Threshold of Fire (15 page)

Since I wanted to make use of the veneer of culture which I had been able to acquire, I opened a school to serve these people. I offered them my ability to set thoughts on paper. I have not been unhappy — on the contrary — but perhaps I should have been because I realized that one man, by himself, cannot alleviate the ignorance — occasionally amusing but nearly always distressing and sometimes even frightful — of thousands of people.

Whenever I emerge from the Subura, I see the villas of rich Christians and I come across a procession led by a priest who is transporting the recently exhumed remains of another holy martyr to one of the basilicas or to a hastily constructed chapel. I can hardly believe my eyes. I ask myself, why this feverish pursuit of the bones of idealists when one could, day after day, hour after hour, make practical application of that idealism by helping to bring about a decent existence for those ragged fellow-creatures huddled in the rat’s nest of the Subura? Of course
the very poor can be recruited as converts, not by giving them food, but by tricking them into believing that if they pray to the earthly remains shut up in a sarcophagus or shrine (whether these are actually the remains of real martyrs is another question), they can bring about miracles.

I am well acquainted with a handful of Christians here in the quarter who condemn this abuse of credibility (pointing out that it is no different from the most blatant superstitions of the past). These are people whom I respect: they don’t make a display of their convictions, but they live their faith. Nothing human is alien to them, and they are unusually cheerful and self-disciplined. I believe that they are much more concerned with examining their own souls than with converting their neighbors. I have no access to their religious life: they do not volunteer any information. It’s possible that they are Arians and therefore prudent out of self-protection. But they do not hide: in case of need, they never refuse a call for help.

The Church, with its impressive rituals and clouds of incense, plays no role here in the Subura; no more than the practices of the anchorite, that other emblem of sanctity which is becoming more popular
every day. If by chance a monk strays from his cloister or a hermit from his cave, and finds his way to this part of the City, he is jeered at and spat upon because he has fled from the world and has chosen to live in wanton filth.

Life here does not rise above the level of the rooftops; it consists essentially of the pavements, the sewers, the stained and moldy walls, constant din of voices, peddling and squabbling, shrieks of pain and of laughter, stink and smoke, darkness behind the doorways, garbage and stray animals, swarms of adults and children. If this sort of existence changes at all, it changes very slowly. Disruption from outside too, has very little effect here. When the Goths were in Rome, they left the Subura alone. Here I am no longer in the present; I am outside time but up to my neck in material reality. I know so well the power of need; the all-consuming search for basic necessities.

For the first time in many months, I left the labyrinth, impelled by curiosity. Honorius went by, a voice cried “
Munera, Munera!
” between the temples, and suddenly everything changed.

Of course I was followed on the way back from Marcus Anicius’s house. Again and again something rustled behind me in the darkness and shot away at an angle whenever I looked back. At first I took it to be a stray dog, but it may well have been the dwarf. When I was leaving the bathhouse yesterday at noon, the fat wrestler popped up out of the crowd at me: I must go with him whether willingly or unwillingly; Pylades wanted to speak with me. I thanked him for the honor and escaped into the bustle of the streets.

Then today the actor himself appeared at the shed next to the fruit market where I was teaching. I let him wait in the hope that he would soon tire of it, but an hour later he was still there, sauntering among the watermelons. In order to get rid of him, I offered him a drink. In the tavern he came out with a proposal: he was looking for an educated man capable of delivering introductory remarks and reciting poetry during his, Pylades’, solo performances as the blind Oedipus, Hercules in the burning shirt, the enraged Ajax, Achilles mourning
the death of Patroclus.

“I can dance and sing, but I am no intellectual,” he said, with false modesty (his eyes remained calculating). “What I need is a man of education and refinement, with the appearance of a philosopher. I’m certain that I’ve found him.”

I reminded him that nowadays only jugglers performed in the theatres; I thought that he was making fun of me. But no.

