The Last Cato

by Matilde Asensi

  “What are you talking about, Professor?” grunted the Rock, throwing back the covers like a little boy. “What do you think you are saying?” he repeated, outraged.

  Mulugeta, Farag, and I looked at the poor man as he tried to wake up shaking his head hard against the warm air and the flies in the cabin.

  “That we’re in Ethiopia, Kaspar,” he said, extending a hand to help him stand, which the captain rejected. “According to Captain Mariam, we crossed the Sudanese border several days ago. We are about to arrive in Antioch, the city of the next test.”

  “Damn it!” he grunted, rubbing his palms over his face, trying to come out of his stupor. His face begged for a good razor. “Aren’t we going to Antioch?”

  “Well, we thought we were,” I replied, as perplexed as he was. “But it turns out it’s an Ethiopian village named Antioch that we’re going to, not to ancient Antioch, in Turkey.”

  “That’s what we don’t know,” Farag sighed, more resigned than we were to this unexpected turn of events, “whether they are the same. They are two correct forms of the name. And there are several cities named Antioch in the world. I didn’t know that one of them is in Abyssinia.”

  “It did seem strange to me,” I said, running my hand through my disgusting hair, “that they would take us from Turkey to Egypt, and then back to Turkey. It would have been a very strange twist for a medieval pilgrim who made the trip on foot or horse.”

  “There’s your explanation, Basileia,” Farag declared, shaking Captain Mariam’s hand, as he went back to leading the trip. “Now, how about we get out of here, breathe some fresh air, and wash up in the river?”

  “It sounds like an excellent idea to me,” I agreed, getting to my feet. “I smell awful!”

  Mariam assured us we’d be in no danger if we dove into the blue waters of the Atbara. So we threw ourselves off the roof. I felt all my muscles and my poor, stunned brain renew themselves. The water was fresh and seemed clean, but the Rock said not to drink even a sip, because malaria, cholera, and typhus were diseases endemic to most African countries. Nobody would have thought that, looking at the smooth, transparent current. Just in case, we obeyed him to the letter. The sky was such an incredibly perfect blue, and the two shores, separated by a good distance, seemed to be covered all the way up to the edge by a thick green. Many tall, leafy trees jutted out, and plenty of birds flocked from one treetop to another. You could hear their quacks and trills and the echo of our splashes and voices in the river. Everything was so beautiful that I swore I could hear, woven in the wind, a huge choir of voices singing in time to the air and the river’s current, in tune with the harmony of the sky and water.

  Although I did not take off the white dalmatic to jump into the water, it floated around me, and I’d have given anything to take it off. Farag and the Rock took theirs off. The men on the boat, who were hoisting the boat’s triangular sails on a double mast, could see me as God brought me into the world, but I didn’t really care. It probably wasn’t the first time they’d seen a naked woman, and they didn’t seem very interested, either. “How you’ve changed, Ottavia!” I said to myself, as I swam like a mermaid from one side to the other. I, a nun who had spent all my life studying or working underground in the basement of the Vatican’s Classified Archives, among parchments, old papyruses, and codices, now floated and dove into the waters of a river in the middle of untamed nature. Best of all: A few meters away was the head of the man I loved with all my soul and who devoured me with his eyes, not daring to touch me.

  For my happiness to be complete, all I lacked was a little soap and some shampoo. I had to make do with a little bar of glycerin soap the Rock took out of his priceless, life-saving backpack that even the Staurofilakes had to respect. After our dunking, we climbed onboard; and our clothes were waiting for us washed and folded inside the squalid stateroom. Dressed and clean, I felt like a queen when the men handed me a huge plate of delicious fish right out of the river, hot off the fire.

  That afternoon we sat on deck with Captain Mulugeta Mariam, who informed us we would arrive at Antioch that very night. He was a man of few words, but what he did say made me nervous.

  “He asks us to pray a lot before beginning the test,” Farag translated, “because his town suffers whenever a saint must be incinerated.”

  “What saint?” the Rock asked, who hadn’t caught on.

  “Kaspar, we are the saints. The aspiring Staurofilakes.”

  “Try and see if you can extract any information from them on those relic thieves.”

