by Jeremy Reed
Valentino smiled. ‘You’ve been through all this before, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘You’ll never know what you want. Nobody does. My mother thinks I should marry. If she knew what I did for money, she would have my father kill me.’
‘Most of Rome seems to know what I am,’ Heliogabalus laughed, reflecting on the downside of public image. ‘Not that it makes it any easier. I still get hurt by comments. Hierocles says they’ll do us one day, and I’m sure he’s right.’
He had deliberately risked bringing Hierocles’ name into the conversational radar in the hope of normalizing affairs. He watched Valentino inwardly flinch, as though an acupuncture pin had turned on a nerve. He clearly resented being reminded of his indiscretion, but there was no other way. He wanted him to learn, and to do so the needle had to be punched home.
‘I just live for the moment,’ Valentino said, deliberately avoiding mention of Hierocles’ name. ‘I’m only concerned with sex, money and getting wasted. That way I don’t have to think too much.’
‘The mind is thinking all the time, even if it’s not in use,’ Heliogabalus said. ‘What goes on in the unconscious is a pointer to another form of reality. I value my dreams more than I do my conscious thoughts. I once had a dream in which I saw myself hatched from an eagle’s egg. I was high up on a mountain ledge, concealed in an eyrie, and the parent bird flew back to me with a purple toga in its claws. I’ll never forget it. The bird was golden and its wingspan huge like the branches of a tree. When I relayed the dream to my tutor, he said it meant I would become caesar.’
He could see that Valentino was slowly starting to relax, despite remaining fractionally on his guard. It was something Heliogobalus had observed in all boys of his profession, an inability to trust. They would only meet you so far before a reaction set in. He had known it so often, the temptation to fall in love with a boy and forget that distinctions were necessary and that emotional involvement was out. It was the awareness of this tacit agreement that helped prevent him from imagining he was in love with Valentino or any other of the countless boys who hung out at the bath-houses and docks.
‘The only dream I remember’, Valentino said, ‘was after my lover Paul died. I saw him standing in the crowd, and when I went over to kiss him he placed a hand over his mouth. I suppose you could call it a sign.’
‘Undoubtedly. It was his way of saying he’d moved on. Not that anybody really dies. They just change address. The priests at Emesa taught me that, and I’ve reason to believe it.’
Heliogabalus watched Valentino settle, now that the conversation had made tracks from its stumbling point. He could see that Valentino was erect, but sex wasn’t on the menu. There was something about this boy which fascinated him, largely, he suspected, because he was the personification of who he could have become under different circumstances. This, as he saw it, was the reason for his attraction to someone whom others viewed as a prescription for ruin. It was also why, in times of crisis, he had the boy over to companion the change. Valentino had, unknowingly, become the witness to psychological factors which in turn affected affairs of state.
As they spoke, a zigzag fork of lightning spiralled across the skyline, its yellow voltage exploding above the city as an ionized fuse. The lightning was answered by a sizzling downpour rapping the spread fig trees beneath the terrace. He looked out, hoping the rain would cancel Annia’s procession to the palace, but the storm was short-lived and, having announced itself, took off again. He could see the sky was coloured a dusty yellow, like Vesuvius, with here and there blotchy blue-black clouds fingerprinting the horizon.
He called for food to be brought, sensing that Valentino was hungry. A servant came in carrying a platter on which two cold lobsters had been prepared. There were star-shaped seafood canapes spiked with flowers, a salad composed of primary colours and an almond cake for dessert. It was a light assemblage, for time was limited, and he had no intention of having Annia discover Valentino in his rooms. That truth would come later, and she would have to accept it or go back to her father. He was determined to make no compromises other than for the sake of formality on his marriage night. Anyhow, he imagined his reputation had preceded him and that Annia, who was past child-bearing age, would expect little of him sexually.
