by C C Taylor
So that was what we rehearsed on the lawns, as soon as we had forced more food down. Skip… I mean, Gratio! had a five minute monologue, then we would come on in our characters to perform our scenes, line by line, as we had just rehearsed, forgetting nothing, pausing for laughs… I don’t know if you ever do any of this performing, old man (‘Old man!’ he said to me), but this is what you should do before stepping on any skene. Imagine the gig going well. Imagine the warmth of your audience and your effortless performance…ars est celare artem as you folk say…and that was how I was imagining it. All that and then going back home to some olive farm somewhere with slaves and a business set up for life.
But I could see Gratio was bothered by something. As people were seating themselves he left the benches and went off to where the animals were housed, waiting for their turn to be part of the fun. I watched as he walked off, already staggering a little, towards the smaller rear door, which he opened, thinking, What in the name of Artemis is he doing now?
Soon, still without Gratio, we were ushered past the shark pool and towards the side of the skene, from where we were to ascend a small wooden ladder to the performing space.
Several people had made their speeches by the time your amicus came back, now quite stinking of wine. ‘Stand up straight,’ I hissed at him, as he took his place beside me.
‘I know where the barrels of wine are kept for tomorrow,’ he said.
‘What? Why the hell did you go off for more wine when we have all we want here for free?’
‘It wasn’t for me,’ he said.
I was about to ask him what he was babbling about, when a silence descended on the crowd. Juba was now on stage. His attendants carried him up in a chair, he descended on to the platform and stood to give a speech about our friendship with his new African kingdom. Here, he publicly vowed to change his city’s name to Caesaria, to great cheering.
‘Long gone are the days of Hannibal,’ he said, ‘and the days of Carthage, long gone the days when Pompey charged us on the Egyptian plains, our riders too slow with their spikes and the animals too drunk, we admit (sympathetic laughter) – though this was now an age ago. Now I return as a citizen of this just ruler of the world, the Roman Empire, on this very day of the birth of the god’s latest incarnation. May you live many more years, our noble Augustus.’
Here, Juba held his hands up to the sky in the direction of our living god, still unshaved and hiding from the sun in his floppy hat, but seemingly with a flicker of a smile about his lips.
So after that there was just the military honours guy to get through and then it was our turn. This was the part, where we had to go up our ladder and stand on our side of the stage to listen appreciatively to the load of old cock that was sure to usher from the old duffer’s mouth. My stomach felt as if it had psyches inside it…papilios, whatever you call them…and looking over at my two colleagues, did nothing to steady my nerves. Harry was gazing straight ahead, breathing deep and with his eyes glazed over in fear, muttering his first line over and over. And your pal was stood next to him, swaying and grinning. I hit him on the shoulder.
‘Sober up,’ I said
‘Look!’ he said, and produced a large metal key from beneath his tunic, grinning all the more
‘What in the name of Demeter…’
And I had time for no more, as a fanfare heralded the approach of the old military geezer and thankfully masked the sound of Gratio dropping the key on the skene. All that stood between us and the gig now was the speech by this chap who was going to be given his title before he keeled over and died. As he was ushered towards the ladder on the other side of the stage, a herald announced him:
‘Please, gentlemen, show your appreciation and honour for Titus Statilius Taurus.’
As soon as Gratio heard this name, he stopped grinning and went white as a sheet. Then he started looking around for his hat. ‘My hat, my hat’ he was saying.
‘You’re not performing in a hat, you kuna,’ I hissed at him. ‘Anyway, it’s down there where we were eating…’
‘Let me…’ he tried to barge past me.
‘No way!’ I said, blocking him
So he froze there next to us and we all looked out across the podium over his shoulder, to where two young guards were helping an elderly man out from under the portico, shuffling him with some kind of walking device towards the skene… Gratio started bobbing his head desperately up and down to catch a glimpse of the old cunt, just to check it was the Titus Statilius Taurus he remembered and loved so much…and sure enough. There, he caught sight of the eye patch just for a second, between the bodies of the two young helpers. And now he’s being hoisted on to the stage. Now we can all see him in profile. The left eye is towards us. The bad one. The one with the patch…
‘Maybe if he gives his speech looking all the while in the other direction’, Gratius hissed at me…
Of course, he was a long way away…
‘Maybe the eyesight in the old fucker’s other eye was bad’, he whispered desperately. He was praying at this point. He had so many gods to choose from, what with all the ones he’d collected on his travels: Innana and Unanna, and Pan and Zeus, and the whole panoply of Greek and Roman and African deities…surely one of them would help him…
And just as the old soldier reached the point in the middle of the skene from where he was to deliver his speech, an owl hooted. An owl. During the day. Romans hate owls. There was an unearthly silence, which the guest speaker dismissed with a wave of his hand and began:
‘Gentlemen,’ the voice boomed out
‘’It’s him all right,’ Gratio said, grabbing my arm till it hurt. I wrestled him off. That thunderous tone was as good an identifying mark as your friend’s blotchy facial curse, it seems.