  “I tried,” Farag protested. “This man believes he’s fulfilling a sacred mission. He would kill himself before he’d betray the Staurofilakes.”

  “Staurofilas,” Captain Mariam pronounced with reverence. Then he looked at us and asked Farag something, who burst out laughing.

  “He wants to know some things about you, Kaspar.”

  “Me?” the Rock was surprised.

  Mulugeta continued speaking. I couldn’t guess his age, not even with that gray spot in his beard. His face seemed young, and his black skin shone like polished metal, in the sunlight. There was something old in the look in his eyes and in his extremely thin body.

  “He says you are twice a saint.”

  I couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

  “He is crazy!” said the Rock, with a bellow.

  “And he wants to know what you did before you became a saint.”

  Farag and I tried, without success, to contain our laughter.

  “Tell him I am a soldier, and I am far from being a saint!” he roared.

  Mulugeta protested furiously when Farag struggled to translate Glauser-Röist’s words. When he heard what Mulugeta said, Farag suddenly froze.

  “Take off your shirt, Kaspar.”

  “Have you gone crazy, too, Professor?” he raged indignantly. Farag’s change in attitude surprised me. “Why don’t you take yours off?”

  “Please, Kaspar! Do as I say!”

  The Rock, as surprised as I was, started to unbutton his shirt. Farag rested his left hand on the captain’s shoulder, and bent way over to look at his back.

  “Look at this, Ottavia. Mariam says that Glauser-Röist is twice the saint because the Staurofilakes have marked him with… this.” He put his index finger on the captain’s dorsal vertebrae.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Professor?”

  In the exact center of the Rock’s back, you could clearly make out a feather-shaped tattoo, instead of the usual cross.

  “What did they tattoo on you, Farag?” I asked, lifting up his shirt. In contrast to the Rock, Farag had what we anticipated, a Egyptian ansata cross above his dorsal vertebrae, located under the branched cross they’d tattooed on us in Constantinople. Just like on Abi-Ruj Iyasus’s body.

  “Abi-Ruj Iyasus was Ethiopian!” I blurted out, excited by my memory of the man whose death had first launched our quest.

  “That’s right,” the Rock said, calmer after covering up. “And we’re in Ethiopia.”

  “I wonder if the earthly paradise could be here…,” I mused. “Could Ethiopia be the origin and destination of the mystery?”

  “We’ll soon find out,” Farag commented, pulling back the neck of my blouse. “You have an ansata cross, too. This cross is the symbol anj of the hieroglyphic Egyptian language, the symbol that represents life.”

  His hand caressed my tattoo (unnecessary and delightful, I must add) while I… “Why of course!” he exclaimed suddenly. “The ostrich feather! That’s what you have on your back, Kaspar. In Alexandria, Farag and I were marked with an ansata cross that is an Egyptian hieroglyph. You were marked with a different symbol, the ostrich feather, the feather of Maat, that stands for justice.”

  “Maat…? Justice?” the Rock asked, confused.

  “Maat is the eternal law that rules the universe,” Farag explained, all worked up. “Precision, truth, order, and rectitude. The main duty of the Egyptian pharaohs was to make sure Maat was
fulfilled so disorder and iniquity wouldn’t reign. Its hieroglyphic symbol was the ostrich feather. That feather was placed on one of the dishes of Osiris’s scales during the judgment of the soul. The dead man’s heart was placed on the other. That heart had to be as light as the feather of Maat to earn the right to immortality.”

  “They tattooed all that on my back?” the Rock articulated, stupefied.

  “No, Kaspar. Just the hieroglyph representing the feather of Maat,” Farag calmed him down. He frowned adding, “Captain Mariam is convinced that’s why you are twice a saint. Or, more saintly than we are, since we don’t have that feather.”

  “All this is very strange,” I said, with concern. Farag was laughing.

  “Stranger than anything else that’s happened to us up to now? Come on, Basileia!”

  There was no feather of Maat on Abi-Ruj Iyasus’s body. I knew that the captain—military career, policeman, the black hand of the Vatican—was the only one of us who presented a real danger to the Staurofilakes. Wasn’t he uneasy that he alone had been marked with a hieroglyph symbolizing justice?

