Diagoras murmured: 'Do you mean to tell me that . . . his terror in the garden . ..'
Heracles' expression showed that this wasn't what he considered most important. But he said: 'Yes, perhaps. Remember, though, it was never my intention to investigate the terror you claim to have seen in Tramachus' eyes, but—'
'What you saw when you looked at his corpse and which you've never seen fit to tell me,' Diagoras said impatiently.
'Exactly. But now everything has fallen into place. I didn't tell you about it because its implications were so unpleasant that I wished to devise a theory to explain it first. I think the time has come to reveal it to you.'
Heracles suddenly raised his hand. Diagoras thought the Decipherer was about to cover his mouth so as not to say any more. But Heracles stroked his small silver beard and went on: 'At first sight, it seems very straightforward. Tramachus' body, as you know, was covered in bite marks, but . . . not all over. What I mean is his arms were almost untouched. That was what surprised me. The first thing we do when attacked is raise our arms, so that's the first place we're injured. How do you explain that an entire pack of wolves attacked poor Tramachus but barely touched his arms? There's only one possible answer: Tramachus was unconscious at the very least when the wolves found him, so he didn't put up a struggle. The beasts went straight for his heart, ripping it out.'
'Please, spare me the details,' said Diagoras. 'But I don't understand what this has to do with—' He stopped. The Decipherer was watching him closely, as if he could read his thoughts. 'Wait. You said that when the wolves found him, Tramachus must have been unconscious at the very least...'
'Tramachus didn't go hunting,' went on Heracles impassively. 'My theory is that he was going to tell everything. Menaechmus ... and I'd like to think that it was Menaechmus ... probably arranged to meet him on the outskirts of the City in order to come to some arrangement with him. There was an argument, maybe even a fight. Or perhaps Menaechmus had already decided to silence Tramachus in the worst possible way. Then, by chance, wolves destroyed the evidence. Now, this is just a theory'
'True. Tramachus may simply have been asleep when wolves chanced upon him,' said Diagoras.
Heracles shook his head. 'A man asleep can always wake up and defend himself. No, I don't think so. Tramachus' wounds show that he didn't defend himself. The wolves came across an inert body'
'But it could be that—'
'That he was unconscious for some other reason? That's what I thought at first, so I didn't want to tell you what I suspected. But if that is so, why have Antisus and Euneos become so afraid since their friend's death? Antisus has even decided to leave Athens.'
'Perhaps they fear we'll find out about their double life.'
Heracles replied quickly, as if Diagoras' suggestions were entirely predictable: 'You're forgetting one last thing: if they're so afraid of being found out, why are they continuing with their activities? I don't deny that they might be scared of being discovered, but I think they're much more scared of Menaechmus. As I said, I've made some inquiries about him. He's violent and irascible, and unusually strong despite his slight build. It may be that Antisus and Euneos now know what he's capable of, and they're frightened.'
The philosopher shut his eyes and pressed his lips together. He was boiling with rage. 'That... wretch,' he muttered. 'What do you suggest we do? Accuse him publicly?'
'Not so fast. First we have to establish the degree of guilt of each of them. Then we have to find out exactly what happened to Tramachus. And lastly . . .' Heracles had a strange look '. . . the most important thing: I have to hope that the feeling lurking uncomfortably inside me since I began this investigation - as if a huge eye were watching my every thought - is unjustified.'
'What kind of feeling?'
Heracles' gaze, lost in the night air, was inscrutable. After a pause, he answered, slowly: 'The feeling that I may, for the first time in my life, be completely wrong.'46
46 The words 'eyes' and 'watchful' have both been repeated frequently in this last section, and they echo the verses that the author has the Chorus speak: 'You are being watched.' So there is a double layer of eidesis in this chapter. On one hand, the theme of the Labours of Hercules continues with the image of the Stymphalian birds. On the other, there is mention of a 'Translator' and of 'watchful eyes'. What can it mean? Does the 'Translator' have to 'watch' out for something? Is somebody 'watching' the 'Translator'? Montalo's learned friend Aristides has agreed to see me tomorrow. (T.'sN.)
