Threshold of Fire Read online

  “Go on! Fight!” screamed the nobilissimi in the first rows, while the man below, his arms raised, attempted to drive the gladiators from the arena with a torrent of words. Trainers and overseers came running from all sides, but they could not silence the monk whom they dared not seize, nor move the irresolute, waiting gladiators to fight again.

  Courtiers of various factions crowded about the Emperor, arguing and disputing with one another at the tops of their voices. I could not see Honorius himself, but I had a clear view of the man who bent over him, talking and gesturing fiercely with his long, pale hands: the poet Prudentius, a recent convert to Christianity, bursting with religious zeal and ambition. Everyone knew that the Emperor was not particularly fond of the man and his work, but he did not have the courage to keep him at a distance because Prudentius was a protégé of the bishops.

  Stilicho and Serena were sitting on the marble seats behind Honorius. As Prudentius pleaded more and more vehemently for the immediate cessation of the performance, attention in the Imperial company was fastened sharply on Stilicho. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of him through the milling courtiers: erect, motionless, self-controlled, he waited to be brought into this affair; but something in the way he held his head and in the tense line of his neck and shoulders (I was familiar with his reactions) betrayed his complete — although vigilant — absorption in deciding his strategy.

  Serena leaned toward him, but they did not speak to each other. She too was vigilant, listening without showing any emotion, but I could see the jewels of her earrings sparkling against her apparently immobile cheek. This time Stilicho made a mistake: in evaluating the situation, he had not taken into account the passions aroused by Pylades’ performance. What he expected — that the Emperor would finally turn to him as usual to resolve the crisis, giving him the opportunity to present Prudentius’s proposal in his own somewhat modified, more diplomatic form — would surely have happened under other circumstances, but then it was too late.

  I didn’t believe that Stilicho really grasped what was going on among the eddying mob in the stands. It was one of those instances which I myself had experienced repeatedly in the past — where the intrinsic difference became perceptible between his nature and that of the native-born Romans. He did not realize what was clear to Prudentius — that the monk must, for his own protection, be made to vanish somehow from the arena and that the only way to accomplish that was to call off the gladiatorial contest. Stilicho had no instinct for the cloudy or ambiguous — that was later to be his un doing. Looking back on that day ten years ago in the Colosseum, I now believe that that was the turning-point of Stilicho’s career and destiny, and that it was an event which had an equally decisive effect upon my life.

  I remember how I stood up along with the multitude when somewhere from out of the highest galleries a demented horde came pouring down the stairs and over the balustrades and railings, to throw themselves into the arena. To my knowledge it had never happened before that the spectators had actually intervened when something went on in the arena that wasn’t to their taste. It was this fact — that the situation was unprecedented, completely unexpected — that made it so terrifying.

  The gladiators and overseers drew back behind the barriers which normally served to protect the public from escaped wild animals. It was only much later that soldiers from the Emperor’s retinue succeeded in dispelling the raging mob, which could not stop kicking the mutilated corpse through the arena. The theatre emptied amidst indescribable confusion. White as chalk, leaning on his bishops, Honorius tottered from his loge. On that same day, he issued the order to ban the games permanently, and proclaimed the unfortunate victim to be a martyr.

  As I accompanied Pylades through the streets behind the Aemilia basilica, it occurred to me that I was walking next to my tangible destiny. I found his mincing gait annoying along with the coquettish way in which from time to time he shrugged his mantle more closely about him. Before he turned corners, he slackened his pace and gestured invitingly to me as if he were a host leading a tour of his property. He didn’t speak to me; the bustle in the street forced us to step aside continually, separating us for some distance. When I looked back I saw the gladiator and the dwarf in our wake.

  I knew now what memories, repressed for more than twenty years, determined my attitude toward Pylades. Something about his appearance, his glance, his movements, above all his aura of theatrical make-believe, his capacity for ambiguity, the embodiment of perversity, called up things which I had wanted to forget: old doubts and shame, my life in Alexandria under the roof of my benefactor, Olympiodorus. When I let Pylades lure me to that tavern, I still did not know exactly who or what he reminded me of, but at every step my reluctance grew. I needed to shake off my uneasiness the way a horse ripples its flanks to drive away stinging flies.

