Your Caius Aquilla
Page 12
Your Caius Aquilla
P.S. On the sidelines, near a line of cypress trees and just the bluest hydrangeas, as I was “taking a knee,” a break and breather, Brutus (you know, the excessively orange-hued, dashing-handsome Q’master) and I got to talking while two other blokes subbed in for us, trotting in like thoroughbreds, like thoroughbreds with their arms held out like kangaroo arms—hence thoroughbred kangas. Things got a bit political, rather, in terms of our chat, Brutus’s and mine. Politics—which as you know aren’t or isn’t my forte but sometimes I get to wondering about…stuff like that. Political stuff and that. Not that I know much about it. It’s all Greek to me really, but I do have my opinions, however shaky, however tendentious, biased, Rome-centric, jingoistic, xenophobic, and correct—the full party line. It isn’t all just jibes and yucks with me, don’t you know. I can be serious, lugubrious, atrabilious. What true poet is not, sometimes. And I am a poet at heart, I know I am. All I must needs do is begin to produce poems and voila! my destiny will be mine. Poems and a five-to-ten minute one-man show bit, that’s all. Now to the issue at hand: of course soldiers of any rank aren’t of course supposed to question foreign policy and all that rubbish but every once in a while… Let me put it this way: no one who constantly thinks up little clever things he could/might use in a sort of stage act could possibly go on forever not thinking. Know what I mean? I try to look at life from a quite quote-unquote different perspective. I might be a bit self-unaware sometimes, a tad unversed in self-knowledge, but I’m no solipsist. I can without fear of infamy honestly say that I will listen to if not solicit the other guy’s opinion—no matter how daft and outrageous and unorthodox it may be. Hahaha. (A little jest there. Touché!) Anyway, I’ll put it in play form, a kind of script, you know, our fascinating-scintillating conversation, so as to amuse you. Picture us standing arms akimbo, two healthy strong fit men, sweaty, shirtless, one of them me; the other a very tall, very handsome, quite strapping, very orange-hued guy—both and all of us in fact in our diaperish underwear, the lower toga and whatnot. Manly as manly can be.You can also envision us kind of doubled over momentarily, catching our breath, bending over with our hands on our knees on account of no matter how combat-ready you are and ship-shape warriorwise, you get way winded and sore from running round using different muscles, football muscles, as it were, when you’re playing football. So there were are, drinking water from a pomegranate gourd, watching our mates flash by, play out the dumb, popular game I’ve just told you about, our heads toggling back and forth to catch the (in)action on the field or pitch, the sharpish, excited cries of kicking and running men going round like echolalia as we (Brutus and me) converse like two noble statesmen and, eerily, seem to read each other’s minds, as men at war and peasant women working weaving or threshing or washing are said to do:
ME Oh, Brutus?
BRUTUS Yes?
ME You’re looking well. A bit sweaty, of course. Orangey, too.
BRUTUS Thank you, Caius. How’s the old helmet? Standing you in good stead in the frays?
ME Oh, sloshing around as usual, you know. Ha! No, it’s all right. I wind a cloth round my head before I put it on—like you said. You really could have given me a new one, though, and nobody’d be the worse for wear.
BRUTUS Sorry about that.
ME No worries. I say, after yesterday’s bloody show, after the “sweep and clear” and all of that rot, the raping (which I don’t take part in, mind) and the pillaging (which I rather do indulge in), I got to wondering, you know if…
BRUTUS What?
ME You ever wonder…
BRUTUS What?!
ME Never mind…
BRUTUS What? Go on, say it.
ME You won’t think me possibly somewhat…seditious?
BRUTUS Not unless you say something treasonable…
ME And report me for…
BRUTUS For gods’s sake, man, we’re old friends! I wouldn’t…
ME Okay, then. You swear?
