Memoirs of Hadrian

by Маргерит Юрсенар

  Love, wisest of gods… . But love had not been to blame for that negligence, for the harshness and indifference mingled with passion like sand with the gold borne along by a stream, for that blind self-content of a man too completely happy, and who is growing old. Could I have been so grossly satisfied? Antinous was dead. Far from loving too much, as doubtless Servianus was proclaiming at that moment in Rome, I had not been loving enough to force the boy to live on. Chabrias as a member of an Orphic cult held suicide a crime, so he tended to insist upon the sacrificial aspect of that ending; I myself felt a kind of terrible joy at the thought that that death was a gift. But I was the only one to measure how much bitter fermentation there is at the bottom of all sweetness, or what degree of despair is hidden under abnegation, what hatred is mingled with love. A being deeply wounded had thrown this proof of devotion at my very face; a boy fearful of losing all had found this means of binding me to him forever. Had he hoped to protect me by such a sacrifice he must have deemed himself unloved indeed not to have realized that the worst of ills would be to lose him.

  The tears ceased; the dignitaries who approached me were no longer obliged to avoid glancing at me (as if weeping were a thing obscene). Visits to model farms and irrigation canals were renewed; it mattered little how the hours were spent. Countless wild rumors were already afoot with regard to my disaster; even on the boats accompanying mine some atrocious stories were circulating against me; I let them talk, the truth being not of the kind to cry in the streets. Then, too, the most malicious lies were accurate in their way; they accused me of having sacrificed him and, in a sense, I had done so. Hermogenes, who faithfully relayed these echoes to me from without, transmitted some messages from the empress; she behaved decently (people usually do in the presence of death). But such compassion was based on a misapprehension: I was to be pitied provided that I console myself rather promptly. I myself thought that I was somewhat calmed, and was almost embarrassed by the fact. Little did I know what strange labyrinths grief contains, or that I had yet to walk therein.

  They tried to divert me. Some days after we reached Thebes I learned that the empress and her suite had gone twice to the base of the colossal statue of Memnon, hoping to hear the mysterious sound emitted from the stone at dawn, a well-known phenomenon which all travelers wish to witness. The prodigy had not occurred, but with superstitious awe they imagined that it would take place if I were present, so I agreed to accompany the women the next day; any means would do to shorten those interminable nights of autumn. Early that morning, at about the eleventh hour, Euphorion came to my cabin to relight the lamp and help me put on my clothes. I stepped on deck; the sky, still wholly dark, was truly the iron sky of Homer’s poems, indifferent to man’s woes and joys alike. More than twenty days had passed since this thing had happened. I descended to the small boat for the short trip, which was not without tremorous cries from the women.

  They landed us near the Colossus. A strip of dull rose extended along the East; still another day was beginning. The mysterious sound occurred three times, resembling the snap of a breaking bowstring. The inexhaustible Julia Balbilla produced on the spot a whole series of poems. The women undertook to visit the temples, but I accompanied them only part way, along walls monotonously covered with hieroglyphs. I had had enough of those colossal figures of kings all alike, sitting side by side, their long flattened feet planted straight before them; in such inert blocks of stone there is nothing which signifies life for us, neither grief nor sensuous delight, nor movement which gives limbs their freedom, nor that capacity which composes a world round a pensive head. The priests who guided me seemed almost as ill-informed as myself about those extinguished lives, though from time to time some discussion arose over a name. They knew vaguely that each of these monarchs had inherited a kingdom, governed over his peoples, and begotten a successor; nothing besides remained. Those obscure dynasties extended farther back than Rome, farther than Athens, back beyond the day when Achilles died before the walls of Troy, earlier than the astronomic cycle of five thousand years calculated by Meno for Julius Caesar.

  Feeling tired, I dismissed the priests and rested for a while in the shade of the Colossus before returning to the boat. The massive legs were covered to the knees with inscriptions traced in Greek by sightseers: names, dates, a prayer, a certain Servius Suavis, a certain Eumenius who had been in that same place six centuries before me, a certain Panion who had visited Thebes just six months ago… . Six months ago. … A fancy seized me which I had not known since childhood days, when I used to carve my name in the bark of chestnut trees on the Spanish estate; the emperor who steadily refused to have his appelations and titles inscribed upon the buildings and monuments of his own construction now took his dagger to scratch a few Greek letters on that hard stone, an abridged and familiar form of his name, ADPIANO. … It was one more thrust against time: a name, a life sum (of which the innumerable elements would never be known), a mere mark left by a man wholly lost in that succession of centuries. Suddenly I remembered that it was the twenty-seventh day of the month of Athyr, the fifth day before our kalends of December. It was the birthday of Antinous; the boy would have been twenty that day had he been still alive.

