Maybe it was a folly sprung from the general lack of belief.
He pictured the million-strong mass thronging toward Jerusalem, and all of a sudden being converted and becoming followers of the Anointed. He shuddered.
It was fortunate that the Judaean peasants were conservative; it was quite impossible to drive anything new into their skulls.
He had already encountered narrow looks like Marcellus’s; he had seen blind fanatics before. The ecstatic looks in Beth Zechariah as they had waited for the First Fruits to be collected had been like that; the expressions of the pilgrims going to Jerusalem had been like that; the faces of the Judaeophobic Greek rabble in Alexandria had been like that. He tried to picture who among his seemingly normal acquaintances he could imagine turning blindly irrational. He could not imagine such blindness in Kainis’s eyes, nor Theo’s — but in Narcissus’s, Claudius’s, and Philo’s he could. He wondered if Tija’s eyes could turn into those of a fanatic. Hardly: in his eyes there was a glint that from the outset had something inhuman, distant, cold about it.
He also tried to picture how Apollos, a skilled orator, would speak to a congregation of ecstatic believers. He just couldn’t; he could not see the new eyes, only the old, rational ones. Apollos did not believe in this folly; he just hoped that Greeks and Jews might be able to approach one another via this resurrected Anointed, in the same way that Philo had wanted this to happen, the hatred driven from their hearts and minds in the same way as wise men like Simon the Magus exorcised demons from the sick.
Priscilla’s eyes were rational eyes; she was no ecstatic believer, just pretending to be profoundly convinced of something that had no reality at all. She was lying. What was going on in her mind, he wondered? Was she resolving the loneliness of widowhood by extending hospitality to believers? Maybe she was unable to mourn her husband. Had she never loved him anyway, and so was feeling guilt on that account, persuading herself that he had not actually died? Had she committed serious offenses against her husband, and instead of being repentant was she declaring the offenses nonexistent because there was no wrong if there was no death? Why did they have no children? Were there never any? It might easily have been a dreadful marriage.
Otherwise nothing happened. Marcellus ate, drank, slept, and loafed around; Hagar cooked, with the girls helping her out of sheer boredom, and Uri did his job. The murals he painted were met with general approval. Construction work on a new house took them to Quirinal Hill, and while the walls were raised he worked on tiling the floor and, if any time was left, familiarized himself with the encaustic technique.
There were practitioners of this ancient Oriental technique in Rome, and it was possible to obtain the pigments and tools needed for it in their small boutiques, the most important tool being a metal implement, with a spoon at one end and a spatula at the other, offering a cold surface for applying the pigments to the molten binder without working away the thickness, thereby producing what were almost relief paintings, with it added the possibility of mixing all the primary colors — red, yellow, white, black — according to taste, on one palette, producing innumerable shades. A well-executed work was not just a colored drawing as it would have been made centuries ago but a genuine painting that almost vied with sculpture, with the advantage over tempera that there was no need to treat the finished surface, and air would not harm it.
In those same small boutiques it was also possible to obtain original Greek pictures, and Uri was fascinated by their depiction of perspective, which despite having been discovered long ago by the Greek masters had never become prevalent in Rome. Uri could see that the masters were guided by the painterly depiction of eminent buildings in that they came to realize that parallel lines converged in the distance to come together at a point on an imaginary horizon; in Nature there were no parallel lines, they were a construct of man, interfering in Nature, further elaborating on God’s work. Without man there would be no parallels. Perhaps there were many things not present in the Creation that man had introduced; the Creator may wonder as He pleases at what has come out of this creature’s imagination.
People had begun to use the geometric deception, which gave a picture a three-dimensional appearance that recorded the sight of living beings, as a result of which the viewpoint of a viewer standing outside the picture had become decisive, Uri could recognize, and he contemplated where he should place himself if he wished to sneak into the picture.
He outlined that problem to one of the picture-dealers, a pleasant and wise man, who was skilled at his line of business but simply could not grasp what Uri was driving at.
“In paintings of the present day,” Uri explained, “what I see is a separate world from that in which I, the viewer, exist. But then what is the world from which I am looking? Another world?”
The picture-dealer was stumped.
“If it’s not another world,” said Uri, “and there is only one world, then I too should be in the picture… But in that case what is it that I’m seeing and how?”
There were shoppers in the boutique, themselves painters, and they drifted over and started to argue, talking indiscriminately until eventually one of them stated that the problem had already been solved by their painting rooms, which spread a continuous picture over the four walls, the floor and ceiling; the rooms of Augustus and Livia had been painted along that principle, and if a person stood in the middle of the room, whichever way he turned he would be in the picture.
“It’s a problem for architects, not painters,” an individual opined in a falsetto voice from the door of the shop. “The most logical building is a hemisphere.”
“Why a hemisphere?” someone asked.
“Because we always stand on something… If that were not the case, then we ought to be hovering in the center of a complete sphere, anchored from every angle.”
Several people laughed.
The falsetto-voiced individual stepped farther into the shop. Uri cast a look at him. He was a young, plump person, his belly quivering, who moved with the limpness of the castrated, his beady eyes shining, brilliant and blue, from a puffy, whiskerless face.
The eunuch looked at Uri.
“Father!” he cried.
They were sitting on the terrace of a tavern, sipping hot water. Uri, trying to choke back his tears of pain and of joy, was shivering.
Little remained of the old Theo, just the eyes and the intelligence; he was just another eunuch.
“Is your eyesight all right?” Uri asked.
Theo was surprised by the question.
“Of course.”
They fell silent.
“I don’t really know why I should be angry at them,” Theo made a start. “I had no sexual desire at the time I was castrated so I have no way of knowing what I might have missed.”
“Don’t you feel something of the kind? Doesn’t your rectum tingle?”
Theo was again surprised.
“Yes, it does… If I see a good-looking woman or man, there is some tingling thereabouts… Not much, but I distinctly feel it. It’s more an aesthetic pleasure than anything else… A fine picture has the same effect.”
“Why did you have to be castrated?”
“Because that fellow who bought me used me as a lover. I reminded him of his dead wife.”
Uri was unable to hold back his tears.
“He was a decent man,” Theo tried to reassure him. “He genuinely loved me: he taught me and looked after me.”
“What did he do with you — poke you in the ass?”