Valentino stacked his plate with lobster brought from the blue coves of Capri and set to with appetite. Heliogabalus preferred to watch others eat and then to do so himself in private. Instead he drank to cushion himself from the pain he felt over Hierocles’ betrayal. He knew from experience that if you drank enough the alcohol eventually reached the pain. It didn’t stay there long, but it finger-tapped the chemistry sufficient to bring about a change. Of more importance to him was that the moment was starting to register as something significant in his life. He found himself reviewing it like someone looking into the complex nature of time and attempting consciously to slow it down. He wondered if time had a shape like molecular configurations or sub-atomic particles and if the moment could be isolated in its particular form. He would like each distinct nanosecond of his time with Valentino to be transparent and teardrop-shaped like a diamond.
Valentino started to tell him about a client who was also a senator and who stayed in the closet to protect his reputation. This man liked to have him wear his wife’s jewels and to act out her role in bed. He was mean and on the last occasion had refused to pay. Valentino wanted to get back at him and asked for assistance. He was determined that the man should be exposed, and Heliogabalus again found it necessary to remind him of the need for discretion even in the face of injustice. It was a lesson he was finding hard, unlike the easy way in which he demolished the lobster salad.
He liked nothing better than to be stimulated by tales of sexual excess. Valentino, like most of the boys in his profession, had pursued a life of such bizarre encounters that most of his stories sounded like fiction. He had little doubt that, properly written up, they would provide the material for a narrative documenting Rome’s sexual underworld. It was something he hoped to see written in his lifetime to rival the more salacious works of Petronius and Juvenal. Only he wanted it hot, with garlic cooking in the writing.
Valentino had moved on to the almond cake and was worried as always about his figure. ‘If you don’t look like a girl you quickly go downmarket,’ he said, his mouth dusted by crumbs. ‘Waists are everything in my job, even if my clients are usually obese.’
Heliogabalus laughed. He, too, refrained from overeating to keep a figure admired in the baths for its defined wiriness. If he remembered age from a previous life, and with it the transformations his body had undergone, then it was as a reality, rather than something abstractly conceived in the way Valentino talked about it. Although he was still a youth, he recollected enough of age to know that it was a process with which you grew familiar, like most patterns in the body. It was something in the genes that you had to accept, like the flower entropy.
For all his self-conscious girlishness Valentino couldn’t resist a second portion of cake, playfully smearing his mouth with the residue, so that it looked like he was wearing a dark lipstick. He leaned over Heliogabalus and smooched him with confectioned lips.
Heliogabalus lay back and luxuriated in the time granted him before Annia arrived. In the extended calm he drew Valentino to him and kissed his mouth into a scorched oval. He broke off, so as to keep the tempo down, took off a blue diamond, a clumpy hexagonal rock of a thing, and pressed the boy to keep it. The stone shone in his palm like a swimming-pool. Heliogabalus watched the confusion he had created. Valentino was too shocked to accept or refuse, his gobsmacked stare saying everything, as he continued to hold the stone up for inspection. The gift was worth more than he could earn in a decade, and he understandably handled it with suspicion, afraid it would suddenly dissolve or burn a hole in his skin.
He insisted that Valentino take it, not as a trifle but as a token of their friendship. ‘Accept it,’ he said. ‘If I die before you, you’ll have something to remember me by.’
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br /> He watched Valentino’s fingers close over the ring, shutting it into his palm like a thief. Even if he declined to speak, it was some sort of acceptance.
Heliogabalus was determined to say nothing. He had no intention of forcing the gift on his friend or adding another word to what he had said. Instead, he decided to change the subject. ‘Have you seen Marco at the baths lately? I’ve been asking about him, but unsuccessfully.’
‘Marco with the wrist-thick cock?’ Valentino exclaimed, momentarily put out by Heliogabalus’ preference for size. ‘I’ve heard he’s ill. There’s some sort of plague that’s hit the baths. Boys are getting fevers, losing weight, dropping away. Nobody seems to know what it is.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ Heliogabalus said. ‘I’ve heard reports that it comes from Africa and that it was brought here by slaves. It’s within my powers to order an enquiry, but I haven’t. Where does Marco live?’
‘Don’t know. He’s got a sugardaddy who looks after him, so he never tells.’
‘I’d like to offer some help,’ Heliogabalus said. ‘Marco’s always been dear to me, and even I have never met his match when it comes to size.’