There it was: his eyes could see it in the darkness. He'd searched for it watchfully, tirelessly, among the opaque stone spirals of the cave. It was the same one, there was absolutely no doubt. As before, he recognised it by the sound: a muffled beating, like the leather-covered fist of a boxer rhythmically pounding the inside of his head. But this wasn't what mattered: what was absurd, illogical, and what his rational eye refused to accept, was the floating arm whose hand was gripping the organ. There, beyond the shoulder, that was where he should be looking. But why was that exactly where the shadows thickened? Darkness be gone! He had to find out what was hiding in that clot of blackness, what body, what image. He moved closer and put out his hand . . . The heartbeats grew louder. Deafened, he awoke abruptly ... and found, to his disbelief, that he could still hear them.
Someone was pounding on his front door.
'What...'
He wasn't dreaming: someone was knocking insistently at the door. He felt for his cloak, which was neatly folded on a chair by the bed. Dawn's watchful gaze slipped through the crack of window. As he came out into the corridor, he saw an oval face, its only features black slits for eyes, floating towards him.
'Ponsica, open the door!' he said
At first, stupidly, he wondered why she didn't answer. 'By Zeus, I'm still asleep: Ponsica can't speak.' The slave gestured nervously with her right hand; she held an oil lamp in her left.
'What? Fear . . . You're afraid? Don't be stupid! We must open the door!'
Grumbling, he pushed past the woman and went into the hallway. The knocking began again. There was no light - Ponsica had the lamp - so, when he opened the door, his terrifying dream of only a few moments before (so similar to the one of the previous night) brushed his memory like a cobweb caressing the unwary eyes of someone moving through an old dark house. But at the door he found not a hand gripping a beating heart but the figure of a man. Ponsica came up behind him with the lamp and the man's face was revealed: middle-aged, with watchful, sleep-filled eyes. He wore the grey cloak of a slave.
'I have a message for Heracles of Pontor from my master Diagoras,' he said, with a strong Boeotian accent.
'I am Heracles Pontor. Speak.'
Intimidated by Ponsica's appearance, the slave replied hesitantly: 'The message is: "Come immediately. There's been another death".'47
47 This is the end of Chapter Five. I finished translating it after my conversation with Professor Aristides, an amiable man with wide gestures but brief smiles. Like Ponsica in the novel, his hands are expressive, while his face remains blank. Perhaps his - I was going to say 'watchful' - eyes (the eidetic words have slipped into my thoughts now)... as I said, his eyes may be the only mobile, human feature of his plump face with its small, pointy black beard. He received me in his large living room. 'Welcome,' he said, smiling briefly, and indicating one of the chairs by the desk. I told him about The Athenian Murders, written by an anonymous author after the Peloponnesian War. No, he hadn't heard of it, but the subject sounded unusual. He settled the matter with a vague shrug, saying that if Montalo spent time on the text, it must have 'some merit'.
When I mentioned that it was eidetic, he looked more interested. 'Strangely, Montalo spent the last years of his life studying eidetic texts. He translated a good many and established the definitive version of several original texts. I would even go so far as to say that he became quite obsessed with the subject. I'm not surprised - some of my colleagues have spent their whole lives trying to find
the final key to an eidetic work. I assure you, these texts can become the worst poison literature has to offer.' He scratched his ear. 'I'm not exaggerating. I've translated some of them myself and have ended up dreaming about the images I've found. They can play tricks on you. I remember a treatise on astronomy by Alceus of Quiridon in which "red", and all shades of the colour, recurred throughout, nearly always teamed with another two words: "head" and "woman". Sure enough, I started dreaming about a beautiful red-haired woman ... I could see her face quite clearly. It tormented me.' He frowned. 'In the end, I discovered through another text that came my way by chance, that a former mistress of the author had been wrongly sentenced to death. Using eidesis, the poor man had hidden the image of her beheading in the text. You can imagine what a shock it was. Instead of a beautiful ghost with red hair, I now saw a decapitated head pouring blood.' He arched his eyebrows and looked at me, as if inviting me to share his disappointment. 'Writing is a strange business, my friend. In my opinion, it's one of the strangest, most terrible things a man can do.' And he added, again giving me his economical smile. 'Reading is another.' 'But getting back to Montalo . . .'
