Colosseum

by Simone Sarasso

  The strength and enormity of the Earth, able to sow life among the stones, in the abysses of the sea, and even in the desert. And its darker side, the dominating power of the sky and the tides, capable of destroying in the bat of an eyelid what mankind, insignificant and miniscule, has spent centuries building.

  Fleet Commander Gaius Plinius Secundus dedicates every moment he is not at sea with his men to examining the mysteries of nature in minute detail. Sometimes he sits up all night by candlelight, ruining his eyesight to read and summarize books worn down by the passage of time.

  Other times though, not even the most detailed scroll is enough to satisfy his curiosity.

  There are days when marvels dance before the eyes of those who are willing to see, days when the extraordinary magnificence of nature bursts into clouds of wonder.

  Today is one of those days—Pliny can see it already.

  In truth, everybody within a radius of forty miles has seen it: the belly of Vulcan, god of all-consuming fire, has been rumbling for hours. At the peak of Vesuvius, visible from every corner of the gulf, the magic is as clear as it is powerful. Pliny has not even broken his fast. The slaves respectfully insist, chasing after him through the atrium and past the impluvium of the villa, bowls of honey and milk straight from the stalls, scented focaccias, fresh bread and seasonal fruit in their hands, but the commander ignores them: the spectacle unfolding before his poor eyes, tired from too much study, is simply incredible. Pliny hastily arranges his tunic and slips on a pair of sandals.

  It is early morning, but already very warm. Late August, undoubtedly the most thankless of months. His nephew joins him on the terrace, a boy of eighteen, rather bright and with an innate talent for the written word; the divine gifts are part of the family heritage and the muse Clio continues to show her benevolence, generation after generation. The boy is Pliny’s sister’s son and, somewhat ironically, bears the same name as him: Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus.

  The two do not know it, can scarcely even imagine it, but their names, so similar that an epithet is needed to differentiate between them, will survive the weight of centuries and the sands of time. Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger will be remembered forever. In two thousand years’ time people will still be reading the words they used to describe the extraordinary, terrible day that is about to unfold.

  Uncle and nephew stand side by side, ramrod-straight, immobile, close enough to brush shoulders, eyes spellbound. Before them, right at the peak of Vesuvius, a column of smoke, rock and fire is rising. It is like the enormous trunk of a maritime pine, branches loaded with scorching dust.

  The gray-black tree of boiling ash is immense and magnificent. It even looks harmless, as the gods always do when they disguise themselves as innocents in order to wreak the worst evils, until it swells so much that it begins to swallow up large chunks of the heavens. Then, all of a sudden, the party turns to chaos, the beast breaks free of its chains and launches itself headlong into innocent flesh. The first warning of collapse rumbles like thunder. Cracks breach the sides of the dark colossus, splitting it apart from within and bearing its incandescent soul. The sky is red with anger, molten boulders plummeting down the length of the trunk, which is now split from the ground by a seam of lava. From where Pliny is watching they look like ashen confetti, as innocuous as petals carried on the wind. They glide and bounce, dragging fire into yet more fire, streaking through the blue of the sky, landing on the slopes of Vesuvius.

  The monster is sluggish, however, in no hurry. It could go on like this all day. Slowly, it sends out filthy, fiery tentacles towards the life below. Herculaneum is the first to fall, the fire of the gods ready for the supreme sacrifice.

  The older man starts at the sight of the smoke. The city is eaten away one rooftop at a time, the flames like pinpricks on the silky skin of the Gulf. It is morning now, but the sky is bruised and loaded with hatred. The wind howls, dragging the red death towards its destination.

  The commander’s soul is split in two: on the one hand his mind is racing to imagine the disaster befalling Herculaneum, the suffocating walls of ash, the embers falling from the sky, the deafening roar. On the other, his scholarly heart is straining in his chest, its only desire to leave the villa and run up to the monster, to stare into its black eyes through the lens of science. His nephew has his gaze fixed on the horizon: he cannot tear himself away from the sight of that fiery rain that rends the land and makes the sea boil. He is too young to understand what it really means. The eyes can deceive; there is still so little of the world in that head of his that he cannot see the tragedy, does not even notice it. Distance creates an unnatural filter, muffles awful sounds: houses collapse without even a groan, and when its turn comes, the roof of a temple falls in silently.

  Death is far away, masked, innocuous. Pliny the Younger shouts excitedly at each distant puff of smoke, at each rock that finds its target.

  His uncle is on the point of telling him what is really happening when a servant bursts into the house with a letter from Rectina, a devoted friend of the commander’s family and wife of Cascus. Pliny the Elder reads it, turns pale and immediately gives the order: “Ready the quadriremes, and set a course for Stabiae!”

