"My name is Nario. You are Mr. Armstead?"
"Yes. I was expecting my uncle."
"He could not come. I am his boy."
Yes, I'll just bet you are, I thought. But then he clarified, if not enough to make a difference to me.
"I am his houseboy. Welcome to Naples, Mr. Armstead."
"Call me Harry, Please. Is it far from here to Positano?"
"No, not too far. The worst part will be getting through the airport traffic. Then it is a very pleasant ride, a scenic ride down the Amalfi coast. Your uncle has picked a very beautiful spot to live in."
And a very beautiful houseboy, I thought. But then I knew he would. Some things never change. I certainly didn't think Uncle Carl would change for anyone. He always expected the world to change for him. Not in this respect, of course—him being here in Italy rather than back in England with the rest of the family—well, most of the rest of the family. That's what I had been sent here to do. I had come to try to get Gordon to come home.
Nario was certainly a cute little trick. Small and deeply tanned—the olive Mediterranean complexion. Curly black hair, a beautiful androgynous face, with a winsome smile. His mincing steps as he preceded me to the baggage claim gave him away. Just like my uncle liked them. Didn't do a thing for me, though. Better here than in England, of course. We'd been well through that. But this was one of the reasons why I was here. I was charged to tell Carl he could come home now—if he had given up the ways that had gotten him exiled. Seeing who he'd hired as a houseboy, though, made me think that part of my mission was a lost cause.
I wondered if Nario too was some important person's favorite son—someone who could dismember Carl at will if he found out what was happening to his precious child. Not that Carl picked them underage, mind you. He just went for the danger of a powerful backlash.
I was on edge and disgruntled. I hadn't told anyone the whole of why I was here. I had only told Uncle Carl that the family wanted me to talk to him—and then only through telegrams. He had said that my plane would be met. He didn't say he wasn't meeting it, though.
As we left the airport, I briefly had the fearful thought that Uncle Carl wasn't even at his exile villa in Positano. He flitted all over the world. He was the portrait photographer of choice for the rich, famous, royal, and, when he needed the money, the want-to-bes. He could go anywhere but England. And, if our circle of friends could be trusted to have their collective ears to the ground, he was even wanted back in England. Despite everything. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the well-heeled in London had greased the skids to just make his trouble go away so that he could return.
And return he could, my family had decided. And it was one of the two legs of the mission I'd been sent here to accomplish. But whereas I hadn't defined these to Carl, I also hadn't told my family all of the reasons I was willing to be the messenger.
If they knew what I knew—indeed, all that Uncle Carl knew—they wouldn't have sent me. Not in a million years.
The drive in the Fiat down the coast of Italy from Naples did quite a bit to assuage my nervousness and pique. And when we crossed the mountains surrounding the seaside town of Positano, west along the rugged coast from Salerno, and descended into the semicircle of old dwellings holding onto the mountainside for dear life, I was completely captivated.
I could understand why Uncle Carl had chosen this escape hatch. And I could understand why he might not want to leave here to return to England.
The Fiat wound its way down a few levels through narrow streets and hair-pin curves until we came to a white stuccoed villa wedged between two ochre ones. It appeared to be mainly only one story, with a large, fully windowed room at one side on the top, opening out onto an open veranda, with a bougainvillea-covered loggia as a buffer between the room and the open air.
This would be a perfect art studio for painting, I thought. And then the dread hit me that perhaps it was. There was a semicircular drive tucked into the narrow stretch of front courtyard between the front of the villa and the cobblestoned road. The courtyard was ringed by a high stuccoed wall, with just an opening at one end into the vehicle turnaround, an identical one at the other end for the vehicle exit, and an iron-gated pedestrian entrance between.
Nario pulled into the turnabout and moved all the way around so that the nose of the car almost spilled out onto the roadway again.
Uncle Carl was at the door, beaming at me and rubbing his hands. He'd hardly aged in the four years since I'd last seen him. Still looking disingenuously benign and almost grandfatherly—he was my father's older brother. A happy smile on his face. He may have put on a bit of weight, but he always had been the stalwart, solid-body type. I knew that he was deceptively strong and that most of what looked like the beginnings of fat was actually muscle. I trusted that he still took his long morning walks and had a weight room tucked around the villa somewhere. Although where it might be was a mystery to me. The villa didn't look very large.
When he ushered me into the main room, however, while Nario struggled getting my luggage out of the boot of the car and carrying it in, I begin to learn that the exterior presentation of the villa was deceiving.
We were on only one of five floors of the villa, he told me, as I walked straight to the large windows at the back of the room and marveled at the panoramic sight down the slope of the town, to the harbor below, and out into the Golfo di Salerno. This view alone was worth the trip.
This floor was largely one room, with a square section in the front corner for the kitchen. On the town side of that room was the dining L. To my right was a spiral staircase leading up and down. The room was richly appointed with old English furniture and oriental rugs purloined from the family estates in England. In contrast to this, however, was the artwork covering the three walls not covered with glass and overlooking the harbor.
All of the celebrities Uncle Carl had photographed over the years—indeed, was still photographing—and the blown up art photos on his walls were of meltingly beautiful and androgynous youths—in the nude. The photographs were provocative and just this side of pornographic—an edge that I had known Uncle Carl to cross but, in this, at least, he had shown a bit of discretion in his life. I was to find that on the next level down, Carl's photographic studio, and the one below it, housing four bedrooms and two baths, he had not held back on the photographs.