'Yes, yes. He took his obsession with eidesis much further. He believed that eidetic texts constituted irrefutable proof of Plato's Theory of Ideas. I expect you know it.'
'Of course,' I replied. 'Everyone does. Plato claimed that ideas exist independently of our thoughts. He said they were real entities, more real than human beings and objects.'
He didn't look too pleased with my summary of Plato's philosophy, nodding his small chubby head. 'Yes . . .' he said hesitantly. 'Montalo believed that if an eidetic text evokes the same hidden idea in all readers, that is, if we all find the same final key, that proves that ideas have their own independent existence. Childish as his reasoning may seem, he was on the right track: if everyone finds a desk in this room - the same desk - that means that the desk exists. In addition - and this is what most interested Montalo - should there be such a consensus among all readers, it would prove, too, that the world is rational and therefore good, beautiful and just.'
'I don't get that last point,' I said.
'It's a consequence of my previous point. If we all find the same idea in an eidetic text, then Ideas exist, and if Ideas exist, then the world is rational, as Plato and most ancient Greeks believed. And what is a rational world, made according to our thoughts and ideals, if not good, beautiful and just?'
'So for Montalo,' I murmured, amazed, 'an eidetic text was nothing less than ... the key to our existence.'
'Something like that.' Aristides gave a short sigh and gazed at his neat little nails. 'I hardly need tell you that he never found the proof he was looking for. Perhaps it was frustration that caused his illness.'
'What illness?'
He raised one eyebrow expertly.
'Montalo went insane. He spent the last years of his life shut up in his house. We all knew that he was ill and never saw anyone, so we left him alone. One day, his body was found in the forest near his house ... He'd been attacked by wild animals. He must have been wandering aimlessly, during one of his attacks, and fainted and ...' His voice trailed off as if to emphasise (eidetically?) his friend's sad end. He finished, almost inaudibly: 'What a horrible way to die.'
'Were his arms untouched?' I asked, stupidly. (T.'s N.)
VI 48
'It was the corpse of a young girl. She wore a veil, a peplos that covered her head and a cloak around her shoulders. She lay on her side on top of an endless erratic outline of rubble and, from the position of her legs - they were uncovered to the thigh and, in a way, it still seemed improper to look at them, even in these circumstances - one might almost believe that death had surprised her as she ran or leapt, her peplos hitched up. Her left hand was clenched, as in a children's game where something is hidden in the fist, but her right gripped a dagger with a blade, of a hand-span in length, that seemed wrought entirely from blood. She was barefoot. As to the rest, there seemed to be no part of the slender body, from her neck to her calves, that wounds had not marked - short, long, straight, curved, triangular, square, deep, superficial, light, grave, the entire peplos had been ravaged; the edges of the torn cloth were bloodstained. The sight, while sad, was merely a preamble: naked, the body would no doubt display the horrific mutilations suggested by the gruesome bulges in the clothing where humours had congealed - dirty excrescences that looked like aquatic plants seen from the surface of crystal-clear water. Surely the death could yield no more surprises.
48 'The papyrus is dirty, riddled with corrections, stains, and illegible or corrupt sentences,' notes Montalo about Chapter Six. (T.'sN.)
But there was a surprise: when Heracles parted the veil, he found a man's face.
