Imaginary LIves (5 page)

Rome attracted her again. At early dusk she walked through the wide squares and thoroughfares, the blazing insolence of her eyes unchanged. Nothing now appeased her though she tried all... even standing in the rain and sleeping in the mud. She bathed in the deep caverns where slaves gambled at dice. She was known in those cellars frequented by scullions and teamsters. She waited on the curb for any man who passed. She perished towards the morning of a suffocating night, after a strange return to a house that had once been her own. Sorry because he had given her so much as a quarter-as, a workman trapped her at dawn in an obscure alley, and strangled her to get his money back. He threw her body, with her large eyes still open into the yellow waters of the Tiber.

PETRONIUS

Romancer

He was born in the days when green-garbed clowns used to sit around a fire roasting young pig; when bearded porters in cherry colored tunics squatted by the vivid mosaics at villa gates, shelling peas into silver platters; when rich freedmen played politics in the towns of Provence; when minstrels sang their epic poems to the desert; and when the Latin language was stuffed with redundant words and puffed-up names from Asia.

Among such elegances he passed his childhood. His garments of Tyrian wool were never worn a second time, and if a silver vessel chanced to fall from the table it was swept away with the rest of the débris. Delicate, unexpected viands were served at every meal, the cooks never ceasing to vary the architecture of their dishes. To open an egg and find a fig in it was no cause for astonishment, nor was it unusual to slice a
foie-gras
statuette modeled in imitation of a Praxiteles. Plaster seals over the mouths of the wine amphora were brightly gilded. Phials of Indian ivory held ardent perfumes for convivial folk, while ewers, pierced in many intricate patterns and filled with coloured waters, sent down a pretty shower as they swung gently to and fro. All the glasses were iridescent monstrosities. Urns there were with handles made to turn in the fingers so that the sides opened out, letting fall a spray of painted flowers. African birds with scarlet cheeks cackled from their golden cages.

Dog-faced Egyptian monkeys chattered incessantly behind gold incrusted grilles set into the sides of the rich walls, while scampering around in precious boxes were slim little scaly beasts with azure eyes. Here Petronius lived, believing the very air he breathed to be perfumed for his special use.

When he arrived at the age of adolescence he did up his beard in an ornate sheath and began to look about him. Then a slave named Syrus, who had served in the arenas, showed him some things he had never seen before. Not of noble race, Petronius was a swarthy little squint-eyed fellow with the hands of an artisan and cultivated tastes. It pleased him to fashion words together and to write them down, though they resembled nothing the old poets had imagined, for they strove only to imitate the things Petronius found around him. Later he developed a grievous ambition for making verses.

Through Syrus he came to know barbarian gladiators, braggarts of the street corners, shifty-looking men of the market-places, curly-headed boys on whom the senators leaned during their promenades, curbstone orators, pimps with their upstart girls, fruit vendors, tavern landlords, shabby poets, pilfering servants, unauthorized priestesses and vagabond soldiers. With his squint eyes he saw them all, catching the precise manner of them and their ways. Syrus took him down to see the slaves in their baths, to the dens of the prostitutes and through those underground cells where the circus gladiators practiced with wooden swords. Sitting by the tombs beyond the city gates, he heard tales of men who change their skins – tales and stories passed from mouth to mouth by blacks and Syrians and innkeepers and guardians who carried out the crucifixions. Absorbed in these vivid contrasts which his free life allowed him to examine, he began, when about thirty, to write the story of those errant slaves and debauchees he knew. In the luxurious society of the city he recognized their morals, though transformed, and he found their ideas and their language among the polite conversations at high ceremonies. Alone, bent over his parchment at a table of odorous cedar, with the sharp point of his calm detachment he pictured the adventures of an ignored people. Under the painted ebony wainscoting, by the light of his tall windows, he imagined smoky torch lit taverns, absurd nocturnal struggles, the twisted candelabras of carved wood, the locks suddenly forced by the axes of police slaves, and the harsh commands of slave drivers shrill above the shuffling rush of miserable people clad in torn curtains and filthy rags.

