by Nick Tosches
Beyond it, to the east, lay the lands of the Arabian nomads. To its west, the vast gloom of the Dead Sea. The hot springs of Callirrhoe, like the deep sea where the Jordan ends, were thick with bitumen. So very dense with bitumen was the Dead Sea, that the bodies of horses, camels, and even bulls would float upon it and never sink.
But the hot springs of Callirrhoe were rich too in living sulphur and rare minerals, and were as legendary for their restorative and curative powers as was the Dead Sea for its power to float the heaviest of carcasses. Herod himself had traveled from Herodium to frequent these hot springs in his late years. And many men of lesser wealth, Jews and Greeks and Romans alike, had also made the beautiful flowing and the splendid dawn of Callirrhoe their destination.
The richest of the Jewish aristocracy were given to making the greatest show of their austerity, such as by girding their fine tunics with unfolded sashes to ostentate that their waist-strips could not be used as keeping-places for something so unholy and defiling as money. Many such men, in making much fuss over their dutiful pilgrimages to the Holy Temple, stopped only briefly in Jerusalem to attend to financial affairs, then made straight for the hot springs near the farther shore of the Dead Sea.
There was thus no want of luxurious accommodations in Callirrhoe. I found for my Lord a comfortable and well-appointed upper room in a secluded inn. The food and drink at this inn were exceptional, no less Roman than Jewish, no less Arabian than Greek. Honeyed camel-milk and date-wine, not commonly encountered outside Arabia. It was a quiet room in a quiet inn, with little sound entering through its windows but for the soft calls and songs of the swallows and the sparrows, and the wintering woodcocks and the wintering turtledoves. Captured by net and roasted, the migrating woodcocks were one of the delicacies of the table here.
As pleasant and peaceful a room as I chose for Jesus, I chose for myself a neighboring upper room that was every bit as peaceful and every bit as pleasant. As for the rest of our retinue, I left them to their own devices. They knew that, though I was supposedly a follower of our Lord, I was still a Roman of equestrian rank, and they thus always had assumed that there were still personal funds in my purse, which at times I shared with the Lord.
Peter still fished the streams at times, for food and for sale. To the others, as well as to our elder fisherman, Jesus sometimes gave a few coins when they brought in especially good collections for the building of the new temple, though we suspected, and had indications, that most of them already modestly stole or skimmed from these collections, either occasionally or regularly. Simon Peter and the rabbi seemed of the most probity in this regard. Andreas and the priest who had put aside his Sadducee sash seemed the least trustworthy, though it worked in our favor that they strived to collect all the more so that they could pilfer all the more.
In Callirrhoe, some of them lodged at a humbler inn, some at a stable, and a few of them in the open. Having a suspicious mind, it occurred to me that those who slept outdoors were the biggest pilferers, and therefore the most intent on concealing this by exhibiting beggarly ways.
Jesus and I took the hot springs alone before daybreak after the night of our arrival. There were four large springs, and several smaller springs among and around them. Warm sulphurous vapors rose from all of them. We chose one of the smaller, outlying springs. At first light, an attendant appeared, bringing us wooden ladles and asking if we should like to have laundered the clothes we had placed aside before entering the spring. We told him yes, and he neatly carried our clothes away, leaving behind clean white robes for our temporary use.
Through some trees, in another spring, a fat man luxuriated alone as his slave ladled water from the spring over his master’s big bald head.
“When we board the ship to leave Judea for Rome, you will have to play the part of my slave,” I said.
“Fuck the ship,” he said. “Fuck Judea. Fuck Rome. Fuck the world. For this one moment, let us both be slaves to this. Let there be only the beautiful flowing of this splendid dawn.”
“You sound as if you slept well,” I said.
“That I did,” said he.
I said nothing else. I knew he needed many moments, many days, and many nights of sleep and rest and of these good recuperative hot springs and good food and good drink.
My eyelids began to lower in aimless, vacating reverie. It was then that I saw in the nearest spring, sitting upright in vaporous water to his neck, rotting Lazarus and his writhing plump maggots. With a start, my eyes opened wide. It was in that unsettling instant that I knew that I too needed rest.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” he said.
He closed his eyes, leaned back his head, and ladled water on himself.
“You will rest,” he said, sardonically. “You will rest well, and you will know.”
The springs were most popular at the midday and sunset hours. It was in the warm winter sunsets that Jesus and I walked the many paths through the good-smelling pines. In these twilight hours, we could sometimes see the disciples taking the waters: alone, in pairs, in groups. Here, at Callirrhoe, they seemed quite apart from us.
At the inn where we stayed, there was a small library of papyrus book-rolls, most of them in Greek, but some in Hebrew, some in Arabic, and some in Latin. One night, after a stew of turkey-flesh, barley, dates, and root vegetables, with big-torn pieces of fresh hot bread to soak in the stew’s broth and wipe clean our bowls—I will not forget this meal, or the Roman wine we drank with it—I settled into a reading-chair by the library lamp and drew open the first scroll of the epistles of Horace. This was an old book, published in the tenth year of the reign of Augustus; but I was unfamiliar with it. I was absorbed well into the night, and in the hot springs at daybreak, I told Jesus of the seven words of Horace that could be translated into Greek as: “Shame is not in having played, but in not knowing when to break off the play.”
