Colosseum (33 page)

The sentence will be carried out in a few moments, at the hands of the gladiators.

Last night, word got out that the Emperor had had his servants scour the streets and prisons. Rickety carts passed through the darkest alleyways of the city, picking up down-and-outs and low-lives of every description. Murderers for the most part, almost all of them guilty of having killed because they were hungry, often unintentionally. With all those empty stomachs, fights have become the order of the day, and all of a sudden someone ends up dead. Those who are born in the streets learn to accept that their end may come any day, and that it may well be a violent one.

But what
nobody
expects really is to be kidnapped while they sleep and carted off to be butchered like an animal. The prisoners have been crammed into the catacombs of the Amphitheater, without food or water. Sometimes without air as well, because it is not easy for twenty-five people to breathe when they are shoved into a single, windowless cell. Some of them wished to check out before they even reached their destination: one slave thrust his head between the spokes of the cart that was taking him to the cells. He died instantly. They unloaded him onto the street, where he had always lived.

Poor nameless bastard.

For the unfortunate survivors, the night was anything but tranquil: who the fuck can sleep with a death sentence hanging over their head?

But now that the sun is burning hotter than hell itself, reality hits them with the taste of the earth which will soon swallow each and every one of them.

The condemned are divided into two groups and set off in an orderly line, heads hanging low. Roman citizens at the back, the rest leading the way. Their entry into the arena is not greeted by shouting or rowdiness, the terraces lying half empty. Many spectators have taken advantage of the interval to go and find something to eat. Some have gotten up off their asses to stretch their legs, others to go and vomit. There is no trace of the animals' corpses in the huge sandy oval; whoever's job that was, they have done it well. But death has not stopped fluttering above the heads of the audience, even for a moment.

Today is the day.

The gladiators enter as well, and the atmosphere builds somewhat, but a sense of fulfillment remains nonetheless, an air of completion hanging in the void.

Three groups of people stand rigidly in the fighting ring, forming an imaginary triangle of life and death in the eyes of those who have the guts to watch. An announcer walks to the center and explains how the show will work, while an assistant brandishing a fearsome-looking
gladius
follows behind him.

The first to die will be the foreigners and, since it would not be right to waste even a drop of Roman sweat in eliminating them, they will take care of it themselves. A pair is picked from the group at random: two scared boys whose ages sum to barely thirty years. The assistant hands the livelier looking one the
gladius
and tells him to slay the other: “Kill the criminal! Emperor Titus commands it!”

The unlucky victim tries to run but he stumbles over. The faster boy is on top of him, stabbing his throat with a clumsy blow.

Well done.

The assistant gives a lewd smile as he runs over to offer his congratulations. He asks for the
gladius
back and the boy hands it over without a second thought: “Return the weapon and await your reward in silence.” The announcer chooses another from the group and hands him the sword.

“Kill the criminal! Emperor Titus commands it!” he tells him, pointing at the bright-eyed survivor.

So that is how it works.

They will murder each other.

And it will go on like that until only one is left, who will be given a choice between getting ripped apart by the beasts or, if he prefers, taking his own life. The massacre is over sooner than expected, the long succession of corpses forming an orderly pile until a single man remains.

The last survivor does not hesitate to make his choice, throwing himself onto the sharpened
gladius
.

APPLAUSE.

Killing Roman citizens, however, is another story.

That is what the muscles from the
ludi
are needed for.

The residual group of prisoners is fairly large, but they will not all face the gladiators. A few Christians, for instance, will be nailed up. These bastards go crazy for martyrdom, practically crying out for it. And Rome's assassins give them what they ask. After having hung them up like their God, they even go to the trouble of lighting a fire under their asses. The odor of cooking flesh is nauseating. Verus's stomach churns.

But there is worse, much worse.

The torment of Orpheus
is the fate that befalls three unlucky, hard-faced victims. According to the myth, the curious lover retired into solitude in order to mourn his Eurydice, saved from the underworld and then lost again when the urge to lay his eyes on her before they were out of danger became too strong. After that he was no longer interested in women, despite the great number of honey pots still on offer to him. The maenads, harlots invested with the spirit of the wine god, dressed only in skins and horny from dawn to dusk, could not bear the idea that someone could refuse them and so ripped him to pieces. They
tore
him, pulling in all different directions.

And here, in the Amphitheater, the equipment is on hand for every kind of wickedness.

The limbs and other parts of the three victims are bound to groups of raging animals, all of them hooded and thrashed into a frenzy. Then a bear is thrown into the mix and he does the rest. When the beasts have finished strewing the arena with bones and guts a team of men arrives to cut them down, followed by another to clean up.

It is all over in half an hour.

In the meantime the group of condemned citizens grows ever weaker and the gladiators stand to one side awaiting their turn, skin reddening and metal armor becoming hotter by the moment.

Before the grand finale, the spectacle reaches a hair-raising level of cruelty.

The lucky prize winner is called Silvia and the announcer even takes the trouble to recount her sad story. Silvia is not some poor wretch, but the wife of a merchant named Sulpicius. A wealthy man, this Sulpicius, dealing in foreign spices, without ever having to leave home. His business was going so well that the master's physical presence was unnecessary—a dozen or so
agentes
in his employ traveled through the Empire selling his wares. All that was left for him to do was oversee the loading and unloading of goods at the commercial port down by the river and then come back to his villa to hassle his young wife. Silvia.

The old bastard Sulpicius was fixated with tidiness. If the tunics were not perfectly stacked and arranged by shade—from darkest to lightest—he was apt to fly off the handle and throw his weight around. One day he lost his temper and gave Silvia such a kicking, down where the sun does not shine, that she began to bleed. At the time Silvia was pregnant. She was so badly hurt that she thought she would soon be meeting her Creator—Silvia is a Christian, which certainly does not help matters—and decided to take the filthy son of a bitch with her. So she slipped into the shack where her husband kept his tools and grabbed a knife: not a carving knife, nor one of those magnificent hunting daggers that Sulpicius was obsessed with having delivered to him from the Orient. Nothing like that.

