War & War (26 page)

9.

Go round again, they told the driver from the backseat, turn right at the corner, do a circle and when you get back to 159th Street again take your fucking foot off the gas and cruise very slowly past the houses, because it wasn’t true that they couldn’t find it, it simply couldn’t be true how much these fucking houses resembled each other, for they’d find the motherfucker, they most certainly would, they said, sooner or later it would all click into place, and they’d go round and round all night if need be, because it was somewhere on the right-hand side, either that house, said one of them, or the one next to the Vietnamese, said the other, having gone round three times already, and how the fuck could it have happened that they had really paid so little attention, but really, the driver called back, surely two normal mothers could not have given birth to such a pair of fuckheads, it being the third time they had gone around, then that guy comes out and they lay into him without even looking back and now nobody knows where to look for him, and don’t anyone tell him how to handle the gas ‘cause he’d leave them here to drown in their own shit, let them do the driving and try to find him by themselves, and when it comes to that, they retorted in the back, they’ll just keep going round in circles until that lousy rat shows his stinking face, so let’s stop here, one suggested, but no, the other snapped back, just keep going, and
whatthefuck
, the driver slammed his hands down on the wheel, is that what they really want, to spend the whole fucking night going around in circles in this filthy, rotten, shithole of a side street? and so they continued at a snail’s pace down 159th Street, moving so slowly that pedestrians passed them by, turning at the next corner and circling the block to return to 159th Street, a Lincoln with three people on board, which was all the Vietnamese grocer saw when, after a while, he went out to see what the devil was going on out there, the car having passed the shop several times, reappearing every few minutes, and repeating this procedure time after time, a light blue Lincoln Continental MK III, he told his wife later, with decorative chrome flashing, with leather upholstery and dazzling rear lights and, naturally, the slow, dignified, hypnotic swaying of the spoiler.

10.

The Albergueria was not exactly an inn, said Korin to the woman on the bed, the sheer extent of it would tell you as much, since people don’t build them of such size, of such astonishing, quite incredible largeness, nor was the Albergueria exactly “built” as such, if by building one meant something planned, for it simply grew, year by year, grew larger, higher, wider, more complete—
expansion
was the word Korin used—with countless rooms upstairs, ever more staircases, ever more floors full of nooks and hallways, exits and connecting passages, a corridor here, a corridor there in entirely incomprehensible order, while along this or that corridor, you might suddenly come across some vague focus of attention, a kitchen or a laundry with the doors removed, from which steam was continually billowing, or, equally suddenly, on some floor or other, between two guest rooms, you’d see an open bathroom with enormous tubs, the tubs filled with the steaming bodies of men surrounded by the slight running figures of Berber boys with towels covering their private parts, and stairs leading everywhere from inside these rooms, stairs that passed office-like quarters on certain levels, with commercial signs on the door and impatient queues of Provençals, Sardinians, Castilians, Normans, Bretons, Picardians, Gascons, Catalans and countless unclassifiable others, as well as priests, sailors, clerks, dealers, money-changers and interpreters, not forgetting a miscellaneous bunch of whores from Granada and Algiers on the stairs and down the corridors,
whores