BRUTUS Oh, for gods’s sake, Caius. Out with it! Are you going to tell me that you think imperialism’s major tenets and its basic ethos is or are kind of a wash or something, cruel and unnecessary; and that we should all just give up these bloody in the sense of the word “blood” campaigns and war tours and march on home to our wives and mistresses and occasional or quondam clandestine homosexual paramours? Tush, tush—you know what I’m saying is true! And moreover that despite the good we do for the glory of Rome you’re dead sick and tired of being hacked by axes, covered with scars and sores, bedding down in swamps, intermittently malnourished, harried by foes, fleas, and fevers, dog-fatigued and nervous and anxious all the time, ready to lose it, come undone, go spare or potty, leave your last few senses, despair like mad and go howling through the camp that you can’t take this anymore, that war itself is a crime, a very bad and sad thing, that humanity is horrible, and that Rome itself is a blight upon said humanity and that, ironically, despite all our propaganda, we are the actual barbar…
ME (shushing him a little) Keep your bleeding voice down! Okay. Right. Pretty much. I couldn’t have put it more eloquently, actually. Wait…what did you say just now about…something about homosexual paramours…?
BRUTUS What? Nothing.
ME I thought you said something about homo…
BRUTUS You must have misheard me, Caius. What are you doing later tonight, by the way? Do you know where my tent, my kip, is? Come on by tonight…if you want to.
ME What?! No. No, no, no. I mean…
BRUTUS No worries. But if you should find yourself waxing insomniac…my flap is always open.
ME Your what?!
BRUTUS My tent flap. What did you think I meant?
ME Nothing. Never mind.
BRUTUS Come, come: surely you must know the talk that swirls round about these parts. About you and the Greek boy whom you let…
ME Oh my gods! That was yonks ago! I mean. Plus I was drunk. And lonely. I’m a happily married man, I am. Look here, old bean: all I wanted to talk about was some questions concerning… I mean, it does seem a bit arrogant to go round subduing subpar peoples who just want to get on with their filthy, vulgar, brainless, pointless, clueless, Romeless lives, doesn’t it?
BRUTUS (petulantly) Whatever you say. You said it.
ME No, no, no—you said it.
BRUTUS Did I? I highly doubt that.
ME What?!
BRUTUS Let us say…we both did.
ME Au contraire…
BRUTUS (sternly) We both did.
ME Well…
BRUTUS But mostly you, come to think of it… You know I only reiterated what you exactly were thinking of telling me—in your own halting and fumbling fashion.
ME What? Get out! I never.
BRUTUS You know you did!
ME Get out! I mean…
BRUTUS (slyly) I could report you, you know…
ME You’d never!
BRUTUS (murmuring) Wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I, though? See you later, maybe—Caius Aquilla?
Exit BRUTUS, walking or stalking away—not quite sure which. Ominously, a sudden rain paves the pitch. It’s a real squall, a dreadful downpour. The sky crackles like a god cracking his knuckles or thumping someone on his head like a vicious and ouchy destiny. However hardy and robust, chiseled and athletic, conquering Romans do not like rain. No, no: we do not. All scramble, laughing and muddy and arm-in-arm, for the rain-sheened and dripping tents with their sopping pennants not flapping, for the warmth and comfort of their cots. All except me, for I tread dejectedly, friendless again, toward my cold and lonely bunk, with its thin pale gray blanket and full chamber pot, wondering what the Hades has just transpired so precipitately between my friend and me. I was glad of the rain, sooth to say, for I had to micturate like an equus used in sporting events of a racing kind, to coin a phrase. End of (sad) scenario.
P.P.P.S. Oh my even more serious gods, oh ye cruel, distant Olympians gazing down disinterestedly (or pointing and belly-laughing with inextinguishable laughter and mirth) on puny human lives like ours, redolent of folly and delusion, hypocrisy, duplicity, and cant! “Betrayal is the only theme!” Who said that? I did. I said that. I say it. Repeat it, too. Betrayal is the only theme! It just dawned on me that that sly, subtle, bum-banditing, nancying poofter, that faggot-fairy, flamer, and superfruity Brutus was/is threatening to blackmail me, tattle like a ten-year-old, if I don’t go a-visiting him in his tent tonight. In order to let him… I can’t even say it! I can’t even think it! Oh woe, woe, woe, Lora. And woe again. How queer people are! What am I going to do!? Oh, Lora. I’m lost, I am. Very very effed here. I don’t know what to do. What do I do, Lora? What do I do?
