Spartacus (14 page)

(She had said to him once, I want you to do something. I want you to do something that we do in the tribe because we believe something. He smiled at her, What do you believe in with the tribe? She said, You will laugh, and then he answered, Do I ever laugh? Have I ever laughed? Then she said to him, In the tribe we believe that the soul goes into the body through the nose and the mouth, a little with the breath each time. You are smiling. Then he answered, I am not smiling at you. I am smiling at the wonderful things people believe; to which she cried, Because you are a Greek, and Greeks believe nothing at all. He told her then, I am not a Greek but a Thracian, and it is not true that the Greeks believe nothing at all, but the best and the richest things people can believe, these things the Greeks believe. To this, her answer was that she didn’t care what the Greeks believed, but would he do what they did in the tribe? Would he put his mouth to her mouth and breathe his breath and his soul into her? And then she would do the same to him, and forever and for all time their souls would be mingled and they would be one person in two bodies. Or was he afraid? And this he answered by saying, Can’t you guess the things I am afraid of?)

She lies with him now on the thin pallet on the floor of their cell. The cell is their home. The cell is their castle. All their being together has been in this stone cubicle, which measures five feet by seven feet and which contains only a chamber pot and a pallet. But even these are not theirs; nothing is theirs, not even each other, and she lies by him now, touching his face and limbs and weeping softly—she whom no one ever saw weep in the daylight.

(I do not give women, I lend women, Batiatus was fond of saying. I lend them to my gladiators. A man is no good in the arena if his parts shrivel up. A gladiator is not a litter slave. A gladiator is a man, and if he’s not a man, no one will pay ten
denarii
for him. And a man needs a woman. I buy the incorrigibles because they are cheap, and if I can’t tame them, my boys will.)

The night is passing, and the first faint gray of the dawn enters the cell. If Varinia were to stand up, rising to her full, tall lissome height, her head would be on a level with the single window of the cell. If she were to look out of the cell, she would see the iron-walled stretch of the exercise ground and beyond it the sleepy soldiers who stand guard day and night. She knows it well. Cell and chains are not the natural habitat for her, as they are for Spartacus.

(This particular woman filled Batiatus with eagerness and delight. His agent had purchased her in Rome for very little, as a matter of fact, for only 500
denarii,
so he knew that the merchandise was hardly unblemished, but just to look at her filled him with eagerness and delight. For one thing, she was tall and beautifully formed, as many of the German tribe-women were, and Batiatus admired tall, shapely women. For another thing, she was very young, no more than twenty or twenty-one years, and Batiatus enjoyed young women. For still another thing, she was quite beautiful and had a grand head of yellow hair, and Batiatus preferred beautiful women with fine hair. So it is not difficult to understand why she filled the
lanista
with eagerness and delight.

(But the blemish was there, and he discovered that the first time he tried to take her to bed. She became a wild cat. She became a kicking, spitting, scratching, clawing monster—and since she was large and strong, he had a bad time beating her into unconsciousness. In the struggle, all the expensive objects which decorated his bedroom were smashed, including a beautiful Greek vase which he had to use to beat her over the head with until she ceased to struggle. His rage and frustration were such that he would—he felt—have been entirely justified in killing her; but when he added the fine vases, lamps and statuettes to her original cost, he considered that the investment was entirely too high to allow himself to be carried away by his anger. Nor could he in all good faith sell her in the market for a price in accordance with her appearance. Perhaps because he had started as a gang leader in the alleys of Rome, Batiatus had an extraordinary concern for business ethics. He prided himself on the fact that he sold nothing on false pretenses. Instead, he decided to let the gladiators tame her, and because he had already taken an unreasonable dislike to the strange, silent Thracian called Spartacus—whose sheep-like exterior covered a flame respected by every gladiator in the school—he chose him for her mate.

(It pleased him to watch Spartacus as he handed Varinia over to him, saying, This is a mate to lie with. Bring her to child or not, as you please. Make her obey you, but don’t injure her or deform her. That is what he said to Spartacus, as Spartacus stood silent and impassive, looking calmly at the German girl. Varinia was not beautiful on that occasion. There were two long gashes on her face. One eye was swollen closed, yellow and purple, and there were green and purple bruises on her forehead, her neck and her arms.

(See what you are getting, said Batiatus, tearing off the already torn dress which he had given her, and then she stood naked in front of Spartacus. At that moment, Spartacus saw her and loved her, not for her nakedness, but because without clothes she was not naked at all and did not cringe or attempt to cover herself with her arms, but stood simply and proudly, showing no pain nor hurt, not looking at him or at Batiatus, but contained within herself, contained with her eyesight and her soul and her dreams, and containing all those things because she had decided to surrender life which was worth nothing any more. His heart went out to her.

(That night, she huddled at the farthest corner of his cell, and he left her alone, made no move toward her except to ask her, when the chill settled, You speak Latin, girl?—no answer. Then he said, I will talk to you in Latin because I don’t speak German, and now the night chill is coming, and I want you to lie on my mat, girl—and still there was no answer from her. So he pushed the pallet toward her, and left it between them, and in the morning it was there, and they had both slept on the stone. But this was the first thoughtful kindness Varinia had encountered since they had taken her in the German forests, a year and half before.)

And on this damp night, turning into morning, the memory of that first night returns to her, and with the memory there goes from her into the man sleeping beside her, such a wave of love that he would have to be made of stone not to sense it. He stirs, and suddenly, he opens his eyes, seeing her dimly in the half light of the dawning, but seeing her wholly with his inward sight, and not yet awake, he takes her to him and begins to caress her.

