Fanina, Child of Rome

by Pierre Sabbagh

  Why had Atia brought her to this squalid den? Did the old witch think she had not suffered enough already? Did she want to put her to the test, to make her life impossible, to degrade her?

  The old woman called out for something to drink.

  Dismayed at the thought of having to go near her, Fanina rose, and was on the point of running away.

  ‘Something to drink!’ repeated the sick woman.

  She could not leave her like this. She had no right to abandon her....

  The inner revulsion she had felt gave way to a feeling of immense pity. Until that moment she had selfishly, fiercely dwelt on her own sorrow. She had thought of nothing save the distress she was suffering, and the revolting injustice of which she had been the victim. She was not the only person to suffer. Throughout the world there were other examples of injustice, of which this unfortunate woman and all the wretches she had passed in Vulci were the living manifestation.

  To nurse this sick woman would be to fight, and not just to toughen herself, to prove her resolution and her courage. Nursing this woman would be a means of standing up against those who had engineered her own downfall: Brazen-beard, Calvinus, and the proud patrician caste as well, which, without actually joining forces with her persecutors to expel her from their circle, had nevertheless done nothing to defend her.

  A burst of wholesome, heady anger rose up in Fanina. Yes, the enemy to destroy was that cruel, greedy caste that thought of nothing but its own pleasures, while millions of men, wretched, starving, a ready prey to illness, passed their life in obscure toil in order to enrich its members.

  Overcoming her repulsion, she sat down beside the old woman, cup in hand. Shuddering in spite of herself at the contact with the damp, icy-cold skin, she carefully lifted her up, and drew her towards herself, then, with infinite gentleness, raised the cup to the fever-cracked lips.

  ‘Drink,’ she murmured. ‘Slowly, slowly. I’ve all the time in the world.’

  Hiccupping, trembling, dribbling, the old woman drank, and it seemed to Fanina, on the verge of tears, that as the wretched woman drank, there drank with her all those who had suffered and perhaps still suffered on account of the blind, thoughtless patrician she had once been.

  Late that night Atia came back. Fanina was sitting on one of the hearth-stones beside the enormous pot, now almost empty, her back was bent with weariness, and she was clumsily mending a ragged tunic. The sick woman, clean and changed, lay sleeping peacefully in her bed. Everything in the hut had been cleaned and tidied and the rags that had lain on the floor that morning had been washed as well as she could manage and were hanging over the fire to dry.

  With a stony glance, Atia looked down at Fanina’s hands, red and painful from so much rubbing, and said coldly:

  ‘This woman’s son has at last managed to find someone to look after his animals until his mother is better. He is here. I have told him what he has to do. Come.’

  Still walking one behind the other, they went back across the moor. The dim light from Atia’s dark-lantern danced along the path, while in the black sky stars pierced through the gaps in the clouds, torn by a wind that came in short, blustering squalls.

  Calm and resolute, Fanina breathed in deeply the chill night air.

  Now she knew why, after trying her so sorely, the gods had led her to this desolate land, why they had given her a chance to see at first hand the misery and hardship suffered by these unhappy people. The pitiful figures she had glimpsed as they came through Vulci passed again before her eyes. Now she realized that the mission foretold for her by the astrologers and the soothsayers was this: to bring happiness to these unfortunate folk, to all the unfortunates who she now realized constituted the bulk of the population of the Empire. This was a mission still finer, nobler and more exalting than that of which Vibidia had spoken.

  Everything was becoming clear. The Empire no longer consisted, in Fanina’s mind, of the handful of high-ranking people who exploited it, and still less of Tiberius, the drunken lecher who was supposed to govern it from the island of Capri to which he had retired. The Empire consisted of all the people she had hitherto passed without sparing them a glance, without ever asking herself why their faces were so often sad and weary.

  This was the Empire she would fight for. The magnitude of the task that awaited her fired her with mystic zeal, as in the days so recently past when the Supreme Vestal had extolled with consummate cleverness the part she would have to play in the destiny of Rome. Within her burned the flame which, for centuries, had fired her ancestors with the ideals for which her own father had died.