Jesus looked straight ahead, into the rising vapors and trees, quite intently. After a while, he said:
“I wonder where the fat man and his slave are. They are usually here by now.”
He did not speak again until we heard the approach of the fat man and his slave.
“The slave looks to me like a Jew,” he said. “Yes. He is a very dark-complexioned Jew. I am certain. But what of the fat man? Do you think the fat man is also a Jew?”
“His features are much distorted and deformed by the fat of his face,” I said. “It is hard to tell what he is.”
“Is he circumcised?”
“I cannot tell from here.”
“Nor can I. And what of his nose? It is a prodigious snout, to be sure; but I cannot say if it is a Jewish or a Roman snout.”
“It is, as you say, prodigious, but it is difficult to distinguish beyond that. Again, all his features are deformed by his fat.”
“If only we could hear him speak. We should know then, by his language, or by the inflection of it. But he is a very silent man.”
“Yes,” I said. “That he is. A very fat and very silent man is he.”
“And does this Horace still live?” he asked, in the same tone he had been using, and still looking straight ahead, into the vapors and the trees and late-most dark and early-most light.
“No,” I said. “He was born under Pompey, in the time of the Republic, before the first triumvirate. He died in the twenty-third year of the reign of Augustus, leaving behind him the most beautiful lyric odes in all of Roman poetry.”
I told him more about the poet, his life and his poetry, and how the two were often inextricable.
“So,” he said, “we were both born by the time this Quintus Horatius Flaccus breathed his last.”
“We were.”
“And what sort of playing do you feel he was talking about? The sort of play we knew as little boys, or this grander play that we have undertaken as men?”
“I believe his words struck me last night because I took them to refer to grander play. He was talking of the ways of men, not of
boys. He was, of course, not speaking of our game, but it was my own preoccupation with our game that brought his words to bear on it, and on us.”
He slowly and thoughtfully repeated the words as I had given them to him.
“Are you once again,” he asked, “thinking that we should end the game? I am not saying that there is not much sage truth in what your Horace said. I am saying only that his when is a very big word, vast as the horizon and unclear as the moment that day turns to night, or night to day.”
We closed our eyes to the world, surrendering every atom of ourselves to the balmy, limb-loosening spring.
“You have rested well, these recent days?” I asked, my eyes still closed.
“I have,” he said, sounding as if he, too, spoke with closed eyes.
“We have rested well. We have eaten well. We have slept well.”
“Yes,” he said, sounding as if not only were his eyes closed, but there was also a far-away smile on his lips.
“So tell me what happened at Bethany.”
To my surprise, he answered as if his eyes were still closed, the smile still on his lips.
“One plays a role too intently, and for too long. He becomes subsumed by the role. Unseen by him, unknown to him, the role enters him, takes tendril-hold, and grows within him. It conflicts with the truth of his nature. It causes an imbalance, a turmoil, in him. This conflict, this imbalance, this turmoil, is a madness of sorts.
“In Bethany, I played no role. I told you that in threatening to give them what they wanted, I showed them the detestable wrongness of their craving for miracles, their desire for what is against nature. When I told you this, I half-believed it. And then I told you that I did not know why I did what I did. And when I told you this, I fully believed it. I did not know. Now I know.”
I heard the sound of him ladling spring-water over his head, once, then again.
“In Bethany, I acted madly.”
I let him hear the sound of me ladling spring-water over my head, once, then again.
His voice came again, in a different tone:
“The fat man’s slave,” he said, “is as thin as the fat man is fat.”
I opened my eyes to find him peering once again, now in increased light, through the vapors and trees.
“When do you see the play ending?” I asked him.
“At the moment we spit in the eye of God, in the eyes of all who believe or pretend to believe in God. At the moment we break into the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, and spit on the Ark of the Covenant.”
As he spoke, I thought: His madness has not passed, but has deepened. It took me a moment to realize that there was no substance in what he said. One could not spit in the eye of that which did not exist, nor could one spit in the eye of every Jew. And there was no way for any man but the high priest to enter the sanctum sanctorum of the Holy Temple, and even he, the cohen gadol, could enter it only once a year, on the Day of Atonement.
In the instant after he spoke his madness and these thoughts came upon me, I immediately saw that there was not only no substance in his words, but also no gravity; for he burst out in laughter, and his bright eyes danced.
I shook my head in relief from the momentary distress he had brought me, and my own laughter followed his.
“Just a gesture,” he said. “That is all. Just a small, fanciful bead of spittle well-aimed.”
“And what might the manifestation of this fanciful spitting be?” I asked him.
We were no longer laughing, but still we smiled. We took to ladling water on our heads again.
“You are the designer and the composer,” he said. “You tell me.”
I said nothing. After a while, he spoke again:
“Maybe that is what your Horace meant: that one must know to end the play before folly becomes a madness that does not pass.”
We watched the dim figure of the fat man rise laboriously from his spring with the aid of his slave.
