Azazeel (14 page)

‘That’s the Sicilian master,’ she said.

Octavia pointed to a wooden coffin leaning upright in the right-hand corner of the room, on the side opposite the balcony. The coffin was finely painted with the image of a grey-haired man in
Greek dress of the type worn by rich people. There was an inscrutable sadness in his eyes, and an intelligence. The image was drawn in the style common among the rich in Memphis and Alexandria, who
had their faces depicted on their coffins and were then mummified and buried in them when they died. Mummification is a traditional pagan custom. The ancient Egyptians used to preserve their bodies
after death in granite sarcophaguses on which they had images of the old gods carved. Then, in more recent times, the sarcophaguses were made of wood and they started to paint a picture of the dead
person on the lid. When I looked at the picture of the Sicilian I realized that Octavia meant to show me that he was advanced in years and had the sedate appearance of a philosopher. As if to
reinforce the impression left by the picture of the man, she added, ‘He lives an ascetic life, keeps his coffin in his bedroom and always thinks about death. On most days when he is in
Alexandria, he sits on this balcony of his and looks out to sea, or reads books.’

‘Why does he look so sad?’ I asked.

‘Because he’s lonely. He’s also a poet. Would you like to see his poems?’

I agreed. She took me to the large library, took from the drawer of the desk some papers with poems written in Greek in the same hand I had seen in the margins of the books. Without me asking,
Octavia left me in the library, but first she gave me a quick hug and repeated in my ear in a whisper, ‘I love you.’ I stayed silent. After a long kiss at the base of my neck she left
the poems in my hands and told me she would go and make us a delicious lunch. She came several times to look over me with a smile, and I was happy among the books.

The Sicilian master’s poems were like his picture – gentle and sad. Most of them were ironic meditations on life and the sea, in the style of the ancient poets and the modern
philosophers. I liked some of his lines of poetry, and on one of the occasions when Octavia dropped by I asked her to bring me some paper so I could copy them out. She gave me a long scroll of
papyrus and two pieces of skilfully tanned goatskin parchment. I did not copy the Greek poems in the normal way, because of their excessively pagan nature, but instead I wrote the words vertically,
from bottom to top, in separate columns, so that if the lines were read horizontally or in any way other than my way, they would look like just individual words with no meaning, and individual
words are harmless and bring no sin. The sin comes about only when the words are framed in sentences.

In the same manner I copied out some of the commentaries the Sicilian master had written in the margins of the Greek translation of the Old Testament – I mean the translation known as the
Septuagint – and his commentaries on some of the Gospels. His commentaries would begin with the phrase, ‘How could anyone believe that...’ and then he would provide a summary of
the verses, and comment on them saying that it was logically impossible to accept such ideas. As far as I could see, the man did not understand that religion has nothing to do with reason and that
faith is faith only if it defies reason and logic, or else it is thought and philosophy. But none the less I pitied this bewildered man at the time, just as today I pity myself for my own excessive
perplexity.

At noon the room filled with the smell of delicious cooking. I closed the door, opened the window carefully and continued rummaging through books and copying out commentaries. The papyrus scroll
was not yet full when Octavia came in with her usual good cheer to invite me to eat. I asked for a little more time, but she insisted. She was wearing a thin blue dress open at the front and the
arms. Her thick brown hair ran riot around her smiling face. Octavia was a beautiful woman.

I rose with her, leaving the books, the inkstand and the scroll on the floor, in the hope of coming back after lunch, but I never did come back. Even the scroll I abandoned there.

I was in a good mood when we went to her room. The food was in bowls spread on the floor. It wasn’t the food that pleased me, but rather the way Octavia took care of me.
After my father died I was not accustomed to having anyone give me the affectionate attention that she lavished on me. Despite her entreaties I could not eat much, although the food was delicious.
My desire for her was stronger than my appetite for food, and she detected my desire from the long looks I gave her and she did not resist when I moved towards her and pulled her close. I suddenly
felt that I loved her and that perhaps she was worth staying with for the rest of my life. I said to myself, ‘Why not? I’ll study medicine and practise in this big city. I will not
renounce my religion, but I will give up the monastic life. My country far away has nothing to entice me to go back. Octavia will be my home and the refuge of my soul. Why not? I have never seen a
more beautiful woman, nor one gentler or kinder. Even as a pagan, is she not purer in heart than most of the Christian women I have known? I mean, those I have seen from afar. But who can be sure
she won’t betray me one day as my mother betrayed my father? If I were to anger her one day for some reason, she could turn against me as women always turn against their husbands, for women
are fickle by nature.’

Tenderly, as she lay in my arms, I asked her if she would keep on loving me whatever happened. Her answer still rings inside me and echoes in my heart. ‘Whatever happens, my love.
I’ll spend my whole life at your side, looking after you, my one hope. I waited for you long and dreamed about you often, and I’ll never find anyone better than you.’

‘Then let the Lord’s will be done,’ I said.

‘My love, don’t speak that way like the Christian people. I hate them.’

‘Why, Octavia?’

‘Because they are like locusts. They eat everything that is ripe in the city, and make life gloomy and cruel.’

She was about to expound at length with disparaging remarks about those of our religion, so I changed the subject by asking her about this Savante of the Ages whom the crier was talking about in
the main street.

She sat up straight and her face shone again. ‘He means Hypatia, the daughter of the scholar Theon, the Pythagorean professor,’ she said. ‘She’s a famous woman, beautiful
and intelligent, and she visits us here with the friends of the Sicilian master at those soirées which go on for hours. She always calls me “my dear sister Octavia”.’

‘In what fields does she give the lectures the crier is inviting people to?’ I asked.

