The Uncertain Hour

by Jesse Browner

  Fabius bowed modestly to the smattering of polite applause. “That was lovely, lovely,” Cornelia said, speaking out of the side of a mouth bulging with masticated figs.

  Fabius’s choice of poem had not been a felicitous one, and all but he were duly aware of the gaffe. The mood of the evening did not call for ancient Greek devotionals, but for something more modern, raucous, risqué even. It was typical of Fabius that his selection was so conventional, and Petronius watched Pol-lia’s expression as she struggled to reconcile her loyalty and her embarrassment. He wondered if she ever regretted having married Fabius. Petronius liked to imagine that Pollia would be much happier with a man like himself, yet he had to admit that he’d been very much like Fabius at his age—high-minded, detached, ambitious, a typical product of the empire. A very conventional young man, to whom happiness had been a convention, too. Glory had been everything—glory and service. Without that, he was nothing, homeless, pointless, so what use was it to seek personal fulfillment? No, that’s not right—glory and service were personal fulfillment. So long as he excelled and furthered the purposes of Rome, he had had no use for any other kind of happiness. He had been happy, in his manner, in the manner of conservative young men who find a way to live without having to think very hard about anything. Fabius was just like that. Certainly, he had a glorious career ahead of him, providing he managed to shed some of his youthful idealism and prudishness, but what kind of a life was it going to be for a woman who outshone her husband at every level? She was spirited and willful enough to carve something out for her herself, Petronius supposed, but she was going to have a hard time of it in the face of Fabius’s limited imagination and correct expectations. Petronius suspected that she’d have been happier with someone of less ambition and more soul.

  He bit into a delicately carved slice of boar haunch, and had immediately to raise his hand to his mouth as a warm, smoky rill of drippings escaped his lips and ran down his chin. Lucullo had been right—the meat, tender as a young cheese, was suffused with the aromatic quiddity of the Umbrian oak forests in which the boar had lived and died. For the briefest interlude, Petronius felt a startling, intimate connection to the creature, as he had earlier to the oyster, and wondered if this heightened sensibility were some sort of premonitory accommodation to his own oblivion.

  The conversation was pursuing its own course.

  “Now I know that few of you will credit it,” Anicius was saying, “but I was a boy in the reign of Augustus, and back then vast stretches of that beach were deserted.”

  “What, between Nesis and Puteoli?” Fabius asked incredulously.

  “Certainly. Nothing but rabbits. Those rabbits are all gone now. When I was a boy, you could walk half a league without seeing a house. Just fishermen, hawking their catch. You paid in drachmas, shekels, whatever. You barely heard a word of Latin around here back then, nothing but Greek.”

  “Not a patch on Cumae, then.”

  “You know,” Petronius said, “I think I’ve had about enough of all this slander. Cumae was good enough for Aeneas, wasn’t it? The father of Rome landed not five minutes’ walk from here. It was good enough for Varro, for Pompey, for Cicero, for Sulla, for Vatia, for Philippus. It’s good enough for me.”

  “And you know what they all had in common, don’t you?” Cornelia brayed thoughtlessly. “They all retired here. They went to Baiae for fun, but came to Cumae to die.”

  Like a flickering flame, the conversation died just as a fresh, salt-laden wind swept across the gardens, rustling the trees in the orchard and causing the lamps beneath the pergola to swing gently. The guests, protected by screens and braziers, experienced its passage largely as an auditory phenomenon—a sequence of subtle variations on the theme of polite shushing. The miniature flotilla in the water table had been set in motion by the breeze, and they watched in detached distress as their supper floated away, beyond reach at the very moment when they sought its distraction. Mortified beyond expression, Cornelia rubbed her eyes with her fists. With barely a sound, a battalion of slaves emerged from the shadows and descended upon the dishes, plucking them from the water before even one had reached the far edge of the basin. The remains of the last course were offered round one last time, while new platters—bearing fried meatballs, black pudding, boiled hare, kidneys and sweetbreads bathing in a pungent yellow sauce—emerged from the kitchen. The guests followed their approach with a show of interest that ill concealed their discomfort. How sincerely concerned they were for Petron-ius’s comfort! How awkward and sweet of them!