“I do not wish to pursue madness,” said Jesus. “You might say that I wish merely to test the limits.”
I made a show of weighing and pondering this comment with due consideration; but all the while was merely waiting to tell him what I said next:
“Soon after the epistle containing those words of Horace, he ends another epistle with a statement of even fewer words.”
Jesus looked to me.
“And what is that?” he asked.
I gave him in Greek the meaning of the poet’s terse, blunt words:
“Death is the limit that ends everything.”
Now it was his turn to weigh and ponder words with due consideration. But his weighing and pondering were no show, but real.
“I thought we were in the business of eternity, which has no limits.”
“No man, nor any of his gods, nor any living thing, is in that business. Not unless one thinks of wind and storm and sky, of cosmos and chaos, as living things.”
“What business, then, are we in?”
“There is only one business. Call it what you would. Deceit. Greed. Filth. It is all the same. He who does business is he who lies. He who does business is he who steals. All business is shit, and he who does business is he who wallows in shit: eating it, regurgitating it, and, all the while, squealing deceit.
“We are men of business, like all the rest. Business. That is all. Simply business.
“To live, unless one is wealthy, one must be either a whore or a slave. Both whores and slaves can buy their freedom and be wealthy. Fortunate are we who have a choice between whoredom and slavery. But there are dangers.”
“Dangers,” he said, lackadaisically.
“Riches are beautiful things.” I was certain that these too were the words of Horace. They were not from my reading in the epistles the night before. But I was sure that he had written them, though I could not remember where. I said them as if they were my own.
“Riches can buy us freedom. The danger is that greed and the love of money overtake all else. The danger is that we lose sight of the freedom we set out to buy, forfeit it, and instead become enslaved to an endless whoredom.”
“There was a time,” he said, “when you spoke of riches unimagined. A time when you spoke of shaping a new sect that would subsume all other sects, and would collect share and tribute from all the usurers of Jerusalem. That would displace even the gods of the gentiles. You spoke of a temple in Rome.
“These things made me then to think that you were mad. Now it is you who see me as mad.”
“Maybe I was mad. Maybe we both have been mad. The control of usury. Priests and temples. All my wild talk back then. But we do have the riches of which we dreamt.”
“And do you recall what we said of dreams? That there are no sweet dreams?”
“We spoke of sleeping-dreams, not of day-dreams, reveries, imaginings in the air.”
“You were rich when we began,” he said.
“And now I am richer more than twice over. And you. You who were sleeping with mice and rats in the dirty doorways of Caesarea. You now can sleep in a villa befitting an aristocrat in Rome. And you can have your asshole groomed every day.”
His chest and lips moved with a slight wan laugh. “But Rome is your home,” he said.
“And it will be yours.”
He shook his head sadly. “I have no home. I was born here, but there is nowhere here that feels to me like home.”
“Rome will be your home.”
Again he shook his head sadly.
“And how,” I asked, “should home feel?”
“Good,” he said. “Home should feel good.”
“That home is inside you. If you feel good, your home is good. If you feel bad, your home is bad. We have nostalgia most for what we have never known. We most miss what we have never had.”
“But we have had our delicious times, haven’t we?”
“That we have. And let me assure you, my friend: you make a damned good Messiah.”
“Do you not wa
nt to go on for just a little more? A bit more money, a few more delicious moments, before sailing away?” he asked.
I confessed that I did. I recalled the feeling that had struck me when I took our money to Caesarea, the feeling that we should ride our mare farther and farther on; the feeling that these fleeting days were for the seizing, and that Rome awaited always.
“How much longer do you want to go on?” I asked him.
“Not much longer.”
“Before, when I was talking in a lofty way, I spoke of dangers. There are more down-to-earth dangers, I think.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as those rumors following your escapade at Bethany. The rumors that you had been reported to the religious authorities. What if such rumors are true?”
“Raising the dead is not forbidden in the Book. It is told that the prophet Elisha raised the dead. And if the modern priests of the law in Jerusalem now look down upon it, those who were to report it would also be implicating themselves and their fellow townsmen, as it was they who implored me.”
“I mean to say only that such rumors can serve as thorns,” I explained. “I feel that the noise of your renown has reached the ears of the religious authorities in Jerusalem. I feel that they frown on a Messiah who is embraced by the people of Judea. I feel that they find him something of a threat to their sovereignty over the people. Such thorns could prick them and stir them to strike out.”
“Strike out in what way?” he asked.
I shrugged, and he seemed to dismiss any and all concern for the authorities.
“So, then,” I said. “How much longer?”
I could not tell if he was thinking or hesitating. Then he gave me his answer.
“Pesach.”
This seemed a poetically fitting end.
And, in truth, it was impractical to think of returning to Rome until the Pesach, after the calends of April, the feast-day of Venus the Changer of Hearts.
You will soon witness this, I hope. It really is something to see her cult image brought from her temple to the men’s baths, disrobed, caressingly bathed in warm water by her alluring female attendants, and garlanded with sweet-scented myrtle. What a lovely way to welcome the warm, verdant days.