Fanina, Child of Rome

by Pierre Sabbagh

  ‘Is that what you want, Fanina? Is that what you really want?’

  Very pale, his brow pearling with sweat, he stood there, desperately trying to read her expression for an answer.

  ‘I have waited for this moment for ten years, Fanina ... ten years in which I asked myself whether my heart would be strong enough to stand the tremendous rush of joy I would feel when victory became certain.’

  With fever-bright eyes, he waited.

  ‘How you cling to your Empire, Sejanus!’

  ‘I never dreamed you minded so much about a Republic no one wants!’

  ‘Perhaps I am different from the other women you have known, Sejanus.’

  ‘No woman in the whole world would ever ask the man who loves her for such a sacrifice! No woman in all the world would refuse what I am laying at your feet!’

  Fanina looked away. Then, in a fit of fury, he clasped her to him, crushing her so that she nearly screamed. Teeth clenched, she stiffened. This was the hard Sejanus, the brutal Sejanus before whom all gave way, this was the man who now stood before her. He was tired of being a suppliant. Without a care for whoever might hear him he ranted on as if he were on the drill-ground in front of his cowed Praetorian Guard. She was to bow to his will. He said so.

  ‘You won’t escape me! You are mine and mine alone, and I’m keeping you! I will force you to accept what you are rejecting and you shall love me in spite of yourself! I’m tired of your little girl’s whims! You are going to reign at my side, as Livia did beside Augustus. And if by some unfortunate chance you get away, I shall search every corner of the universe to find you.’

  ‘And would you search every corner of the Kingdom of the Dead, Sejanus?’ Fanina asked in icy tones.

  His face set, the commander of the Praetorians did not reply.

  ‘Let me go! ... You are hurting me....’ she added.

  Sejanus released his hold on her. Although her head was racked with a terrible migraine and her throat on fire, she held her ground resolutely before him, looking him up and down in utter disdain. Their eyes met and he looked away.

  ‘What are you trying to do?’ he asked her in a mere whisper.

  His face was drawn and furrowed with wrinkles she had not seen on it before; he seemed aged, defeated, and for the first time in his life of adventure, he admitted defeat.

  ‘I want nothing more than what I have always wanted,’ Fanina stated crisply.

  He took a step back, clasping and unclasping his hands convulsively as he said very softly:

  ‘The gods have played a dirty trick on me.... How could I have known that in the hour of victory I should have to choose between the most powerful empire in the world and a little girl full of old-fashioned notions, noble and fraternal notions, which no one has I lie slightest desire any more to see put into practice?’

  Then, still softer, eyes closed, he went on:

  ‘A little girl, the most precious, the most beautiful little girl ... Why am I Sejanus? Why are you Fanina more than Bella whom I love? Why have I striven for so long? Why are we not just a man and a woman like other men and women, without any mission to fulfil, without any ambitions to satisfy, without any desire save to live happily together without any worries?’

  Fanina turned away. These were words she too could have uttered. Why was she not someone other than Fanina? The woman she might have been could have lived beside the man who would have made her completely happy. But that man was not Sejanus.

  The commander of the Praetorians stretched out one hand towards her, stopping a few inches from her body as if he dared not touch her.

  ‘Don’t turn away from me, my love. With or without the Empire, if I lose you I shall die. Let it be as you decide....’

  His voice had regained some of its firmness. A revolution seemed to have taken place within him. His face had grown haggard, and his eyes burned with a strange, intense, fanatical light.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a voice full of conviction, ‘may Jupiter strike me dead on the spot if everything you want to happen does not take place point by point.’

  Then turning towards the door, he called:

  ‘Gryllus! Romilius!’

  Immediately his two bodyguards appeared. Sejanus drew them and whispered a few words in their ears. Gryllus nodded.

  ‘That’s easy, master,’ he said. ‘Everything has been lined up for the past week.’

  Slowly and deliberately the two decurions unbuckled their belts, took off their metal breast-plates and laid down their helmets.

  ‘Is that enough?’ Romilius asked, drawing a large cutlass from his tunic.