“Oh, my darling, my darling,” she says.

“Let me.”

“And where will you find the strength for today, my beloved?”

“Let me, I am full of strength.”

Then she lies in his arms, the tears flowing silently.

 

 

The black man, Draba, awakens on this morning, and in his own tongue, he says, “I greet thee, day of death.”

He lies on his pallet and thinks about his life. He muses over the strange fact that all men, even the most miserable, have memories of love and care and kisses and play and joy and song and dance, and all men are afraid to die. Even when life is worth nothing at all, men cling to it. Even when they are lonely and a long way from home and bereft of any hope whatsoever of returning to their home and subject to every indignity and pain and cruelty and fed like sleek beasts and trained to fight for the amusement of others—even when this is so, they still cling to life.

And he, who was once an honest homesteader, with home and wife and children of his own, a voice listened to in peace and honored in war—he who was all that is now given a fish net and a fish fork and sent to fight, so that people can laugh at him and clap their hands at him.

He whispers the empty philosophy of his kind and his profession,
“Dum vivimus, vivamus.”

But it is empty and without solace, and his bones and muscles ache as he stands up to begin his day and force his body and mind to the task of killing Spartacus—whom he loves and values above all other white men in the place. Yet isn’t it said, “Gladiator—make no friends of gladiators.”

 

 

Already, the baths were steaming hot, and they plunged into the murky water quickly, as if everything had to be gotten through without thought or consideration. The bath house was quite dark, forty feet long and twenty feet deep, and lit, once the doors were closed, only by a small mica skylight. Under this pale light, the water of the bath was dull gray, overlaid by the hot mist rising from it, steaming from the red-hot stones which had been dropped into it, filling the whole bath house with the heavy texture of vapor-saturated air. It penetrated every pore of Spartacus’s body, relaxed his tense muscles, and gave him a strange, divorced feeling of ease and comfort. The hot water was a never-ending wonder to him, and never did the dry death of Nubia wash entirely from him; and never could he enter the bath house without reflecting on the care given to the bodies of those who were bred for death and trained to produce only death. When he had produced the things of life, wheat and barley and gold, his body was a dirty, useless thing, a thing of shame and filth, to be beaten and kicked and whipped and starved—but now that he had become a creature of death, his body was as precious as the yellow metal he had mined in Africa.

And strangely enough, it was only now that hatred had come to flower in him. There was no room for hatred before; hatred is a luxury that needs food and strength and even time for a certain kind of reflection. He had those things now, and he had Lentulus Batiatus as the living object of his hatred. Batiatus was Rome and Rome was Batiatus. He hated Rome and he hated Batiatus; and he hated all things Roman. He had been born and bred to accept the tilling of the fields, the herding of cattle and the mining of metal; but only in Rome had he come to see the breeding and training of men so that they could cut each other to pieces and bleed on the sand to the laughter and excitement of well bred men and women.

From the baths, they went to the rubbing tables. As always, Spartacus closed his eyes as the fragrant olive oil was poured onto his skin and each separate muscle of his body was loosened under the facile and knowing fingers of the masseur. The first time this had happened to him, his feeling was that of a trapped animal, panic and terror, the small freedom of all he owned or had ever owned, his own flesh invaded by these probing, writhing fingers. By now, however, he could relax and take full advantage of what the masseur gave him. Twelve times, he had lain like this; twelve times he had fought, eight times in the great amphitheatre of Capua, with the screaming, blood-maddened crowds urging him on, four times in the private arena of Batiatus for the edification of the wealthy connoisseurs of slaughter who travelled down from the mighty, legendary
urbs,
which he had never seen, to spend a day with their ladies or their male lovers watching men fight.

Now, as always when he lay upon the rubbing table, he lived over those times. It was all graven on his mind. No horror of mine or field was like the horror which gripped you when you stepped onto the hard-packed sand of the arena; no fear was like that particular fear; no indignity was like this particular indignity of being chosen to kill.

And so he learned that no form of human life was lower than the gladiator, and his very nearness to the beasts was rewarded with the same anxious care bestowed upon fine horses, even though Lentulus Batiatus or any other Roman would have been revolted at the thought of destroying a good horse in the arena. He wore his own mantle of fear and indignity, and now the fingers of the masseur traced the weave of each thread and cross thread of scar tissue.

He had been lucky. Never had he suffered a severed nerve, a scraped bone, a gouged eye, a dagger point in the eardrum or the neck or any others of those special and particular wounds his comrades feared so and dreamed of at night in a sweat of agony and terror. Never had he been hamstrung or had his intestines pierced. All his wounds were simple
mementa,
as they called them, and he could not ascribe this to skill and did not want to. Skill in this butchery!
No slave makes a soldier,
they said. But he was quick as a cat, almost as quick as the green-eyed Jew, the creature of hate and silence who lay on the table beside him, and very strong and very thoughtful. That was hardest—to think and not to become angry.
Ira est mors.
And those who became angry in the arena, they died. Fear was something else, but no anger. It was not hard for him. All his life, his thoughts had been his tools of survival. Few people knew that. “The slave—he thinks of nothing at all.” And, “The gladiator is a beast.” That was obvious, but within it was its very reverse. Once in a while, a free man survives by thought; but from day to day, the slave must think to live—another kind of thought, yet thought. Thought was the philosopher’s companion, but the slave’s adversary. When Spartacus left Varinia this morning, he blotted her out. She must not exist for him. If he lived, she would live, but now he was neither alive nor dead.