The Uncertain Hour (10 page)

“It will do you good,” Melissa said warmly.

“What good could it possibly do me?”

“It pleases me.”

“Are you growing maternal in your old age, Melissa?” he joked, but it was the wrong thing to say. In apology, he brushed her fingertips with his lips and deposited his last tear in the palm of her hand.

He turned to Anicius on his left, who was twisting a section of sow’s vulva between his fists, seeking the right angle of attack. Petronius noticed something he had never noticed before: that Anicius’s scalp, where it was revealed beneath his thinning weave of gray hair, was flaked and peeling, as were the pink inner shells of his ears. “Have you tried the Lucanian?” he asked.

“First things first,” Anicius said, nodding at his hands.

Petronius took in each guest on the couch to his left. None had touched the boar or the sausage. Suddenly, it seemed very important that someone, anyone, should bear witness to the sausage. The sow’s vulva was an easy touch, and Lucullo was justly famous for it, but it was on the deceptive simplicity of the sausage, its emblematic qualities, that the success of the evening rested. Petronius suddenly felt this with an urgency verging on panic. An entire life’s work might be vested in a sausage, rightly seasoned, yet why would no one try the Lucanian? Was there, perhaps, something wrong with it, or had they all agreed to conspire against it, or against him? His head spun with the possibilities. After all, not every plot was a fabrication; this was just the sort of thing Nero and Tigellinus excelled at. He turned to his right, and found himself looking directly into Martialis’s eyes, of precisely the same saturated yellow-green as Petronius’s prized myrrhine ladle. Martialis was studying him calmly, gnawing on a length of Lucanian sausage.

“How is the sausage?” Petronius whispered. Martialis cocked an eyebrow quizzically.

“Why don’t you try some?”

“I think I will.” Without breaking eye contact, Petronius accepted a length of sausage from his guest and nibbled at it. Suddenly, he found himself panting, sweating, his eyes welling with tears of relief.

“Too much cumin,” he laughed.

Martialis leaned forward until their foreheads were almost touching, and Petronius could see every hair follicle on his cheek. “Never complain, never explain,” he said, and the world resolved itself into its old, familiar configuration.

“A poem, I think,” Melissa said, clapping her hands com-mandingly. “Who will give us one?”

Fabius leapt to his feet. “Fetch me a harp!”

“Best leave off the harp, Fabius,” Pollia suggested gently. “And the singing.”

“No harp, then. Here we go.” He recited in Greek, in an accent that would have been the delight of his boyhood tutor but made him a laughingstock in the streets of Nicomedia.

But when the artichoke flowers, and the chirping grasshopper sits in a tree and pours down his shrill song continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the overflowing spring which pours down unfouled thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.

Fabius bowed modestly to the smattering of polite applause. “That was lovely, lovely,” Cornelia said, speaking out of the side of a mouth bulging with masticated figs.

Fabius’s choice of poem had not been a felicitous one, and all but he were duly aware of the gaffe. The mood of the evening did not call for ancient Greek devotionals, but for something more modern, raucous, risqué even. It was typical of Fabius that his selection was so conventional, and Petronius watched Pol-lia’s expression as she struggled to reconcile her loyalty and her embarrassment. He wondered if she ever regretted having married Fabius. Petronius liked to imagine that Pollia would be much happier with a man like himself, yet he had to admit that he’d been very much like Fabius at his age—high-minded, detached, ambitious, a typical product of the empire. A very conventional young man, to whom happiness had been a convention, too. Glory had been everything—glory and service. Without that, he was nothing, homeless, pointless, so what use was it to seek personal fulfillment? No, that’s not right—glory and service
were
personal fulfillment. So long as he excelled and furthered the purposes of Rome, he had had no use for any other kind of happiness. He had been happy, in his manner, in the manner of conservative young men who find a way to live without having to think very hard about anything. Fabius was just like that. Certainly, he had a glorious career ahead of him, providing he managed to shed some of his youthful idealism and prudishness, but what kind of a life was it going to be for a woman who outshone her husband at every level? She was spirited and willful enough to carve something out for her herself, Petronius supposed, but she was going to have a hard time of it in the face of Fabius’s limited imagination and correct expectations. Petronius suspected that she’d have been happier with someone of less ambition and more soul.

