There must have been more to it than that: hidden behind a curtain like a character of comedy awaiting the auspicious moment, I would listen intently to the sounds of an unknown interior, the particular tone of women’s chatter, a burst of anger or of laughter, intimate murmurings; all this would cease the moment they knew I was there. The children, and the perpetual preoccupation with clothing or money matters, must again have taken first place once I was gone, though their importance was never mentioned in my presence; even the scorned husband would become essential, and perhaps an object for love. I compared my mistresses with the unsmiling faces of the women of my family, those whose concerns were chiefly domestic, interminably at work on the household accounts, and those who, steeped in family pride, were forever directing the care and repainting of the ancestral busts; I wondered if these frigid matrons would also be embracing a lover in some garden recess, and if my pliant beauties were not waiting merely for my departure to plunge again into some interrupted quarrel with a housekeeper. I tried as best I could to fit together these two aspects of the world of women.
Last year, shortly after the conspiracy in which Servianus came to his end, one of my mistresses of yore chose to travel all the way to the Villa in order to inform against one of her sons-in-law. I took no action upon the denunciation, which could have been inspired as much by a motherin-law’s hatred as by a desire of being useful to me. But the conversation interested me: just as in the inheritance court of old, it was wholly about wills, darkest machinations between relatives, unforeseen or unfortunate marriages. Here again was the narrow domain of women, their hard practical sense and their horizon turned grey the moment that love has ceased to illumine it. A certain acerbity and a kind of harsh loyalty brought to mind my vexatious Sabina. My visitor’s features seemed flattened out, melted, as it were, as if the hand of time had passed brutally back and forth over a mask of softened wax; what I had consented, for a moment, to take for beauty had never been more than the first bloom of youth. But artifice reigned there stilclass="underline" the wrinkled face played awkwardly at smiles. Voluptuous memories, if ever there had been any, were completely effaced for me; this was no more than a pleasant exchange with a creature marked like me by sickness or age; I felt the same slightly irritated sympathy that I would have had for an elderly cousin from Spain, or a distant relative coming from Narbonne.
I am trying for a moment to recapture mere curls of smoke, the iridescent bubbles of some childish game. But it is easy to forget. … So many things have happened since the days of those ephemeral loves that doubtless I no longer recognize their flavor; above all I am pleased to deny that they ever made me suffer. And yet among those mistresses there was one, at least, who was a delight to love. She was both more delicate and more firm than the others, gentler but harder, too; her slender body was rounded like a reed. I have always warmed to the beauty of human hair, that silken and undulating part of a body, but the headdresses of most of our women are towers, labyrinths, ships, or nests of adders. Hers was simply what I liked them to be: the cluster of harvest grapes, or the bird’s spread wing. Lying beside me and resting her small proud head against mine, she used to speak with admirable candor of her loves. I liked her intensity and her detachment in loving, her exacting taste in pleasure, and her consuming passion for harrowing her very soul. I have known her to take dozens of lovers, more than she could keep count of; I was only a passer-by who made no demands of fidelity.
She fell in love with a dancer named Bathyllus, so handsome that all follies for his sake were justified in advance. She sobbed out his name in my arms, and my approbation gave her courage. At other times we laughed a great deal together. She died young, on a fever-ridden island to which her family had exiled her after a scandalous divorce. She had feared old age, so I could only rejoice for her, but that is a feeling we never have for those whom we have truly loved. Her need for money was fantastic. One day she asked me to lend her a hundred thousand sesterces. I brought them to her the next morning. She sat down on the floor like some small, trim figure playing at knucklebones, emptied the sack on the marble paving, and began to divide the gleaming pile into heaps. I knew that for her, as for all us prodigals, those pieces of gold were not true-ringing specie marked with the head of a Caesar, but a magic substance, a personal currency stamped with the effigy of a chimera and the likeness of the dancer Bathyllus. I had ceased to exist for her; she was alone. Almost plain for the moment, and puckering her brow with delightful indifference to her own beauty, like a pouting schoolboy she counted and recounted upon her fingers those difficult additions. To my eyes she was never more charming.
The news of the Sarmatian incursions reached Rome during the celebration of Trajan’s Dacian triumph. These long-delayed festivities lasted eight days. It had taken nearly a year to bring from Africa and from Asia wild animals destined for slaughter in the arena; the massacre of twelve thousand such beasts and the systematic destruction of ten thousand gladiators turned Rome into an evil resort of death. On that particular evening I was on the roof of Attianus’ house, with Marcius Turbo and our host. The illuminated city was hideous with riotous rejoicing: that bitter war, to which Marcius and I had devoted four years of our youth, served the populace only as pretext for drunken festival, a brutal, vicarious triumph. It was not the time to announce publicly that these much vaunted victories were not final, and that a new enemy was at our frontiers. The emperor, already absorbed in his projects for Asia, took less and less interest in the situation to the northeast, which he preferred to consider as settled once and for all. That first Sarmatian war was represented as a simple punitive expedition. I was sent out to it with the title of governor of Pannonia, and with full military powers.
The war lasted eleven months, and was atrocious. I still believe the annihilation of the Dacians to have been almost justified; no chief of state can willingly assent to the presence of an organized enemy established at his very gates. But the collapse of the kingdom of Decebalus had created a void in those regions upon which the Sarmatians swooped down; bands starting up from no one knew where infested a country already devastated by years of war and burned time and again by us, thus affording no base for our troops, whose numbers were in any case inadequate; new enemies teemed like worms in the corpse of our Dacian victories. Our recent successes had sapped our discipline: at the advance posts I found something of the gross heedlessness evinced in the feasting at Rome. Certain tribunes gave proof of foolish overconfidence in the face of danger: perilously isolated in a region where the only part we knew well was our former frontier, they were depending for continued victories upon our armament, which I beheld daily diminishing from loss and from wear, and upon reinforcements which I had no hope to see, knowing that all our resources would thereafter be concentrated upon Asia.