Fanina, Child of Rome

by Pierre Sabbagh

  ‘And do you imagine you might have found some trace of me in Baiae with your pretty Calpurnia?’

  Once again she had linked his name with Calpurnia’s, and with inexpressible misery realized that her words were going home. Vindex had not been expecting her to come out with this detail, and the blood drained from his face. She had disarmed him, and he stood there, trembling, fists clenched, vainly seeking for words. She repeated witheringly:

  ‘Do you imagine you might have found some trace of me in Baiae, with your pretty Calpurnia?’

  Drawing his trembling hand across his forehead bathed in sweat, lie replied:

  ‘In Baiae I was a guest of her father, Calpurnius Piso!’

  Suddenly standing up, Fanina looked him straight in the eyes and asked in a hollow voice:

  ‘And Calpurnia was not there as well, Vindex? Give me your word that Calpurnia was not with you!’

  Speaking very softly, and looking straight into Fanina’s eyes, as if to convey to her some message that he could not utter, he murmured:

  ‘I tell you again that I have never thought of anyone but you.’

  He was hoping for an act of faith from her, whereas everything depended on the answer he refused to give her.

  ‘Swear that Calpurnia was not with you!’

  In a flash all contact between them had been broken. Turning violently on Sejanus, who had not even deigned to notice the contemptuous attitude the impudent young officer displayed towards him, and who had been watching him in utter detachment, he retorted:

  ‘And what about that man there? Isn’t he with you at this very moment?’

  Deliberately closing her heart to him, as if urged on by some evil genie, she replied:

  ‘Am I still answerable to you after all you have made me go through?’

  ‘Explanations are superfluous when I find you beside that lewd swine, the mere sight of whom is enough to make any woman who cares about her reputation feel unclean.’

  Too late! It was too late! It was no longer possible to retreat. Fanina and Vindex were no longer the only ones involved. Romilius and Gryllus, Sejanus’s two bodyguards, had crossed the room in a few strides and, one hand on their swords, stood beside the young officer, watching for an order from Sejanus.

  Then Fanina grew alarmed for Vindex’s safety.

  ‘Don’t touch him!’ she cried, terrified, rushing towards him.

  ‘Stand back,’ Sejanus calmly ordered the two guards, who reluctantly fell back. ‘It has already proved a disagreeable enough spectacle to see an officer of our valiant legions giving way to anger. Don’t provoke him any more by your presence.’

  Standing between Vindex and Sejanus, Fanina, chilled with fear, did not dare to move. This was a matter between men that was about to be settled before her. A matter between the most powerful man in the Empire and this very young military tribune who had had the audacity to insult him.

  Nonchalantly resting one elbow on the table, with his hard chin resting on his hand, Sejanus had not made a move. Vindex, his face convulsed with the same angry expression that had so terrified Fanina when he had rushed headlong from her room in pursuit of the dwarf in the leather cloak, had taken a step back, and she saw to her horror that he had drawn his sword.

  ‘I am unarmed,’ Sejanus said coldly, ‘and I shall not bother to remind you of the cruel punishment you run the risk of suffering for insulting, then threatening with an unsheathed sword, a Consul of the Roman people who, even in the days when he was nothing more than a young officer like you, never made himself ridiculous by getting involved in tavern brawls.’

  The two men faced one another, apparently oblivious of Fanina’s presence.

  Sejanus was really the stronger of the two at that moment. It was not only because of all the power and authority concentrated in his person at the summit of the Roman State; not only because of Romilius and Gryllus standing on guard at the door, ready to run to his assistance at his first call; not only because of the escort of veterans encamped in the courtyard of the posting house; he inspired respect because of and in himself. He had all the strength of maturity, the cold mastery of the soldier of fortune whose daily bread was danger, the sovereign authority of a leader who, after weathering many a storm, quelling many an uprising, getting rid of every rival he was unable to bend to his will, now commanded countless thousands.

  Vindex had nothing on his side but his impetuous youth, and lace to face with this cunning, unscrupulous but undeniably brave man, his youth was his worst enemy.