  ‘You won’t need even that,’ Sejanus replied.

  Returning to Fanina he said:

  ‘In less than an hour, the first of your wishes will be fulfilled.’

  The suddenness of her lover’s capitulation had left Fanina breathless and overcome. After her exhausting fury with the commander of the Praetorians, she felt like a soldier who, after fighting to the utmost limits of his strength against a much stronger enemy, suddenly sees him lay down his arms. She had fought too much. She was worn out.

  ‘Come then,’ he said.

  A moment later they reappeared in the banqueting hall, preceded by the two decurions. Everyone fell silent. A slave came by, bearing a tray laden with cups of wine. Sejanus emptied three, one after the other. People were watching them as they crossed the room in silence.

  Near the door, Khera, one of Fanina’s servants, made as if to rush towards them: her hair was tousled and the short loin-cloth that covered her thighs was crumpled.

  ‘What is it, Khera?’ Fanina asked.

  Seeing Sejanus’s eye on her, the slave-girl said:

  ‘Nothing, Mistress.’

  And suddenly rushed away.

  Then, turning towards his guests, the commander of the Praetorians spoke in a toneless voice:

  ‘Tonight this is your house....’

  Then turning to Fanina, added very softly:

  ‘After that, it will be for you to decide, my beloved ... for you alone.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Fanina raised her hand to her brow. Far from helping to clear the slight intoxication she still felt, the cold night air made her feel far worse. The flagstones seemed to sink beneath her feet, and she felt as if she was in a cotton-wool world where nothing was clearly defined, where sounds were muffled and sensations blunted.

  Sejanus made as if to hold her up, but she stopped him with a single gesture.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked in a tremulous voice.

  ‘It’s a surprise ... a wonderful surprise.’

  In the hazy light from the lamp standard in the middle of his garden, the strange new expression that had come over Sejanus’s features since he had submitted to Fanina’s wishes was even more striking.

  ‘Things will be as you wish them,’ he went on, with a wild excitement. ‘And so it shall always be, for I have sworn it, beloved!’

  Gryllus and Romilius were waiting for them by a little door at the end of the garden.

  ‘Are you going like that, master?’ Gryllus asked in surprise, pointing to Fanina’s scarlet gold-embroidered robe anti Sejanus’s white beltless tunic.

  The commander of the Praetorians hesitated for a moment, then replied dryly:

  ‘Yes, like this.’

  Now they were walking along a narrow street traversed at intervals by high stone steps, a street that led down the steep hill towards the Via Triumphalis, which they crossed before plunging into a dark alleyway shut in between high walls.

  Everything was quiet in this aristocratic neighbourhood. Everyone was asleep in the magnificent houses which they skirted on their exceedingly complicated route.

  Sometimes the road went up, then it would go down. Obstinately refusing Sejanus’s proffered arm, Fanina struggled along as if in a dream, twisting her ankles on the cobblestones.

  ‘May Jupiter strike me dead on the spot if everything you desire is not accomplished point
by point,’ the commander of the Praetorians had sworn. He was carrying out one of her wishes. Towards what victory was she going?

  Occasionally she would hear the tread of a patrol of nightwatch-men in the distance, but she was far too weary to be accessible to the terrible memories which that haunting sound usually aroused in her.

  For a time she could not get out of her mind the thought of Khera, Marrha, Lhena and Tasha and of all the other poor girls she had left defenceless amidst all those men.

  ‘I’m worried about Khera.... Those men are brutes....’ she said.

  Sejanus made no reply.

  Then suddenly they came out into a street Fanina knew well: Victory Rise, along which she had so often travelled in her litter on her way to her parents’ house on the Palatine Hill.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see, my love.’

  When they reached the Temple of the goddess Fortuna Privata, Gryllus drew a bunch of keys from his tunic and opened a small door that pivoted silently on its hinges. How many doors did Gryllus open after that? He had the keys to all the temples in the area and even those of the house in which Tiberius had lived before he had settled on Capri.

  They were crossing the grounds of this house when a man holding a large dog by the collar suddenly loomed out of the shadows.

