Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  While that caress ravaged her, her soul screamed. She uttered toward Jesus Christ a clamor of revolt. Why had he wanted this? Had she not immolated for him her youth and her life? If he had permitted his creature to be lying under this caress, it was because he could do nothing about human action, it was because he was impotent for good as for evil. She no longer believed. Faith left her like an unhealthy humor that has long maintained the dolor of a wound, extracted by the surgeon’s knife.

  After the pleasure, the man fell asleep.

  Slowly, Priscilla moved away from him in order no longer to feel the contact of his skin. She was against the wall and she could not think of getting out of the bed without waking Peter. But she did not even think about it. She was devoid of strength. She fell into a demi-slumber.

  And suddenly, it seemed to her that a voice shouted nearby: “The one who has never sinned!”

  And she came forward.

  There was a great assembly of people in front of a church. She saw prelates in golden miters, cavaliers, and the people of Alexandria. The Patriarch Cyril was about to celebrate a marriage. That marriage was her own. She had been chosen by Peter as a spouse. Her father Diodorus, her brother Marcus, the monks, the Parabalani: they were all there. The door of the church, which was the Church of Caesarea, opened and she saw the face of a fat priest appear, with the same innocent expression as the one she had seen on the morning of Hypatia’s death.

  And she had become Peter’s wife. She shared his bed. She felt the warmth and odor of his body, she was moistened by his sweat. Thus, all that there was on earth of the abject had been for her. Jesus Christ had bought her to the brothel in order that she should have, as the aliment of her soul, the hatred of Deborah, and as bodily pleasure, the putrefaction of Artystone and Peter’s caress.

  Now she was lying beside the man she had feared since childhood. That was the terminus of her mystical youth.

  Was that possible?

  She was almost tempted to wake Peter up in order to belong go him again and see whether she could go any further along the road of her absolute misery.

  She emerged from her demi-slumber and it seemed to her that the room, which was only illuminated by a smoky lamp hanging from the wall was filled with a sudden brightness. She saw with sharp clarity all the events of her life unfold, her journeys to Zenobia’s convent, the piety of her childhood, the stone that she had thrown at Hypatia, and the nullity and the stupidity of her entire existence appeared to her.

  For her to be here, lying ignominiously next to that repulsive male, various causes had been necessary. She pictured her grandfather, stubborn and fanatical, her limited father, and Bishop Cyril, who had weighed upon the destiny of her family like the stone of a sepulcher on a creature buried alive.

  Everything had pushed her toward evil.

  Evil was the stone of hatred that she had thrown; evil was ugliness and debauchery; evil was the man snoring beside her.

  And evil was triumphant everywhere. The weak were crushed, the pure were soiled and the gods did not intervene, and Jesus said: “Turn the other cheek.”

  And she had been cowardly enough to let herself go, to get down on her knees, to throw the stone, to listen to the monk Zosyma, to open her body, to sacrifice her beauty.

  So the evil had just entered into her. She had felt it profoundly in her loins. It had labored her. She was covered in filth.

  But in that extremity, it seemed to her that she had traveled a kind of circle and had returned to her point of departure. She glimpsed a new faith. A task appeared to her, for which she had been chosen. She began to understand the meaning of her life. She associated the death of the beggar Dionysus, who had allowed himself to be killed almost voluntarily, with the presence of Peter asleep beside her.

  Yes, that was it! It was for her to cut the throat of evil, to be the instrument of justice. She felt pure. She had never sinned. What was material was of no account. With the pollution of Peter she had just received an ignoble baptism, but it had spiritualized her soul.

  At that moment, far way along the ramparts, the trumpets sounded of cataphracts who were leaving the city for exercises. For her, it was like an announcement of the Last Judgment. She shivered. The divinity to which she no longer gave a face was perhaps about to demand that she account for actions she had not yet accomplished.