  ‘I’ll break you, Sejanus,’ the young man growled, ‘later on, when you have grown still stronger.’

  Finding herself right outside this quarrel, which was a man’s quarrel, in which she was the stake, Fanina looked from one to the other in terror. She had brought about this situation. She had to put up with it without being able to regain control again.

  As Vindex uttered these last words the Prefect’s eyes narrowed and his jaw hardened. Sejanus was not a man one could threaten with impunity. Anyone other than this young officer, any legionary, would have felt his blood run cold to see the expression which Sejanus turned witheringly upon the man senseless enough to defy him.

  Fanina moved in order to shift his attention on to herself, possibly to turn the impending thunderbolt towards her, and the commander of the Praetorian Guard looked up at her. Seeing her agonized expression, the clever actor, who had succeeded in circumventing even the wily Tiberius, immediately reassumed the calm and smiling expression he had worn as the pleasant companion he had become since they had reached the agreement that bound them together. He spoke in a conciliatory tone:

  ‘The divine Augustus forgave ungrateful Cinna who had been planning to assassinate him; why should mere Sejanus not forgive the hot-headed Vindex, who has merely threatened him?’

  Then, his mouth creasing in a wry smile, he added:

  ‘Clemency is the supreme indulgence of the strong, my young friend.’

  Taking his sword in both hands and holding it up level with his chest, effortlessly, with a flick of the wrist, Vindex snapped it in two.

  ‘A challenge hurled at the strong is the supreme indulgence of youth, Sejanus,’ he replied, his lip curling. ‘I shall break you just as I broke this sword.’

  Turning stiffly on his heel, he walked smartly to the door. Fanina rushed after him, calling: ‘Caius!’

  As he was about to cross the threshold, he turned, and throwing the pieces of his sword at her feet, he said in an icy tone:

  ‘A Vindex has never drawn his sword without staining it with his enemy’s blood. This one is dishonoured.’

  Then, with a laugh that hit her like a whiplash:

  ‘I’ll wear another one tomorrow when I see Calpurnia again.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Whinnying with pain, Vindex’s mount clattered over the cobblestones of the courtyard, then galloped off at top speed in the direction of Rome.

  Motionless, Fanina waited for silence to fall once more, then raising her head discovered Romilius and Gryllus watching her as they stood on either side of the door. When her eyes lighted on them, the two decurions looked quickly away as if unable to bear her gaze.

  A strange creature, Fanina! A disconcerting creature, even more disconcerting to herself than to those around her. Whether she liked it or no, she would always be the woman her destiny forced her to be. The impulsive, loving and so vulnerable Fanina that she still was, in spite of all the tribulations which assailed her without ever breaking her spirit, would always meet adversity with the pure face of a haughty patrician, the proud heiress of an incomparable line of exceptional people, a creature dedicated since her tenderest years to this dramatic destiny which she could not escape.

  She felt as if she had been drained of her life blood, and was no more than a soulless body ready to succumb beneath the weight of this last blow fate had dealt her, a blow that should have felled her utterly. But this was far from being the case, for she had already recovered her poise.
Already, without her realizing it, her face had composed itself, like the impenetrable face of some idol, full of serenity and disdain, assuming the expression which she had been taught during the long years of her training as a vestal, which would always remain with her. And yet, how she was suffering!

  Vindex had gone. All around her life went on as if nothing had happened. The rough voices of the Praetorians rose up from the courtyard and she could hear the dull ring of their spoons on their crude iron plates. The master of the post was scolding a slave-girl who was whimpering. A dog barked. A chariot passed by on the Aurelian Way ...

  Slowly Fanina walked back towards the table. Everything was finished now, tragically finished, stupidly finished. In order to kill their love the more surely, in order to set her and Vindex the more violently against one another, the gods had blinded them and taken their reason from them. As she crossed the big, silent room again, Fanina felt the words she should have said rise to her lips, words she should have used to win back the man who had insulted her with words too cruel for her ever to forget them.