everywhere, everything so enormous, so confusing and so complicated that no one was able to comprehend it all, because there wasn’t one single owner here but infinite numbers of them, each of them keeping an eye only on what was theirs and not caring about the rest and therefore lacking the foggiest notion of the place as a whole, which was in fact true of everyone there, and one should say, said Korin massaging the nape of his neck, that if this was the case on the upper levels, it was even more so on the ground floor,
down below
, for there chaos and incomprehensibility,
the impenetrable situation
, said Korin, was the general rule, it being impossible to be certain of anything, of whether, for instance, this space with its marvelously frescoed ceiling supported by roughly fifty columns and below it the vast, all-encompassing gloom constituted a dining hall, a customs house, a surgery, a bar, a financial exchange, a vast confessional, a marine recruitment agency, a brothel, a barber’s shop, or all of these together at the same time; the answer in fact being “everything at the same time,” said Korin, for the ground floor, the
downstairs
as he called it, was a monstrous Babel of voices morning, noon, evening and night, full of monstrous numbers of people continually coming and going, and what was more, added Korin blinking, it was as if they all existed in a slightly non-historical space, so that there were enemies and fugitives, hunters and pursued, the defeated as well as those about to be defeated; for here you would find the suspicious agent of a bunch of Algerian pirates consorting with the secret emissary of the Inquisition at Aragon, undercover Moroccan dealers in gunpowder in conversation with traveling salesmen from Medina carrying little statuettes of Stella Maris, Capocorsicans en route to Tadjikistan, Misur and Algiers walking shoulder to shoulder with beautiful melancholy homeless Sephardics who just a year ago had been expelled by Isabella, as well as crushed Sicilian Jews exiled by the Sicilians themselves, all of them in a state between genuine hope and despair, revulsion and dream, calculation and waiting for miracles, here, in the empire recovered but two years ago from the migrating Catholic Kings, every one of them living in expectation—
another expectancy
, said Korin—waiting to see if three frail
caravelles
would return and if they did so, whether the world would change, a world, which like the Albergueria with its becalmed ships in the bay, itself seemed becalmed, had suspended its activities, yet permitting all this—the chaos and confusion of the ground floor and the floors above ran riot—while outside some missing power, the power of
peace,
somehow balanced the equation, the peace that Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót were happily enjoying on the journey from Lisbon to Ceuta—that’s the way it was, and that
in point of fact,
was the state of affairs behind the thick and secure walls of the villa at Corstopitum too, for within them, he said, they felt a kind of inner calm settling on them, a calm that felt like being reborn, as Falke put it, after several weeks of having walked the length of the Vallum and returned—for Corstopitum to them meant security, the guarantee of which was the extraordinary wall constructed some thirty miles away from where they were—for the sensation for example, said Korin, of entering the baths of the villa that had been made available to them by the will of the
cursus publicus
, the joy of casting a glance at the wonderful mosaic floor and mosaic-covered walls, of sinking into the water of the basin and allowing the flush of hot water to reach every part of one’s frozen limbs, was the kind of feeling, the kind of morale-raising luxury for the protection of which you required at least a proper Vallum or its equivalent, so that the kind of security experienced at Corstopitum, that calm and peace, signified a genuine triumph, a triumph over that which lay beyond the Vallum, the forces of barbaric darkness, of bare necessity, of savage passions and the desire for conquest and possession, triumph over all this,
triumph
, Korin explained, over what Kasser and his companions had seen in the wild eyes of a Pict rebel hiding in the scrub somewhere behind the tower of the fort at Vercovicium, over the state of permanent danger, triumph over the eternal beast in man.