  ‘It’s me, Gryllus,’ the decurion said softly.

  ‘I thought you would turn up one of these nights,’ the man replied. ‘Go ahead. There’s a light by the entrance to the tunnel.’ Following Gryllus as he held a lantern, its panes made of bladders, at arm’s length, Fanina climbed down the steps of an interminable spiral staircase leading to the depths of Mount Palatine.

  ‘If I hadn’t made a detailed study of the way we had to come. I wonder how we would have got even as far as this,’ grumbled Gryllus as they went on.

  At the end of a long vaulted passageway, about fifteen steep steps led to a narrow landing that ended in a panel of black marble framed in a huge iron frame.

  ‘Now quiet, everybody,’ whispered Gryllus.

  The marble panel pivoted on itself as silently as all the earlier doors had done. Fanina’s temples felt as if shot through and through with cruel darts; her legs were giving beneath the weight of her own body; she hesitated.

  Why was her heart so suddenly hammering within her breast? Why this wild anxiety that had gripped her?

  Sejanus pushed her gently forward, and she crossed the threshold, her mouth agape, staring....

  She recognized this little room with its black marble walls in which Gryllus’s lantern was reflected many times. This was the room in which she had undressed immediately after being condemned by the pontiffs. This was where she had narrowly escaped being scourged by the ape-like Rubellius. It was here that she had been wrapped in a shroud before setting off for the grave they had dug for her in the Field of Evil-doers.

  And this secret door by which she had entered was the door at which Brazen-beard had concealed himself to look on her nakedness and revel in his loathsome victory.

  Meanwhile, the two decurions had crossed the room on tiptoe. She heard a soft ‘shsh!’ and the blade of Romilius’s cutlass flashed.

  ‘Philoena?’ whispered Gryllus.

  ‘Here I am,’ came the almost imperceptible answer from a woman who had glided like a shadow across the dark room towards the two Praetorians.

  Rooted to the ground, her head racked with pain, and overwhelmed by the host of memories that came flocking back to her, Fanina reeled and almost fell. Sejanus’s strong hand gripped her arm to hold her up.

  ‘Come, my love,’ he whispered in her ear. Then tenderly, infinitely solicitous, he drew her over to the opposite corner of the room, from which they could make out the confused sound of whispering.

  ‘They’re all asleep,’ said the woman Gryllus had called Philoena. ‘No one heard the bell that rings when anyone opens that door. We are quite safe. The master trusts no one but me and I am the only person who watches over him at night.’

  As Fanina and their chief approached, the two decurions stepped aside. Fanina gave a violent start. How could she ever forget the morose face of that woman, cruelly caricatured by the light from Gryllus’s lantern that lit it up from below? This was the same hard, suspicious face of one of the old slaves Calvinus had entrusted her to, after sentence had been pronounced on her casting her out from the world of the living.

  ‘Her!’

  The old woman had not been expecting this stark confrontation either, in the very place where she had taken a servile delight in subjecting Fanina to her implacable surveillance. Suddenly discovering ‘the dead vestal’, she backed away, her eyes starting from her head and her features distorted with abject terror.

  ‘You didn’t tell me!’ she shrieked in horror.

  Seizing her roughly by the elbows, the two Praetorians pushed her over towards Fanina....

  A painful shudder ran down Fanina’s back. The sickening intoxication she had been unable to shake off, which had wrapped her in a cotton-wool world in which all true sensations were stifled, was suddenly transmuted into a blinding fury. The wheel had come full circle. Without any warning Sejanus, now blindly determined to satisfy her on every count, had willed it that she should be able to do what she had waited all too long to do.

  All the suffering she had borne, all the affronts she had endured, the disasters that had overtaken her, the fears she had known, they surged to the surface in all their unbearable intensity. The moment of revenge had come, the moment of true justice, as the gods willed it in their infinite mercy.

  Grouped around her, the two decurions and their chief looked at her with respect and superstitious awe. Never had they seen her like this before. Draped in the sumptuous scarlet robe that glowed in the shadows, her glistening golden hair like a halo about her pure face, transformed as if by a holy wrath, she reduced them to the status of performers whose own will must be eliminated before hers.