  Throughout the whole of that day, without ceasing to attend to the sick woman, Fanina had gone back over her past, trying to sort out her memories. She had drawn parallels, and, no doubt oversimplifying things, had reached certain conclusions which seemed to her inescapable.

  Up till that time, she had allowed her vision to be obscured by Calvinus and Brazen-beard. Calvinus and Brazen-beard were only minor characters; alone they would have been powerless against her father, and still more so against Vibidia. The man who had made their crimes possible and covered them up, the man who had made her a vestal, who had forbidden her to love and to be loved, who had allowed her to be condemned by retreating behind flimsy pretexts, the man but for whom she would be living happily with Vindex, was the man whose bloody tyranny and senile dementia made Rome tremble. At the root of all her misfortunes and of all the tragedies that had plunged the Empire in mourning stood always the same man — Tiberius.

  Once the Emperor was overthrown, his accomplices and the servile clique that upheld him would fall of their own accord. A new and more just government as in the fortunate days of the Republic would be established and happiness would come again to everyone. Happiness for her and for Vindex too, perhaps. . . .

  Out of superstition Fanina dared not dwell on the all too seductive images that crowded into her mind. Tomorrow or the day after, she would return to Rome. There she would find Vindex and win him back. But instead of taking refuge with him in Gaul, as she had promised herself, she would draw him with her into the struggle she was about to engage in. Vindex was too generous, too brave to refuse. Then, when they had won, no aspiration would be forbidden them.

  When she and Atia reached the warmth of the temple, the latter asked:

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  Fanina was nearly starving, but she would not have admitted it for anything in the world. Putting a tattered old leather bag down on the ground, Atia drew out of it an appetizing slice of smoked meat, some eggs and a hard wheaten biscuit.

  ‘I sent to Vulci for these for you,’ the old woman said.

  Fanina looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘For you too?’ she asked.

  ‘No, just for you,’ Atia replied.

  Then, without taking her eyes off Atia, Fanina picked up the chased gold dish from the chest where it had lain since the morning. The unappetizing rye porridge it contained had by now turned into a sort of lumpy, indigestible cake into which, without a moment’s hesitation, she plunged a spoon.

  When the plate was empty, and her stomach heavy with food, she lay down on her paliasse, her head swimming with fatigue. For a moment she fought against sleep, her vision already clouding over, then all of a sudden she went under.

  Later, much later, she woke with a start. Outside there was a high wind blowing and the river was roaring in the distance. Far off a wolf howled and the stamping of a herd of wild boars as they moved over the heath in search of food came to her ears.

  She sat up. Atia was standing at the temple door, wrapped from head to foot in a big grey woollen blanket; she seemed to be watching for something. The old woman turned to Fanina:

  ‘Do you hear anything?’ she asked.

  With puckered brow, Fanina held her breath and concentrated. It might have been her imagination, but now she thought she heard a thin, almost imperceptible wail mingling with the powerf
ul roar of the torrent: a long-drawn-out, piteous cry, tragic, inhuman.

  Suddenly realizing that the burial ground of ancient Vulci stretched for miles on all sides of the temple, she gave a shudder.

  ‘It’s almost like the death-cry of a human being in the ravine,’ she said.

  At that moment the wind changed and the wailing stopped.

  ‘We must have been dreaming,’ muttered Atia, returning to her bed. ‘There are some nights when the spirits delight to mock us.’

  ‘Atia! Atia!’

  It was already daylight. From outside came the sound of a man’s voice panting between shouts as he hurried along the path.

  Still somewhat confused in her mind, Fanina instinctively cowered against the wall in the shadow of the big, black chest, and gave no sign of life. Arms folded across the plunging neckline of her short tunic she waited with bated breath.

  The man’s heavy footsteps drew nearer. Now his silhouette stood out against the luminous rectangle of the doorway.

  ‘Atia, where are you?’ He went on panting for his breath as he entered the passageway.

