Threshold of Fire (11 page)

I could have replied that they had left the forbidden ground and emerged into public view in a manner that was not especially discreet, and that, moreover, they had made themselves extremely noticeable by stumbling over my legs. If the cry ‘
Munera! Munera!
’ had not disturbed Honorius’s entry, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to someone creeping through the temple wall.

I wanted to leave. For a moment Pylades had captured my interest; I was caught up by the memory of what he had been — and of course what I had been. But more than that — something about him made him seem to be a thread in the pattern of my life, an element in the network of my secret self. I felt that we had nothing to say to each other; I did not want any further contact with him. I thought that, in order to grasp the significance of this fleeting encounter on that particular day, I did not need him and his one and a half followers.

I know now whom he reminded me of — even though there was no physical resemblance: Olympiodorus’s confidante, that slave from Syria or Persia, whose task it was to prepare the boys in the house for what would be expected of them there and to bring them to reason if they appeared reluctant. Like a dark silent Hermes Psychopompos, he conducted his master’s favorites through the labyrinth of that house in Alexandria — those who should know say it deserved a place among the wonders of the world.

Black marble floors, pillars of porphyry and basalt; at every turn a view of adjacent enclosed gardens or the reflecting rectangle of a pool; and, alternatively, twilit rooms where one walked over soft panther skins and where there were the undefined odors of incense and spices. Statues of gods and athletes populated the galleries — frozen perfection.

The only female attributes one could admire in that house were the breasts of the sphinxes and harpies who stood, life-sized, on either side of all the doorways; and, in miniature, as decorative motifs on furniture and utensils. Endlessly repeated on murals, always before one’s eyes wherever one was, whatever one did, were female monsters with wings,
claws and scaly tails. The masculine statues in marble — even an Antinous, a Narcissus — nearly androgynous, were incarnations of the daylight world of harmony and light, while the dream creatures with the breasts were preposterous, impossible apparitions which belonged to the troubled secrets of the night, experiences of lust and pain.

Olympiodorus sent his proteges to the best schools and tutors in Alexandria, to make them, in conformance with the Greek ideal of knowledge and beauty, into young philosophers and athletes — but he expected from them, between sunset and dawn, compliance in alien rituals invented by his slave.

I pulled my mantle from Pylades’ fingers. But of course I remained seated. The hour passed when I usually sought my habitual corner in the public baths where I acted as oracle to my unlettered neighbors. Slightly drunk, filled with aversion for myself, for Pylades and for the low den in which we found ourselves, I thought with the melancholy of one who had gone astray, about my bench in the
tepidarium;
about the shopkeeper of the district whom I promised to help take stock of his wares; about the inhabitants of the
insula
Cornelia for
whom I was to draw up a letter of protest to their landlord; about all the acquaintances who were now there, leaning against the steamy tile walls.

Pylades tried again to intimidate me in various ways — a little game which could deceive no one and whose only purpose could be to find out where I was vulnerable. I did not rise to the bait. I didn’t understand, for that matter, where he was trying to lead me. His hints and questions bored me. I kept drinking, picturing to myself how, at that moment, in the hastily restored and cleaned galleries of the Palatine, Honorius was playing the little emperor as usual, waving his heavily beringed hand condescendingly, his toga, resplendent with sparkling embroidery, artfully draped to conceal his meagre, childish body. They say that, despite the bishops’ opposition, he had increased his demands for ceremonies like those which are practiced in Constantinople.

In those days during my recitations, I often had to stand by his side; to him I was no more than a verse-making, verse-reciting instrument which he could command with a gesture to begin and to cease. It was reported that he valued my work highly, but he never spoke to me; he looked at me without seeing me. But
I got a good look at him: his hair, plastered in symmetrical curls against his skull, his haughty, yellowish profile. To learn how he should react, he threw frequent quick glances at Stilicho, who knew, always, how to preserve the perfect balance — sometimes giving a nod of approval accompanied by a slight ironic smile to minimize my lyric flight without criticizing the meaning or the cadence; sometimes giving greater importance to the actual impact of a verse by a barely perceptible change of expression.