  She raised herself up on her elbow. But no. No hatred! She had plenty of time. She knew from experience the duration of those heavy drunken slumbers. It was necessary to reflect. It was necessary to preserve her precious life. She felt vigorous, active, and cunning. She imagined everything that would follow. Everything would succeed. She was invincible.

  Cautiously, she slid her naked arm under the mattress. She grasped the knife that was hidden there and drew it out of its leather scabbard. It was astonishingly sharp. She remembered. The man who had dropped it from his cloak was a philosopher in a white robe whom desire had not pushed toward her. He had scarcely brushed her forehead with his hand. He had only come, by virtue of an enchantment of mysterious things, to leave that weapon in her hands.

  Oh, how she would have liked to make Peter suffer! She wondered whether she ought not to put his eyes out, or castrate him. But he would cry out, someone would come. She would not be able to escape. She was determined to preserve the treasure of admirable life.

  And she remembered that the Hindu Bagawali said that in her religion, the most unfortunate were those who die abruptly, because they were dragged, without being prepared for it, into the region she called Kama-Loka, where the dead despaired. That Kama-Loka must be the Amenti of her country, perhaps also the Christian Hell.

  Let death be abrupt for that accursed man!

  She searched for the location of his heart. The folds of the raised dalmatic hid it.

  Then she delivered an immense thrust to the throat, for she thought the flesh more resistant than it was. The blade plunged in to the hilt and penetrated quite profoundly into the wood of the bed, so that the man was nailed to it.

  Scarcely had she struck than Priscilla took the gilded dalmatic in her fist and stuffed it into Peter’s open mouth, as he gasped. She held it there until the spasms of the body had stopped.

  She leapt out of the bed, strangely calm and lucid.

  Blood was flooding over the floor-tiles, and was so abundant that it might pass under the crack of the door and stream into the corridor. She leapt toward the pitcher, which was empty. She put on a light chemise, red in color, in order that no one would see the stains by which her body was soiled, put the pitcher on her head, and went downstairs.

  She stopped for a few seconds on the threshold of the low room. Spartacus was asleep. Two of Peter’s companions were in the same state but the other two were still drinking with Livia and Bagawali, who had stripped naked.

  Laugher and gibes greeted her. Priscilla replied to them joyfully, pointing to the pitcher she was carrying. She caused water to flow from the fountain noisily. She reappeared again outside the low room and stopped, putting her pitcher on the floor, or further pleasantries. She took care to close the door of the room before going upstairs.

  With her torn chemise, dipped in the pitcher, she staunched the blood that was flowing. She washed herself, and put on a tunic and a cloak. She wrenched the philosopher’s dagger out of Peter’s throat, wiped it carefully, and put it in her belt. Perhaps she would need it again. Woe betide anyone who tried to get in her way!

  One last glance at the room where she had suffered without hope. The ivory Christ before which she had prayed so much had fallen from its niche by virtue of the shock of the dagger-thrust. She looked at it for a second and, with her toe, she pushed it into the blood.

  No one saw her slide along the corridor and open the door to the street. Outside, the boulevard was deserted. The brothels were dark. Only the windows of the square towers in the ramparts cast glimmers of light at intervals. It was the indecisive hour when the night is coming to an end but the sun has not yet begun
to appear.

  It seemed to Priscilla that the landscape was new and mysterious, full of the multiform riches of life. She had never looked at the world in which she lived. The towers appeared to her for the first time with their signification of force and war. The brothels revealed to her the enigma of their nameless misery. The prowler drawing away to the right was a silhouette of crime, the one drawing away to the left a silhouette of despair. The houses, the earth and the sky were full of correspondences and signs. On all sides there was danger, hatred and amour for her but she no longer feared anything. Was she not an Exterminating Angel?

  In any case, she knew where she was going. Ibas, the merchant from Zante, was in Constantinople and would set sail in the morning. He had told her the day before that he would sleep on his boat and that the boat in question was moored at the extremity of the port. Priscilla calculated that Peter’s death would be discovered within an hour. She also calculated that an hour after that the port would probably be closed and all the boats searched. She remembered the rapidity with which, a few months earlier, the Nycteparch’s police had acted after the murder of a less important individual than a Logothete of taxes. She had two hours in which to find Ibas, tell him everything and persuade him to set forth. That was just enough!

