Tiberius was breathing deeply; I closed the draperies and waited. The soft Capri afternoon enveloped me; I watched the fire dying in the hearth; I listened to the dripping of the water clock that marked the time of Tiberius Caesar, fat, stiff-necked Caesar, sleeping uncomfortably, and breathing with difficulty; I inhaled the wild perfume of the laurel roses that surrounded the Imperial Villa, and said to myself: Take care, Theodorus, those roses smell good but they are poisonous; I stood up and covered my master’s face with a silk cloth, for flies were gathering about the remains of his meal, and threads of wine and honey trickled from between the Emperor’s thick lips; I was grateful for the adherence to the blessed law of silence.
Then I myself broke that law; I looked at the water clock; it marked the hour. It is told that there are rooms in which no one may enter unless with great need and with prior purification; unless he fulfills the ritual, one will feel afraid … and anyone who lies down in these chambers will be thrown forcefully from his bed by impalpable forces, and later found half dead. I walked toward the balcony that faces the wine-dark sea, a sea of nereids and dolphins, the glimmering court of Neptune, the liquid cave of Circe. Again I gazed about the placid imperial chambers; suddenly the dead flames in the hearth sprang to life; I trembled, I hesitated no longer; I drew back the draperies and saw standing there the phantom of Agrippa; the sun was at his back and cast an aureole about his head, but his somber face reflected only the shadow of the chamber. He wore a black tunic, and he stood motionless. Behind him, jumping down from the balcony and scurrying toward the sharp rocks was the fisherman who had shown him the way; the fisherman who had known this route since he was a child, known how to scale the rocks and catch the largest mullets in these seas; his face was marked by the sharp pincers and rough shell of a crab; I saw him no more; he fled. Only pregnant she-goats browsed on the rocky heights.
The phantom of Agrippa entered the chamber as I retreated, never turning my back, attempting to fathom that gaze, so deep, masked, a gaze capable of convoking its own shades; but the phantom was not looking at me, he stared through me absently, as absent as my body seemed before his advance. I could imagine his goaclass="underline" the triclinium of Tiberius, where my master dozed, where lay his heavy, digesting, impotent, senile body: my master, the master of the world, the murderer, the pervert, and I his servant, his inseparable witness and chronicler, his sycophant; the black and gold phantom of Agrippa Postumus advanced, bent over the sleeping face of Caesar, breathed upon the pale, parchment cheek of Tiberius, and then suddenly, violently, snatched away the silk cloth covering his face and simultaneously withdrew the cushion upon which rested the Emperor’s head; and the eyes of my master, who could see in the darkness, opened wide like two lakes of terror; and as my lucid mind witnessed that terror, I questioned: why, if every afternoon at the hour of the nap my master is visited by this phantom, does he now show such fear? he must be accustomed to it. My courtliness overcame my amazement: I introduced them: “Caesar … the phantom of Agrippa.”
And Caesar screamed, yes, he could scream, no, no, this is not the phantom, I know the phantom perfectly well, the slave Clemens, this is the slave Clemens, the eyes are different; I can see in the dark, I can distinguish between the two, they are different, the phantom and the slave, Agrippa and Clemens; tell me, slave, how did you become Agrippa? and the black and gold creature, bent over Caesar, finally spoke, the cushion in his hand: “In the same way that you became Caesar…”
He raised his slim, strong, pale arms, he grasped the cushion in both hands and with incredible power thrust it upon Tiberius’s face; the renewed flames of the hearth leaped high and duplicated the trembling of the struggling figures; I succumbed to temptation; I ran to the side of the slave, the phantom, whoever this executioner might be, recalling the imploring gaze of the disfigured Lesbia, her humiliation, her horror, and I helped him suffocate my master.
Old and coarse, even so, Tiberius struggled, he shuddered, and finally freed his manes with a fearful death rattle. The terrible visitor removed the saliva and blood-stained cushion; the enormous eyes of Tiberius contemplated the phantom, and he, the phantom or the slave, enjoyed it, he had the right to enjoy this vision. On the other hand, I fled into the courtyard, quietly summoned the guard, and we ran back to the chamber and captured this infernal man who still knelt beside my dead master, as if paralyzed by Tiberius’s last gaze: the incalculable abyss of those black and glassy eyes.
V
I, Theodorus, the narrator, am writing all this on the day following the events I describe; I am writing them in triplicate, in accordance with the specific logic of my master’s vague testament; and I will place the three writings into three long green bottles, which I will seal carefully with red wax and the imprint of Tiberius’s ring.
The slave Clemens, this very morning, was thrown from the heights of the cliffs into the sea, where a crew of sailors awaited his fall to beat him to death with oars and gaffs. I did not attend the spectacle; I am surfeited with blood; enough, enough, I feel nauseated …
But this afternoon I descended to the village of Capri and listened to what was being murmured in the taverns and among the nets and fishing boats of the old harbor: the slave Clemens had been thrown into the sea, but the sailors had searched for him in vain to break his bones and club him to death with their oars; in vain, for as he hurtled toward the sea, Clemens, in mid-air, was transfigured into Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Augustus and heir to the Empire; his naked body had been cloaked in a cloud, and the cloud transformed into a white toga, and the toga into wings that deposited the condemned man upon the back of a dolphin that swam with him to a safe port from which the heir will again battle against usurpation at the head of the nameless and numberless legions of the slaves.
I know that all this is fantasy; but who can prevent a legend’s being believed by the ignorant? and what threats are posed by that belief? This I do not know. I have limited myself to following closely the last orders of my master Tiberius; I myself, with a knife, traced last night a bloody cross upon the back of the murdering slave, and in the face of his controlled pain, invoked the words of my master:
Let Agrippa Postumus, multiplied by three, one day be revived from the bellies of she-wolves, so he may contemplate the dispersion of the Empire of Rome; and from the three sons of Agrippa may another nine be born, and from the nine, twenty-seven, and from the twenty-seven, eighty-one, until unity be dispersed into millions of individuals, and as each will be Caesar, none will be he, and this power that now is ours will never again exist. And let these things all come to pass in the ragged reaches of the Empire, beneath the secret sands of Egypt where are buried the trinitarian mysteries of Isis, Set, and Osiris, beneath the arid sun of rebellious and restless Spain, fatherland of the insurgent Viriathus and of the Numantine suicides, on the shore of Lutetia, on an unsubmissive Gaul subjugated by Julius Caesar, a city of inquisitive and suspicious minds, as well as in the deserts of Israel, which knew the teachings of the Nazarite and the vulgar ambition of Pilate. And since the cross of infamy will preside over these lives of the future, as it presided over the death of the Jewish prophet the Nazarite, let the sons of Agrippa — who will bear the sign of the cross upon their backs — be called by the Hebrew name Jehohanan, which means “Grace comes from Jehovah.”
This last stricture, I hasten to add for those who may read these papers, was but a small erudite fantasy on my part.
This is not the serious part, what was serious was that in the end, as with the knife I traced a cross upon the back of the rebellious Clemens, I could see his accursed eyes, and in them I saw twice repeated that same bloody cross; that was his gaze. And these were his last words: “My death does not matter. The multitudes will rise again.”