“In private houses, of course. The authorities allow it. There’s a great demand for it. We must manage somehow with whatever is possible: the pay is good.”

“I do useful work in a literary area that brings me enough to live on.”

“A select public, of literary connoisseurs, or just newly-rich ignoramuses, who are ready to pay for a grain of culture. But always grateful listeners, often in the long run valuable connections, more than ever
now
— if you see what I mean. In the works of the great poets, the gods still live.”

“It doesn’t appeal to me.”

“You’re accustomed to quite a different life from this.”

“I’m satisfied.”

“
I’m
not,” he said, with sudden ferocity. He moved nearer to me and lowered his voice. From close by, I saw his wrinkled skin, the black smudges under his eyes. The odor of his pomade was so overpowering that I had to turn away from him.

“I now have a company — what I call a company. The dwarf, the fat man, a girl I picked up in the street. You’ve seen me perform in the past …” He put his hand on my sleeve; there were tears in his eyes — a genuine reaction, for the first time. “Can you imagine what it means to me to have to work — when work of that kind is possible today — with a bunch of freaks that don’t know the first thing about any of it? I am a professional person and what I am doing now has nothing to do with my profession. I am betraying the artist I once was. It’s betrayal enough in my field to grow old, to become decrepit. I am a perfectionist; there is nothing I find so humiliating as being forced to give third-rate performances simply because my troupe doesn’t measure up. I spend hours working to prepare myself, I tune my instruments, swallow honey to make my vocal cords supple, do my exercises, paint a mask on my face. It is my practice to leave nothing to chance. But that monster,
and the whore, and the fellow who’s only good for strong-arming people — they have no conception of finesse. This is eating me up.”

“I wouldn’t be any better at it than they are, believe me.”

“The great classic works, without vulgar sensationalism; the solo mime in the style of the golden age — that’s what I want to bring back. I’ll drop the troupe. If you lecture on the text, explaining and making connections —”

“That’s absolutely out of the question.”

“I can force you to do it,” he said, with sudden venom.

“I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t be so sure of yourself. It could be in your own best interests to do what I ask of you. There are greater stakes involved here than just mine, that’s all I can tell you right now.”

I thought that this was enough, and I left him. He called something after me but I could not make it out.

A couple of days passed. Yesterday, when I came home toward evening, I could hear the rustle of the straw mattress behind the door to my room. I
pushed the door open but at first in the half-light I could make out nothing. Then I saw someone sitting on my bed. As I snatched up the lamp and struck it into flame, I demanded that the visitor identify himself. Breathing and rustling, but no response. The wick flamed up.

A woman was huddled in the farthest corner of my couch. I saw, between the reddish strands of hair, the pale gleam of her arms and shoulders, and lower, her
palla,
which had slipped into a muddle of saffron-colored folds. I asked her what she wanted, why she hadn’t replied. She made no sound, but glowered at me from behind her hair. I took her arm to pull her out of the corner; her clothing glided still farther down her body. She kept staring at me, with a mixture of defiance and distrust. She gathered her garments about her — or appeared to, for I had the impression that she was baring herself with every movement. I recognized her now; she was the woman I had seen in the public house on the day of Honorius’s entry, the mistress or accomplice of Pylades and his cohorts. I was angry because I saw through this new scheme: since neither promises nor threats had worked with me, they had sent me a woman,
thinking that I, poverty-stricken and long in the tooth, would be so eager for her free favors that I would not be able to resist yielding to them.

“Get out of here or I’ll throw you out!”

I expected her to curse or spit as she had the first time. But she said nothing, drew up her shoulders, and then looked suddenly helpless and forlorn as she groped for her sandals on the floor in front of the couch. I felt the same pity for her that I feel for the grimy children on the staircase of the
insula,
who creep up to me to show me their scratches after a scuffle or a beating, or to beg a crust of stale bread.

“What’s your name?” I asked, pushing one of her sandals toward her with my foot.