'You are astonished, Decipherer!' cried the astynomos, effeminately pleased. 'By Zeus, I do not criticise you for it! I did not want to believe it myself when my servants told me! But may I ask you why you are here? This kind gentleman’ he said, indicating a bald man, 'assured me that you would want to see the body. But I don't understand why. There is nothing to decipher here save the obscure motive that prompted this ephebe . . .' He turned towards the bald man. 'What did you say his name was?'
'Euneos,' said Diagoras, as if in a dream.
'. .. the obscure motive that prompted Euneos to dress as a courtesan, get drunk and inflict these dreadful wounds upon himself... What are you looking for?'
Heracles was gently lifting the edges of the peplos. 'Ta, ta, ta, ba, ba, ba,' he hummed softly to himself.
The corpse appeared taken aback by the humiliating exploration: it gazed up at the dawn sky with its remaining eye, while the other, torn out and hanging by a viscous string, stared at the inside of an ear. Split in two, the muscle of the tongue protruded, mocking, from the open mouth.
'What are you looking at?' cried the astynomos impatiently, for he wished to complete his task. He was charged with cleansing the city of excrement and litter, and with supervising the final destination of any bodies that sprouted among them. The early-morning appearance of a corpse on a piece of land strewn with rubble and waste in the district of the Inner Ceramicus was, therefore, his responsibility.
'How can you be so sure, astynomos, that all this was self-inflicted?' asked Heracles, now busy opening the corpse's left hand.
The astynomos savoured the moment, a grotesque smile smeared over his small, smooth face. 'I don't need a Decipherer to tell me what happened!' he shouted. 'Can't you smell his filthy clothes? They stink of wine! And there are witnesses who saw him slashing himself with the dagger.'
'Witnesses?' Heracles didn't seem impressed. He'd found a small object in the corpse's left hand and had put it away under his cloak.
'Highly respectable witnesses. I have one of them right here.' Heracles looked up. The astynomos was pointing at Diagoras.49
49 'The sentences appear deliberately vulgar. The lyricism of the previous chapters has been lost, and instead we have satire, vacuous mockery, causticity, foulness. The style is no more than a residue of the original, a scrap tossed into this chapter,' states Montalo, and I couldn't agree more. I would add that the images of 'dirt' and 'rubble' seem to suggest the Labour of the Stables of Augeas in which the hero must clean out the filthy stables of the King of Elis. Montalo had to do much the same here: 'I've removed all the corrupt sentences and polished certain expressions; the text is, if not exactly gleaming, a little cleaner as a result.' (T.'s N.)
They offered their condolences to Trisipus, Euneos' father. The news had spread quickly so there were a lot of people there when they arrived, mostly family and friends, for Trisipus was highly respected. He was remembered for his exploits as a general in Sicily and, more importantly, he was one of the few who returned to tell of them. Should anyone have doubted him, his history was engraved in dirty scars on the tombstone of his face, which, as he would say, was 'blackened at the siege of Syracuse'. One scar in particular was the source of more pride than all the honours received in
his lifetime - a deep, oblique fissure running from the left side of his forehead to his right cheek and distorting the moist eye in its path, the result of a blow from a Syracusan sword. While unpleasant to behold, his weathered face, with its pale cleft and eyeball resembling a raw egg, was a badge of honour, and many a handsome youth envied it.
There was a great stir at Trisipus' house, but one got the impression that it was always thus, it mattered not that this was an exceptional day. As Diagoras and the astynomos arrived (with the Decipherer lagging behind - for some reason he had been reluctant to accompany them), two slaves emerged carrying bulging baskets of rubbish, the result, perhaps, of one of the many large banquets held by the military hero for the great men of the City. It was almost impossible to enter due to the piles of people deposited at the door - they asked questions; they were baffled; they expressed opinions but knew nothing; they watched; they complained when the ritual wailing of the women interrupted their conversations. There was another subject, apart from death, at the animated gathering: there was, above all, the stench. Euneos' death reeked. Dressed as a courtesan? But. . . drunk? Insane? Trisipus' eldest son? Euneos, the general's son? The ephebe from the Academy? A knife? But...
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