  I went back aboard; the wound closed too quickly had opened again; I stifled my cries in the cushion which Euphorion slipped under my head. That corpse and I were drifting apart, carried in different directions by two currents of time. The fifth day before the kalends of December, the first day of the month of Athyr: with each passing moment that body was sinking deeper, that death was more imbedded. Once more I climbed the treacherous ascent; with my very nails I strove to exhume that day dead and gone. Phlegon had sat facing the door, but remembered the successive entries and departures in the cabin only for the ray of light which had disturbed him each time that a hand pushed the blind. Like a man accused of a crime I strove to account for each hour: some dictation, a reply to the Senate of Ephesus; at which of those phrases did that agony take place? I tried to gauge the play of the footbridge under his tread, to reconstitute the dry bank and the flat paving stones; then the knife cutting the curl at the edge of his temple, the inclined body and knee bent to allow the hand to untie the sandal; the unique manner of opening the lips as he closed his eyes. It must have cost a desperate resolution indeed for so fine a swimmer to smother in that black silt. In my thoughts I tried to go as far as that revolution through which we all shall pass, when the heart gives out and the brain stops short as the lungs cease to draw in life. I shall undergo a similar convulsion; I, too, shall die. But each passing is different; my attempts to picture his last agony came to no more than mere fabrication, for he had died alone.

  I fought against my grief, battling as if it were gangrene: I recalled his occasional stubbornness and lies; I told myself that he would have changed, growing older and heavy.

  [Hadrian 204a.jpg] Hadrian at Middle Age Alexandria, Greco-Roman Museum

  [Hadrian 204bc.jpg] Panorama of Ruins of Antinoöpolis Engraving by Jomard, in Description de L’Egypt

  [Hadrian 204d.jpg] Antinous as Osiris Dresden, Albertinum Museum

  Such efforts proved futile; instead, like some painstaking workman who toils to copy a masterpiece, I exhausted myself in tasking my memory for fanatic exactitude, evoking that smooth chest, high and rounded as a shield. Sometimes the image leaped to mind of itself, and a flood of tenderness swept over me: once again I caught sight of an orchard in Tibur, and the youth gathering up autumn fruits in his tunic, for lack of a basket. I had lost everything at once, the companion of the night’s delights and the young friend squatting low to his heels to help Euphorion with the folds of my toga. If one were to believe the priests, the shade was also in torment, regretting the warm shelter of its body and haunting its familiar habitations with many a moan, so far and yet so near, but for the time too weak to signify his presence to me. If that were true my deafness was worse than death itself. But after all had I so well understood, on that morning, the li
ving boy who sobbed at my side?

  One evening Chabrias called me to show me a star, till then hardly visible, in the constellation of the Eagle; it flashed like a gem and pulsated like a heart. I chose it for his star and his sign. Each night I would follow its course until utterly wearied; in that part of the sky I have seen strange radiance. Folk thought me mad, but that was of little consequence.

  Death is hideous, but life is too. Everything seemed awry. The founding of Antinoöpolis was a ludicrous endeavor, after all, just one more city to shelter fraudulent trading, official extortion, prostitution, disorder, and those cowards who weep for a while over their dead before forgetting them. Apotheosis was but empty ceremony: such public honors would serve only to make of the boy a pretext for adulation or irony, a posthumous object of cheap desire, or of scandal, one of those legends already tainted which clutter history’s recesses. Perhaps my grief itself was only a form of license, a vulgar debauch: I was still the one who profited from the experience and tasted it to the full, for the beloved one was giving me even his death for my indulgence. A man frustrated was weeping over himself.

  Ideas jarred upon each other; words ground on without meaning; voices rasped and buzzed like locusts in the desert or flies on a dung pile; our ships with sails swelling out like doves’ breasts were carriers for intrigue and lies; on the human countenance stupidity reigned. Death, in its aspect of weakness or decay, came to the surface everywhere: the bad spot on a fruit, some imperceptible rent at the edge of a hanging, a carrion body on the shore, the pustules of a face, the mark of scourges on a bargeman’s back. My hands seemed always somewhat soiled. At the hour of the bath, as I extended my legs for the slaves to shave, I looked with disgust upon this solid body, this almost indestructible machine which absorbed food, walked, and managed to sleep, and would, I knew, reaccustom itself one day or another to the routines of love. I could no longer bear the presence of any but those few servants who remembered the departed one; in their way they had loved him. My sorrow found an echo in the rather foolish mourning of a masseur, or of the old negro who tended the lamps. But their grief did not keep them from laughing softly amongst themselves as they took the evening air along the river bank. One morning as I leaned on the taffrail I noticed a slave at work in the quarters reserved for the kitchens; he was cleaning one of those chickens which Egypt hatches by the thousands in its dirty incubators; he gathered the slimy entrails into his hands and threw them into the water. I had barely time to turn away to vomit. At our stop in Philae, during a reception offered us by the governor, a child of three met with an accident: son of a Nubian porter and dark as bronze, he had crept into the balconies to watch the dancing, and fell from that height. They did the best they could to hide the whole thing; the porter held back his sobs for fear of disturbing his master’s guests, and was led out with the body through the kitchen doors; in spite of such precautions I caught a glimpse of his shoulders rising and falling convulsively, as under the blows of a whip. I had the feeling of taking that father’s grief to myself much as I had taken on the sorrow of Hercules, of Alexander, of Plato, each of whom wept for a dead friend. I sent a few gold pieces to this poor fellow; one could do nothing more. Two or three days later I saw him again; he was contentedly picking at lice as he lay in the sun at the doorway.