  “Could that be silphium in the sauce?” Anicius inquired incredulously. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen it, I’ve quite forgotten what it tastes like.”

  “Alas, I’ve not seen silphium on the market these past twenty years or more,” Petronius said. “They tell me it’s all but extinct, even in Cyrenaica. This is asafoetida, from India. It’s a reasonable substitute, I suppose, but I’ll never get over the disappearance of silphium. I feel genuinely sad for those of you who were too young to have tried it.”

  Martialis snorted derisively into his goblet.

  “You do not care for silphium, Valerius Martialis?” Cornelia asked with studied naïveté.

  “I’ve never tasted it, Cornelia Felicia,” Martialis said. “But from everything I’ve heard, it was more a status symbol than a condiment. An entire island was enslaved so that a handful of senators might sprinkle stinking grass on their fish and impress their friends. Now that it’s gone, let Cyrenaica sink back into the sea; it’s of no further use to anyone.”

  “I am not a patrician, Martialis,” Lucilius chided gently, “yet I was able to appreciate silphium very much for its own exquisite, unique perfume. Despite its price, not because of it.”

  Martialis was preparing a retort, but was cut off before he could deliver it.

  “Who is Vatia?” Fabius put in. A roar of mirth arose from the elder members of the company.

  “Servilius Vatia! What a man!”

  “What a legend!”

  “Sit up a minute, Fabius,” Anicius said, pointing southward across the parapet and inlet. “You know that big villa on the water down the beach? The one with the two grottoes, between the lake and the cape? You can just see, there are four torches flaming on the terrace there? That’s Vatia’s house.”

  “When I first bought this place six years ago, Fabius,” Petronius said, “I thought the sailors were rioting in Misenum every night. It turned out it was just Vatia’s orgies. You could hear them clear as day all along the beach.”

  “His fishponds grew the finest bearded mullet in the land, but he became so attached to them, he’d have to send to market for his supper. If one of those mullet failed to eat from his hand, he’d lose an entire night’s sleep worrying over its health.”

  “One year he cornered the entire market in garum from New Carthage, and if you didn’t want to eat vinegar on your fish that year, you had to come pay homage to him and leave gifts of gold for the holy chickens in the temple of Apollo.”

  “Most men would have been crushed by the burden of leisure he bore so effortlessly. He was a hero to many.”

  “The caterer’s guild of Naples named a dish after him. It was called ‘Vatia’s Standard.’ It was a duck, stuffed with truffles, then stuffed inside a goose that was stuffed inside a peacock that was stuffed inside a heron that was stuffed inside a swan that was baked and gilded with egg yolk and gold leaf and carried in at the end of a long pike by a company of chefs dressed as legionaries and haruspices.”

  “He was fabulously wealthy—he’d been commander of the Praetorians at one point—but he acted like a vulgar freedman, boasting and counting his money at the dinner table and farting ostentatiously and being familiar with his slaves. Still, everybody loved him, you couldn’t help it—he never apologized for anything. He was happy to be exactly who he was, and no one could tell him any different.”

  “It’s true,” Petronius added. “When I first came to Cumae, the
very first day I moved in, along comes this slave boy, trotting down the beach with a heavy platter. On the platter was a whole roast piglet, and in the piglet’s mouth was an apple, and in the apple was a dart, and when I removed the dart the apple fell neatly into two pieces, and sandwiched between them was a silver medallion that was stamped with an invitation to dinner that very night. It was so tasteless and common, I had to laugh out loud. But from then on, I knew exactly whom to turn to whenever I needed cheering up. He was never depressed, never had any self-doubt. I rather envied him, that lack of self-consciousness. You could never tell if he was unaware that people laughed at him behind his back, or if he knew and just didn’t care. He used to say: ‘Pretend I’m dead. Say something nice about me.’ He was one of a kind, and when he died of liver poisoning I remember thinking that the world would never see his like again. And then I met Martialis here.”

