A young woman might be turned aside by a word spoken at the right moment, he thought.
He instructed Majorin and the slave Thoutmos to accompany her.
The streets of Rhacotis were so narrow that they could not advance three abreast. They went up and down and walked until they had difficulty going further forward because of the crowd that had gathered. In a little square, a trestle of planks had been set up, leaning on a brick wall. Zosyma was standing on the trestle. Bent over, his head forward, he was parading over the terrified audience eyes that burned like coals, and he seemed to be launching tangible maledictions with his hand.
Beside him, a fanatic was holding a torch, raising it and lowering it in order the people could see the prophet’s face, and also a wound that he had beneath his rags, and which he uncovered proudly. Around him, the hovels of the poor raised up their small heaps of dirty stones. The lamp of a tavern blinked like a gummed-up eye. The noxious side-streets gave the impression of plunging into a perspective of misery.
Zosyma expressed himself in the Coptic language, with the result that not everyone understood what he was saying. But those who only spoke Greek read in his face and his gestures the terrible meaning of his words.
He cursed those who forgot God. He cursed all men. The most wretched members of his audience committed the same sin as the rich. There was no difference between them. They all lived like pigs, and what did it matter whether the trough was a little more of less full? The human beasts only pursued the enjoyment of their bodies, or that of their souls, which was worse. No one knew the narrow road that leads to God, which was the road of perfect and voluntary dolor.
Priscilla shuddered with hope. Zosyma’s words celebrated her own horror of life.
A magnetic communication was established between the members of the audience, and she participated in it. Around her, the people aspired to suffer. What a sublime compensation, if the crushing burden of dolor procured eternal salvation! The wound covering Zosyma’s breast was as radiant as a sun.
“Cast a glance into yourselves. Seek out what is odious and which arouses the disgust of the spirit, and strive toward that ideal of suffering. Let the man who takes pleasure in his house set fire to it! Let the man who is handsome disfigure himself! Let the man who cherishes his children live far away from them! The contemplative should break stones! The traveler should remain stationary! No wine for the drinker! No book for the man devoured by the desire for intelligence! And those who do not accomplish expiation during the rapid years lived on earth will be condemned to accomplish it during eternity.”
The torch was suddenly extinguished, and the prophet was no longer anything but a silhouette gesticulating in the darkness, a bird of ill omen.
Men tore out their beards. Others cut themselves with their knives. There was a stir in front of a doorway. A woman whose limbs were agitated by a tremor pulled a crude cross out of her house, and, holding out a hammer and nails, she begged those who surrounded her to crucify her like Jesus.
Priscilla and her two companions returned through the streets.
Majorin let his ill humor burst forth in acerbic words. Priscilla kept silent and listened to the tumult of her thoughts.
She could see now, she understood. The monk Zosyma was right. What was it that inspired the most horror in her? It was the desire of men, the image of their possession of her virgin body. So? So?
She drew in her shoulders. Her flesh froze. But she recalled the Christ of her dream, the ulcerated Christ. He had only appeared to her with all the wounds of the earth and had only made a sign to her to indicate the path to follow.
And her resolution was made from that moment on.
As they were about to quite Rhacotis something strange happened.
A crouching form stood up, emerged from the shadow and ran toward Priscilla, who was walking two or three paces behind Majorin and Thoutmos.
Priscilla uttered a cry of terror.
But the goitrous Dionysus fell to his knees and attempted to kiss the hem of the young woman’s robe, repeating: “My child! It’s you, my child!”
Priscilla recognized him, heard the words that he pronounced almost tearfully, and distinguished that there was nothing in his attitude but humility and inoffensive admiration, but in spite of that, without knowing why, she cried: “Help!”
She stuck herself against the wall with the gesture of someone who is being attacked.
Thoutmos turned round and thought that his mistress was in danger. He leapt forward and struck Dionysus a heavy blow with a metal club that he had, attached to his wrist by a strap.
Dionysus, who had got up, collapsed into the gutter, vomiting blood.
“It’s Dionysus,” said Priscilla, very calmly, leaning over him while he repeated, in a desperate tone: “Oh, my daughter! You, my daughter!”
“He attacked you, Mistress?” said Thoutmos.
Priscilla did not reply.
She did not feel any pity.
“I think it’s the jaw that he’s broken,” said Majorin, bending down. “The blow must have been terrible, and to judge by the spasms of his body, one can tell that he’s going to die.”
Priscilla stepped lightly over the body of the beggar, which was blocking the street.
“Come on,” she said to the two men, and without looking back, she drew away.
Everything appeared facile to her, and it all unfolded with the ease of actions that one accomplishes in a dream.
Money? She only needed enough for the journey. She would always have enough. Clothes? She aspired to be naked.
The galleys that went from Alexandria to Constantinople were frequent. She took a place on one of them, which was laden with Ethopian slaves destined for the service of the Hippodrome. Those slaves, lying on the deck, made a seething and howling mass that exhaled a heavy human odor.
Pricilla respired that odor with delight, savoring its nauseating effect more than the rarest of perfumes.
