The stalls were being emptied and the dried seaweed swept away. In wooden crates, large soft, shiny, multicolored fish seemed to be gazing at her sadly with their insensible round eyes. She went down again by a wider street that ended at the tower of the Maganes.
Around her walked men in the most various costumes. There were Armenians with large embroidered dalmatics, Jews in black robes tightened at the waist by a yellow belt, Bulgars with leather braces, Scythians with long hair braided like that of women, Persians clad in silk with a fringed garnet shawl around the neck, and Byzantines with violet cloaks decorated with silver peacocks and fabulous birds.
There was a great rattle of armor because soldiers were numerous there. Latin mercenaries with their medallion faces, their tight-fitting knee-length gray garments and their short swords mingled with negro guards in violet garments of the same sort, Iberian merchants in red and Scandinavian mercenaries who were never separated from the rounded bucklers attached to their backs.
Priscilla saw before her the great shadow cast by the uniform line of the rampart, sometimes cut by a high square tower. She perceived the numerous brothels opposite with their low doors, their barred windows and the powdered and plastered faces of prostitutes crouching under Syrian bonnets and yellow robes. She understood that she had reached the place for which she was searching: the market of female bodies, the immense convent more redoubtable than the one in which her mother was tortured by thirst in the desert; the abode of penitence where no prayer rises toward God, where flesh is incessantly wearied by sickening dolor in a cell without solitude.
As she stopped she was surrounded by a group of Varangians of the Palace Guard. They were gigantic in stature and entirely clad in gold, from their conical helmets to their bulbous breastplates and belts. One of them, with a coarse laugh, plunged his hand between Priscilla’s breasts. Another seized her by the waist.
She uttered a cry and pulled free. Arms extended around her to grab her. She fled. But the Varangians tried to catch up with her. Night had almost fallen. Priscilla slipped between the groups, which were becoming more compact. She collided with a bearded merchant who began to swear. Her youth, her fearful features and her white veils attracted the attention of the men she brushed past, and who attempted to caress her.
She had started running, still pursued by the gold-clad giants, who were gesticulating and laughing. The brothel-keepers on the thresholds called her filthy names because they hated streetwalkers who came to compete with their houses.
A mime who was spinning on one foot and beating cymbals made a few pirouettes around her. A hideous face breathed in her face in passing. A man with a wooden leg attempted to trip her up with it. Others started to give chase to her. Hands palpated her and grabbed her. She collided with the legs of a camel laden with gourds of wine and then, traversing and empty space, almost fell between the paws of a trained bear dancing to the sound of a flute.
A clamor of joy resounded. She bounded forward and, hunted like a beast, ran along the rampart. Corridors opened in places that led to the second enclosure. She threw herself into one of those corridors and reached the shadowed space that separated the two walls.
That formed a leprous avenue into which rubbish was thrown and into which prostitutes drew temporary lovers for rapid couplings. The obscurity was too great for anyone to be able to reach her.
She stopped. She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt remorse. Why was she fleeing that for which she had come in search? Was that people in rut not the force of God that was to labor and crush her body for the salvation of her soul? She had weakened at the first step. But she no longer wanted to recoil. Mute, her teeth clenched, she fortified herself in her resolution. Then she looked around. She would have liked a form to emerge from the darkness and possess her immediately, bruising her back on the stones.
She reflected that she would not suffer enough. She would not be able to see. She would not savor the torture. She started walking in the darkness. She stumbled over a couple lying on the ground and, extending her hand, felt the warm softness of a woman’s breast. Around her there were murmurs and sighs. She perceived the sound of human caresses, mingled with oaths and arguments over price, in the midst of an insipid odor of sweat and putrescence.
Priscilla went around a tower and arrived at another opening in the rampart. Illuminated lanterns now gave a nocturnal pomp to the boulevard along which the crowd was passing. She plunged into it again, having partly covered her face with her veil.
Before a house more lugubrious than the others, where the bars on the windows seemed thicker and from which a heavy mildewed breath seemed to be emerging, a man more frightful than all those she had yet perceived was sitting.
He had an incandescent red beard, square and thick. Long hair like a mane sprang from his cranium and inundated his shoulders. He was enormously tall; his neck sank into his shoulders. Red eyebrows hid his round and stupid eyes almost entirely. And all that could be seen of his person—his breast, his arms and his hands—was covered with long red hair, so that he looked likes a human lion, posted to guard a brothel. He was the brothel-keeper Spartacus. It was him that Priscilla chose.
Having traversed the crowd, she let her veil fall over her shoulder, leaned over him and asked him in a low voice to welcome her among the women of his house. As she was unaware of the customs relative to such engagements, she hastened to offer the man the small bag of gold coins that she had brought with her.
The brothel-keeper Spartacus opened his eyes immeasurably wide. He had difficulty recruiting women. He had been obliged the previous year to go and buy Syrians in the market at Antioch. He had paid dearly for them and had not been able to keep them.
He did not understand at first what Priscilla was saying to him, for he was slow-witted. Nevertheless, he stood up at the sight of the gold and went into the house with her, letting the multicolored curtain that hung over the threshold fall back.
