I do not know whether I laughed as I cursed him: “May you grow an extra toe on each foot to aid you in arising and in traveling more swiftly…”
I do not know whether I laughed; I was not master of my words: in my heart I wished to thank him for not having betrayed me.
VI
The notice of Tiberius’s death flies to Rome on the wings of horses no less swift than Pegasus. The funeral flutes will be heard in all Italy and will allow us no sleep; voices will be raised in mournful outcry. This is my pious imagining; my sense of the truth proclaims, on the other hand, that the multitudes will run jubilantly through the streets of Rome, celebrating the death of the tyrant, shouting “To the Tiber with Tiberius,” asking that the corpse of my master be dragged there by gaff hooks, raising supplications to Mother Earth that Caesar find no rest save in Hell. Poor, stupid mob. They desire only occasions for rejoicing, for carnivals, circuses, and saturnalias. Why instead of occupying themselves with the dead do they not occupy themselves with the living? Why do they not ask who will succeed Tiberius, and what new misfortunes lie in store for Rome?
But that is not my problem. My stoic spirit dictates to my hedonistic hand the last words of these folios, and I say that in every good action what is praiseworthy is the effort; success is merely a question of chance, and, reciprocally, when it is a question of culpable acts, the intent, even without the result, deserves the punishment of law; the soul is stained with blood though the hand remain pure.
Did I truly assist the slave, or did I struggle unsuccessfully against his efforts to suffocate my master? I have no moral refuge but that of having written what I have reported; if any of these bottles is retrieved by one of my contemporaries, I shall be punished; if my papers are read in a distant future, perhaps I shall be praised. I write today: I run both risks. Whom have we killed here: a phantom of flesh or the flesh of a phantom? Was it all illusion, deception, a comedy of roving, disembodied larvae and mischievous, ghostly lemures? The true history perhaps is not the story of events, or investigation of principles, but simply a farce of specters, an illusion procreating illusions, a mirage believing in its own substance. I, like Pilate, shall wash my hands and wait for time to decide; let the reincarnations herein consigned, herein desired, herein cursed by the last will of Tiberius Caesar, decide.
Having written these things, I seal, as I have said, the three bottles and throw them one by one from the high lookout on Capri into the deep and boundless waters of Mare Nostrum, as black tonight as the velvet shroud that enveloped the remains of my master Caesar, of whom, when I was still a child, my father, master of rhetoric, Teselius of Gandara, said to me: “He is mire mixed with blood.”
Yes, the bottles carrying my manuscript will drift to all the limits of the Mediterraneum, to the Hispanic coast and the Palestine coast, but I shall keep for myself the most secret of my secrets: the knowledge that Tiberius’s curse had begun to be fulfilled before he had pronounced it, for in truth, on that not so long ago afternoon in the month of Nisan in Jerusalem, when I was traveling on the road to Laodicea, I beheld Pontius Pilate judging three identical men in the Praetorium, three equally ragged and bearded magi or prophets, perhaps three brothers, each crowned with thorns, each wounded by the lash, their lacerated backs marked with the sign of a bloody cross. Which of the three did Pilate condemn as the false Messiah, deliver to the Sanhedrin and death on the cross? What became of the other two? The chronicles say that there were three condemned men on Golgotha. The Nazarite and two thieves. Were, in truth, these thieves the two brothers of the Nazarite?; did Pilate, with the wisdom of Solomon, opt for the death of a single Messiah, depriving the other two prophets of that dignity, condemning them as vile thieves? Did he think thus to balance the relations between the power of Rome and the power of the Jews, giving them something, but not all they requested, giving himself the privilege of killing one God, of refusing the Jews more than one God, of astutely making mock of the Jewish faith in a unique God? Not three: the pantheon — the reunion of all the gods — is the privilege of Rome; so let you, Jews, have one God and two thieves. Rome: one Caesar and many gods. Israeclass="underline" one God and many Caesars. Pilate and the Nazarite: one Caesar and one God. Poor deceived man: his uniqueness was his mortality; I suspect, on the other hand, that those three identical magi I glimpsed from a distance through the haze of the Levantine dog days will be forever interchangeable …
And then I hear titters from the chamber of Tiberius, I hear the moans and cries and sighs of Lesbia and Cynthia, of Gaius, Persius, and Fabianus; I hear the voice of my master Tiberius summoning me to his quarters, come Theodorus, come in, do not be afraid, speak to me of the flesh, Theodorus, ally my pleasures, pain and lust, Theodoras, do not be afraid, come …
ASHES
He had a vague impression of his own face. In passing, he caught hasty, fleeting glimpses in the stained mirrors the inhabitants fleeing the palace had left behind, here and there, in a bedchamber, in a tower. He did not see the wrinkles, the gray hair, the marks of time; increasingly, he was surrounded by shadow. The shadows were his old age. He remembered certain courtyards, certain galleries with white leaded windows through which the light of day had formerly filtered. Not now. Inch by inch the shadows were confiscating his palace.
“Where is everyone?”
He commanded and ordered that a hundred poor be dressed in the clothing lying forgotten in the coffers of those who had fled, and that ten thousand ducats be provided to wed poor, orphaned women, preferably of good reputation. The nuns howled quietly when Mother Celestina made her periodic visit on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. El Señor delighted in verifying the noxious usury time had practiced upon the aged procuress whose upper lip was now streaked with dark fuzz, and whose chin whiskers were thick as a beard. Unconsciously, El Señor repeated the words formerly spoken by the go-between: You’ve become an old woman; they speak wisely who say that the years take their toll; methinks you were beautiful; you look different; you have changed. And she, for both of them, would reply, laughing, the day will come when you won’t recognize yourself in your own mirror, and he was grateful that the increasing shadows of his palace were the only sign of time’s passing, but the old vixen was like a dog with a bone, and half whining and half laughing said:
“It’s clear that you didn’t know me twenty years ago. Ay! Any man who saw me then, and sees me now … His heart would break with sorrow. But I know very well that I rose in the world merely to descend, and that I flowered only to wither on the vine; I had pleasure only that I might know sadness; I was born that I might live, lived that I might grow to womanhood, reached womanhood only to grow old, and grew old … merely to die. Do you know that, too, Yer Mercy?”
Then she repeated what El Señor wished to know — more than ever after reading the manuscript of Caesar’s man, the counselor Theodorus — that the Idiot Prince was sleeping his long sleep with the dwarf in Verdín, that a hawk’s murderous beak had seized the pilgrim of the new world by one arm, and that both, bird and youth, had drowned on the coast of the Cabo de los Desastres; the third assurance was in El Señor’s own house: the deceiver and the novitiate were forever united, in perverse enactment of love, in the prison of mirrors. And what more? Well, the throng of beggars around the palace was growing larger every day, Señor, and it seems that the kitchens are in service only for them, for Yer Maj’sty never tastes a bite, they say, and the fame of your charity is growing throughout the kingdom.