  I stopped him on the threshold of Apicius’s public house.

  “I used to admire your artistry, but that’s no reason for us to go drinking together.”

  “What are you really afraid of?” he asked over his shoulder.

  Although the time for the midday meal had already passed, there were still many people eating in the tavern, a natural result of the large turnout for Honorius’s entry. I knew the cellar by reputation; the proprietor had a bad name. The place was murky, like a cave. Reddish smoke hung in the rear, above a row of portable charcoal cookers. I pushed my way to sit facing Pylades at a free corner of one of the tables. The dwarf and the fat man looked for other places. I found it difficult to eat the pieces of meat and fish without bolting them down; I controlled myself mostly because Pylades did not take his eyes off me.

  “I still don’t understand why I am being honored,” I said, drinking to him.

  “I can see immediately … whether someone belongs with us.”

  Carefully, he licked his lips, like a great cat.

  I contemplated my beaker without answering.

  “Listen, don’t act as if you don’t understand. You’re one of us, you hold the old beliefs, in Liber Pater, surely, at the least, in the god who gives himself freely and joyously …”

  As he spoke these words, he shoved his beaker against mine so that the wine spattered over the table. Although nothing around us appeared to change, the noise seemed to lessen as if there were secret listeners, as if we were being stealthily watched.

  I lifted my beaker and drank.

  “Bacchus will never again be more to me than this,” I said, “but that’s not negligible when it’s a question of a decent wine.”

  “Everyone here is a good sort.” Pylades was becoming impatient. “You don’t have to try to evade the issue.”

  “I don’t equivocate. I say what I mean.”

  “But you’re not of … this,” he said. He dipped a finger in the wine and traced a cross on the table top.

  I shook my head.

  “So, what then?” he insisted, suddenly angry.

  “Isis? Mithras? The Syrian gods? Say it! Are you a coward?”

  “I’m nothing,” I said, shrugging.

  “A philosopher?”

  “I feel flattered.”

  “And the death then, the resurrection, immortality?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  Now his face became a mask of resentment; his eyes glittered with hostility.

  “I curse your sort, that pride, that superior little smile. They have no need for mysteries, oh no! A rational explanation for every secret, and what cannot be explained does not exist. You go through life deaf and blind. You don’t even realize what you’re missing.”

  “Save yourself the trouble. The secrets and riddles of the so-called commonplace are enough for me — and, by the way, I have no desire to solve all of them, even if I were to be granted the ability to do it —”

  Pylades tried another tack.

  “I haven’t asked your name. Something tells me that in your case it’s not very important to know what you’re usually called. But you ca
n’t fool me, even though you walk around in rags. You’re an educated man, you belong to a distinguished house. I have eyes and ears for things like that.”

  I shrugged. “It’s unimportant, my friend.”

  “Do you think so?”

  I didn’t like his look — appraising, sly, full of secret satisfaction … a desire to run away came over me: to slip sideways from the bench like a crab, to vanish far from Pylades into the labyrinth of my distant quarter and so to my safe corner in the insula Iulia. But with the man’s infallible seventh sense, he read my intention; before I could move, he put his hand on my arm.

  “One word, one gesture from me, and you disappear, quickly and quietly, into the sewer—an intruder who denies the existence of the mysteries, perhaps a potential spy for the authorities …”

  “What do you really want from me? In the district where I live, they sometimes call me Pro Se because I never meddle in other people’s affairs. I’m just a seedy clerk. Years before the Gothic invasion, I lost my post and my connections. Now and then I earn a little money giving lessons and writing letters and petitions. That’s all there is to know about me.”

  Pylades fingered my threadbare toga and shook his head, smiling.

  “You meddle with nothing and no one. But that didn’t prevent your pointing out to my friends and me that we had committed a minor infraction of the law, did it? You would have done better not to have seen us when we came through the wall.”

  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 pretende
d 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.