‘In mathematics and philosophy, but not in medicine. Don’t imagine that I will let you get close to her, or else you might fall in love with her and abandon me – although she
is much older than you,’ she said.

‘Don’t joke, because I really do want to find out more about her.’

That day she told me much about Hypatia, the woman known as the Savante of the Ages. She spoke about her with pleasure in the telling and in a way that stimulated my interest in seeing her.
Octavia said Hypatia taught at the theatre in the city centre. Her father Theon used to teach in the great temple, the Serapeion, which once stood proudly in the Egyptian quarter in the south of
the city. But the Christians destroyed it and brought it down on the heads of those inside in the days of Theophilus. She meant the bishop. When I asked her what days Hypatia taught on, she looked
at me from the corner of her eye, with an oblique look that mingled jealousy and a desire to pick a quarrel, and she did not answer. When I insisted, she said Hypatia lectured on Sundays because it
was quiet in the mornings when the Christians went to the Church of the Wheat Seed to hear the sermon of their current leader, who had succeeded his uncle Theophilus at the head of that church
which had turned the world dark! I was startled at what she said and her outspokenness frightened me.

‘Do you mean Bishop Cyril?’ I asked.

‘May the gods bring his dark days to a hasty end,’ she said. ‘He has made the city as gloomy as a ruin since the time he took charge. But you’re strange! You know Cyril
but you don’t know Hypatia.’

‘Octavia, I don’t know anything here. Before I saw you, all I’d seen of your city was the stretch I walked from the Moon Gate to the beach where I almost drowned in front of
your eyes.’

I will never forget her sudden happiness, as she shouted in glee, ‘True, my love, my heart, true. Now I’m happy and certain that the god sent you to me, truly and
honestly.’

‘Now we’re back to superstitions.’

‘My love, you are the most beautiful superstition I’ve known, and I’ll continue to believe in it for the rest of my life.’

The curtains of the evening had fallen and I felt that I was quite adrift in Octavia’s orbit, drowning completely in the torrential river that she was. She encircled me on all sides, as
the Great Sea surrounds the whole world. I said to myself, ‘I’ll make up my mind tonight. I’ll think carefully, then decide tomorrow at dawn what will become of us.’ That
was what I intended, but I did not know what would happen, unaware of what fate would bring.

Octavia invited me to her bed. The world had fallen still around us and inside us. She told me she wanted to take a light snooze. I had no desire to sleep so I asked her if I could go back to
the library. She answered in a friendly manner, full of ambiguity and redolent of vice, ‘If you stay with me, I’ll teach you things you won’t find in books.’

I tried to be serious in the hope that she would comply with my request, but her high spirits overwhelmed me and I found I had no choice but to submit as she pulled me towards the bed. That day
I really did experience with her what no one could find in any book, because Octavia had talents unheard of by those who write books. We lay there naked until night encroached on us and the cold
began to bite. She pulled the blanket over us, wrapped her arms around me and prepared for sleep.

Then suddenly she stood up, her lively mind taken with a whimsy. ‘My love, come with me and I’ll show you the wine cellar,’ she said.

‘I want to sleep.’

‘Sleep! If you’re tired at the beginning of the night, how will you be at the end of it? Come with me, I’ll fetch you from the cellar the best wine in the world.’

Octavia never stopped.

SCROLL SIX

I
remember well that to reach the cellar we went down the stairway leading to the roof, and then the big staircase linking the two floors, and then
another stairway behind the wooden door at the end of the large hall with the image of the sad dog on the floor. The last stairway was made of stone and the steps grew wider the more we descended
towards the cellar.

The air in the cellar was damp and cold, and the smell was strong. The floor was stone and on top of the flagstones, thick oak planks had been laid. I had not realized that cellars could be so
wide, because the houses and temples in my first country did not have cellars, and I had thought that a cellar was a low passageway under big houses and palaces, like a corridor, and that it was
necessarily narrow and confined. But with Octavia, by the light of her metal lantern, I saw a whole storey with high walls, supported underground on rows of strong marble pillars, with each row
connected by a brick wall. There were three shelves on either side of each wall, and on each shelf so many jars it would be hard to count them.

‘We have enough wine to last a thousand years,’ she said proudly. ‘Come this way, where there’s the vintage wine from grapes pressed in the best years.’

‘Why do you lay down all this wine? Does the owner of the house think he’s going to live forever?’ I asked.

‘Take it easy, my love. His father had much wine made for him, and he has brought some kinds of wine from Greece and Cyprus, because they used to have many guests here and hold large
banquets. I’ve seen that ever since I was a little girl.’

She took me to a corridor that ran between the lines of jars and at the end of it she reached behind the jar next to the wall and took out a bottle of clear green glass. She took two steps back
until her bottom was against me and, rubbing her bottom against my groin, she said, ‘This is excellent wine, just right for our little party!’ She turned her face towards me with a
smile and continued to gyrate against me. ‘I saved it here for us months ago, because I liked the taste,’ she added.

I forgot myself at the time, and I was annoyed that it was always she who took the initiative. This time I felt the urge to do so myself, to make her feel that I was strong. I was young and
rash. I turned her by the shoulders until her face was towards the wall and then I pushed her forward, my hands on the sides of her back. She moved forward obediently. I blew at the flame of the
lantern and it went out, and darkness enveloped us. Her front was against the damp wall and my chest was against her warm back. In the darkness I fondled her body and found it completely
submissive. She put her hands against the wall and bent her head forward a little. I lifted my gown off and took down my undergarments. Then I lifted her dress off. She had nothing underneath for
me to take down, and we were completely naked. She made much noise as she moaned, and asked me to split her in two. O my God, it is most improper, all this that I remember and that I relate after
the passage of these long years.