He bit into a delicately carved slice of boar haunch, and had immediately to raise his hand to his mouth as a warm, smoky rill of drippings escaped his lips and ran down his chin. Lucullo had been right—the meat, tender as a young cheese, was suffused with the aromatic quiddity of the Umbrian oak forests in which the boar had lived and died. For the briefest interlude, Petronius felt a startling, intimate connection to the creature, as he had earlier to the oyster, and wondered if this heightened sensibility were some sort of premonitory accommodation to his own oblivion.

The conversation was pursuing its own course.

“Now I know that few of you will credit it,” Anicius was saying, “but I was a boy in the reign of Augustus, and back then vast stretches of that beach were deserted.”

“What, between Nesis and Puteoli?” Fabius asked incredulously.

“Certainly. Nothing but rabbits. Those rabbits are all gone now. When I was a boy, you could walk half a league without seeing a house. Just fishermen, hawking their catch. You paid in drachmas, shekels, whatever. You barely heard a word of Latin around here back then, nothing but Greek.”

“Not a patch on Cumae, then.”

“You know,” Petronius said, “I think I’ve had about enough of all this slander. Cumae was good enough for Aeneas, wasn’t it? The father of Rome landed not five minutes’ walk from here. It was good enough for Varro, for Pompey, for Cicero, for Sulla, for Vatia, for Philippus. It’s good enough for me.”

“And you know what they all had in common, don’t you?” Cornelia brayed thoughtlessly. “They all
retired
here. They went to Baiae for fun, but came to Cumae to die.”

Like a flickering flame, the conversation died just as a fresh, salt-laden wind swept across the gardens, rustling the trees in the orchard and causing the lamps beneath the pergola to swing gently. The guests, protected by screens and braziers, experienced its passage largely as an auditory phenomenon—a sequence of subtle variations on the theme of polite shushing. The miniature flotilla in the water table had been set in motion by the breeze, and they watched in detached distress as their supper floated away, beyond reach at the very moment when they sought its distraction. Mortified beyond expression, Cornelia rubbed her eyes with her fists. With barely a sound, a battalion of slaves emerged from the shadows and descended upon the dishes, plucking them from the water before even one had reached the far edge of the basin. The remains of the last course were offered round one last time, while new platters—bearing fried meatballs, black pudding, boiled hare, kidneys and sweetbreads bathing in a pungent yellow sauce—emerged from the kitchen. The guests followed their approach with a show of interest that ill concealed their discomfort. How sincerely concerned they were for Petron-ius’s comfort! How awkward and sweet of them!

“Could that be silphium in the sauce?” Anicius inquired incredulously. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen it, I’ve quite forgotten what it tastes like.”

“Alas, I’ve not seen silphium on the market these past twenty years or more,” Petronius said. “They tell me it’s all but extinct, even in Cyrenaica. This is asafoetida, from India. It’s a reasonable substitute, I suppose, but I’ll never get over the disappearance of silphium. I feel genuinely sad for those of you who were too young to have tried it.”

Martialis snorted derisively into his goblet.

“You do not care for silphium, Valerius Martialis?” Cornelia asked with studied naïveté.

“I’ve never tasted it, Cornelia Felicia,” Martialis said. “But from everything I’ve heard, it was more a status symbol than a condiment. An entire island was enslaved so that a handful of senators might sprinkle stinking grass on their fish and impress their friends. Now that it’s gone, let Cyrenaica sink back into the sea; it’s of no further use to anyone.”

“I am not a patrician, Martialis,” Lucilius chided gently, “yet I was able to appreciate silphium very much for its own exquisite, unique perfume. Despite its price, not because of it.”

Martialis was preparing a retort, but was cut off before he could deliver it.

“Who is Vatia?” Fabius put in. A roar of mirth arose from the elder members of the company.

“Servilius Vatia! What a man!”

“What a legend!”

“Sit up a minute, Fabius,” Anicius said, pointing southward across the parapet and inlet. “You know that big villa on the water down the beach? The one with the two grottoes, between the lake and the cape? You can just see, there are four torches flaming on the terrace there? That’s Vatia’s house.”

“When I first bought this place six years ago, Fabius,” Petronius said, “I thought the sailors were rioting in Misenum every night. It turned out it was just Vatia’s orgies. You could hear them clear as day all along the beach.”

