the guitarist took a break. Rather than going into the interior of the restaurant, he came over to my table.