Silvia wielded a coulter in two hands, part of a plow that had been left on a workbench one foggy, sleepy afternoon. A nice, big chunk of iron used for digging up the earth, like a cleaver straight from the hands of Polyphemus or one of his idiotic fucking brothers.

Back in the atrium she found Sulpicius munching his way through something savory, and promptly split his skull in two like a ripe melon. After that she allowed herself the luxury of fainting, imagining that she was already well on her way to paradise.

When she awakened, Silvia was in for a surprise: no singing chorus of celestial hosts, just a throbbing headache and the ferrous smell of iron chains wrapped round her wrists and ankles. Sulpicius was dead, but she was not.

How fucking ironic fate can be.

The one who ended up getting caught in the middle was the baby daughter she was carrying in her belly; come into the world too soon, born alone and dead shortly afterwards, killed by kicks and cold. After the argument, the servants had rushed to patch the woman up and help her to give birth, but one of them alerted the imperial authorities—the master had been killed, after all. And that was why things happened as they did. Silvia was locked up, but a crime such as this deserved a punishment that would serve as an example. This is the reason why they kept her behind bars all winter, so that they could kill her in front of everybody, on the day that nobody would forget for a thousand years.

That day has come, Silvia, and all you can do now is place your trust in your battered, penitent God. Because from the Eagle and the She-wolf you will receive no mercy.

The torment of Pasiphae awaits you.

Silvia is a mere shadow of the woman she was; months in jail have hollowed her out. She looks nothing like the fiery wife of Minos, king of Crete. According to the myth, Poseidon had given the king a fine bull so that he could sacrifice it to him, but the greedy monarch kept the handsome animal for himself, preferring to have it in his herd rather than chopped up on the sea god's altar, offering up a different beast instead. But offending the gods is never a good idea: they are vengeful, and immortal to boot, which means they have all the time in the world to make men pay.

Poseidon took a while to decide how to get his own back, but in the end he came up with the idea of filling the beautiful Pasiphae's head with an uncontrollable urge to fuck the bull that her husband had spared so blasphemously. Except it is no easy thing to convince a three-thousand pound beast to lie with a queen. And a little bit dangerous, too. So the cunning Pasiphae disguised herself as a cow, hiding inside a faithful reproduction of a young heifer that had been artfully constructed by a skilled carpenter, and enjoyed the ride. The woman fell pregnant and the unlikely union bore fruit: the unfortunate Minotaur, whose story is known by all.

Just as every spectator in the arena will soon know the sad epilogue of Silvia's story. Silvia is no longer herself. Verus never met her
before
that fateful day, but when his gaze meets her sunken eyes, he realizes he does not have a human being before him, but a walking corpse. Skin and bones; after months of fasting her stomach has closed like a vise, preventing her from keeping down even that little that Mother Rome allowed her during the time in prison. Her once proud breasts droop from her body liked rotten fruit, frayed hair sticks to her forehead and her joints protrude horribly.

Silvia is toothless. Someone must have smashed them in at the prison so he could get his blowjobs without running any risks. But her eyes still burn: who knows whether it is the thought of the God she will meet soon enough, or her hatred—simple, crystal-clear hatred for every man on Earth—that has kept her alive.

The
structure
has been placed at the center of the arena. The two groups, prisoners and gladiators, stand at either side, as impotent as poor old Sulpicius.

There is nothing that can save Silvia from what awaits her. Slaves in crimson tunics place the woman on the wooden scaffold and bind her in place: legs spread apart, back bent at ninety degrees and arms out in front. An old man arrives to open her with a blade, as Silvia screams like a madwoman. Verus is on the point of throwing up. There must be a moral to this story, but he really cannot see it. He vomits on the ground. Priscus caresses his neck with a glance.

The spectators murmur quietly as they watch the scene, shaken by a dirty thrill, lightning through the muddy water.

When he has finished, the old man gives a whistle and four men arrive to cover the poor, skinny body of the woman with a cow hide. Then the old man whistles again. A bucket full of red liquid is brought out: blood from a cow in heat.

The bastard smears the sticky liquid over the mess he has created of Silvia's flesh and, before he leaves, pours half the bucket on the ground, right between her thighs.

Only then does the bull appear
.

And it really is a big one, at the height of arousal. Four assistants are hard-pushed to hold it back. It is black as night, snorting and sniffing heavily: it has already caught the smell of sex. When the assistants let go, it charges on ahead, its excitement mounting.

Martial is watching the show from up on the terraces. As the assistants busied themselves preparing the torture devices, he was noting down every small detail. But he no longer feels like composing a fucking epigram about the affair: how the hell can you write a story like that?

The poet gulps and forces himself to watch. Like everyone else, all around, until Silvia's cries cease, until the bull has
consummated
, until the wooden frame bearing the body of a guiltless murderer gives way, until the fall breaks her neck, already left hanging by a thread by the beast's pounding.

At that point Silvia's soul ascends to the heavens, flies down to the underworld or goes its own way.

Nothing more than a memory remains of her body.

A doll, broken by the furious play of Emperor Titus.

This, too, is Rome.

Welcome.

The final act of public execution calls for the gladiators' presence. This is why Titus has had them take the field: they will take care of the convicts, just the same way as the Roman legions do when they go out “exploring”conquered territories. The Emperor wanted the gods of the arena to see the killing up close. Ramrod straight, like Leonidas' hoplites at Thermopylae, moments before the red-stained chaos is unleashed.