Then he rediscovered his professional knowledge of bodies. He took account mentally of the age that Priscilla might be, and marveled at her beauty, the quality of her skin, the abundance of her hair and the proportions of her form. He touched her breasts, he had a desire to make her open her mouth in order to see her teeth, as he did in the slave market.
At the same time as he appreciated those marvelous gifts he was gripped by a timidity, for, although he exercised his métier strictly, he was an innocent brute, a lion full of forbearance.
He considered with astonishment the resolute young woman, whose lips were trembling slightly, and made her repeat the objective of the visit several times. Certainly, he was ready to protect her if, gone astray into the quarter of prostitution, she had come to put herself under his safeguard. But no, there was no doubt about it. She was only an errant whore, weary of wandering, who wanted to enroll in his house and was offering him her fortune to keep. It would be folly to send her away.
“You know the customs,” he said. And he tried to defend himself against his timidity by means of the thunderous sound of his own laughter.
No, she did not know them.
The first custom, when a prostitute entered into a house, was to give herself once, on arrival, to the proprietor of the brothel.
He pushed her toward a bed by the side of the door and tipped her on to it.
At that moment, a regular leapt down from a camel and attached it by a strap to a iron hook in the wall.
He shouted: “Spartacus!”
And he waited on the threshold.
The camel moved the striped curtain aside with its head and projected its long neck into the house.
And Priscilla, torn, found a little comfort in the fraternal melancholy of the animal’s large eyes.
Priscilla was inscribed in the registers of the house of Spartacus under the name of Fabrilla.
A few months before, a young Armenian woman who bore that name had attracted a numerous clientele by her beauty and her appetite for amour. An eteriarch of scholars who was g
oing to the Danube frontier had taken her away with him. Spartacus hoped by that similitude of names to let people believe that that Fabrilla had returned. So, when anyone asked for her, he called Priscilla. But the men were generally disappointed, for what they had liked about the real Fabrilla was a joyful humor that they did not find in the new one.
She was, along with the Jew Deborah, the only free woman in the house. The others were slaves. Spartacus had to pay a higher tax for free women, so he demanded more of them. When someone came at the hour when everyone was asleep, a little after sunrise, it was always Priscilla who was woken up; in any case, he found her docile and never weary.
The women lived on the first floor of the house, in narrow rooms that were all similar, which opened on to a corridor. They had their name inscribed on a piece of wood suspended by a cord from each door. The regulars went up directly to the corridor and penetrated into the room of the woman they wanted to see when the piece of wood was not inverted. Others had them come downstairs to drink palm wine in the low-ceilinged room on the ground floor or the courtyard behind the house. They often got drunk, for since the beginning of the world, the pleasure of drunkenness has been indissolubly combined with that of amour. Then the blows rained down, blood flowed, and Spartacus was obliged to intervene with his great leonine strength.
Priscilla’s room had for its entire furniture a wooden bed, a stool, a chest, a sandstone water-trough with a tall two-handled pitcher and a carpet soiled by years of debauchery. The walls were covered with inscriptions. There was vermin in the mattress and black beasts emerged from the cracks in the floor-tiles when the light was extinguished.
During the day, Priscilla stayed in her room, sitting on her stool, her eyes fixed, waiting for someone to open the door. She wore the yellow robe of a prostitute and the square Assyrian bonnet.
In the evening she went down to the common room where people were drinking. Soldiers put her on their knees and made her drink by force, partly undressing her. She never showed any preference for one over another. She gave herself silently, complaisantly, without enthusiasm or disgust.
She did not suffer. But she was astonished not to perceive within herself the enlightenment for which he had hoped. In the drunken voices of street-porters and merchants, in the insults of men who played dice on her body and vied for her possession with punches, she often strove to hear the sweet music that ought to charm the ears of the elect. She did not hear it. No celestial dove came to fly toward her as a messenger, no angel of God appeared to her.
She did not have a dolorous disappointment in consequence, but she started to desire death ardently. She could not imagine that the existence she was leading could last for long. She expected death as the natural consequence of her sacrifice. She summoned it with all the sincerity of her soul.
It was forbidden for women in brothels to have an image in their room representing any divinity whatsoever. Those who infringed that prohibition could be condemned to flagellation, and the brothel-keeper subjected to a heavy fine. But the Nycteparch had instructed his functionaries to turn a blind eye to it and, in fact, the presence of gods above the beds of pleasure was tolerated. It was sufficient for a little curtain to hide them.
The women were almost all of different religions and each of them had a little hidden altar in her room. Seso, who was an Egyptian from the upper Nile had a statuette of Isis. The Babylonian Artystone had one of Ormuz. Cleobuline of Byblos adored Astarte. The Hindu Bagawali rendered worship to Indra, the transformer of things, who had seven arms to unite the parts of the heavens. The Roman Livia had a whole collection of different gods and accomplished a thousand bizarre rituals for them. She burned incense for Priapus and Comus. She offered flowers to Pilumnus, who protects women in childbirth. She poured water over Conisatus, who provokes sweat after amour, and wine over Tryphallus, who renders the body firm. And she did not fail to prostrate herself every evening before Genita-Mana, who protects against the pain that men can cause during coupling.
