“Have something. Can I offer you an apéritif, Agent Stone?” He spoke as though defying poverty. His own poverty.
Stone looked around. They were at Café Fandango in Piazza di Pietra, in the very heart of Rome, behind the Pantheon and opposite an impressive colonnade that once marked the boundary of a pagan temple but had later been incorporated into a structure less than a thousand years old. Café Fandango, owned by a successful independent producer, was frequented by writers and film people. Perosino went there often, hoping to be able to market one of his many stories of ancient Rome for a film.
“There’s something you definitely have to see, Professor Perosino.”
Stone was peremptory, as usual. Once again Perosino followed him.
During the drive to the covert hospital attached to the embassy, Stone and Perosino did not speak. Their silence was broken only when the driver deviated from the route and took Via dei Fori Imperiali in order to pass by the Colosseum.
“Do you like the Colosseum, Professor Perosino?” Agent Stone asked, indicating the seven concentric circles of arches that had once been adorned with huge slabs of travertine marble.
“The Colosseum is Rome. I was born here. These are things that happen to you. You don’t have the option of liking or disliking them.”
“You don’t believe that the past can reappear, Professor Perosino?” Agent Stone asked him after a brief pause.
“Rome is the Eternal City, I imagine you’ve heard it said, Agent Stone. When you live in eternity you don’t believe in anything,” Perosino replied.
Yet even as he spoke those words of deliberate cynicism, the researcher, confused by the noise of the traffic, had the momentary impression that he was seeing his city on the night before a spectacle, two thousand years ago. The blaring car horns sounded to him like the infernal din of the carts making their way from the animal parks of the imperial gardens, carrying the beasts toward the inevitable, their sole performance in the arena. Locked in dark cages, they would wait in the underground crypts of the Colosseum, already buried under the earth’s crust.
In the hospital room where the most recent hallucinator had been treated, Perosino and Stone found only Agent Miller awaiting them. This time the person shattered by the visions was a woman. A young woman, exceedingly pale, with huge green eyes, lying in a state of persistent catatonia. Maybe because she was covered with a white sheet, maybe because she was so beautiful and unreachable — like the ancient priestesses of the goddess Vesta, who took a vow of eternal chastity and were buried alive if they broke their vows — for a moment the American girl seemed to Perosino like a vestal virgin dressed in white. One of those eternal virgins who surrounded the Emperor on his dais during the gladiator games. In the end, Perosino said to himself, she, too, seemed to be buried alive in the grave of a psyche lacerated by the apparition.
“What do you see in these images, Professor Perosino?”
Agent Miller interrupted the flow of the researcher’s thoughts as she placed before him the visual transcription of the girl’s account, which must already have been heard before his arrival and recorded by the Cinecittà sketch artist.
Perosino looked at the drawings. He looked at them and was horrified. They portrayed a woman prisoner who, wrapped in a cowhide in the middle of the arena, was made to couple with an enormous white bull. In subsequent images, the body of the woman, already mutilated, was pierced by the tip of a red-hot spear, brandished by someone wearing the winged headdress of the god Mercury. Appearing next in the scene was someone with a bird’s beak, wearing a clinging garment and pointed leather shoes, holding a large hammer with a very long handle. This monstrous creature had seized hold of the unfortunate victim’s corpse and was smashing the skull with the hammer. Finally, the Colosseum workers, using big hooks, dragged the corpse out of the arena. The hooks were lodged in the flesh of the woman’s belly, already perforated by the bull. In the stands, surrounding the scene of carnage, the public was in ecstasy.
“What do you see in those images, professor?” Agent Miller repeated.
“I see the myth,” Perosino replied, casting a compassionate glance at the girl lying on the bed. She might be more or less the same age as the torture victim, and to have witnessed that scene must have been severely traumatizing.
“What do you mean, professor?” Agent Miller pressed.
“The scenes are mythological. The coupling between a woman and a bull recalls the myth of Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who became infatuated with a bull she was given by Poseidon, and had herself shut up inside a faithful reproduction of a heifer, constructed by the architect Daedalus, in order to copulate with the beast. The creature with the bird’s beak is Charon, the demon who ferried the souls of the dead to the other side of the river Styx in Hades. In the beliefs of the ancient Romans, this figure, inspired by Charu, the Etruscan god of death, was almost always accompanied by the god Mercury, who appears here armed with a spear.”
“Now it’s all clear!” Agent Miller was elated. “This proves that our patients’ so-called ‘visions’ are actually inspired by concepts and images derived from previous knowledge. In this instance, the girl, a student of archeology at Stanford, drew upon sources of the classical myth that she must surely be familiar with.”
Angelo Perosino glanced again at the girl shattered by the apparitions, lost in sympathy. Then he shook his head vigorously. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case, Agent Miller. These mythological performances were actually staged in the Colosseum at the expense of some poor unfortunate. The violent copulation between the woman and the bull was made possible by the fact that the cowhide in which the victim was wrapped was first smeared with the blood of a cow in heat. It was the ancient Romans who believed in the reality of myths, not us.”
At that moment the girl was shaken by a paroxysm and began thrashing around in her bed.
“Maybe she’s trying to tell us something,” Perosino suggested.
“She hasn’t spoken since yesterday. She stopped talking right after finishing the account of her vision,” Stone informed him.
“Why did you wait until now to call me?” Perosino asked.
“Agent Miller felt that your advice was no longer needed,” Stone explained.
Using gestures, the girl asked to see the drawings. When she had them in her hands, she threw all except one to the floor. She turned the single sheet over to the blank side, took a pencil from the bedside table, and, with some difficulty, wrote a few phrases in Latin.
“Would you translate them for us?” Miller asked Perosino.
The researcher hesitated, still somewhat offended, then took the paper and read:
As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome will stand. When the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall. When Rome falls, the world will fall.
“What kind of nonsense is this?” asked Agent Miller, more intractable than ever. Her colleague Stone, meanwhile, clasped his hands in his lap, almost as if he were praying. He awaited Perosino’s answer with an eager gaze.
“It’s the prophecy of a wise man of late antiquity, who has come down in history by the name of the Venerable Bede.” Perosino moved away from the bed toward the other end of the room, where a halogen lamp gave off a faint light. “Unfortunately, it never came true,” he added. Then, not knowing what else to do, he turned the paper over and looked again at the drawing. “To be fair, perhaps there is an inconsistency,” Perosino concluded after a few seconds’ observation.