  I couldn’t shake that surprise, not even as we read through the Divine Comedy to prepare for the last circle of Purgatory. The boat, the Neway, slowly approached the port of Antioch, a simple platform made of poles on the right bank of the Atbara.

  Like us, Dante, Virgil, and Estacio, the poet from Naples who had joined them in their ascent to earthly paradise, were nearing their final destination. Night was falling so they had to hurry to reach the seventh circle, the one with lustful souls:

  We had, by now, arrived at the last round

  and, having made our usual right turn,

  our minds became absorbed by something else:

  there, from the inner bank, flames flashed out straight,

  while, from the ledge, a blast of air shot up,

  bending them back, leaving a narrow path

  along the edge where we were forced to walk

  in single file; I was terrified—

  there was the fire, and here I could fall off!

  Virgil repeatedly begs his pupil to watch where he steps; the slightest mistake could prove fatal. Dante paid no attention; hearing some voices singing a hymn that begged for purity, he turns around to discover a large group of souls advancing amid the flames. One of them asks Dante why the sunlight doesn’t pass through him:

  “I’m not the only one—all of us here

  Are thirsty for your words, much thirstier

  Than Ethiopes or Indians for a cool drink.”

  “This is too much!” Farag exclaimed, when he heard the last verse.

  “That’s true,” I agreed.

  “Why didn’t we see that before? Why didn’t we pick up on that when we read the entire Purgatory in Rome?”

  “When you read it for the first time, Professor, could you have even imagined what the seven tests consisted of?” the Rock asked. “Don’t pose that question now. What if it had been India instead of Ethiopia? Dante said what he could, he took a chance because he knew he had a good story. He was ambitious, but he wasn’t crazy and didn’t want to take any chances.”

  “And yet, they killed him,” I replied with sarcasm.

  “Yes, but he didn’t want that to happen, so he concealed the facts.”

  In the distance, where the shores of the Atbara converge, I could just make out the village of Antioch and its dock. A weak ray of twilight sun warmed my right shoulder. My stomach lurched when I saw the thick columns of smoke rising to the sky from the village. If only the Neway had turned around, but it was too late now.

  The soul of that lustful man, who turned out to be the poet Guido Guinicelli (a member of the secret society of the Fidei d’Amore like Dante), asks our hero why he blocked the sunlight. Another group of spirits approaches from the opposite direction walking down the burning path. When he hears what both groups say, as they kiss each other and rejoice at running into each other, Dante deduces that some are lustful heterosexuals and others are lustful homosexuals. Uncharacteristically, he consoles them—perhaps because he feels kindly toward that sin or because the majority of them are literati like him. He reminds them they don’t have very far to go to reach God’s peace and forgiveness and a heaven full of love.

  The day is practically over when Canto XXVII begins; the three travelers come to a point where the entire road is in flames. A joyful angel of God appears and encourages them to cross the flames. Horrified, Dante covers his face with his arms, feeling like someone stuck in a grave. Seeing him so frightened, Virgil calms him down:

  Both of my friendly guides turned toward me then,

  and Virgil said to me: “O my dear son,

  there may be pain here, but there is no death.

  “Believe me when I say that if you spent

  A thousand years within the fire’s heart,

  It would not singe a single hair of yours.”

  “That’ll work for us, too, right?” I interrupt, hopeful.

  “Don’t jump to any conclusions, Basileia.”

  The Rock, staying calm, kept reading how Dante, terrified, froze before the flames, not daring to take a step.

  “And, entering the flames ahead of me,

  he asked of Statius, who, for some time now

  had walked between us two, that he come last.

  “Once in the fire, I would have gladly jumped

  into the depths of boiling glass to find

  relief from that intensity of heat.

  “My loving father tried to comfort me,

  Talking of Beatrice as we moved:

  ‘Already I can see her eyes, it seems!’”