And other women simply had a phallus in bronze or gold, which they adored as the force generative of joy and life.
Priscilla placed in a niche above her bed, behind a piece of black silk bought for that purpose, a little wooden cross with a crude representation in ivory of the crucified Jesus.
That was the primary cause of the irrational, pitiless, delirious hatred that the Jewess Deborah, worshiper of the unique God without an image, had for her.
Priscilla was linked by amity with the tender Seso. She was a tender creature who gave the impression of carrying a secret within her. She taught Priscilla how to dye her hair with saffron in the Greek fashion; she took her to the shops where copper rings for the ankles and necklaces of colored stones to put round the neck were sold at a low price, and paints and powders for the face. She explained to her how many drachms she ought to demand from men and how she ought to demand more from those who were drunk. She showed her where to find the money-changer to convert drachms into gold besants, in order to have her fortune in the smallest possible volume and to be able to hide it more easily under a floor-tile in her room. She taught her what caresses she ought to make more willingly, according to whether she found herself in the presence of Greeks accustomed to amour or coarse barbarians. She taught her to fear the brutality of Cappadocians and the perversity of the men of Byblos.
Priscilla and Seso were both Egyptians, and the sound of their voices evoked for them the same landscape and the same sky. It was in the morning, when the house was deserted, before going to sleep, that Seso sometimes came to Priscilla’s room.
They had equally weary bodies and buzzing heads. The sentiment of their misery penetrated them, but they found a tenderness in conversing in low voices and holding hands.
Priscilla talked about Jesus Christ to Seso and told her all the stories of the saints and martyrs that she knew. Seso told her the story of the death and rebirth of Osiris, and told her how Isis had searched for the fragments of his body on the banks of the Nile, how she had und them among the lotus flowers and how Horus, he luminous son, had grown in Abydos.
But while Seso listened distractedly to the marvelous lives of saints that Priscilla retraced with all her faith, the old Egyptian religion awoke dormant memories in Priscilla’s soul. That was, above all, when it was a matter of the tenebrous Amenti, guarded by Anubis with the head of a jackal, where all the dead had to render. She believed that she would soon traverse that Amenti. Perhaps she would penetrate into the hall of truth and Hermes would unwrap before the Judge the tablets where all her actions were engraved. But what if the abandonment of her body to the most horrible torture was not sufficient to compensate for the evil that she had done? Had she not thrown a stone with all her strength into a face where intelligence was radiant? Was it not written that: The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin against the spirit?
In that case, Hermes would not give her the ring, the crucial sign of immortality; he would not permit her to climb into the boat of Isis to glide toward the realm without matter. Her soul unpurified, she would not be confounded with Osiris—or, rather, with Jesus Christ. She confused the two religions. She came back to her own with more ardor, but she remained troubled by the similarities they had.
And when, one day, Seso gave her a little statuette of Isis, she did not refuse it, because of the shadow of the Anenti, where she was afraid of remaining after her death.
The Jewess Deborah execrated in Priscilla, first of all, a creature who belonged to a religion that persecuted hers. She execrated, in addition, a woman more beautiful than her, for whom she experienced a natural antipathy, a physical repulsion.
Deborah had insensate fits of violence. Anger caused her to fall into crises in which she howled endlessly and in which white foam emerged from her mouth.
When the night was terminated, Spartacus sometimes shared her bed. She claimed that Priscilla was striving to attract him to her by means of hypocritical maneuvers.
Afterwards, she said t
hat someone had stolen a golden comb from her, and that it was Priscilla who had accomplished that theft. Spartacus, fearing that she would make a complaint to the centurion of the quarter, visited Priscilla’s room and found nothing.
Then Deborah adopted the habit of spitting with disgust every time she was in Priscilla’s presence. She heaped her with mockery and insults and exasperated further every day the disdainful silence with which Priscilla enveloped herself like armor.
One evening, Deborah was visited by a coachman from the Hippodrome who sometimes came for her. All the women were in the common room, some on the knees of visitors, others waiting, painting their fingernails or putting on make-up in front of their little bronze mirrors.
A coachman from the Hippodrome was an important person, and Deborah felt an extreme pride in his visits. She stuck herself against him and unfastened her tunic all the way to the belly in order to show off her cleavage, which was beautiful. Having drunk to excess, she started to say a thousand foolish things, and to dance among the tables, and as Priscilla remained motionless in a corner she exhorted the coachman by way of derision to take the Christian immediately, in front of everyone, in order that he could compare the value of their mutual caresses.
The coachman, a taciturn man, did not budge, and tried to calm her down.
She then threw her arms round his neck, and shook him with all her strength, shouting: “If you’re not a coward, to and give her a slap for me.”
The coachman did not depart from his immobility.
Fury set Deborah ablaze, inflaming her face. And she went to Priscilla and slapped her twice.
A brawl followed, some siding with the Jewess, others with Priscilla.
Spartacus said nothing, out of respect for the coachman. He waited for the night to end. But when the door closed on the last of his clients he seized Deborah by the hair and dragged her, in spite of her screams, to Priscilla’s room.
Priscilla of Alexandria Page 26