“His fishponds grew the finest bearded mullet in the land, but he became so attached to them, he’d have to send to market for his supper. If one of those mullet failed to eat from his hand, he’d lose an entire night’s sleep worrying over its health.”

“One year he cornered the entire market in
garum
from New Carthage, and if you didn’t want to eat vinegar on your fish that year, you had to come pay homage to him and leave gifts of gold for the holy chickens in the temple of Apollo.”

“Most men would have been crushed by the burden of leisure he bore so effortlessly. He was a hero to many.”

“The caterer’s guild of Naples named a dish after him. It was called ‘Vatia’s Standard.’ It was a duck, stuffed with truffles, then stuffed inside a goose that was stuffed inside a peacock that was stuffed inside a heron that was stuffed inside a swan that was baked and gilded with egg yolk and gold leaf and carried in at the end of a long pike by a company of chefs dressed as legionaries and haruspices.”

“He was fabulously wealthy—he’d been commander of the Praetorians at one point—but he acted like a vulgar freedman, boasting and counting his money at the dinner table and farting ostentatiously and being familiar with his slaves. Still, everybody loved him, you couldn’t help it—he never apologized for anything. He was happy to be exactly who he was, and no one could tell him any different.”

“It’s true,” Petronius added. “When I first came to Cumae, the very first day I moved in, along comes this slave boy, trotting down the beach with a heavy platter. On the platter was a whole roast piglet, and in the piglet’s mouth was an apple, and in the apple was a dart, and when I removed the dart the apple fell neatly into two pieces, and sandwiched between them was a silver medallion that was stamped with an invitation to dinner that very night. It was so tasteless and common, I had to laugh out loud. But from then on, I knew exactly whom to turn to whenever I needed cheering up. He was never depressed, never had any self-doubt. I rather envied him, that lack of self-consciousness. You could never tell if he was unaware that people laughed at him behind his back, or if he knew and just didn’t care. He used to say: ‘Pretend I’m dead. Say something nice about me.’ He was one of a kind, and when he died of liver poisoning I remember thinking that the world would never see his like again. And then I met Martialis here.”

“And I confirmed the suspicion.”

“The only person I ever knew who didn’t like Vatia was Seneca. He couldn’t bear him.”

Lucilius groaned and buried his face in his palms. “Oh please, don’t get me started on Seneca.”

“Why, what’s the matter with Seneca?” Martialis asked with a feeble affectation of nonchalance.

Lucilius sighed. “You know, those last two years of his, he was not at all happy. After his downfall, he traveled up and down southern Italy trying to ‘forget politics,’ but he couldn’t get over not having a handy audience for his sermons. He was never in one place long enough to really buttonhole his host and give him the full treatment. He started writing me these long, moralizing letters. Me! Now you know, Seneca and I were friends for a long, long time, but I never had much patience for his ethical pretensions, considering the way he lived his own life. Socrates he was not, no, nor Diogenes neither. I started receiving these haranguing letters, streams of them, exhorting me to live better this way, think better that way, analyzing my problems, as if he knew anything about my problems! There are some people, you know, they just can’t help themselves, they always think they know what’s best for a person. How Nero put up with him all those years, I cannot tell. They were a match, all right—salt and pepper. And do you know, I feel sure he was making copies of those letters with an eye to future publication. In fact, he told me once that I would be famous because of those letters. How fortunate I am to know you, I wrote back.

“Anyway, in one of his letters, he reminded me how he and I had once walked along this very beach, and when we passed Vatia’s place he had said ‘There lies Vatia.’ And I’d asked him what he meant, Vatia wasn’t dead, and he’d said that he might as well be because living the way he did wasn’t living at all, it was hiding from life. Leisure was noble if spent improving oneself, but idleness was a kind of death in life, et cetera, et cetera. And do you know, he was so pleased with himself for coming up with this pearl of wisdom that he could never pass by Vatia’s place after that without shaking his head and sighing ‘There lies Vatia.’ A hundred times I must have heard him say it, ‘There lies Vatia,’ and each time as if it were a fresh insight. He was devastated when Vatia died, because they buried him somewhere else. The funny thing is, I’m not sure he ever even met Vatia.”