“Urbanilla,” she said, sullenly.

“Urbanilla, I don’t want you. Tell that to Pylades. He must leave me in peace.”

She stooped to fasten her shoes, looking at me over her shoulder. Eyes like stone. The flame of the oil lamp trembled in a draught, shadows moved like dark water over her back and thighs, over the curve of her arm, coming to rest on the edge of the couch.

It was as if I saw, against the backdrop of the
plaster wall, a sphinx or harpy from the house of Olympiodorus in Alexandria; one of the life-sized female monsters now become flesh and blood: an ageless face, a blind stare, half-open mouth filled with darkness, a torso with youthful breasts, the lower body fallen into folds and coils which evoked the indistinct forms of plants, billows, animal claws.

These rapid metamorphoses overwhelmed me: first a vulgar streetwalker, then a helpless child and finally something inhuman in human form, a ghastly visitation in the night. I had felt successive aversion, rage, and compassion looking at this creature on my sleeping bench; but all these emotions left me — what remained I cannot describe.

The girl herself was not aware of these metamorphoses—I knew that, of course. She was like clay, or wax being shaped without her own participation, in a form she could not understand. I saw in her everything that could lead a man to ruin: not seduction in the erotic sense, for what was there before me did not promise the satisfaction of lust. It was something else, more than that: the temptation of the unknown, the pursuit of self-created danger, the irrepressible desire to
penetrate into regions where the borders were blurred between cruelty and pleasure, life and death, man and beast.

If I had taken that woman at that moment, I would perhaps have been able to drive away the images which swarmed around me, incoherent as dreams or drunken visions, offering the unheard-of, the never-seen… Unequalled power over the powerless, the possibility of frightful suffering consuming the entire world and all the creatures in it. I can’t put it into words. I don’t know why, I shuddered as if I saw before me a field gnawed bare by locusts, a mutilated, depopulated city; or, again, a mob of escaped slaves (I saw them four years ago when the Goths took Rome) seeking out their former masters to wreak vengeance on them for ill-treatment and humiliation. I remembered the face of Persephone, abducted by the dark god: beauty touched by death in the full bloom of life. I saw the Medusa head of the murdered Serena, stuck on a spear above a Rome fallen into decay.

Now in daylight, it seems to me absurd — clearly insane — that because she scowled at me, because she bent over to fasten her sandals, a creature like Urbanilla could be raised to dizzying heights as
the embodiment of a choice for or against humanity. This lasted, it is true, for only an instant. As soon as she stood erect, she became a young slut like hundreds of others who stroll about in the Subura, indifferently flaunting her naked breasts while slowly lifting her skirts. “What do you want from me?” I asked harshly, in confusion.

“Ask the boss,” said the girl, shrugging, before she disappeared.

Recollection of things long forgotten. Once in the reed-lands, I had cut off the head of a cock. A cruel game, a senseless, horrible act. The thrashing and fluttering of the vigorous animal in my grasp, his hoarse shrieks and later the jerking of that headless body, gave me a thrill of curiosity, dislodging something in me — I don’t know what — the desire to prove my power, to test the limits of endurance, to fill a black void with violence? Much later, at the house of Olympiodorus, I had had the same feeling; only there
I
was the cock, the object of oppression, who struggled in desperate panic. The only witnesses, the stone harpies. I realize now that this time of darkness affected, in the ensuing years, my closest friendships, thwarting them,
undermining them. Concerning men, I knew no middle way between hatred and hero-worship; one woman, Serena — who belonged to Stilicho — I elevated to the role of celestial mother: the others I mounted in cold, heartless lust as if they were the sphinxes on whom I must avenge myself.

The Works of Claudius: lifeless ornamental plants, artificial vines in the darkness.

This afternoon, in the crush of the fruit market, someone nudged me and whispered, “Marcus Anicius Rufus asks that you come, about the fifth hour after sunset; it is very urgent!”

I could not overtake the man.