  He reached the chest and, suddenly arching her back, Fanina sat up on her palliasse. The man stopped dead when he saw her.

  ‘I... was looking for Atia,’ he stammered.

  His skin was yellow, like most of the inhabitants of Vulci, and his face was emaciated, wrinkled, and overgrown with an immense greying fan beard. He was short, thin, hollow-chested and wrapped in a ragged nondescript wolf-skin cloak; he stood twisting a filthy, dirty, battered broad-brimmed felt hat between his bony fingers, and kept his small slit eyes on the ground, for he did not dare look at Fanina.

  The silence seemed likely to go on for ever.

  ‘If Atia were here, my good man, I think she would have answered you,’ said Fanina. ‘Would you like me to give her a message?’

  ‘I came to tell her they’ve found a man in the Arminia . . .’ he stammered out.

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  But the man seemed to be in no hurry to go away. As he shuffled backwards towards the door, he repeated:

  ‘Tell her . . . the man . . . was the man who came to her place the night before last....’

  ‘The night before last?’ Fanina sprang to her feet.

  ‘What was the man like?’ she asked faintly.

  The old fellow appeared to hesitate for a moment, then, making up his mind, said all in one burst:

  ‘He’s the man who brought you here, illustrious stranger.... I was keeping my sheep near the bridge, and I saw your wagon go past, you see.’

  Fanina suddenly realized what had happened. Xychus! The man they had found in the torrent was Xychus. Inexorably the tragedy was being played out. She held out her trembling hands towards the shepherd, ‘Is he dead? Tell me, is he dead?’ she panted.

  ‘I know no more than you, illustrious stranger. Just a few moments ago Velchana the cowherd galloped by on his mule on the other side of the torrent. He just had time to shout out that the man who had been at Atia’s two evenings ago had been found lower down the Arminia near the place where Larth the butcher killed a wolf last week. Maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s not...’

  He only just had time to get out of the way. With her long, golden hair untied and streaming down her back, tense-faced, gripped by a mortal dread, Fanina rushed past him. Holding her short tunic up with both hands, she made straight for the entrance to the temple, raced madly between the tombs of the huge burial-ground that stretched as far as the eye could see, rushed down a giddy path that twisted and turned from tomb to tomb down the steep slopes of the ravine, ran across a narrow strip of stones beside the torrent, leapt from boulder to boulder over the foaming waters, then slipping, falling, splashing through the icy water, her knees cut and bleeding, her throat parched, finally reached the forbidding wall formed by piled-up blocks of volcanic rock among which the waters of the Armina seethed and roared.

  It was high, very high. Her face was bathed in sweat. Her legs were scarcely able to carry her. She rushed at the wall, tore her feet, bent her nails back. One crag, then another even steeper still. At last, panting for breath and staggering with exhaustion, she drew herself up on the crest of the wall of rock.

  From this vantage-point she could see the course of the river for more than a hundred yards.

  She saw Atia on the bank below her, and lower down, standing thigh-deep in the black water, a group of men carrying a bundle wrapped in a dark blanket.

  Once again everything was conspiring to overwhelm Fanina with misfortune.

  When she reached Atia, she saw that the old woman was leaning on Xychus’ heavy double-headed axe. Fanina and Atia looked at one another.

  Atia’s lips moved:

  ‘Xychus,’ she said.

  Lowering her eyes to the axe, she went on:

  ‘They tied it round his neck to stop him being washed out to sea ... so that we should be in no doubt about the fate he met with.’

  The men laid the body on the bank, and Fanina made as if to go towards it. But Atia’s sharp nails dug deep into her arm.

  ‘There’s no point,’ the old woman said coldly. ‘You would not recognize him. They did everything they could to make him talk before finishing him off....’

  With fixed gaze and jaw firmly set, Fanina followed Atia across the burial ground.

  The respite had been all too short. They had not given her time to regain her self-possession. Once again, death was striking all round her. Once again, an innocent victim marked a further stage in her unhappy life.

