The Last Cato (31 page)

“The circle of the envious,” I murmured, a bit cowardly, putting my left hand on my forearm where the tattoo of the first cross was still tender.

“Come on,
Basileia,
don’t let them think we’re cowards,” Farag uttered, elated, as he thrust himself through the hole.

A second hedge extended in front of us. We couldn’t see the end in either direction; the two formed a path that seemed to go on forever.

“Would the lady and gentleman prefer the right or the left?” Boswell said in the same good-humored voice.

“Which way does Dante go?” I asked.

The captain quickly pulled his well-thumbed copy of the
Divine Comedy
out of his backpack and scanned it.

“Listen to what he says in the third strophe of the canto,” he said, visibly excited.
“‘No sign of any souls or carvings here. The cliff face is all bare, the roadway bare…’
Four lines later he observes of Virgil:
‘Then, looking up and staring at the sun, he made of his right side a pivot point bringing his left side of his body round.’
Could you ask for any clearer directions?”

“So, where’s the sun?” I inquired, looking around. The gigantic trees grew so close together they covered the sky.

The captain looked at his watch, took out a compass, and pointed to a spot in the sky. “It should be about there.”

Sure enough, once we knew where it was, it was easy to detect the source of the light coming through the branches.

“But we can’t be sure what time of day Virgil looked at the sun,” replied Farag. “That could completely change the direction.”

“Let’s take a chance,” I reasoned. “If the Staurofilakes wanted us to take a certain direction, they would have shown it to us.”

Glauser-Röist, still reading the
Divine Comedy,
raised his head and looked at us with shining eyes. “Well, Doctor, this time chance is on our side, for Virgil and Dante arrived at the second cornice just past noon. About the same time we did.”

With a satisfied smile, I lifted my face to the sun, planted my right foot on the ground, and turned to my left. My left foot landed on the path on the right. We started down the “bare roadway” between the bare walls that only appeared seamless because they were formed by a dense bower. The “bare roadway” wasn’t completely smooth, either: Every couple of hundred meters, firmly anchored in the ground, was a wooden star. At first those stars really caught our eye, and we speculated about what they meant. After more than an hour of walking, we decided that however incorrect we might be, whatever they were, they were all the same and were therefore insignificant as clues.

Fatigue was starting to take its toll. My feet were burning and aching. What I wouldn’t have given for a chair—better yet, a comfortable leather armchair like the one in the helicopter. Like Dante and Virgil, we walked a long way before we found anything noteworthy.

“This reminds me of a line by Borges,” said Farag, “which says: ‘I know a Greek labyrinth that is a unique, straight line. So many philosophers have gotten lost on this line that even a mere detective could get lost.’ I think it’s from
Artificios.
”

“And don’t you remember the part about that ‘infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is so great that it appears to be a straight line’?” I too had read Borges, so why not show it off a bit?

At about five in the afternoon, with nothing to appease our hunger or thirst, we came upon a gap in the hedge: an iron door, as tall as the enclosure it sealed, and some eighty centimeters wide. When we pushed it and crossed the threshold, we discovered some interesting things. First, our enormous hedges were solid stone walls nearly a meter thick and entirely covered by vines. Second, the door was designed so that it could only be opened from the outside. As soon as we turned our backs, we couldn’t open it again.

“We need something to prop it open,” proposed Farag.

There were no rocks lying around, and we couldn’t spare anything we were carrying. On top of that, the vines were as strong as hemp rope and pricked like the devil. The only solution was to use Farag’s watch. He offered it generously, saying that it was made of titanium and would easily hold up. We leaned the iron slab on it very gently. The poor watch held out for a few seconds, then buckled under the door’s weight and shattered into a thousand pieces.

“Sorry, Farag,” I said, to console him. More than downhearted, he was incredulous.

“Don’t worry, Professor—the Vatican will compensate you. The bad part is, the door is now closed and there’s no way for us to get out.”

“That means we’re on the right path,” I replied, nervous about what might be next.

We were all thinking the same thing, so we started walking again. The second path was narrower than the first, and darkness made walking dangerous. There may have still been plenty of light outside the forest; but under that thick sky of branches, visibility was very poor.

We hadn’t walked a hundred meters when we stumbled upon a new symbol on the ground. This one was much more original.

It seemed to be made of lead, although we couldn’t be sure. Whoever put it there had made certain we couldn’t pry it loose. It was as if it had sprung from the earth.

“It looks familiar.” I squatted down to examine it. “Is it a zodiac sign?”

The captain just stood there, as if waiting for the two classics experts to decide what it is.

“No. It looks like one, but it isn’t,” said Farag, brushing back the weeds. “It’s an ancient symbol for the planet Saturn.”

Furtively, I bared my teeth in a scornful grimace only Farag could see. He smiled. We stood up and kept walking. Night was filtering down on us. From time to time we heard the cry of some bird and the sound of leaves rustling in the gusts of wind. As if that weren’t enough, it was starting to get cold.

“Will we have to spend the night here?” I asked, turning up the collar of my jacket. At least it was leather and had a thick flannel lining.

“I’m afraid so,
Basileia.
Kaspar, I hope you foresaw this possibility.”

“What does
Basileia
mean?” asked the captain.

Suddenly, my legs started to tremble.