11.

There was a noise outside the front door and the interpreter’s lover jerked her head to one side and waited in case the door opened, her whole body tense, her eyes full of fear; but there was no further activity at the door so she opened the magazine she was reading and examined it again, gazing at a picture of what happened to be a brooch, a brooch with a sparkling diamond at its center at which she stared and stared until she eventually turned the page.

12.

He arrived in the uniform of a centurion of the Syrian archers and a simple legionary’s helmet with a plumed crest, wearing a short leather tunic, chain mail, neck-scarf, a heavy cloak, with a long-handled
gladius
at his side and the ring on his thumb that he never forgot to wear, though he would refer to him rather as a master of ceremonies, or, as Korin had it, a
master of ritual
, who appeared among the staff of the villa in the week following their return from the wall, though no one knew who had sent him, the
Praetorius Fabrum
or the
cursus publicus
, though it might have been the high command of the auxiliary cohorts or some unknown officer of the II Legion from Eboracum, but at any rate he turned up one day, flanked by two servants bearing a large tray full of fruits, the last of the original Pons Aelius rations, the three of them entering the central hall of the villa where meals were usually taken, he stepping in to introduce himself as Lucius Sentius Castus, then bowing his head, and with full consciousness of the effect he was having, after a moment of silence, called the attention of Kasser and his companions to his presence and announced that though no one had asked him to do this, no one, he repeated, had asked, it would be a great honor for him,
very dignified
, in Korin’s words, if with the completion of his mission not only the mission but his very being were to cease, that he was a simple bearer of news who had come with both news and an offer, and with the conveying of these he would prefer to bring his emissary role to an end, or, if they might allow him to put it that way, that with the delivery of the news and the offer he would willingly vanish like the
Corax,
having said which he fell silent—
silence
, said Korin—and for a moment it seemed he was searching their faces for traces of understanding, then launched into what Korin considered to be an especially incomprehensible speech consisting almost entirely of signs, hints and references, which must, said Korin, have been in some kind of code, which, according to the manuscript, was perfectly understood by Kasser and the others, but seemed decidedly
difficult
to him, and he could form no clear picture of its subject since it demanded the establishing and interpretation of connections between objects, names and events that seemed entirely unconnected, not only to his own admittedly defective mind, but to any mind, since expressions such as
Sol Invictus, resurrection, the bull, the Phrygian cap, bread, blood, water, Pater, altar
and
rebirth
suggested that it was an adept of some deep mystery such as the cult of Mithras that was speaking, but what it all meant, Korin shook his head, was impossible to guess, for the manuscript merely rendered Castus’s speech but gave no clue or explanation, not even in the most general way, as to its meaning, but, as so often in this chapter it merely repeated everything, three times, to be precise, in a row, and having done so, the text simply shows us Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót recumbent in that refectory decorated with huge laurel branches, their eyes sparkling with excitement as they listen to this Castus character who, true to his promise, vanishes like the
Corax
or raven, an army of astonished servants behind them and the scented dates, raisins, nuts and walnuts as well as the delicious cakes, products of the confectioners of the Corstopitum
Castrum
lying on the tray in front of them, all of which make a very deep impression on a person, as do the broken sentences of Castus, though none of this actually leads anywhere—
it didn’t lead nowhere
, said Korin—except into obscurity, into the densest, foggiest obscurity, or it might possibly mean, Korin declared, that the kind of total obscurity into which it led was of the so-called Mithraic sort, since, at the end of the speech, when Kasser on behalf of his companions silently nodded to him, Castus
seemed
to be indicating that some not-quite-definable
Pater
was awaiting them on the day of
Sol’s
resurrection in the Mithraeum at Brocolitium, and that it would be he—Castus pointed at himself—or some other person, a
Corax
, a
Nymphaeus
or a
Miles
, who would come for them and lead them into the cave, though who precisely was to do that remained unknown as yet, but there would be someone, and that this person would be the leader,
the guide
, and so saying he raised his arms, fixed his eyes on the ceiling then addressed them, saying: please oblige me by also desiring that we may summon him, as we do, the blushing
Sol Invictus
, after the becoming manner of
Acimenius
, or in the form of
Osiris the Abrakoler
, or as the most hallowed Mithras, and you should then seize hold of the bull’s horns under the crags of the
Persian Dog
, the bull who will take a firm stand, so that henceforth he should follow you, having said which he lowered his arms, bowed his head and added, very quietly:
outurn soluit libens merito
then departed—
leave taking
, said Korin—the end of the fourth chapter being entirely steeped in puzzles, secrets, enigmas and mysteries, much like the text that followed, an extraordinarily and equally significant part of which was also comprised of such puzzles, secrets, enigmas and mysteries, though all this served to characterize only one of the groups waiting at the Albergueria, there being one recurring image involving some Sephardic and Sicilian brothers in which—whatever the Sephard or Sicilian’s occupation, whether he be beggar, printer, tailor or cobbler, whether he be interpreter or scribe in Greek, Turkish, Italian or Armenian, or a money-changer, or a drawer of teeth, or whatever—
never mind
, said Korin—what you plainly saw was that suddenly he stopped being what he was and was transported to
another world
, that suddenly the tailor’s scissors or the cobbler’s knife ceased moving, the spittoon he was carrying or the
maravedi
he had counted out stood still in the air, and not only for an instant but for a minute or more, and the person, we might say, was lost in meditation—that he would
brood
, said Korin—and had entirely ceased to be a tailor or cobbler or beggar or interpreter and became something completely different, his gaze contemplative, oblivious to the calls of others, and then, since he continued in this state for some time, the person confronting him also fell silent, no longer addressing remarks to him nor shaking him, simply watching the peculiarly transformed countenance before him as it gazed, entranced, into the air, watching this beautiful face and those beautiful eyes—
beautiful face and beautiful eyes
, said Korin—and the manuscript kept returning to this moment as if it too were lost in contemplation, meditative, entranced, suddenly letting the text go and allowing his inner eye to gaze on these faces and eyes, this manuscript, said Korin, of which it was possible to know this much at least, or at least he himself knew this from his first reading of it, and indeed it was the one and only thing he knew about it from the very beginning, that the whole thing was written by a madman, and that was why there was no tide page, and why the author’s name was missing.