  Cascus’s home lies right on the slopes of the mountain, the only way out now is by sea. The servant managed to leave during the night in search of help, but by this point the situation must be extremely serious.

  Pliny bids goodbye to his nephew, kissing his dark, curly locks before starting out to meet his destiny. Neither of them knows that this will be the last time they see one another.

  Those stern but just eyes of his uncle will remain in the boy’s heart forever. Eyes determined to embrace the secrets of the world, even when the world goes up in flames.

  Commander Gaius Plinius Secundus hurriedly boards the ship’s bridge and leaves the villa behind him.

  Before evening he will have brought Cascus and his family to safety, landing near his friend’s home and venturing onto Stabiae beach with him to point out their escape route.

  Before evening, Pliny the Elder will be dead, suffocated by the ash and smoke, left alone on a beach in flames.

  Before evening, the Empire will have suffered the wrath of the gods.

  For the moment though, the lapping of the waves and the salt in the air speak of adventure and satisfy the senses. Truly, there is nowhere else that the commander would rather be.

  It is only when he is halfway to his destination that a dark omen disquiets his soul. A violet cloud appears out of nowhere, filling the air with death without so much as touching a hair on anyone’s head.

  Pliny sniffs at the air and notices it immediately: the wind has just changed.

  The rain of fire that has devastated Herculaneum is ready to reap new victims.

  The beast is enraged and Pompeii is damned close by.

  In the city of the sun, darkness is about to fall.

  Within a couple of hours, it will once again be down to Verus to save his skin, and run like the wind.

  The day got off to a bad start. Verus did not get a wink of sleep.

  “You know when you wake up full of energy, when you want to take on the world with your bare hands?” Massinissa asked him as soon as he woke up. Verus stretched, hearing his tendons flex and creak.

  “No,” he answered sullenly, rubbing his eyes.

  Massinissa bowed his head, his body a shameless expression of infinite weariness: “Nor do I.”

  The two looked at each other for a long instant, then burst out laughing.

  “May the gods twice curse the Romans, brother! May this fucking city burn down to the foundations!” Massinissa has inspired himself and Verus signals to him to keep his voice down, but it is already too late.

  One of Demetrius’s minions is finishing his patrol through the cages and he must have cleaned his ears out properly this morning. He stands in front of the Numidian with his arms folded.

  “Let’s hear that again, negro…Wh
at is it that should burn?” And then, before Massinissa had time to explain himself or think up an excuse, the guard flings open the cage and starts beating him. The blows land on his face and chest, opening a couple of wounds that spew out blood like fountains.

  Verus is dying to step in but the guard does not let him. The son of a bitch is trained to hurt people and he is good at his job. He jams the handle of the club into his balls and sends him to the ground.

  When he has finished he steps slowly back out of the cage and spits at the two slaves.

  “Have a good day, you pieces of shit…”

  Verus and Massinissa sit licking their wounds for a moment before they hear the distant crack of the jailors’ whips and the screech of cage doors being swung open: another day of toil.

  Life at the quarry is truly exhausting. Verus and his companions work like dogs from sunrise to sunset. There are no breaks, apart from the time it takes to swallow a bowlful of boiled grain and a few crusts of hard bread. They take it in turns to sit down for a moment when the guards have their backs turned. Verus works with a chisel on the bare rock. He has grown used to the vibrations, shuddering through his forearm, shaking the gums in his mouth.

  A hundred strikes delivered with precision are enough to turn a crack into a hole, another hundred and the groove widens, filling the workers with confidence. Another thousand, with thirty different mallets, and the river bursts its banks, finite separates from infinite and the rock-face calves a piece of itself, reduced to a boulder and finally a squared block. The material from the quarry goes to build the villas of the well-to-do, those villas that Verus has never seen, but which he imagines as being vast as a grassy plain and crowned with towers like a soaring sea cliff. There are rumors around the camp: some of the oldest slaves, who have seen something of the world—lucky them, and who have connections in the right places—say that much of the stone that is quarried at Pompeii travels all the way to Rome, to contribute to the construction of Vespasian’s mad dream.

  “And what the hell would that be?” Verus asked one day, chisel in hand beneath the blazing sun.

  The man shook his head in response: “You know nothing, damned Briton! The Emperor is building the greatest amphitheater in the world! They say when it’s ready there will be a hundred days of fighting between beasts and Christians, gladiators and heroes!” His gaze was lost in the airy void of legends.

  Verus did not understand much of it. Each question he asked led to another, eventually giving the impression he was just some damned ignorant barbarian.

  “All right… but what exactly is a gladiator?”

  The other stared at him, wide-eyed. He could not believe it. He called his companions over so they could all laugh at him together.

  “Are you serious?”

  Verus shrugs with bewilderment while the rest of the work party fell about laughing.

  The old slave’s face lit up, as often happens when simple men get the chance to describe the indescribable.