When his six books were finished Petronius read them to Syrus. And the slave is said to have howled his laughter aloud and clapped his hands for glee. At that moment they conceived the notion of putting those adventures into practice. Tacitus has falsely written that Petronius was present at Nero’s court, telling how his death was brought about by the jealousy of Tigillinus. But Petronius did not vanish murmuring lewd little verses as he stepped delicately into a marble bath. He ran away with Syrus to end his life on the roads.

His appearance made disguise easy. Turn by turn, he and Syrus carried the leather sack containing their money and clothing. They slept in the open air, on hillocks beside the crossroads, often watching the dismal cemetery lamps twinkling among the tombs. They ate their bread sour and their olives rancid. They became wandering magicians, vagabond fakirs, companions of runaway soldiers. Petronius dropped his writing completely, for he now lived the life he had once imagined. They had treacherous friends whom they cared for, he and Syrus, and who left them at the gates of towns after borrowing their last coin. They carried on all sorts of debauches with escaped gladiators: they became barbers and scrubmen. For several months they lived on crusts stolen from the graves of the dead, and all who saw Petronius were terrified by his wry eye and the swart cast of him. One night he disappeared. Syrus expected to find him in a dirty hovel where he had been with a tangle-haired girl, but a drunken squatter had sunk a knife in his neck while they were lying together on the floor of an abandoned cave in the open country.

SUFRAH

Geomancer

The story of Aladdin is in error when it tells how the African magician was poisoned in his palace and how his body, burned black by the drug, was thrown to the dogs and cats. His brother was so deceived by these appearances that he stabbed himself after donning the robes of the blessed Fatima, but it is nevertheless certain that Moghrabi Sufrah (for that was the magician’s name) only slept under the influence of the powerful narcotic. He escaped through one of the twenty four windows of the great hail while Aladdin was tenderly embracing the princess.

Hardly had he reached the ground after sliding down easily enough by one of the golden drain pipes to the terrace, when the palace disappeared completely, leaving Sufrah alone on the open desert. Nothing remained, not even one of the bottles of African wine for which he had gone to the cave at the command of the treacherous princess.

Desperate, he sat down under the fierce sun, knowing well how infinite was the torrid expanse of sand in every direction, so he wrapped his head in his cape, waiting for death. Not one magic charm was left to him, no spell casting perfumes, nor even a dancing ring with which he might have sought some hidden source of water to quench his thirst.

Night came on blue and hot, but it relieved the inflammation in his eyes a little, then he decided to trace one magic figure on the sand to learn if he were destined to perish so, lost in the desert. He drew the four main lines with his finger, set out the points for the invocation of Fire, Water, Earth and Air, then for the Equator, the Orient, the Occident and the Septentrion. At the end he collected all the points, odd and even, arriving finally at the first figure. To his joy he saw it was Fortune Major. And he knew then that his escape was certain.

Now the first figure must be placed in the first house of astrology, the house of the Geomancer. In that house, called the House of Heaven, Sufrah found again the figure of Fortune Major pronouncing success and glory to his ventures. But in the eighth house, the House of Death, he came upon the figure of the Red One, messenger of blood, fire and omen sinister. When Sufrah had conjured the figures of the twelve houses he took two proofs and from these proofs one judgment, thus testing well the accuracy of his calculations. The Prison was the figure in the Judgment, so Sufrah knew by that he would find glory at great peril in some shut and secret place.

Since he was not to die, the magician meditated now in confidence. The lamp had been transported to the very centre of China with the rest of the palace. He could not hope to retrieve it. He recalled the fact that he had never discovered the identity of the lamp’s first master, who was also the owner of the treasure and of the garden of precious fruits. On the sand he traced a second figure, reading it by the letters of the alphabet. First the characters S.L.M.N. were revealed, and when the tenth figure confirmed them Sufrah knew at once that the magical lamp had been part of King Solomon’s treasure. He continued to study all the signs attentively until the Dragon’s Head gave him the information he sought, for it was joined by the figure of The Boy, emblem of riches hidden in the earth, and by the figure of The Prison, where the position of any hiding place may be deciphered.