“It was a very common word in Byzantine, meaning ‘worthy woman.’”

What a liar! I sighed silently with relief.
Basileia
would never have been translated as ‘worthy woman’ and it wasn’t a common Byzantine word. Its literal meaning was “empress” or “princess.”

It was only six thirty in the evening, but the forest was so dark that the captain had to switch on his powerful flashlight. We’d walked all day down long dirt paths and had gotten nowhere. Finally, we stopped and sat on to the ground to eat our first meal since we had had breakfast back in Rome. We chewed the infamous salami and cheese sandwiches (the captain’s menu never varied), and recapped what we’d learned. We came to the conclusion that we were missing several pieces of the puzzle. The next day we’d figure out what we’d gotten ourselves into. A Thermos of hot coffee got us back into a good mood.

“Why don’t we sleep right here? We can set out at dawn,” I ventured.

“Let’s go on a bit longer,” countered the Rock.

“But we’re tired, Captain.”

“Kaspar, I think we should do what Ottavia suggests. It’s been a very long day.”

The Rock gave in, utterly disgusted. We set up an improvised tent, and the captain handed us a couple of heavy woolen hats. We laughed, and looked at him as if he were crazy.

“Your ignorance is shameful!” he thundered. “Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘If you’re feet are cold, put on a hat’? A good part of body heat is lost through the head. The human organism is programmed to sacrifice the extremities if the torso and back get cold. If we don’t lose heat through our heads, we will maintain our body temperature and keep our feet and hands warm.”

“That’s too complicated! I’m just a simple man of the desert!” joked Farag. Nonetheless, he and I jammed the caps down to our ears. The one the captain gave me looked vaguely familiar. I didn’t recall why until later.

Then, the Rock took from his magic backpack what looked like a pouch of tobacco and tried to give one to each one of us. Of course we rejected the offer in the nicest way possible. Glauser-Röist, steeling himself with patience, explained that the pouches contained survival blankets, a sheet of plastic that weighed practically nothing but kept you really warm. Mine was red on one side and silver on the other, Farag’s was yellow and silver, and the captain’s was orange and silver. They were indeed very warm. Between the cap and the blanket (which rustled every time you moved), we barely noticed we were out in the middle of an open forest. I sat down between the two men, carefully leaning my back against the wall, the captain switched off his flashlight. I must have slid down without realizing it until I was leaning against Farag, my head on his shoulder. In between dreams, it came to me that my woolen cap was the same one the brunette girl wore in the photograph in the captain’s living room.

I
t started to grow light—going from utter blackness to a dark gray—at about five in the morning. We all woke up at the same time, surely on account of the bird’s deafening arias. Half-asleep, I remembered it was Saturday, and that just the week before, I had been in Palermo with my family, at my father and brother’s wake. I silently prayed for them and tried to accept the demented reality around me before I opened my eyes for the day.

We stumbled around, drank some cold coffee, gathered up our supplies, and set off down the path. We walked without a break until nine or nine thirty; we counted some thirty symbols of Saturn. Suddenly, in front of us, we came across an enormous wall that cut into the path.

“Attention!” announced Farag. “We’re there!”

We picked up the pace, animated by the crazy desire to reach the last step. But the truth was, we weren’t even near the end. Although that bramble-covered wall closed off the path we had traveled, to our left we noticed an iron door, identical to the one we had walked through the day before. Knowing there was nothing we could do to keep it open, we pushed on it and walked through with an air of resignation, guessing that on the other side we would find a panorama similar to what we were leaving behind. If it weren’t for the fact that the new path was narrower than the previous one, we’d have thought we hadn’t gone anywhere at all.

“I get the feeling we’re walking across parallel paths that are getting closer to one another.” Farag extended his arms from side to side; the tips of his fingers were just a palm’s width from the hedges. The hedges had changed too; the walls weren’t just covered by tangled stalks and leaves. Interlaced were huge thickets of thorns, brambles, thistles, and nettles that pricked us if we just lightly brushed up against them.

“The paths are much narrower,” the Rock agreed, looking at his compass, “but I don’t think we’re headed down straight, parallel lines. We seem to have veered about seventy degrees to the left.”

“Are you serious?” Farag said, surprised. He walked over to the captain to check out his measurements.

“Borges once spoke of ‘infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is so great that it appears to be a straight line,’” I said, as my fingertips touched one of the pointy-tipped spines protruding through the wall. If it weren’t so clearly a plant, I would have bet it was the sharpest needle ever made. Its thorn oozed a soft black goo. Seconds after touching it, my skin got red and burned as if I’d touched a burning match. “My God, these nettles are terrible! We must stay away from them.”

“Let me see.”

As the captain studied my hand, the redness and stinging slowly subsided. “Fortunately, the poison of the nettle you touched is shortlived; but all the species around here may not be the same. Be careful.”

Trying not to brush up against the thorny plants, whose rapiers were strong enough to tear our clothes, we walked about a hundred or hundred and fifty meters more until the captain stopped short.

“Another strange design,” he said.

Farag and I leaned over to look at it. It resembled an artistic numeral
4,
made with a metal that shone with a bluish glint.

“The symbol for the planet Jupiter,” Farag pointed out. “I wonder… If we are in fact turning and a planet appears on each new path, it’s possible all this is in fact a large rendition of the cosmos.”