  “And I confirmed the suspicion.”

  “The only person I ever knew who didn’t like Vatia was Seneca. He couldn’t bear him.”

  Lucilius groaned and buried his face in his palms. “Oh please, don’t get me started on Seneca.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with Seneca?” Martialis asked with a feeble affectation of nonchalance.

  Lucilius sighed. “You know, those last two years of his, he was not at all happy. After his downfall, he traveled up and down southern Italy trying to ‘forget politics,’ but he couldn’t get over not having a handy audience for his sermons. He was never in one place long enough to really buttonhole his host and give him the full treatment. He started writing me these long, moralizing letters. Me! Now you know, Seneca and I were friends for a long, long time, but I never had much patience for his ethical pretensions, considering the way he lived his own life. Socrates he was not, no, nor Diogenes neither. I started receiving these haranguing letters, streams of them, exhorting me to live better this way, think better that way, analyzing my problems, as if he knew anything about my problems! There are some people, you know, they just can’t help themselves, they always think they know what’s best for a person. How Nero put up with him all those years, I cannot tell. They were a match, all right—salt and pepper. And do you know, I feel sure he was making copies of those letters with an eye to future publication. In fact, he told me once that I would be famous because of those letters. How fortunate I am to know you, I wrote back.

  “Anyway, in one of his letters, he reminded me how he and I had once walked along this very beach, and when we passed Vatia’s place he had said ‘There lies Vatia.’ And I’d asked him what he meant, Vatia wasn’t dead, and he’d said that he might as well be because living the way he did wasn’t living at all, it was hiding from life. Leisure was noble if spent improving oneself, but idleness was a kind of death in life, et cetera, et cetera. And do you know, he was so pleased with himself for coming up with this pearl of wisdom that he could never pass by Vatia’s place after that without shaking his head and sighing ‘There lies Vatia.’ A hundred times I must have heard him say it, ‘There lies Vatia,’ and each time as if it were a fresh insight. He was devastated when Vatia died, because they buried him somewhere else. The funny thing is, I’m not sure he ever even met Vatia.”

  Petronius felt Martialis shifting uncomfortably at his shoulder. It was only natural that the boy should be uneasy. Growing up in his little Spanish mountain village, he’d been weaned on stories of his famous countryman Seneca, a distant cousin from Cordoba who’d gone off to Rome and become an illustrious playwright, a renowned philosopher, tutor to the emperor! When Martialis first arrived in Rome, a wide-eyed provincial with ringlets in his hair, he’d been deeply impressed by Seneca, who was still playing the elder statesman and sage mentor, even though he was in his final decline and could barely show himself in the streets in the daylight hours. How warmly Seneca had welcomed him! Martialis was the last man in Italy who still thought Seneca a great and powerful politician, and believed the promises he’d made about introductions, shamelessly, in front of people who knew only too well the sad truth of his reduced circumstances. No one who had come to love Martialis had had the heart to disabuse him, so that again he was probably the only man in Italy to be shocked and dismayed by Seneca’s arrest and suicide six months later, lumped in like a common criminal with Piso’s conspirators. And even afterward, when Seneca’s widow Paulina survived her own suicide attempt and began spreading the unlikely tale of her husband’s heroic, So-cratic last moments, only Martialis was taken in. So now it can’t have been pleasant to hear those who knew his cousin far better than he discuss Seneca’s foibles so casually, barely a year after his death. Petronius felt a feeble wave of sympathy pulse through him, but it was not strong enough to move him to a word of compassion. After all, he had already seen a vision of Martialis’s future—the one in which, after a dignified pause for mourning, he found a new patron with better political prospects, composed appropriately flattering verses for future emperors, and achieved the fame and notoriety he’d dreamed of since boyhood—and it did not involve any sacrifices to the memory of dead, disgraced mentors.