Sufrah clapped his hands for happiness. Now the geomancy showed King Solomon buried under those very sands of Africa, while on his finger was the all-powerful signet ring that gives immortality to its wearer. So King Solomon slept on as he had slept through the myriad ages.

Sufrah waited eagerly for the dawn. In the blue half-light he saw Bedouins riding by. When he hailed them they pitied his distress, giving him a little sack of dates and a gourd of water. He started then on foot, traveling steadily until he came to an arid stony place between four bare cliffs stretching like fingers toward the four corners of the heavens.

There he drew a circle and pronounced certain words; the earth trembled, opened, showed a marble slab with a bronze ring in it, and Sufrah seized the ring, calling out three times in Solomon’s name. As the stone swung from its place Sufrah went down a stair into the earth.

Two fiery dogs bounded from niches opposite him, spitting tongues of flame as they sprang, but Sufrah had only to say the magic name again to make them disappear. He found an iron door, it turned silently at his touch and he passed through it into a deep corridor carved out of living porphyry.

An eternal glow was there, emitting from numberless seven branched candelabras, while at the end of the long corridor Sufrah saw a room with jasper walls. A golden brazier burned richly in the center. On a couch, hewn like a block of frozen fire out of one single diamond, stretched the form of an old, white bearded man who wore a crown. Near the King stood a mummy, her thin hands still graciously extended, though the warmth of her kisses was long gone. And on the fallen hand of the King Sufrah beheld the great shining seal.

He crawled to it on his knees, raised the shriveled fingers and snatched off the precious seal.

So were the predictions of the unknown Geomancer fulfilled and the immortal sleep of Solomon brought to end. In less than a moment the King’s body crumbled to a little handful of dust and bones, which the gracious form of the mummy seemed still to watch over.

Crushed at that same instant by the Red One from the House of Death, Sufrah spent all the blood of his life in one vermilion gush before the deep sleep of earthly immortality swallowed him up.

With Solomon’s ring on his finger, he laid him down on the diamond couch to be preserved from corruption during the myriad years, in that shut and secret place disclosed to him by the figure of The Prison. The iron door of the porphyry corridor fell closed as the fiery dogs took up their guard over the immortal Geomancer.

FRA DOLCINO

Heretic

He first learned of holy things in the church of San Michele at Orte, when his mother held him so his little hands might touch the pretty wax figures hanging before the Virgin. His parents’ house adjoined the baptistry. Three times a day, at dawn, at noon and at nightfall, he saw two Franciscan monks go by begging bread for their basket, and often he followed them to the convent door. One of these two was very old, having been ordained by Saint Francis himself, so he said. He promised to teach Dolcino the language of the birds and how to talk with all the beasts of the fields. Soon Dolcino spent his days in the convent, adding his fresh young voice to the songs of the brethren. When the bell called them to work he would help wash their greens and vegetables around a big bucket. Robert, the cook, loaned him an old knife to scrape the bowls. Dolcino liked to visit the refectory; he loved to see the fine lamp they had there, and the painted shade with its pictures of the Twelve Apostles in wooden sandals and little capes that fell over their shoulders.

But to go to begging from door to door with the monks was his greatest pleasure. On such occasions he was permitted to carry their napkin-covered basket while they asked for bread. The sun was high in the sky as they walked along one day after several poor houses along the river bank had refused them. The heat was intense, and the two friars were hungry and very thirsty when they entered a courtyard they had never visited before.

Dolcino exclaimed in surprise as he set the basket down, for this place was all tapestried with fresh green vines and transparent verdure. Leopards and other strange beasts from across the sea were romping together, while youths and girls in bright clothing made sweet music on pipes and with zithers. A deep tranquillity pervaded the cool and odorous shade. Singers were singing strange songs to which the others listened in silence. The monks uttered not a word. Their hunger and their thirst were sated. They no longer wanted for anything.