He could see that Valentino felt slighted, despite having just received an extravagant present. Like most of his kind he had a woman’s jealousy and a tendency to identify with being perfect. He was likely always to construe allusions to others as an attack on himself. Heliogobalus knew him well enough to know that this couldn’t be avoided. The boy’s expression looked dented, showing the kink in his mood. His petulance expressed itself through the rapid flickering of his eyelashes.
‘Marco deserves whatever he’s got,’ he said spitefully, the force of his indignation causing his lip to curl.
‘That’s taking things a bit far,’ Heliogabalus responded philosophically. ‘Do any of us really deserve to suffer, and when we do is it of our own making or is it due to circumstances outside our control?’ He realized at the same time that Valentino had little or no aptitude for philosophic enquiry and instead offered him the choice of a plate of ripe figs. He still had Annia on his mind. The whole ceremony had smacked of hypocrisy on his part and insincerity on hers. He doubted, too, that the people would celebrate his marriage with any conviction. It was too obviously a marriage of convenience to merit the explosives of orgy. Annia was doubdess, to their minds, menopausal, stretchmarked and disfigured by cellulite – not a woman to colour the erotic imagination. His mother had taught him that there was no reason for embarrassment in these affairs and that they simply served as a means to an end.
But Marco, he had expectations for the boy, and felt a pit open inside him at the prospects of youth decimated by plague. He knew without having it analysed that the virus didn’t come from the bathhouses or the river or the refugees on whom inevitably it would be blamed. There were no records as yet of a single woman in Rome having gone down with the disease; it seemed almost exclusively confined to the gay community. It simply hadn’t shown up in any other sector, and he had cause to worry. If Marco had gone down – and how many more of his friends? – then he, too, could be a carrier. The virus even now could be circulating in his cells like an undercover agent.
He had a longing to be out of the palace and to sniff out the night. Always, when it got dark, he had this desire to dress up and become somebody else. A rent boy, a clown, a man openly wearing drag, a singer, a graffito or simply an anonymous person out walking the city. Even though it would cause offence if he was to go out now he saw no reason why he should remain at home to receive Annia. Antony would be able to handle the formalities of showing Heliogobalus’ bride to the room especially prepared for her, the luxury of which he hoped would more than compensate for his absence.
‘Let’s go out,’ he sprung on Valentino. ‘I can’t face the prospect of being here when she arrives. You doubtless know that the people call me obscene names like Tibernius, Tractatilius and Impurus, and so what have I to lose by creating an additional scandal?’
‘People despise whatever they can’t understand,’ Valentino said. ‘And in my job I’m hated even by my clients.’
‘That’s because you remind them of themselves. Self-hatred invariably leads to a person turning on their own kind. It’s like smashing a mirror because you can’t stand your own reflection. Let’s go …’
Heliogabalus got up from the couch and put on an outrageous ankle-length leopardskin coat. It took Valentino’s breath away, and Heliogobalus pointed the collar up so that it came level with his ears. ‘The coat is probably made from three cats the size of Vesuvius,’ he said, fitting it to his shoulders and moulding the line to his body. He stuffed the pockets with the money he intended to give away, the gold coins spilling as he kneaded them with his fists. ‘Whatever comes to me goes. It’s my way of being everywhere at the same time. Giving means being in circulation.’
He called for Antony and told him of his plans. That it was dangerous for him to go out without minders was all part of the thrill, and tonight he intended to end up in a riverside bar called the Pink Sailor. On the way across town he planned on distributing money at random to the poor. It was his way of playing games with the people, and occasionally he would make his identity known to the incredulous recipient by whispering, ‘Antoninus gave you this.’
They were driven into the city by a chauffeur who never spoke. Heliogabalus liked the man’s inscrutable discretion. He was off-beat, had only one arm, never asked questions and rarely if ever volunteered a word. His job was to park up out of sight and wait, something he did to perfection.