P.P.P.S. Would you be so kind, so very kind, as to, in your next (and sorry about the split infinitive), describe what a pizza tastes like? War is Hades. It really is. I would kill—even maybe one of our own less affable fellows—for a sausage/peppers/onions/pineapple/pig with extra goat cheese plus heaps of crushed garlic and anchovies and a side of bread sticks and olive oil right now. A thin crust ’za, just a touch overcooked, with nice burnt bits, just the way I like it, as you only too well know. Yum. (Damn this and all wars! And my honor for a calzone or something!)
XXI Aprillus
Dear Friend:
Hail. The special guard—two unsmiling giants I have never met, let alone seen, before—where do they get, nay, grow these gargantuan people, I wonder?—have just been here, to my tent, at daybreak. They didn’t even knock. Well, it’s not easy to knock on a tent flap, I understand, but at least they could have said, “Knock-knock” or, “Wakey-wakey!” or, “Oi, Caius Aquilla, we’re come to take you to ‘stand before the man’ before you are shortly crucified after a swift and kangarooish court martial!” My worst fears are realized: I’m to go before the general immediately after breaking my fast. One of the giants even intimated that I would be frogmarched if I didn’t come along pacifically. As if! Like I’m not going to go with them like a good soldier and warrior brave and true! Worst bit: a Roman camp breakfast’s to be my final meal! Egads! What a fate! What a gyp! What a nightmare! Brutus has denounced me, surely. What else could it be? I am so screwed here. I am effed: more effed than the effed I previously thought before I was. Discombobulated, too. The general’s the same one I saved from the bees or wasps! What’s that mean? People’s memories are so short! Has he forgotten how I lay atop him, took a stinging for him? Took several hundreds of stingings, in fact. How my poor quill quivers just the now! Lifting it, it describes nervous arabesques in the very air. It shakes and trembles like the line of craven barbarians we mowed down just the other day—a bedraggled group who were surrendering, no less. We just didn’t feel like filling out the papyruswork so we just slaughtered them. Faked like we were going to let them “come over,” as they say, “come in” and lay down their arms, but then we ran them through at close range. Only around thirty guys but still. Pretty dirty trick we pulled. Pretty funny, though. Could not stop laughing. Wasn’t even my idea but gods a-mighty you know how crazy that zany Joculator gets sometimes. What a card is he! A total “idea guy,” as they say. Who are “they,” I always wonder? Who is this “them” people always allude to, huh? Are they a consortium of some sort, a secret society of Druids or Potentates?” Deep thoughts here. Very deep. Plus dark, disturbing, etc., which befits my current mood or mode, certes. Anyway…Lora! Gods help me—why did I ever say such compromising things before cunning-deceiving traitorous Brutus? I didn’t even say them! He just read my thoughts like he was, er, reading them like a book that lay open. A book with a bookmark in it that announces “Read me!” I’m kicking myself here because why didn’t I bloody go to his bloody tent last night? Maybe he just wanted a chat or summat. Maybe he just needed a friend. Yeah right: he needed a friend who’d suckle his julius or whose jules he’d suckle. I know him. I know the type. So the answer to that one’s (why I didn’t go to his tent) that there is nothing in this whole vast flat world that could ever make me be unfaithful to you, Lora, ever ever ever again—even were someone to put a freshly sharpened sword or scimitar or dagger or lance or spear or cat-o’-nine-tails to my head and fiercely-hissingly say, “Now, let this here chap suck off your julius,” I would not let him. Suck me, that is. Nor I suckle him. No! I would rather die by that sword than suck or be sucked off by said imaginary guy, no matter how toothsome and irresistible.