  She started to run in the direction of the port.

  Priscilla had more than two hours before her to flee, in consequence of an event that cast all the inhabitants of Spartacus’ brothel into a stupor.

  The centurion of the quarter had just arrived. He had had the house surrounded by his soldiers and he had gathered everyone who was there on the ground floor in order to interrogate them. It was evident to him and everyone else that it was Priscilla that had committed the crime.

  Then, howling, agitating her curly hair, Deborah launched herself toward the centurion.

  “It’s me who killed the Logothete! It’s me! It’s me! I cut his throat with this hand! I’m ready to do it again!”

  In vain, Spartacus swore that it was impossible, since Deborah had not quit a laborer from the quays of Neorium, who had left almost at the moment when Peter’s murder had been discovered.

  Did Deborah want by accusing herself to glorify herself with the admirable action that the murder of a high functionary of the Empire was because she was jealous of not having accomplished it herself? Was she thinking, in her hatred for Priscilla, of stealing such a dangerous honor from her? Or, by an abrupt reversal caused by admiration, did she want to save her enemy by giving her time to escape?

  She he could never explain it to herself.

  Confronted by her formal confession, the centurion had her wrists bound and kept her out of sight until the arrival of the Nycteparch.

  Daylight had appeared by the time he came.

  He was a very small man, old and wily, who seemed never to look at anyone but saw extraordinarily far into souls, beyond the appearances of gestures and words.

  He had the whole affair explained to him, listened to Deborah’s renewed confessions and immediately said, when she had finished: “Fifty lashes for this woman for having accused herself falsely. No more. She isn’t an accomplice.”

  Then he gave rapid orders to be transmitted to the gates of the city and the jetties of the port.

  It was too late. The boat of the merchant Ibas was already heading for the open sea.

  XVII. The Crown of Narcissi

  Isidore of Gaza lifted his thin finger toward the star-studded sky as if to take it as a witness to the prodigies with which the earth was full, and he said: “I had two extraordinary dreams last night of a prophetic character. Listen.”

  Around him, extended on the carpet in the Greek fashion or leaning on the marble balustrade of the terrace, were grouped the philosopher Proclus and his former master Eunapius: Asclepigenia,37 a young woman renowned for her knowledge of magic and theurgy: the Chaldean priest Cerinthus; Antagoras, an extraordinary individual renowned for his eccentricities; and young Telamon, among others.

  The villa of Palladius was situated not far from the port of Cenchreae on the Saronic Gulf, at the foot of the ruins of the temple of Venus. It was in Corinth that Palladius lived now for preference, and it was there that he reunited in his villa the philosophers of the Museum, who had almost all deserted Alexandria, in the wake of Cyril’s persecutions, for the various cities of Greece.

  Palladius was striding back and forth agitatedly, often looking in the direction of the gardens in order to see whether any further guests were going to appear. Pale under the mauve of his tunic, his fine head leaning on his arm, decked with bracelets, Telamon’s misty eyes were staring in the same direction.

  Satisfied by the silence, Isidore of Gaza spoke.

  “At the bottom of a great mass of stone that might have been the pyramid of Cheops, a temple or a hill, two young women, two sisters of great beauty, were walking side by side. They wore a blue ribbon around the forehead with a golden hawk—which was, as you know, the distinctive sign of the ancient priestesses of Nephtys, the Minerva of Egypt. That also makes me think that the dream might have been the image of an anterior life rather than a scene from the mediocre existence that we are living.

  “One of the two sisters, the younger, showed the other a young man who was drawing away, and by whom she was loved. The elder sister persuaded her younger sister forcefully that it is shameful for a priestess to yield to the love of a man, and exhorted her to chastity by the powerful radiation of her will. Now, the elder sister had, in my dream, the face of Hypatia, while the other resembled the daughter of Diodorus, that Priscilla, whose intelligence amazes us, whose life appears to us to be an enigma, and whom we all love, albeit to different degrees.”

