Threshold of Fire (18 page)

Exhausted, he has dropped off to sleep in the early morning. Hadrian! Suspended between dreaming and waking, he feels a deep pleasure, like a sick person who knows that he will soon be cured. Hadrian!
Clarissime!
The voice of his secretary at the foot of his couch. Now he will hear that Marcus Anicius Rufus and his friends have been arrested in the night and transported to the prefecture for a speedy trial. A confused dream crosses his consciousness just on the border where images are created by repressed pain and distress. He no longer knows what it was, nor does he want to know. He opens his eyes.

His secretary is indeed standing there. The message has been delivered. The previous afternoon, on the Prefect’s order, wax tablets had been provided to the prisoner, now freed; his writings were retrieved from the cell.

The secretary — correct as always, but behaving with a certain wariness which the Prefect has never noticed in him before — places the bound and sealed tablets at the foot of the couch and, with a bow, departs.

Eliezar, Father —

By way of salutation and of posthumous homage, I dedicate to you this testament which is not one, since I have nothing to leave. I call you father: my life comes from you, you have created it. Your son who begat me, still lives in Alexandria, unreachable. He is nothing to me, I am nothing to him. You, who no longer exist, I can reach only in myself, nowhere else. I scarcely knew you. To me you were the old man, the lord of the estates, immensely rich in possessions and in knowledge, the wise, strong master, taken for granted as the backdrop to my life. My future lay in your hands.

Once, when I came across you in the olive garden, you made a gesture as if you were about to place your hand on my head. But you quickly recovered and simply waved your hand at me. I feared you, I respected you, but at every turn, whenever I saw you — in conversations with overseer or steward, slaves or freed servants, women or children — you were always listening with the same attentiveness, always speaking with the same calm composure, even when
it was a question of a reprimand or punishment. This caused me to be overwhelmed by a vague feeling, a mixture of despair and malice, a need to provoke, to push you to the point where I could see you lose that patient self-control, to force you to act in a way that would justify the secret undercurrent of hatred inside me. I was not grateful when you did not punish me after that bloody game with the cock, but instead sent me to school in the city. But I forgot my resentment when I became absorbed in my studies. I did not think about you any more. I worshipped the rector Claudianus who imparted knowledge to me and, through that knowledge, a feeling of dignity. When
he
died, I realized that I stood alone.

Perhaps I knew unconsciously what has never been revealed until today. Flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, and at the same time irrevocably rejected, shut out. Who knows, I may have spent my life striving, in word and deed, to prove my right to exist. I sought for what I had never really had — a father: example and roots. In the underworld, in the realm of black magic, I found a father-in-evil: Olympiodorus. I wanted to possess the demonic power which I believed was his. Later I saw
fathers in people whom I considered to be wise, level-headed, of unimpeachable integrity. At every turn, another image of myself as a “son”, a new form of dependency, and then, after a time, new forms of resistance: I must break away in order to go on living.

Now I have outgrown all that; I have passed the age at which I needed to be a son. No more the unconditional surrender, the identification. I don’t want any longer, out of shame or self-contempt, to destroy what I once revered. To be adult, independent — that means having the courage to submit one’s acts — as well as those of others — to a lucid examination, to criticism; to challenge the self-love, the pretensions of infallibility which are hidden in all of us.

It would seem that, three centuries after the short and promising rebellion under the sign of the Fish (against the rigidity of the Law and Authority, the State and the Faith, and despite internal rigidity), Rome chose the Son, the image of total submission — a terrible mistake. For what does he symbolize? Powerless, tormented, his outstretched arms nailed down so that he cannot take the suffering to his heart, nor raise his fist in wrath against the
persecutors and despoilers. Resignation has been declared sacred. What are the results? That the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. That the sword will be raised against those who most deserve solicitude and consolation. That for many years to come, the earth will be scorched, life despised, humanity trampled into bloody rags. That men will tolerate torture, slavery and starvation. Who will dare to impose another conception of the Son so that we will not be ruined by the omnipotence of the authorities whose criteria are unworldly and supernatural?

Where will the meaning of life be found, if not in the so-called temporal world, in the existence on earth of man, that creature gifted with reason? I do not believe in miracles, nor in the resurrection of the dead, let alone in ascension to the heavens. But I know that militant and at the same time humble consideration for the living, a thirst for justice, can be embodied in a man among men. Only he who loves and understands his fellow men in their affliction and their ignorance, who knows that in a world governed by greed and violence, true compassion requires an iron will and self-discipline — only he who devotes himself in word and deed to
making sense of the absurdity, the injustice of being born “fatherless” — that man alone would be an innovator, a giver of life.

Eliezar, you thrust me into the world, first at Alexandria and from there (your experience of men, your mastery of the game of chess taught you to foresee the consequences of certain combinations) to Milan and Rome, to high honor and renown and then finally to humiliation and oblivion, perhaps so that I should learn to be a resistant son, searching for a meaningful place under the sun and not for myself alone. For ten years I taught in the Subura in order to stay alive, because the only trade I could command was language usage and the interpretation of texts.

I had no grandiose expectations for these lessons. I hoped that in the future perhaps some artisans would be able to praise their products in other ways than by the use of clumsy marks, and would know how to compute their expenses and their income, and that a handful of warehousemen and porters might no longer need to stare helplessly at indecipherable characters. It did occur to me, too, that one day these people might be less willing to go on allowing themselves to be treated as doormats
and beasts of burden. My ambition and my ability did not reach beyond that.