  But why, oh why, had she reacted so stupidly? How could she have behaved so intransigently, since she was by no means blameless, in that she had been unable to resist the guilty pleasure she had found in Sejanus’s arms?

  But alas! Vindex was gone, and Sejanus was still there.

  Leaning his elbows on the table, the commander of the Praetorian Guard watched her approach. Behind his affectation of offhandedness, Fanina sensed that he was perplexed, vaguely uneasy, not quite knowing what attitude to adopt towards a woman who had sworn to be his most faithful ally, and whose unpredictable behaviour after a scene that should have left her shattered, had taken him by surprise.

  Fanina refused to show him the face of a defeated and humiliated woman, not even to allay the vague feeling of anxiety she sensed stealing over him. The daughter of Senator Faninus, ‘the conscience of the Senate’, might well have been guilty of a momentary weakness, but she must at once take a hold on herself again.

  She would not let Sejanus witness her suffering. A terrible suffering, but one she would overcome, because she had to.

  She walked round the table and sat down beside the commander of the Praetorians. Speaking in a clear voice, she said:

  ‘All that is over and done with, illustrious Sejanus. Now we must look towards the future ...’

  Dry-eyed, she examined the commander of the Praetorians and concluded on a note of finality:

  ‘The future I intend to fashion with you, Sejanus, or in spite of you, if you repudiate the undertakings you have given me.’

  What had been in the mind of Sejanus when Fanina had offered to ally herself with him?

  No doubt he had thought that she would confine herself to playing the passive role of a living talisman whose presence would guarantee the success of his ambitious plans by securing him the protection of the gods.

  But such was not Fanina’s wish. Her only reason for living now was the struggle she had sworn she would wage against Tiberius and all he stood for, which she regarded as disastrous for the Empire as she thought it should be.

  Fanina wanted this struggle to be a fierce, open one. She burned to sacrifice herself, to take her place in the front rank, in the position of greatest danger: the kind of position from which there was no retreat. Thirsting for the transcendental at the outset of a life she considered as shattered, unworthy to be lived, she would not die without leaving her mark. The last descendant of the ‘divine’ Mastarna would be an historic figure like Tiberius and Cornelius Gracchus, the sons of the unforgettable Cornelia, who had died a glorious death because they had tried to distribute, among the poor, public lands that had been left fallow by the big landowners who had appropriated them.

  ‘Where do we stand at present, and what are your plans?’ she asked Sejanus point-blank.

  The commander of the Praetorians seemed to withdraw into himself. He looked away towards the ceiling beams and allowed himself a long interval in which to think.

  ‘Is my question so difficult to answer?’ Fanina insisted.

  Gryllus and Romilius were standing on the threshold. The room was empty. Sejanus was free to speak openly, without fear of being overheard.

  ‘I’m listening, Sejanus.’

  Still avoiding her gaze, Sejanus smiled.

  ‘Your question has caught me unprepared, illustrious Bella,’ he replied softly. ‘I had hoped that you would leave the conduct of operations in my hands.’

  Speaking very softly, but emphasizing every syllable in order to give greater weight to each word, Fanina replied:

  ‘What trust can I have in you, illustrious Sejanus, if you do not satisfy my perfectly legitimate desire to know how things stand at present?’

  At that moment Romilius announced the arrival of a courier from Rome, and the commander of the Praetorians left the room after offering his profuse apologies for leaving Fanina alone.

  As if it were the custom for a Consul of the Roman people to go to meet every messenger who happened to arrive!

  Sejanus was being evasive; Fanina was champing at the bit, but she contained her anger. Some time later Romilius entered begging her to accept further excuses from his leader ‘who had a great number of urgent orders to send off’, and he offered to escort her to her room.