‘There can be no higher privilege than to receive this honour from my fellow Romans,’ he began to drone. ‘Rome! The highest of high civilisations… Since the earliest days of Romulus and Remus…’ he went on…
‘Oh, R and R the squabbling siblings?’ hissed Gratio.
‘The Alban kings…’
‘Who probably never existed…I’ve got to get away from here…Phil, help me down…say I’m ill…’ but of course this was impossible.
‘To the Republic.’
‘Steady as you go now, Taurus.’
‘…And now our blessed state as citizens of a land presided over by no less than a GOD!’ (He made this last one echo round the portico and the surrounding cliffs).
Gratio’s head was down, his lips moving in prayer again.
‘And as I speak out to every last one of you…’ bla bla bla, he went on…‘I say we shall never live in better times than this. (Shaking his head) In the presence of such golden greatness…’
‘Let the end come quickly’, Gratio said to me, as still the old soldier trotted out his clichés…
‘…In times of Peace…’
He was saying, as his face now turned directly towards us. Gratio went weak at the knees, literally, I saw him. Then his body relaxed and a smile spread across his face as he realised that the old brute’s other eye – the right one – was also covered by a leather patch. Some concerned citizen had had the decency to take out the cunt’s good eye in a brawl somewhere, we later learned. The hour arrived. The man was saved.
So there was Gratius right next to me, not listening now, his head swimming with relief and also the nerve-steadying wine, about to take the stage…he had been all but dead just a few seconds earlier, but now you could visibly see a weight being lifted from his shoulders as he rejoiced in his old tormentor’s pathetic blindness, and he spent the last minutes of Taurus’ interminable speech grinning to himself at the stout soldier’s fortuitous mutilation, mimicking his atrociously dull speech and almost bouncing with desire to get onto the front of the podium himself and start to entertain the emperor with flute and song. The crisis, it seemed, had been averted.
Of course, I wanted to ask him about the business with the key. It was
only after the gig and the trip down to the pool, that Hanno the elephant finally worked out that Skip had left the door of his cage open and came charging out of the animal house at the guests, totally methed up on the vats of krasion, which your pal Gratio had left right next to the cage for him. It was reckoned that the beast trampled some six of the Big Fish to death, as well as maiming several more. The bigwigs escaped unscathed, as is usually the way, protected behind their wooden balustrade. Though the beast did manage to topple the scaffold to the ground before being subdued by soldiers, who came running from all directions at the alarm.
A sight to see…the emperor clinging to a wooden beam in order not to fall onto the grass below, senators and centurions menaced by drunken elephant’s breath, as they backed their way up the ranks of wooden benches. The rich and powerful hauled up by the elephant’s trunk and scattered into the wind with their arses showing under their fluttering togae. It must have been quite delightful. But neither we nor Gratio were in a position to witness this, except acoustically, so we can only imagine. The two of us (he indicated his companion and himself), on account of this ‘show’ your brother had prepared (his voice turned to anger again), were by that time in a dank cellar, in which we had immediately been imprisoned, then whipped, beaten and mutilated as soon as our, that is to say, his performance had finished.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I had to interrupted them at this point. “Your story is becoming confusing. Let us compose ourselves before continuing,” and I ordered more wine.
Well, their reaction is understandable, young one. Imagine it. You go off to seek your fortune by virtue of an easy gig, and someone you depend on gets pissed as a coot and blows the gig for you. And instead of pretty wives and lemon groves, it’s dark dungeons and sadists with irons. You can see why I gave them some money, I hope. And I do hope they’re well if they ever made it back to where they came from. Why should I dislike them? They were tougher than I thought for a couple of euriproktoi. Of course it’s not my fault a member of my family ruined their lives, but…ah well…
So how did the actual gig go? You’ll be wanting to know. Though I can’t see how in the world of Hades it can have beaten watching some fat pompous rich cunts getting tossed in the air naked by a drunken monster.
That said…in a way, you know, from how Phil and Harry described it, you might even have said our Skip did a show to rival that. Was it his best ever? He was certainly inspired by something, though it was more Bacchus and Pan, than Apollo and his golden hosts of poetry. Sometimes, the Greek boys said, the life of an artist is defined by one performance. ‘I will always be remembered for my Oedipus’ Phil informed me and Harry here…‘Do not make me blush,’ he said…and so on.
According to these two experts, your great, great uncle’s performance was the best five minutes of comedy they had ever seen. All the gods he’d prayed to jumbled up inside him and came pouring out. The fact that he was drunk was by the by. ‘Though we come here asking for reparation’, he said. ‘He will always have our kudos for what he did’.