If I have to pay for my faithfulness,
my fidelity to you,
my wife,
with my
very
life,
so be it from
Your Loving and Most Loyal (And Perhaps Quite Doomed)
Caius Aquilla
P.S. Just back from seeing the general and his frowning cronies. Braced and grimly expecting my mittimus, I marches up, I gives appropriate salute, doffs ill-fitting helmet (thanks again, Brut; thanks for nothing), in full regalia, battle gear and all the rest of it; I step in place, halt, salute again, helmet of course slipping a little on account of how sodding ill-fitting it is, and the fact that I’m nervous, sweating like a slave in the ring—and who can blame me? What I want to shout—my impulse, suppressed—is: “What the demons is this all about, General? What have I done? I’ve done nothing. Why am I as it were standing before the man, you being the man, the man I’m standing before, trying to suss out why I’m here, standing?” Of course I don’t say that. But I think it so loudly that it’s almost as if I have said it and a terribly guilty look traverses my visage—it must do. I must look like the fox that’s been caught in the hen house with fresh yolk bearding his happy grey or red fur. Damn me. What have I done? I must have done something. Must have transgressed somehow with some transgression or other. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, I’m going, thinking to myself: oh dear. Racking my brains to think what I actually did do to deserve what I anticipate to be some grotesque burlesque, me being the figure of fun. Figure of fun then tragedy, as I’m accused of high treason and sedition and disloyalty to Rome, summarily court martialed, then roundly whipped and warmly whipped, then slowly crucified in front of everyone, the lads gawking as they pass me on their way to the frays each morning, with me badly broken on the cross or wheel, sweating and drooling and bleeding, serving as a cautionary tale as my compatriots think thoughts by turns of pity, sorrow, and I-knew-this-would-happen-to-that-Caius-guy-sooner-or-later. The generals and the higher higher-ups—they don’t just call you in for fun, to have a wee talk and see how you’re doing, headwise; make inquiries as to how you’ve been holding up during the frays and if you need anything, a new sword or—hello!—helmet. Bad Brutus has to have ratted on me. What other explanation could there be? Ratted, yes. But about/concerning what? I never said, “We should leave these poor inferior alien personages alone and stop going about
conquering them and taking their women and gold!” I never said any such thing! So, as I was telling you, I walks up. Silence at first, then a stertorous murmuring. There are four or five other high officers flanking the general, whose called Caius, as I told you. Caius Maximus, General. Who raises his hoary hand. Now it’s super quiet. You could hear a goblet drop. I could use a goblet just about now. A big fat fat one that I would quaff in one go, one gulp, just glug glug glug glug glug—all the way down. The jingling of the horses’ reigns, their mellow snorts, the wind in the pennants and the trees—these take on an eerie quality, a weird aura. The general’s on a sort of a plumped-up, makeshift throne on account of he’s not (as I also mentioned) tall at all. It’s red and plush, the throne, with golden tassels and great candy-striped stalks of red and white. Looks really nice and comfortable. I wish I could sit in it, his chair, for just a little while. That would be grand. I’ve not had a good sit-down for months now. Things in the old bum dept. have not been hunky-dory ever since I was stung saving him, the ingrate! “General,” says I, “you commanded me to come before you. Here I am. Here am I. As ordered.” He looks down at this vast scroll he’s got on his lap. He looks so bored, so over it. The bureaucracy those guys have to endure—must be tough. Not as tough as slogging through hurricanes of clayey mud to sever some Goth or Trojan’s hairy head, but still. I feel for them, the officers, the generals, their staff: not an easy job, orchestrating all our maneuvers and things, deciding who gets into the thick of it, who hangs back and mops up and manifests the second wave. Lotta responsibility there. Lotta pressure. “I understand,” I wanna tell him; I dream of telling him. “You don’t have it easy—no matter what anyone says. None of you guys do, you who are close to the higher higher-ups. Don’t let anybody tell you you have an easy, cushy job, notwithstanding the cushy cushions you’ve got your royal bum parked on now, mate. Honest. Even though I may have, without my knowing, done something offensive to the Legion, I can see you’ve taken a shine to me. A dashed shine, if I may say so. Haven’t you? Well, I don’t blame you. I’m quite a guy, actually. Pretty special. Extraordinary, actually. Not your usual/typical grunt. How nice if you could get to know me: I could get to know you and you could get to know me. We could have a spot of tea and a bit of a chat about things, the usual things, you know, that lowly legionaries and great, short-guy generals natter on about.” “Caius Aquilla!” he intones just then, as I get to the bit, in the midst of my reveries, about the tea and chat. I