‘Rome’s too fat,’ Heliogobalus said, as they walked out under trees to the car. ‘Everything’s here. The wines and fruits of Italy, corn from Egypt and Africa, oil from Spain, cured meats from Baetica. Shall I go on? Marble from Tuscany and Greece, ivory from Syrtes, gold from Dalmatia, glass from Phoenicia, spices from the Orient, stones from India, silks from Asia … This is the data that feeds the Senate. Men who are unable to identify with their opposite find it difficult to die. Remember that, Valentino. The richer you grow the harder it is to accept you’re made of dust. It’s easy to let go nothing, but what do you do with an empire?’
He knew that Valentino had taken in his outburst, even if he only understood it in part. People were like that, he reminded himself. They blocked everything they didn’t want to hear and saw only what was like themselves.
Mohammed was his usual taciturn self as they burned across the city. There were people out in the streets celebrating his marriage, and a spermatozoa trail from a blue firework fanned out like a peacock’s tail over one of the squares. He appreciated the irony of the situation in which he, as the groom, was busy on his marriage night escaping the bride. He shouldn’t have been headed for the Pink Sailor near the Aventine, but there was no choice in the matter. Impulse was stronger than reason, and he had to obey.
There were more firework explosions in the form of scarlet and pink frothy detonations as they headed towards the port. The night had come on violently, and the city throbbed with nightlife. According to Antony, crowds had converged on the three ports of Ostia, Porus and the Aventine, and a number of ships had been set on fire as part of the celebrations. There had been trouble around the central halls of Trajan’s Market, the banking and stock exchange district of the city, and troops had been called in to subdue a potential riot. He knew he was risking his life by going out tonight and that a soldier not recognizing him in drag could well cut him down as an undesirable. But he didn’t care. He knew that his death, when it came, would be a violent one and that like so many of his predecessors he would be butchered. His heroes had all gone that way or had been forced into taking their own lives, like Nero and Otho and, more recently, Caracalla and Geta. He came from bad blood and he knew it, and while he smiled at being both the most powerful and despised of men he flinched from the idea of being carved up alive.
They drove by the Horrea Agrippiana between the Clivus Victoriae and the Vicus Tuscus on the fringe of th
e Forum and headed in the direction of the Aventine. People were out carrying torches and candles, and he wondered if there wasn’t a very real chance of the city being set on fire. A group of clowns caked in theatre makeup were carrying candles shaped like giant phalli down an avenue to the side of the Forum. The scatological black candles, complete with heavy balls, were, he knew, not only a reference to an imperial marriage taking place but also a deliberate pointer to his renowned preference for size. There was no way of hiding secrets from the media, and his sexual tastes had become common knowledge.
People were on their way to opera and to the theatre, and he himself had agreed to sing in a production that was coming up in the next weeks. He was to be the soloist who incarnated the show’s entire action and, unlike Nero, who would sing for hours, he intended to keep his appearance short. He was fascinated by singers and their obsession like all stage artists with maintaining a youthful appearance. They kept away from acid foods and hydrogenated fats and did breathing exercises to extend their note range. It was their ethos of makeup and stage glamour that appealed to him and the way, too, in which their occupation dissolved all notions of gender. They were people like himself who devoted their lives to their looks and agonized over a facial spot or being seen out of context.
The area of the port in which they parked was relatively quiet. It was in a slum complex, and most of the disused warehouses were deserted and the empty tenements taken over by rats, alcoholics and the mad. He remembered encountering a sailor here in the past who professed to be emperor. The man had painted his face and arms blue and was looking for a prophetic snake he claimed to have brought back with him from Africa. According to the man, the python knew the whereabouts of all the treasure buried in the empire … He remembered the incident like a hallucinatory flashback, as he stepped out of the car leaving Mohammed in his usual catatonic state at the wheel.
When they walked into the lowlit bar there was a castrato singing on a small stage in the middle of the room decorated with ostrich feathers. He recognized the singer as the Queen of Sheba, a young man who worked the bars and whom he intended to invite to perform at the palace. He, too, hung out at the baths, a fugitive who slept by day and came out at night. It was a pattern adopted by most of his friends with their unconventional lifestyles and avoidance of normal society.