Maybe we’d better leave it there. I could tell you how it went tomorrow. Aren’t you hungry yet? It’s getting dark as well… Are you sure? What’s kudos? I suppose, it’s what the clown at Ascanium had in Skip’s favourite old story. You remember the…? You remember the…? What? You think I should finish the story now? You’ll be late home to eat…
Vale, then, here goes…to the best of my ability, according to the unsworn testimony of the Catullus fans who were actually present at the event, I bring you, Skip Delirio’s best or worst ever gig depending on how you look at it, and to the best of my poor memory’s ability, and – it has to be said – seen through the eyes of one of Skip’s greatest admirers…but here goes:
"SKIP: (tumbles on centre stage) ‘Whoah! How you folks all doin’?’
(You could see straight away this was not the expected form of greeting)
‘What a lovely day…evening…late afternoon…what time is it? What do the sundials say? There must be a hundred of them. And they’re all set wrong. They must be, as his godliness is always turning up late for battles…’
(Given the silence that accompanied this first gag, a sober man might have changed direction, but no…)
‘Or maybe we only used to fight at night…’
(More silence. Normally after the first two silences the comic needs to strike the cymbal with the third one or he’s dead. But as our Greek friends told it, Skip was in full I-don’t-give-a-fuck mode. When will he learn?)
‘So a-a-anyway…It’s lovely to be here. In the Roman Empire, doncha know. In times of Peace. And it is lucky that we are in times of peace. Because back where I come from, the Bastarnae and Moesi are kicking up trouble to the east. And on the way here, we’ve had Asturies and the Cantabrians chucking spears at us from the Hispanic mountains. I’d hate to think what things would be like if we were still at war.’
This speech is greeted, of course, with more silence. And I do not have to tell you that this bears no relation to the introduction he was supposed to give. None at all. Nor did it seem he had any intention of returning to it. The two of us look on, horrified. What can we do? Perhaps we could tumble on now with the amphora and begin the clowning? But would that look even worse? A still more nightmarish thought flashed through my head. If we entered the skene now, this would implicate us in whatever it was that Gratio was doing. We stay frozen, to one side, watching. Gratio continues, swaying. Some of the faces in the audience are looking concerned. Maybe their Greek isn’t good enough to fully understand? But Augustus’ brow is beginning to furrow and that is sign enough.
Gratio does the Caesar-falling-in-the-African-beach-mud routine that went down so well among the smiling, white-teethed Nubians. This almost brings him a reprieve. He takes out his flute and plays a few sad notes before continuing. As the sun sinks low in the sky and Jupiter throws out beautiful coloured rays to end the day, a chill descends over the crowd."
‘Getting a bit cold, is it? It would be nice to be in Alexandria right now? Have you ever been? They say it’s fabulous. And there’s no winter there. I was near there once, I got kidnapped and made to stand in front of an army of elephants. Ha ha.’
“Clearly he had lost his reason.” (Phil said to me. He wasn’t to know it was the truth)
‘Yes, Alexandria…lovely place… I hear we have a lovely young ruler for the whole of Africa. Spiffing. And now we can have Gauls in the senate, why, we soon won’t have enemies left. Good. Civilise the cunts, that’s the way forward. If we teach those fucking barbarians one thing, let it be haircuts…it’s no wonder they get fucked over in battles if they can’t see where they’re going.’
(Augustus whispered something to a man at his side. The man moved off. The others watched on disbelieving).
‘Some of the Northerners won’t even drink alcohol. The barbarians. And those Greeks. Ancient. Past it. Fucking philosophy? Fucking science? They should be killing animals for fun like we do.’
For the third time in his life, Roman soldiers were about to arrest him at the end of a gig. Even Gratio noticed and tried to go back.
’Vale, vale… Here’s one you might like…’
“He didn’t say that, did he?” I asked Philoktetes.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Uh oh.”
‘Who’s the greatest? Augustus or Alexander?’
The audience look blankly at him
‘Augustus. By a nose.’
The blank looks continue.
“Come on, that’s a good one,” he said, then just stood there, looking at us all, swaying defiantly, if you can imagine such a thing.
“All right, then…here’s one you might like…” he announced to the crowd, grinning and swaying.
“Then he said the only line of the piece that was in the original text,” Harry informed me.
“And that was?” I asked.
“Since well I’ve played my part, all clap your hands…’ And from the stage dism
iss me with applause,” Harry says for my information.
“Well, not exactly,” Phil corrected him. “It was in the vernacular. More like ‘That’s your lot; now clap you fuckers!’”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing. Silence.”
“For our part, because we thought it was all rather marvellous. In other circumstances I would have applauded,” Phil said. “And would have even then had I known at that moment I was less than an hour from losing one of my hands.”
“And for their part (meaning the audience),” Harry added, “there was nought but mute incomprehension.”
“Because that was before the elephant came charging.”
“And then what? You can’t leave the story there, in silence…”
“Not total silence.”
“No. Not total silence.”
"There was the rhythmic stomping of the soldiers’ boots on the grass, as they approached the skene to haul Gratio away.
And a slight wind was getting up so you could hear, not all that far away, the rippling waters that began to lap at the edges of the lake as the sharks began to gather there."