  The moon had finally disentangled itself from the pergola and, its jaundice purged by the high winds, hung silver in an empty sky the color of raw sinew. Petronius judged by the echoes from the cove that the tide had turned and was advancing. It would soon overtake and lift the bow of the stranded yacht down on the beach. In another hour, the boat would be free to sail, if there were anyone needing to sail her. Petronius considered the unpleasant irony that, in his final hours, all of nature had been transformed into an exquisitely accurate timepiece.

  The night had grown colder, the warmth of the braziers intermittent and barely adequate, the breeze steady against the screens, bowing them like sails. Petronius realized with a mild start that some of the guests had been issued blankets of reddish Canusium wool. When had this happened? Had he fallen asleep? It would not be long before he would need to return for another round of bloodletting, and he feared that it would affect him more severely than anticipated, perhaps incapacitate or render him unconscious, and thus put a premature end to the dinner and inconvenience his guests. He resolved to keep his wits sharp while he still had them. He leaned into the water table abruptly and stuck his head beneath the frigid water. He opened his eyes, and the shadows cast on the granite floor of the basin by the wavering lamplight across the floating platters looked like the shadows of clouds migrating across the face of a mountain. He thought of Mysian Olympus, above Prusa, on a crisp day in early May, before the saffron had been planted and the slopes were still a chalky gray.

  PETRONIUS HAD BEEN determined to pursue his acquaintance with the centurion’s wife, though official duties kept him in Nicomedia longer than he would have wished. Ultimately, it took him almost two full months to redeem his promise to himself. Once there, he made a halfhearted pretense of furthering his investigation into the city finances, but in fact spent much of his time wandering the streets in search of the woman. He sought her several times in the ruined house where they had met, varying the time of day in the hope that she kept a regular appointment there, but to no avail. Now, the kouros seemed to mock him even more cruelly for his obtuse fantasies—a grown man, with the full power of the empire behind him, skulking through the byways of an obscure provincial town for a woman he barely knew—but he had a purpose that counterbalanced his frustration and shame. Naturally, he could not seek her out in the barracks, the one place he could be sure of finding her, and his face was too well known by now for him to spend much time in any one place where he would attract unwanted attention. The town fathers resented him venomously; the merest whiff of scandal would be enough to prompt a letter of complaint to the Senate that would immeasurably complicate his life and pursuit. Even so, he grew desperate enough to throw caution to the wind, and found himself, but poorly disguised in a Canusian cloak, loitering for hours by the gates of the barracks. It took almost two days of waiting until she finally emerged, wearing a long-sleeved tunic and rough
woolen shawl and carrying an empty reed basket on her arm. Having had only the most cursory glimpse of her face at their first meeting, he could not even be perfectly certain that it was her until he studied her gait, the way she walked like a senior magistrate in measured strides, shoulders thrown back. The plaza was almost deserted; he could not follow her directly without drawing the scrutiny of the picket at the gate. Waiting until she rounded the corner, he turned up a parallel alleyway and made for the marketplace, where he found her dawdling among the stalls, halfheartedly picking over the meager selection of fruit and vegetables. It was there, ridiculously posing as a fellow shopper, that he closed on her.

  He stood at her side, not knowing how to reintroduce himself. It was not that he was afraid of scaring her off—there was nothing of the skittish or the shy about her—but that he wanted to make a powerful impression upon her and had little experience of such matters. As nothing came to mind, and as he was anxious not to squander the opportunity, he simply leaned to his right and bumped shoulders with her. When she looked up in irritation, all he could do was smile foolishly back at her, at a loss for words. She was very beautiful, more beautiful even than he had thought she would be, and her beauty was enhanced rather than mitigated by a suggestion of hardness, or perhaps it was sadness, around her eyes. Her eyebrows were thick and darker than her hair, and there was a hint of silky down above her upper lip. Her lower lip was somewhat swollen, pouty, as if she had spent her entire lifetime drinking milk from the spout of a pitcher. Her skin was pale and matte. Her hair was indeed light brown, the color of ripe wheat, straight and fine, pulled back in a simple braid that ended between her shoulder blades.