Uncle Carl

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.

I was to be shocked—although I told myself that I shouldn’t be—to see that he still displayed some photographs I remembered well. Ones the authorities must have found quite damning when they had come for Uncle Carl in his wing of Armstead Rest just outside Cambridge. How Carl was able to get the sons and daughters of some of the richer and more powerful to pose for him like this was beyond me. But, then, who was I to question his powers and his sense of danger?

The floor at the bottom of the house contained a laundry, a dark room, storage, a well-stocked wine cellar, and Nario’s small bedroom and bath. Both this level and the bedroom level had no view, being blocked by the back wall of the villa immediately down the steep slope from Carl’s villa

“You didn’t show me the roof,” I said to Carl as we sat out on the full-width balcony between the house and the harbor view on the living-room level—which made the floors below it deeper than the two upper levels. Nario had served us drinks and disappeared, after Carl told him he’d be down in the studio shortly.