  They had killed Xychus! There could be no doubt about it: the man they had heard screaming in the ravine that night must have been Xychus!

  They had pushed their cruelty to such a pitch of refinement as to cut him to pieces alive right beside her, and after hearing Xychus’ desperate shrieks, she had gone back to sleep again!

  How could she have suspected that those were human cries that she had heard, and not the dismal howling of the wind through the heather and the tombs, nor the deceptive cries of the night spirits to which Atia had referred.

  Fanina looked at Atia. The old woman was walking calmly towards the temple, very upright, impassive, almost indifferent. The terrible sight she had just witnessed did not seem to have disturbed her unduly. No, in actual fact, the old woman’s attitude and the words she had spoken were not those of an outsider suddenly plunged into the thick of the drama, fraught with sudden and bewildering changes of fortune that was the stuff of Fanina’s life. She was behaving precisely as Vibidia, the Supreme Vestal, would have done under similar circumstances, in other words like a woman who always knew more than she would say, like a woman accustomed to keep secrets of the greatest moment, a woman never caught off her guard by even the most unexpected events.

  It was no more a matter of chance that Atia was Fanina’s custodian than that Jupiter’s Flamen and his wife Paulla had refused downright to answer any of the over-direct questions Fanina had asked them. Atia was one of the guides, one of the inflexible guardians that had been imposed on Fanina to keep her in the way that had been ordained for her. Atia had not taken her in out of sheer goodness of heart; she was first and foremost one of the instruments of Fanina’s harsh destiny.

  Therefore she must be made to talk. She must be led from one question to another to reveal everything she knew.

  ‘Who do you think killed Xychus?’ Fanina asked abruptly as they reached the entrance to the temple.

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ muttered the old woman, diving into the gallery.

  Tense with anger Fanina followed hard on her heels. She must make Atia talk. She must prevent her from slipping away. She could not go on living with someone of whose objectives, motives and feelings towards herself she knew nothing.

  The old woman passed quickly through the entrance to the passageway, where their encampment in all its squalor and its sumptuousness was installed. Crushing with her foot a golden bowl that lay in her way she plunged into the depths
of the gallery.

  Fanina pushed after her, bumped into the corner of a wall, laid her hand on something ice-cold that felt like the metal head of a lion or a gryphon, then, with every nerve straining, she stood still and listened.

  Without the help of a lamp, Atia was striding away through the pitch darkness into the depths of the labyrinth of which Xychus had spoken to Fanina. For a time she could still just make out the soft padding of the old woman’s bare feet. Then something soft and warm brushed her face — a bat! The labyrinth was also the haunt of those innumerable loathesome little creatures.

  Fanina clenched her teeth to stop herself shrieking, and groped her way back towards the light at the temple entrance, where, trembling with rage, she sank down on the big black chest.

  She gave a violent start. The piece of metal around which her fingers had closed — she could recognize it without looking, in spite of the time that had elapsed since that terrible night when, with a shudder of disgust, she had thrown it down, blood-stained and sticky on the cobbles of Cyprius Street. Taking a hold on herself, she held it up to the torches that lit the passage. It was what she had thought: The bronze pennant.

  All the memories linked to the mysterious talisman came crowding back into her mind: the ceremony in Vesta’s Temple when Vibidia had bestowed the pennant on her in the name of the Emperor; the little house full of rubble where she had found it not far from Araxea’s body; the fat man who had attacked her, and against whom she had used it instead of a dagger.

  She saw herself again, standing a few paces from the Janus-Curiatius shrine, by which she was to have met Vindex again. She could hear the dreadful moaning of the big, half-naked man she had stabbed. And she could see the shadow of the monstrous dwarf with the russet leather cloak attacking the Praetorian Guard.

  It was at that precise moment she had lost the man she loved, at the very moment when she had parted with the precious relic, whose protective powers were supposed to help her to overcome the obstacles placed before her, in the days when, according to the predictions of the soothsayers, ‘she would hold the destiny of Rome in her hands’.