at all. Riccardo would connect finds together and create a story. The story may or may not be true. What we can infer today may not be how people thought back then. For me, each artifact can have value in and of itself. Then I look for patterns. If I find enough artifacts of the same expression, of the same utility, I know it was in routine use. If I find a piece of technology, I know the level of progress of the civilization. There is a valid history of technology, although sometimes even that can be misleading.”
“Such as?” She brushed her hands together to loosen the clinging soil, then wiped them on her pants.
“Well, for instance, the indigenous Americans used rounded objects to grind corn and make pottery, yet they never invented the wheel for transport. Amazing.”
“Amazing indeed.” She nodded. “Which led to a number of misinterpretations of native uses of technology . . . Regardless of some faulty assumptions, though, wouldn’t you say that some histories are defensible?” In spite of the heat, the damp ground soaked through her khakis and chilled her.
“Defensible histories that are straightforward, linear, that use the pieces of knowledge necessary to achieve the next level of advancement, yes. But not quixotic histories that speculate on human motives and emotions. Too subjective for me.”
“Psychological profiles are important to anthropologists. Otherwise, we couldn’t reason out the stories of civilization, understand human motivation. Perhaps there’s a niche for me there.” She shifted from side to side to loosen her slacks from the grasping earth.
“The female brain is hardwired for such endeavors. I’m not.” Morgan was unaffected by the growing dampness. He was in his element.
“Let me see if I get this straight: I’m an unrealistic girl who goes around with her head in a cloud wearing rose-colored glasses.”
“Something like that.” He tipped his hat playfully.
She stood abruptly, brushed herself off, and climbed the ladder. “I’m walking back,” she called down from above. Should I even consider working with him? He insists on such unimaginative thinking.
“I had more to show you, Justine. Don’t be angry. I was just playing with you.” He climbed the ladder two steps at a time, walking rapidly after her, unable to catch up.
As she emerged from the tree canopy into the heat of the day, her scalp began to sweat. The walk back into town didn’t soothe her frustration with her father’s chauvinism. He was either dismissing her work or trying to get her goat. Testing her all the time. She knew he was kidding, but it got tiresome.
Justine opened her car trunk, threw in her jacket, changed out of her boots, grabbed her purse, and brushed the dried mud off her slacks. She headed toward the east side of Cerveteri and a gray stone castle that housed the Etruscan museum.
A small sign indicated the entry through a ground-floor archway underneath the ramparts. She handed three euros to a young woman in a glass booth and stepped inside. An incline led to the upper ramparts and wound into a parapet and eventually a turret with barred windows. Crevices from missing stones offered homes to dozens of pigeons.
In the darkened room, strategically placed lights beamed down on sarcophagi, pottery, tools, and delicate votive offerings behind glass walls. Light streamed in through the barred window onto ancient carved metal mirrors, one decorated with the Etruscan god Tinia, known in Greece as Zeus, holding a feather umbrella and touching the gown of a maiden wearing rose- and disc-shaped earrings and bracelets of gold filigree and granulated crystals. Long rows of perky ducks walked across brooches and fibula. Fingers of light caressed black Bucchero pottery scattered about, designed to serve both utilitarian and decorative function; amphora and drinking cups dedicated to the Etruscan god Fufluns; vases and funeral urns engraved with the names of men and women. Bronze tableware, bowls and pitchers, ladles and strainers. Halfway down the room she came upon a terra cotta sarcophagus that drew her attention with such intensity that chills moved up her bare arms. She stood mesmerized for several moments by the mystery of this scene of profound union. A man and a woman lounged in each other’s arms on stone pillows, legs extending the full length of a royal bed. He was naked above the waist; she wore a tunic and long braids. His right hand rested tenderly on her shoulder, the forefinger of his hand extended as though pointing toward something they were viewing together through peaceful, yet lively, almond eyes. His left palm remained open as though it had once held a treasured offering of his love. The intimacy of this poised couple makes me feel like an intruder in an ancient boudoir. Behind the sarcophagus were four framed drawings of the floor plan and sketches of the inside of the tomb in which the sarcophagus was found. This Sarcophagus of the Married Couple from the necropolis nearby had been dated to the second half of the sixth century BCE.
She turned around slowly, riveted by a growing consciousness of the story around her. She stared again at the images of men and women on the mirrors and black pottery, some etched with names for both partners, at amphora with dancing partners regarding each other without guile or modesty. She swirled, seeing the room with new lenses, her eyes the shutters of a fast-firing camera. Men and women were in conversation, touching, relaxing together, a natural part of each other’s world. The men assumed no dominance or superiority—no semblance of diffidence or timidity defined the women. The room came alive with the communal existence of humans on a shared journey. If any moment in time can bring an awareness powerful enough to inform everything that comes after, this was such a moment for Justine. Her eyes narrowed, her long fingers formed into a tent that she drew in wonder to her lips. A goddess culture, this extraordinary civilization began as a goddess culture! She felt with great avouchment that she understood the relationship between men and women in Etruria.
“Unrequited love is the only possible way to give yourself to another without being held in indentured servitude.”
—Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
HER HEAD STILL SPINNING from the museum visit, Justine parked her Spider in front of Chez Anna and checked in. She climbed the stairs to her room, threw open the shutters, and gazed out on the valley below, the sea beyond. Her mind floated back to the carved mirror in the ceiling of the tomb, the married couple in a warm, respectful relationship on the sarcophagus lid in the museum. Riveting images of men and women together . . . what did she know now?
The iron four-poster bed, covered with a white quilted coverlet, coaxed her to take off her shoes and dirt-encrusted khakis and relax with her latest purchase—D.H. Lawrence’s Virgin and the Gypsy, a quick read that the author had written for his stepdaughter, Barbara. She was again surprised by Lawrence’s ability to write with such sensuality without explicitly describing sexual consummation (until Lady Chatterley, that is):
. . . And through his body, wrapped round her strange and lithe and powerful, like tentacles, rippled with shuddering as an electric current, still the rigid tension of the muscles that held her clenched steadied them both, and gradually the sickening violence of the shuddering, caused by shock, abated, in his body first, then in hers, and the warmth revived between them. And as it roused, their tortured semi-conscious minds became unconscious, they passed away into sleep.
An