  It was in seeing the impassioned face of Palladius that Isidore of Gaza added the last words, with an ironic half-smile.

  For me, dreams are more mute than tombs,” said old Eunapius. “And if they sometimes speak, they are more deceptive than the clouds and the wind.”

  “The time is not far off,” said Isidore of Gaza, shrugging his shoulders with an indulgent pity, “when, thanks to me, everyone will know the future as well as the past. It will suffice to make the ablutions that I indicate, to say three prayers whose formulae I will give, and by means of an ineffable communication with the invisible powers, one will be in confrontation during sleep with the great tableau of events of life, which contains all possibilities and all fatalities.”

  “Excuse my short sight,” said Telamon, “but I don’t see why the dream you’ve had merits being reported.”

  Isidore of Gaza started to laugh at such ignorance. “My dream is marvelously symbolic,” he said. “It explains what has astonished us all, it answer a question that we have posed. How was a young woman endowed with reason, even though she was a Christian, able to participate in the stoning of Hypatia? How, so few years thereafter, was she to show such an amorous admiration for that same Hypatia? That amour has caused her to renounce her religion, to raise her intelligence to the point that the philosophy of Plotinus is accessible to her and she can discuss it with us. It even seems that that amour is reflected in the plasticity of her features, since I believe I can sometimes distinguish a certain resemblance between Hypatia and Priscilla.”

  “Is it also because of that amour,” said Asclepigenia, ironically, that Priscilla can live with a man as vulgar as that grape-merchant named Ibas?”

  “The faculty that is superior to all others, enthusiasm,” said Proclus, “can as well be found under the dense form of a grape-merchant as that of the most elevated of philosophers. It appears that this Ibas spends hours in the temple of Minerva alongside the port of Lechaeum and that he begs to goddess to render him more intelligent. He strives to read and to comprehend, I don’t know whether he’ll succeed, but I find that very touching. The only time it has been given to me to see him, he reminded me of those extremely faithful dogs that gaze at their master with a fixed stare in which one perceives the enigma of all nature making progress toward more
thought and more love.”

  “It’s a pity,” said Asclepigenia, “that he has such pretentions to elegance. With his embroidered cloaks and his appearance of a Zantean peasant, he always seems to be a ridiculous travesty.”

  “In any case, Priscilla lives with that Ibas like brother and sister,” said Palladius, becoming very red, while Asclepigenia uttered an ingenuous bust of laughter.

  “I still don’t see,” Telamon added, “how Isidore’s dream can...”

  The joy of explaining a dream made Isidore of Gaza’s eyes sparkle even more.

  “I’ve seen in my dream a scene from the past that illuminates the present and the future. In a previous life, Hypatia and Priscilla were sisters and loved one another tenderly. Hypatia then deflected Priscilla from amour, doubtless in order to consecrate her to the religious life of the temple of Nephtys, of whom they were both priestesses. In doing that, she caused an injury to her sister by depriving her of the happiness to which she aspired, from the superiority that she might have acquired by means of pleasure. Every injury receives its punishment in one life or another, and the stone that Priscilla threw was merely the payment of a debt engendered by imprudent advice in a previous life. For everyone must remain free in one’s actions and create one’s own destiny, good or bad. The debt having been paid, the anterior love reappeared, and it’s a sister that Priscilla is mourning without knowing it.”

  “That explanation is very subtle,” said Proclus, getting up and advancing toward the edge of the terrace, outside the luminous circle of the torches, as if he had suddenly been attracted by the shadows of the night. “What does the chain of events that links us to one another matter? The essential thing, in the sadness of these times, is that those who are linked hold one another’s hand faithfully. The memory of Hypatia is like a pure flame that illuminates us, and perhaps the powers by which we are ruled have sent the beautiful Pricilla to us in order that she should be its living representation among us.”