give a bit of a visible start, am taken aback, as I’m a person. Startled and quite frankly gutted, I was just then, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The mere thought of me, a distinguished legionary, here, in this predicament—the very thought of it! Insupportable. I have an unanswerable reputation, if you ask me, I do. The general’s voice sounds like an oracle of oracles. Quite booming and impressive. It’s a bit hard not to start and stare when a real live oracle addresses you personally, pointedly, or at least booms near you, as it did me. “Yes, sir,” I says, trembling in my sandals, nearly whizzing my leather kilt. I don’t mind telling you: I was intimidated. I was. Says he: “Your soldierly sojourn has been distinguished…though that is I daresay hardly the most appropriate term…by ignominy and blundering…unnecessary death and buffoonery and shame…and yet…” “Your Honor!” I says, fumbling for something to reply to this jolly sally, intending to tell him, tell him…tell him that no matter what he’s heard from a certain less-than-manly party called Brutus the Orange-Colored Quartermaster I have said nothing treasonous, nothing seditious, nothing compromising to or of the glory of Rome, hoping to stave off whatever accusation he’s going to make; assure him that whatever dread, fey Brutus told him, told on me, that is, was or is a gross distortion of…or at least just a momentary lapse of reason when…ah, I didn’t know what I was thinking, saying… I… I… I…know I’m rather malleable sometimes and easily swayed by nefarious and attractive influences but… “Silence, blunderbuss!” the general blurted. “Where was I?” “‘Shame,’ Your Honor,” I tells him meekly. “Right,” says he and looks ferociously down at his scroll. A nice fresh small wind’s making a kind of baby’s plume or widow’s peak of his thin blue hair. The scroll sort of lifts in the breeze and he (the general) has to sort of tamp it down so that it doesn’t blow away. It looks like a papyrus swan or a pelican, one that a child might fashion after several dismal, failed attempts at it, making a bird out of paper. How I wish a great tornado or tidal wave or sudden-appearing volcano or something would come and blow us all away…spirit us away from here, wipe us out to a man (except me, of course). General Caius Maximus continues: “Shame—yes. Yet just as your career has been distinguished [again that word!], so it is now extinguished, for you are granted, it says here, three months leave.” “What?!” I say. “Just what I said,” the general announces and calls me over with a little clap-cupping of the fingers of his free hand. “See here—‘Caius Aquila: leave granted for three months.’ Go on, man. There’s a viaticum and a wagon waiting for you to take you to the city of Nice, from whence you will embark on an expensive delicate ship, sojourn upon the seas, then dock in Ostia and be home in glorious Rome in no time. This is you, isn’t it?” The general bids me crane and look. There it is: ‘Caius Aquila.’ One “l,” not two. Must be some other bloke. Someone who is not I. How can that be? The Roman Imperial never makes mistakes like this! Not in a million thousand moons! What a terrific serendipity! What an hoot. He (the general) points with his shaking (has he been at the palm wine already this fair morning?), authoritative finger to the column on the left of the scroll. On the right hand side, glancing, I see something quite shocking: “Caius Aquilla” is the name that’s calligraphied there. It’s a list of casualties. Fatalities, no less. I’m dead! Well at least the list says so. Where did they get that idea from? Wait! Joc, maybe?! It’d be just like him, for a larf, to report me as dead, a fatality! I thought I was going to die, be court martialed and crucified, and it turns out there’s something better for me: I’m dead! They think I died in combat! More fools them! I mean, the last few frays have been inordinately tough, but nothing out of the ordinary for a noble Roman such as Yours Truly, Your Caius. I am dead! I am dead! If that makes sense. (It doesn’t.) No more does this recent and utterly unexpected development. Goes to show you: you never know. How odd life is. I’ve hardly had a scratch for weeks! It must’ve been the other Caius A. who’s gone and croaked it, and just on the eve of his leave, too, and some orderly misspelled his name! Dear gods, I’m going home, Lora! I’m coming home to you. They’ve made a grave (pun!) mistake. I’m outta here! I may never have to come back! Huzzah, hurrah for me! I go from quaking with fear to jumping for joy. I try to conceal my peeing-in-my-kit/kilt excitement and sort of nobly nod when the general asks me if that’s me. Ha! I never said it was; just the nod was enough. I could have been about to sneeze or something. My honor, my integrity—I think—is intact. And besides, they’ll never figure their error, military bureaucracy being what it foully is this days, FUBAR and all of that, don’t you know. Well, well, well. Gotta pack my kit up ASAP before they find it’s a clerical and orthological error! Which they never will! Better stop writing now and get on that bus! Well, not a bus but you know what I mean! Mwah and see you soon from