I never believed that Stilicho had any real literary insight and taste, but he, more than anyone, gave me the opportunity to develop my talents in that area (and he, more than anyone, profited from it). Usually, during my recitations, he stood next to the Emperor — where, by the way, he belonged because of his rank and prominence — but not too close: at a deliberately proper distance, just outside the carpet spread around the Imperial throne, on the marble which shone like a mirror.

An irony of fate that I, who on these occasions had, through rhetorical artifice, greatly exaggerated the outrages of Honorius’s enemies, had to remain silent after the murder in Ravenna; that I, who denounced
the hypocrisy of Gildo (he poisoned his adversaries while they sat as guests at his table), had no words to describe the Emperor’s treachery; that I, who once wrote a poem in which the villain Rufinus was charged in the underworld with his crimes by the ghosts of his victims, could not open my mouth to accuse, in the names of Stilicho and Serena, the man who is carried now in great pomp in his palanquin through Rome, Master of the Empire of the Occident, ally and friend of — and yes, relation in marriage to — the Goths who six years earlier had played havoc here, burning and plundering everything in their path.

“It’s an old geezer,” said a woman’s voice above my head. The dwarf and the ex-fighter appeared from the ruddy depths of the public house, accompanied by a slattern, who now stood leaning against the table. Long strings of henna-dyed hair, escaping from a slovenly bun, straggled over her shoulders; a scent of cheap perfume and bath oil rose from the folds of her garments.

“Push off, Urbanilla,” Pylades said irritably. “Nobody asked you to come here.”

“Oh, yes,
they
did.” The girl jerked a shoulder
toward Pylades’ confederates.

The dwarf clambered onto the bench next to Pylades. In order to deceive what had once more become the two-headed monster, I pretended to be drunk and mumbled something into my beaker. That roused the dwarf’s contempt. “He really will not do,” he said.

“I don’t know yet what to think of him.”

“Don’t waste your time. You can see, can’t you, that he’s worthless. You can get another one.”

“Oh yes, that’s so simple,” Pylades said sarcastically. “Just leave that to me. I don’t make mistakes.”

I judged that the moment had come to get up from my seat, bawling unintelligibly. The fat man made a move in my direction, but Pylades restrained him. I shuffled past the girl, who spat a couple of insults at me — boozer, filthy swine. I really did not expect them to let me go. Halfway down the street, I pretended to stumble over a peddler’s baskets, in order to look behind me. The three of them had left the tavern. At first they began to follow me, but when they realized that I was wandering aimlessly, they joined me. In the hope of getting rid of them, I chose the ever-crowded streets and alleys near the Forum. But they had attached themselves to me
like leeches, determined to find out where I lived. I was reminded of how I used to walk in these same squares and steps, at propitious times of the day, always surrounded by my clients. I burst into laughter. The ex-gladiator poked me; Pylades observed with contempt that I could not hold my liquor.

“Don’t start with him,” the dwarf said again. For the umpteenth time, they began to quarrel. They discussed my appearance, my demeanor: according to Pylades, if I were properly dressed and shaved, and after a brief period of retraining in social practices — which they believed I had clearly forgotten — I could be very useful. The dwarf doubted that and attempted with a vehemence which I attributed to jealousy, to persuade Pylades to abandon me to my fate.

“Who’s in charge here, you or me?” Pylades asked coldly.

I could still only guess at the nature of their intentions toward me. They certainly found it worth their while not to let me out of their sight. It had been going on too long: I was as sober again as I had been in the morning, and I was annoyed with this unwanted company.

Like a ghost surrounded by malignant spectres in a borderland of death, I wandered through the Imperial heart of the City which had for years seemed more unreal to me each time I came here. It was still broad daylight, but the sun was in the west; the columns threw elongated shadows across the porticos. That is the hour when the new Rome — or the non-Rome; I don’t know what to call it — takes on a dangerous formlessness; the crowd consists no longer of separate individuals with recognizable faces and gestures, but becomes a buzzing stream of spilled colors moving between the buildings which seem, in the honeyed light, to be made of eggshells, about to crack. One has the feeling that with a wave of the hand, one could sweep away the image of reality like a glossy film, behind which lies chaos, darkness.