  Fanina was sitting on a very high, very narrow, gilded bronze bed, in a most attractive room on the first floor of the main building. She had dismissed the slave-girl whom the master of the post had put at her disposal. She wanted to be alone, but not in order to dwell on the torturing vision of Vindex rushing at full gallop away from her through the oncoming night, with that laugh on his lips that had been even more insulting than the last sentence he had hurled in her teeth before vanishing into the darkness. She wanted to hear that laugh no longer. She wanted to hear that phrase no longer. She wanted to hear no longer the double ring of the pieces of Vindex’s sword as he hurled it at her feet.

  She wanted to think no longer about the man who had been all in all to her. She was going to wipe him out of her life.

  Proudly withdrawn into herself, her whole will was to give herself body and soul to the only distraction available to her in order to forget her grief. She brought the whole power of her concentration to bear on analysing Sejanus’s attitude towards her since the wild gallop of Vindex’s steed had died away in the distance, over the cobblestones of the Aurelian Way in the direction of Rome.

  This extraordinary power of concentration had been born in her, her teachers in the House of Vestals had merely developed it; Fanina had inherited it from her father, who had been famed in the Senate for the swiftness with which he assimilated even the most complex briefs that were submitted to him. It stemmed undoubtedly also from her ancestors, who from one generation to the next, for centuries, had been accustomed to concentrate all their faculties into a single beam which they then trained on a single point, more often than not on one of the magic formulae, whose dread powers none in Rome could use to better advantage.

  Fanina was reflecting intently. Thanks be to the gods, she was no longer as she had been recently, tossed like a rudderless ship on a sea of tragedy, not knowing whence the disasters came. She was leaving the darkness behind her and never wanted to return to it.

  Why had Sejanus slipped away as soon as she asked him for details of the conspiracy he was organizing? He was by nature suspicious and not accustomed to unburden himself, especially to a woman, and Fanina had noticed that his distrust of her had become clearly apparent when he had seen her so completely in control of herself after Vindex’s dramatic exit.

  Fanina’s lip curled in contempt. That ‘low-born intriguer’ — she found herself unconsciously applying to Sejanus one of the scornful expressions her father had been accustomed to use in speaking of the all powerful Prefect of the Praetorian Guard — that ‘low-born intriguer’, did he imagine she was going to let him see the spectacle of her boundless grief, especially as he was the man who had forced
her to submit to him in spite of herself?

  He was a man who had had so many affairs that they were beyond counting. He must surely have experienced quite a few stormy parting scenes. A woman capable of appearing serene after a scene in which he had heard her burst out in tones of irrepressible jealousy against the man who had betrayed her? That he had never seen l)efore. She baffled him and disturbed him, all the more because he was well aware of her doubly sacred nature, as a vestal and as the elect of the gods. An incredibly beautiful vestal who had had a lover. An elect of the gods who had been ignominiously condemned by the Pontiffs, buried alive and rescued by he knew not what miracle. A vestal whom he had had the misfortune to outrage, thus committing the most terrible sacrilege. An elect of the gods in whom Tiberius placed all his hopes and who had dealt with him as one sovereign power to another, had offered to become his ally, and now, without more ado, wanted to share with him the secrets of his conspiracy against the Emperor.

  At that moment Sejanus must be racking his brains to think whether he had not fallen into some trap, and Fanina had to admit that the commander of the Praetorians would have been rash to do otherwise.

  Fanina suddenly jumped down from the bed. Somewhere on the floor below she could hear a young woman crying. Fanina opened her door and then recoiled. There in the dim light from the oil-lamps that hung at intervals from the walls, she saw Romilius’s squat silhouette. Wearing light goat-skin slippers, minus his helmet and breast-plate, but carrying his broad sword at his side, he stood there, a rolled blanket at his feet; the decurion was standing guard over her door, of that there could be no shadow of doubt.

  ‘The commander ...’ Romilius began.

  Fanina pushed him aside, and was at the top of the stairs in a few strides. At the bottom of the flight stood a young Numidian slave-girl, her tunic half torn off her, her firm, naked breasts marked with bruises, struggling in the arms of Gryllus, who was trying to hold one hand over her mouth. She was the slave-girl who had been sent to Fanina by the master of the posting house.