The emergence from the harbor took a long time because the galley had to row around the Heptastade and the isle of the Pharos. They were the only moments of anguish she had during her flight. She thought that her disappearance might have been perceived, that she might have been seen on the jetty, and that small boats might have time to overtake the galley.
She could see her house in the distance, the high windows, the great marble columns and the garden where she had played. Perhaps, by leaning over the side, she might have been able to distinguish the stooped silhouette of her father or the hesitant step of her brother Marcus. But she did not lean over.
The wind that began to inflate the sails also blew in her soul, bringing her the mystical hope of the fall of which she dreamed.
And when the large fig-trees and arborescent tamarinds of the isle of the Pharos began to decrease on the horizon, when Alexandria, with its towers, its obelisks, its acropolis and its triumphal arches was no more than a patch of white stone on the horizon, a great peace descended within her. She was in haste to open her arms, to be labored by caresses, purified by disgust, to attain God by means of the martyrdom of abjection.
XIV. The Phantom of Touta
Aurelius had passed through Antioch; he had reached the ancient city of Palmyra, built in the middle of the desert, and he had set forth across a region of sand and stones in order to reach the banks of the Euphrates.
He had dreamed of following exactly the same itinerary that Apollonius of Tyana had followed several centuries before, but he had not been able to find any trace of his passage in Antioch. Many temples were disaffected; others had been destroyed; the last priests were ignorant. The very name of Apollonius, once more celebrated that that of Jesus, was almost unknown.
Aurelius was now heading toward a temple consecrated to the goddess Derceto, which had been a celebrated center of initiation, and where a very ancient college of priests ought still to exist. Apollonius had stayed there while on his way to India. He had instructed the priests there in divine matters when
he had returned from his voyage, bearing his message of wisdom.
Night fell. Aurelius’ gourd was empty. He had eaten his last barley cake. He was exhausted.
He was about to lie down on the sand and sleep there, when it seemed to him that the wind, being less hot, must have passed over water and foliage that had refreshed it.
According to the indications he had been given in Palmyra, the trail he was following ought to lead him to a small agglomeration, doubtless the community of the temple of Derceto, and to a place where there was a bridge over the river. He climbed a ridge and in the twilight he perceived the blue sinuosity of the Euphrates. His strength returned, and he started to run.
When he had slaked his thirst and washed his feet and his face, he looked around.
Everything was silent. No prayer of neophytes turned toward the setting sun, no music of sacred flutes resonated in the air. No white robe of a hierophant in meditation appeared in the increasing shadow. He took a few steps and saw that he had to his right an entirely ruined village that seemed deserted. To his left, imposing masses of stone loomed up, a profusion of walls and columns.
He went there and recognized that the ancient temple of Derceto was no longer anything but a mass of ruins. He saw the skeleton of the porticos of the sacred enclosure, and the debris of the balustrade that preceded the place where sacrifices had been made. There was no longer anything but the framework of the lateral walls of the cella. He was walking over the grooves of pilasters and fragments of capitals.
He stopped. He was about to tread on the detached marble hand of a statue. Its lineaments were extraordinarily pure.
He noticed that it was turned toward the Orient.
He sat down on the ground and wept.
What if everything he believed was nothing but chimeras? Perhaps Apollonius of Tyana had not even passed this way. Perhaps he had never gone to India? Perhaps humanity was living at hazard, without any sage ever having guided it?
His head was empty. He was hungry. He was discouraged. He reviewed his past life and regretted it bitterly.
It was his dream of verity that had doomed him. He had not cultivated energy within himself. It would have been better if he had been an ordinary man with violent desires and the force that others put to work in order to realize them. He had loved a woman and he had done nothing to get her back when she had been snatched away from him! In Alexandria, a beautiful young woman who was his daughter had been instructed in the Christian faith, in which he did not believe, and he had done nothing to tell her that he was her father! He had always lacked courage. He had only shown any in order to head for an inaccessible country, abandoning a young slave who had loved him.
Then, through the turpentine trees that had grown between the colonnades, he perceived the form of a woman, standing still. It was a transparent apparition, slightly gray-tinted, which reproduced the face and familiar attitude of Touta when she came back from Alexandria binging him some news.
He thought immediately that it was a creation of his imagination caused by the intensity of memory—but, low and tremulous, coming from infinitely far away, a voice reached him.
“One doesn’t suffer too much,” said that voice. “One feels oneself diminishing, one dies a little more every day. One has difficulty remembering…fortunately! For if one remembered, it would be too sad. I’ve followed you in the cities, I’ve followed you in the sand, and I’ve followed you into these stones. Then I’ll lose you, because I’ll no longer be anything.”
Aurelius knew that his slave Touta was dead, and he was stricken by grief. What he knew of the worlds of the afterlife made him think that perhaps that image had only appeared to him in order to formulate some posthumous plea. He was not unaware of the difficulty that the shades of the dead have in manifesting themselves to the living, and that it was necessary to hasten to grant such pleas.
“Can I do something for your repose?” he murmured. “Ought I to return to Alexandria to build you a sepulcher? Tell me quickly what you want.”