  A voice singing from afar “Blessed are the pure of heart” turns out to be the last guardian angel, who appears as a blinding light amid the flames. He erases the last P on Dante’s forehead. They figure out how to get out of the fire and find themselves before gleaming earthly paradise. Content and happy, they begin their ascent. As they are climbing, night falls, and they have to stretch out on the stairs because they were warned at the beginning that one can’t climb Purgatory Mountain at night. Lying there on those steps, Dante sees a sky full of stars, “larger and clearer than I’m used to.” Contemplating them, he falls deeply asleep.

  The Neway had veered off toward Antioch’s dock where hundreds of townspeople dressed in white from head to toe—tunics, veils, scarves, and loincloths—shouted in welcome and jumped or waved their arms in the air. Apparently, the return of Mulugeta Mariam and his sailors was reason for great joy. The village was made up of thirty or forty adobe houses crowded around the dock. Their walls were painted lively colors with thatched roofs all sporting black tubes, a type of chimney that spanned a ditch. The thick smoke I’d seen when we were still at a great distance came from somewhere behind the village, somewhere between it and the forest. From up close, it seemed really huge, like the arms of titans as they struggled to touch the sky.

  We were about to dock, but Glauser-Röist didn’t seem ready to put down the book.

  “Captain, we’ve arrived,” I told him.

  “Do you know exactly what you’re going to face in this town, Doctor?” he challenged me.

  The shouts of the men, women, and children of Antioch could be heard on the other side of the boat’s hull.

  “No, not exactly.”

  “All right, then, let’s keep reading. We must not get off this boat without knowing all the details.”

  But there weren’t any more details.

  To conclude, Dante Alighieri describes, with a beautiful melancholy in his words, how he wakes up at dawn and sees Virgil and Estacio already up, waiting for him to finish climbing the steps to the earthly paradise. His teacher tells him:

  “That precious fruit which all men eagerly

  go searching for on many boughs

  will give, today, peace to your hungry soul.”

  Dante rushes ahead, impatient. When he finally gets to the last step and sees the earthly paradise’s
sun, the bushes, and the flowers, his beloved teacher bids him farewell forever:

  “You now have seen, my son, the temporal

  and the eternal fire, you’ve reached the place

  where my discernment now has reached its end.

  “I led you here with skill and intellect;

  From here on, let your pleasure be your guide:

  The narrow ways, the steep are far below.

  “Expect no longer words or signs from me.

  Now is your will upright, wholesome and free,

  And not to heed its pleasure would be wrong:

  “I crown and mitre you lord of yourself!”

  “That’s it,” the Rock announced, closing the book. He seemed less like the Rock than normal, as if he’d said good-bye to an old friend forever. Over the last several months, Dante Alighieri had been an integral part of our lives. That last, fleeting verse left us alone, without a guide.

  “I believe this is the end of the line…,” Farag whispered. “It feels like Dante has abandoned us. I feel like an orphan.”

  “Well, he made it to the earthly paradise. He reached his goal—the glory and the crown of laurels. We,” I said, smelling the strong smell of smoke, “must still pass the last test.”

  “You’re right, Doctor. Let’s go.” Glauser-Röist jumped to his feet. I saw him secretly caress the cover of his well-thumbed copy of the Divine Comedy before he dropped it in his backpack.

  The village of Antioch received us with loud cheers. The minute they saw us on the dock, their shouts of joy and clapping grew deafening.

  “What if this is a town of cannibals cheering for the arrival of supper?”

  “Farag, don’t make me nervous!”

  Captain Mulugeta Mariam, like a master of ceremonies, walked down the narrow path opened by the multitude amid exclamations, kisses, shoves, and hugs, just like a Hollywood star. Behind him walked Captain Glauser-Röist, whom the Anuak children watched from below with fearful smiles and admiration in their eyes. He was so blond and so tall; they’d never seen such an impressive male specimen in their short lives. The women paid more attention to me, dying of curiosity. There mustn’t have been many female saints who came down the Atbara to attempt the last test of Purgatory; and I could tell from the looks in their eyes that they were proud to see a woman who had succeeded. Farag’s dark blue eyes caused havoc. A young girl, not more than fourteen or fifteen, egged on by her friends huddled around her, dying of laughter, rushed up and tugged on his beard. Casanova let out a burst of laughter, absolutely enchanted.