Some choose to believe that it was the Gothic occupation which irrevocably changed the character of Rome within a generation. I myself often tried to explain away my feeling of alienation by attributing it to my advancing age, and to the complete reversal of my fate ten years ago. But I know that none of this
is true: the Goths are not responsible for this metamorphosis; the natural deterioration of age has nothing to do with my condition, nor do the events which so radically transformed my life. These things are the culmination of a process which began twenty years ago when I left Alexandria to come to Rome.

I could have recognized the signs if I had chosen to. The Rome that I loved, that I venerated, no longer existed, had not existed for a long time … if indeed it had ever existed at all. Perhaps it existed only in the dreams of an Egyptian with a Greek education who had, under the colonnades and in the study halls of Alexandria, formed an idealized image of the civilization of his time. It seemed to me that this lustre was reflected in people like Ammanianus Marcellinus, Praetextatus Symmachus, Rutilius Namatianus, Serena. But they too lived in a different world from that whose demeanor and style they adopted. When I think of them, I remember uncertainties, contradictions, which had not struck me at the time, or which I may well have noticed but refused to accept. In the course of those years, I had become increasingly aware of the uneasiness that clouded Stilicho’s life and aspirations, despite his resolute commitment to Rome.

He knew that what he wanted to accomplish was justified, and he knew too that he would never be able to attain those goals — not because he was deficient in any way, nor because others worked against his projects (although this was certainly the case, more even than he ever suspected), but because his strength of purpose and abilities and those of his partisans were no match for the indefinable but clearly perceptible pressure from without as well as within: a torrent of change. Stilicho had the courage to combat the incomprehensible with untiring tenacity and he was an excellent strategist who knew how to change his tactics as often as he thought necessary. But he must have known that his enemies would take advantage of that very fact, because it could make him seem unpredictable, or even untrustworthy. The consequent erosion affected us all.

I see images from that former life as though they appear on a mural partially obliterated by age: a face, a gesture, the outline of a figure, a group, in faded colors, suggesting what it was when it was fresh, but now eaten by decay, cracked, slowly peeling. Yesterday, as I wandered through the crowded streets between the government buildings with those three at my heels like warders, I was assaulted anew — as
I had been so often in the past — by the realization that my old friends were dead and gone. I could touch the railings, the columns where their hands had rested; I recognized at every step a place which I had passed in my walks with them.

Despite some open spaces left here and there by fires, the overall picture of this sea of houses remains roughly unchanged, and I recognized the spot where, strolling and chatting, dazzled each time anew by the splendor of the spectacle, I used to point out to my companions the play of light and shadow over the aqueduct. Pylades’ mantle fluttering before my eyes; the dwarf — that strange gnome — now in front of me, then again behind me; the fat man’s fist planted annoyingly in my back… all of it, even the most concrete — walls and trees, the people I brushed against and whose breath touched me as I passed them — all seemed unreal to me. Sometimes in earlier days I had seen columns of white or ochre dust rising here and, squinting against the glare, I had imagined that this was a procession of spectres filing through the living crowd. Now I myself was one of those ghosts.

On all sides of us were tall, white shapes; we were in the Forum of Trajan, a place which for years I had
avoided like the plague. There they were: the twice dead, with their bloated marble faces, in their marble togas, petrified in an oratorical pose, heroically brandishing the staff of command or the book scroll. I was seized by rage against this grotesque and impotent pack of immortals. Many of these, since the invasion of the Goths, were headless, armless. Some of them had been knocked off their pedestals and lay awaiting restoration. I can find my way among those heroes and masters. A sudden desire to torment myself impelled me to hurry to a pedestal to look at a face that no longer resembled anyone, to read an inscription that I knew by heart.