But the shade of Touta became less visible. She was about to dissipate. A few words reached Aurelius’ ears, but faintly and more distant. He heard: “Think of me…Priscilla…the roses in the garden…out there...”
That was all. There was no longer anything among the turpentine trees.
Aurelius remained in the same place for a long time in the hope that the image of Touta might form again before him. The stars had lit up in the sky. He waited in vain. Wrapped in his cloak, he lay down among the stones. He ended up going to sleep.
When he woke up the dawn did not take long to appear. His limbs were numbed by cold. He took a few steps and emerged from the temple. In the midst of the ruined houses that he could distinguish confusedly near the Euphrates there was the light of a fire. He ran toward it.
In a building whose walls were blackened and the roof disjointed, a tall man was sitting. He was clad in animal skins and hirsute, but beneath the hair that dangled over his face two soft eyes gleamed.
Aurelius interrogated him, speaking to him about the temple, the priests who had inhabited it, and the objective of his journey.
The man shook his head silently. He did not understand. He opened his mouth and showed the philosopher that his tongue had been cut out. With a gesture, he invited him to sit down, and to share the meal he was about to have, of barley bread and dried fish.
From the explanations he was given by means of gestures, Aurelius understood that at a time already distant, marauding tribes at war with the Palmyrans had set fire to the temple and the village, and massacred the priests and the inhabitants. The man had exercised the function of ferryman before the catastrophe occurred. He had survived the torture, and an obscure sentiment of duty had constrained him to remain, alone in the burned village, in order to continue to take travelers from one bank of the Euphrates to the other.
Alas, Aurelius would not have the consolation he had expected from the presence of learned priests, inheritors of the tradition of Apollonius. He would be obliged to continue his voyage with no other testimony or hope than his own faith.
The hirsute man had emerged from his house and had taken his guest as far as the bank of the Euphrates. A boat was moored amid the vegetation, near the piles of a destroyed bridge. He made him a sign to get in and took him to the other bank.
On the other side of the river there were more ruins. Aurelius made out a circular kiosk surrounded by columns, such as there had once been in proximity to important temples, where those who had a request to make of the divinities could deposit votive offerings.
The sun began to appear, making the Euphrates a long red streak, and illuminating the wild palms and the columns that were still standing with crimson. By means of that light, Aurelius, who was leaning over a fragment of fallen marble, read a name in Greek characters engraved with the point of a knife:
Apollonius of Tyana.
It was a small indication, but it was sufficient. His courage returned.
With his extended arm, the man showed him the way to the nearest town, Hanthis, in the direction of the rising sun.
Leaning on his staff, he set forth.
XV. The Brothel of Spartacus
The brothels of Byzantium pullulated along the enormous rampart built by Constantine They commenced at the Neorium and formed a quarter in which all the races of the earth became confounded at dusk.
The best-stocked were facing the fortifications. In accordance with the old Roman custom, they had before their doors either a phallus of painted wood or a copper plaque with an inscription, but the brothel-keepers attracted their clients by banging a gong, waving a lantern or shouting a joyful invitation, accompanied by the names and prices of the women. There were even brothels for the lowest orders hollowed out in subterrains in the fortifications, which were former food stores that had been disaffected and abandoned to prostitution.
When the sun set a human tide departed from the quays of the Golden Horn, the barracks quarter and the e
mporia and flowed toward the ramparts. Then the stevedores, the mercenaries, the stable-hands of the Hippodrome, the riff-raff of the port and that of the Sikhe district where foreigners lived mingled together. In a matter of minutes the silent boulevard and the side-streets that ended there were animated by an obscene and terrible life.
Drunken clamors mingled with the cries of the brothel-keepers, the clink of soldiers’ swords and the screams of pursued women. Mounted on donkeys, merchants of watermelons went from group to group and sometimes sold their fruits by auction. Hairdressers and perfumers slid toward the doors brandishing bottle of curling tongs in order to be recognized, for there were fights in front of certain houses, which were more sought-after than others. Sometimes, a cataphract, with his horse, or a Patrician in a litter surrounded by slaves cleaved through the crowd in the midst of the tumult. Mimes gave performances by torchlight. Dancers with hairless bodies contorted themselves in lascivious poses. Procurers seized the best-dressed passers-by bodily and tried to drag them away by force, while whispering promises of little girls and boys.
When Priscilla disembarked on the Golden Horn the sun had not yet disappeared into the waves of the Propontida. She looked to the right and the left at the immensity of the quays, the wandering crowd going in and out through the Kharsian gate, and took at random one of the streets climbing up and around the seven Byzantine hills. The Church of Holy Purity erected its pink steeple and its colored architecture in the sky. From the narthex of a church floored with mosaics and surrounded by thin amaranthine columns a religious odor of dead flowers drifted toward her.
She went past a cortege of Kaloyeres in brown robes, which disappeared through the door of a convent murmuring prayers. She went down the street of jewelers through a magical landscape of topazes from the island of Taprobane, which sparkled in all the shops. She went up again along the streets of armorers, that of harness-makers and that of confectioners and emerged into the fish-market.
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