I know that human nature holds a core of creativity, the germ of individuality. There is a poet, so to speak, in everyone—even Urbanilla, perhaps, half cruel and inquisitive child, half dull and withered flower of the brothel. The true power on earth is the power of poetry. Only the poetic vision, clarifying and connecting, makes life worth living.

If I were able to go on living, I would try to build on what I am only now beginning to understand. Someone — Marcus Anicius Rufus, I suppose — found an opportunity to send me a vial with a few drops of poison — a friendly service from a Roman of the old school, to spare me the humiliation of an execution “in the spirit of the law”. But it seems that the powers-that-be have reserved another sort of death for me. I must become — according to him who has unwittingly proved to be your most perfect instrument because for the second time he has been able to provoke me to rebellion — what I have always been, from the very beginning: a prisoner for life. Thanks to this gift, I can, this last time, escape from his control. Voluntary death is also a form of resistance.

Thus a testament and last will. I possess only the will to rise, like the Phoenix, from my earlier self. That impulse I dedicate to you, Eliezar, father. I am one with you and still irrevocably another. You abandoned me; now I leave you forever. I love you and I reject you.

Farewell.

When, later than usual, the Prefect sets foot on the black-and-white marble floor of the justice hall, the sight of his officials, scribes, assessors and attendants arranged in a half-circle before him on the dais, brings home to him the full significance of what he had done that morning. He is not a solitary agent, responsible for his own decisions alone — he represents a structure that begins at the bottom with the praetorian guard and ends at the top with the Emperor himself. If the Prefect errs, he undermines the prestige of the Imperial Majesty; he weakens the widespread apparatus of justice and police power. The argument that he had formulated in the still hours of the night to justify the release (“the sentence pronounced ten years ago must be revoked; the guilt of the accused was not conclusively established”) calls into question the whole system of prosecution for divination, most notably by making public the practice — inevitable in this sort of process — of using a network of informers and provocateurs.

The nature of the silence which greets him
convinces the Prefect that the situation has been discussed before his arrival; the air is filled with repressed tension. He takes his place, pushes his right foot in its red senatorial shoe to the edge of the platform, arranges the folds of his toga. While he is doing this, he realizes that, contrary to custom, he has not asked for nor received the documents for the cases at hand.

The Commandant Aulus Fronto appears at the door, surrounded by his men. This in itself is not unusual: the detachment of the praetorian guard which makes the arrest must be present at every session of the court. However this time the Commandant does not move to the side of the hall, but stands in the middle, before the dais, on the meandering mosaic. He requests permission to speak.

“In the cell of the released prisoner, a small sealed vial was discovered, which, after inquiry, was found to contain a quick-acting poison. This vial was not on the person of the prisoner when he was locked up yesterday afternoon. It follows therefore that it must have been delivered to him later, in secret. I, Aulus Fronto, Commandant of the third division, praetorian guard, consider it my duty to report this fact, since I am responsible for irregularities in
the prison vaults.”

One of the guard now hands a small bottle of opaque glass to the Prefect, who lifts it unthinking to his face, smells the odor of bitter almonds. Absently, he lets the fragile shell glide back and forth between his fingers, while the Commandant continues.

“This morning about sunrise, on written order of the illustrious Hadrian, Prefect of the City, I had the doors of the prison opened in order to effect the release of the man who called himself Niliacus. It lies within the power of the Prefect to discharge from further prosecution because of lack of evidence, this man, who was encountered on the grounds of the villa of Marcus Anicius Rufus, and interrogated in connection with that arrest. However, this person who called himself Niliacus, is none other than Claudius Claudianus, poet, who was, at an earlier time, condemned to exclusion from fire and water, but who has since returned inside the territory of the City, an act forbidden to him on pain of death. Therefore in this case the Prefect is required to execute the customary sentence.

“I, Aulus Fronto, Commandant of the third
division of the praetorian guard, am not in a position to refuse to implement the commands of my superiors in rank. But I cannot contribute, through my obedience, to this violation and evasion of the law. Therefore I request to be relieved of my duties.”

Now the Prefect, as highest magistrate of the City, is still sitting on his ivory throne. On either side of him the
lictors
raise the bundled rods and axes, the
fasces,
symbol of his rank. But he is already no more than a pile of ashes; a breath of wind will suffice to blow him away, and he knows it.

The stirring and whispering behind him has an unmistakably hostile character; short taps with his signet ring will never again call this company to order. The face of the Commandant Aulus Fronto, exemplary soldier, betrays no emotion, but his bearing is grimly inflexible. He stands there, legs apart, chin raised, a personification of the principles strictly upheld for years by the Prefect himself; a perfect product of the Prefect’s beliefs and behavior, spirit of his spirit, a relentless supporter of his doctrine, a representative of the new generation of order and discipline, the true son. The Prefect is surprised: he had always known that
he was not loved; he had never realized how much he was disliked.

He recognizes this feeling of desperation. He is standing with his back against the basalt; there is no escape. From outside, over the buildings of the former temple of Tellus, through the small high windows of the justice hall, come the sounds of Rome, like the murmur of the sea, the rustle of waves rolling over myriad pebbles on the ocean floor.

It takes a simple gesture: to raise the thin glass vial to his lips. An odor of bitter almonds.