  ‘Your master!’ she snapped out to the old woman as she fought to free herself from the decurions’ grip.

  ‘You didn’t tell me ...’ the woman groaned, half dead with terror.

  ‘You didn’t ask yourself so many questions when I gave you twenty thousand sesterces to betray your master,’ growled Gryllus. ‘It’s too late now, you bitch ... get on with it!’

  Gripping her firmly, the two Praetorians dragged her off. Fanina and Sejanus followed hard behind them, crossing a vestibule, climbing several flights of stairs and walking down long corridors where thick Indian carpets muffled the sound of their footsteps.

  Heavy purple hangings hid a doorway which Fanina entered, pushing aside her companions.

  The small room Fanina had entered was hung from ceiling to floor with Persian tapestries, and their golds and purples glowed in the dim light of two silver lamps.

  In front of Fanina, sitting rather than lying on a very high bed, propped up against a carefully arranged pile of embroidered cushions, his jaw pendant, his hideous face twitching spasmodically, Calvinus was dozing.

  Roughly pushing the slave before them, Sejanus and the two decurions entered the room. The old man gave a start and said in his soft husky voice:

  ‘Philoena!’

  ‘She’s here, Calvinus,’ Fanina replied, fists clenched.

  His horrible wrinkled face a tangled network of lines around his toothless, almost completely drawn-in mouth, the pontiff opened his red-rimmed eyes, which had lost all their lashes.

  ‘Who spoke?’ he asked.

  ‘I,’ Fanina replied, lifting one of the lamps that lit the room up to eye level.

  His head lolling on his scraggy neck, his bony fingers clutching at the surrounding cushions, Calvinus raised himself painfully, then, after remaining unsteadily seated for a moment like a disjointed puppet, suddenly bent forward and stretched out his face towards her to look at her.

  ‘Who are you?’ he stammered.

  His voice died away in his throat, as Sejanus, crossing in fr
ont of Fanina, seized him by the shoulder.

  ‘Stop play-acting, you old monkey,’ growled the commander of the Praetorians, shaking him viciously. ‘You know her! It’s Fanina, the girl you had buried alive!’

  Shaken by Sejanus’s tight grip on his shoulder, Calvinus could only stammer:

  ‘Fa... ni... na ...’

  Then fighting desperately to free himself from Sejanus’s grip, he turned towards the door and called:

  ‘Philoena! My little Philoena! Help! Come and help me!’

  The terror that convulsed him made him still more hideous. His tiny eyes were streaming and his feeble voice broke into short bewildered squeaks.

  ‘There’s your Philoena, there she is!’ sniggered Gryllus hurling the slave-girl, more dead than alive, to the end of the bed.

  Stepping back in disgust, Fanina spoke:

  ‘You can shout for help as much as you like, Calvinus. You are even more completely cut off from your friends than I was in my tomb in the Field of Evil-doers, and your Philoena betrayed you to us for a few thousand sesterces, just as Melixo betrayed me to you....’

  Trembling violently, Calvinus tried to get up, but Sejanus gave him a push that sent him flying back on to his bed.

  ‘Seize that woman Fanina!’ Calvinus yapped. ‘Seize her and kill her here before my eyes so that I can be quite sure this time that no one will get her out of her grave again!’

  Then seized once more with terror, he snivelled:

  ‘No, Fanina, my mind is wandering ... I want you to be rehabilitated ... I shall devote the rest of my days to your rehabilitation ... I shall have it proclaimed that it was the gods themselves who released you from your tomb...’

  ‘And will you get my father and my mother out of their tombs in the same way, Calvinus? ... And poor Vibius Cetra? And my poor Catia? ...’

  In a fit of rage, Fanina had rushed over towards the pontiff and now stood over him, her hair dishevelled and her face streaming with tears, as she repeated:

  ‘Will you get them all out of their graves, Calvinus? What punishment would ever be severe enough to make you pay for all the crimes you have committed?’