  Messages flooded in; Pancrates sent me his poem, finished at last; it was only a mediocre assemblage of Homeric hexameters, but the name which figured in almost every line made it more moving for me than many a masterpiece. Numenius sent me a Consolation written according to the usual formulas for such works; I passed a night reading it, although it contained every possible platitude. These feeble defenses raised by man against death were developed along two lines: the first consisted in presenting death to us as an inevitable evil, and in reminding us that neither beauty, youth, nor love escapes decay; life and its train of ills are thus proved even more horrible than death itself, and it is better, accordingly, to die than to grow old. Such truths are cited to incline us toward resignation, but they justify chiefly despair. The second line of argument contradicts the first, but our philosophers care little for such niceties: the theme was no longer resignation to death but negation of it. Only the soul was important, they said, arrogantly positing as a fact the immortality of that vague entity which we have never seen function in the absence of the body, and the existence of which they had not yet taken the trouble to prove. I was not so certain: since the smile, the expression of the eyes, the voice, these imponderable realities, had ceased to be, then why not the soul, too? Was it necessarily more immaterial than the body’s heat? They attached no importance to those remains wherein the soul no longer dwelt; that body, however, was the only thing left to me, my sole proof that the living boy had existed. The immortality of the race was supposed to make up in some way for each individual death, but it was hardly consoling to me that whole generations of Bithynians would succeed each other to the end of time along the banks of the Sangarius. We speak of glory, that fine word which swells the heart, but there is willful confusion between it and immortality, as if the mere trace of a person were the same thing as his presence. They would have had me see the resplendent god in place of the corpse, but I had created that god; I believed in him, in my way, but a brilliant posthumous destiny in the midst of the stellar spheres failed to compensate for so brief a life; the god did not take the place of the living being I had lost.

  I was incensed by man’s mania for clinging to hypotheses while ignoring facts, for mistaking his dreams for more than dreams. I felt otherwise about my obligations as the survivor. That death would be in vain if I lacked the courage to look straight at it, keeping in mind those realities of cold and silence, of coagulated blood and inert members which men cover up so quickly with earth, and with hypocrisy; I chose to grope my way in the dark without recourse to such weak lamps. I could feel that those around me began to take offence at a grief of such duration; furthermore, the violence of my sorrow scandalized them more than its cause. If I had given way to the same tears for the death of a brother or a son I should have been equally reproached for crying like a woman. The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.

  We came back down the river to the point where Antinoöpolis was beginning to rise. There were fewer boats in our party than before; Lucius, whom I had seen but little again, had returned to Rome, where his young wife was newly delivered of a son. His departure freed me of a goodly number of curious and troublesome onlookers. The work already started was altering the line of the shore; the plan of buildings-to-be became visible in the clearings between mounds of earth dug up everywhere for foundations; but I no longer recognized the exact place of the sacrifice. The embalmers delivered their handiwork; the slender coffin of cedar was placed inside a porphyry sarcophagus standing upright within the innermost room of the temple. I approached the dead boy timidly. He seemed as if costumed: the stiff Egyptian headdress covered his hair. His legs tightly bound in strips of linen were now only a long white bundle, but the profile of the young falcon had not changed; the lashes cast a shadow which I knew on the painted cheeks. Before they finished the wrapping of the hands I was urged to admire the gold fingernails.

  The litanies began; the departed one, speaking through the priests, declared himself to have been perpetually truthful, perpetually chaste, perpetually compassionate and just, and boasted of virtues which, had he practiced them as described, would have set him forever apart from the living. The stale odor of incense filled the room, and through the smoky cloud I tried to give myself the illusion of a smile on those lips; the beautiful, immobile features seemed to tremble. I watched the magic passes whereby the priests force the soul of the dead to incarnate some portion of itself inside the statues which are to conserve his memory; there were other injunctions, stranger still. When all was over, the gold mask cast from the wax funeral mold was laid in
place, perfectly fitting the features. That fair, incorruptible surface was soon to absorb within itself its own possibilities for radiance and warmth; it was to lie forever in that case hermetically closed, like some inert symbol of immortality. A sprig of acacia was placed on his chest, and some dozen men lifted the heavy cover into position.

  But I hesitated still about where to place the tomb. I recalled that in ordering rites of apotheosis everywhere, with funeral games, issues of coins, and statues in the public squares, I had made an exception for Rome, fearing to augment that animosity which more or less surrounds any foreign favorite. I told myself that I should not always be there to protect that sepulchre. The monument envisaged at the gates of Antinoöpolis seemed too public also, and far from safe. I followed the priests’ advice. On a mountainside in the Arabic range, some three leagues from the new city, they indicated to me one of those caverns formerly intended by Egypt’s kings to serve as their funeral vaults. A team of oxen drew the sarcophagus up that grade; it was lowered with ropes to those subterranean corridors, and was then slid into position to lean against a wall of rock. The youth from Claudiopolis was descending into the tomb like a Pharaoh, or a Ptolemy. There we left him, alone. He was entering upon that endless tenure, without air, without light, without change of season, compared with which every life seems short; such was the stability to which he had attained, such perhaps was the peace. Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.