  “Gladiators are gods, my friend! Warriors sworn to death, heavenly dancers, true deities. Crowds worship them and women go crazy for them. They bet their lives on the thrust of a sword: all or nothing, my boy.”

  All or nothing.

  So that is how it works.

  Verus would soon find out. In the meantime however, the master’s ugly face appeared to remind the wretches that the time for chatter had just ended. So the young man went back to his chisel, his head filled with doubts and dreams. In the following days he continued to investigate, finding out about the gladiator schools, the fights, the women.

  Today too, the sun does not let up for a second, and the ground under their feet simmers like a pot of lentils. Verus badgers his dark-skinned friend as he makes iron resound against rock.

  “These damned gladiators must be happy, don’t you reckon?” Tiny pebbles between his teeth and little desire to pass the time of day.

  The Numidian shakes his head: “Are you happy to live in chains, you knuckleheaded Briton?” Grayish dust on ebony flesh.

  Verus spins around, realizing he has failed to ask the most obvious question: “You mean the gods of the arena are slaves, just like us?”

  Massinissa hits harder, a fair-sized splinter flies to the ground. The two friends work balanced on a pile of stones, tackling the rock higher up, where the wind has made it more brittle.

  “Not all, but most. Then there are those who choose to give five years of their lives over to death. But there again the world is full of madmen, my friend. Take my uncle, for instance…”

  Suddenly, Verus is interested.

  “Did he become a gladiator?”

  Massinissa answers without looking him in the eye. Delicate balance and cutting jokes.

  “No, he fell in love with his goat.”

  Verus lets his mind fly elsewhere for a moment. His thoughts move swiftly and without baggage. In an instant they cover the entire world. The Briton imagines a future of iron and glory, not goats and raving lunatics. Massinissa, however, confuses the excess of concentration for interest.

  “Fucked that goat better than he did his wife. And more often, apparently…”

  Verus starts listening again as he stops daydreaming, for the first time since the night of the massacre, about freedom, and the absurd bundle of emotions that the damned word brings with it. Because, he realizes, there are slaves and there are slaves: it is one thing to break rocks all day, and another to test your courage with weapon in hand, urged on by the loving roar of the crowd.

  “To listen to him, you’d think the fucking goat let him do what he liked to it…” Messinissa is gathering steam.

  Verus stops him brusquely: “Listen, brother. I don’t know if I really want to hear this, seriously…”

  But it is in this very moment that the gods decide the time has come and there will be no tomorrow.

  The sky darkens, gray clouds loaded with death blow out of Vulcan’s belly.

  Verus’s pulse is racing when the first flaming rock hits the ground. The size of a fist, it slams into the sand and begins to sweat dense smoke.

  The second is as big as a sheep, and knocks the pile of stones supporting Verus and Massinissa to the ground.

  The two slaves lose their balance and tumble to earth. The African burns himself, screaming as his flesh blisters revoltingly. Verus looks up and realizes the blue vault above him is swarming with ash, the air filled with shouting and commotion.

  The guards run, and so do the slaves in chains. The soldiers on the watchtowers of the quarry waver, and then break.

  Hades flings its doors open wide and vomits fire onto the victims’ heads. The bright red tower, which looked to Pliny like a tree trunk atop Vesuvius, now looks like the boiling innards of a butchered titan. A heavy stench that fills the lungs, but the boiling hail is the worst punishment of all. Verus wants to help his friend, but a burning chunk of embers puts the African out of his misery, smashing into his heart.

  The impact is nauseating, Verus kneels and vomits bile, rolls on the ground, scratched and burnt. He rasps teeth and elbows in the sand, makes it to his feet and runs.

  Here is panic everywhere.

  And darkness.

  And ash.

  The rain gets heavier by the moment, Verus threads his way through rocks and flame.

  His mind races. He is losing it.

  Damned fire. Fire again.

  The night of the massacre explodes in his chest, the river of white-hot memories burrowing through his insides as fear does the rest, pumping blood into his legs.

  Verus looks for shelter and bursts through the door of a guard hut. The roof is solid, strong beechwood beams that creak but do not break. But it is beginning to give way under the weight of the flaming rock.

  The roof cracks, the smoke is inside now.

  He is enveloped in a world of ash; his lungs cry out for relief.

  But there is no end to it, the fury only swells.

  The Briton goes outside again and
sees him: Demetrius, his master, face broken by rocks, legs mauled by flames. A few steps further on is the frenzied crowd that has trampled him.

  The slaves have broken their chains.

  Faced with the end, the damned Christians have a point: we are not very different from one another. The well-to-do and the wretched of the Earth, they all die in the same way.

  Verus joins the rush, fighting the urge to gag as the air and the ground, he notices only now, become hotter with every step.

  And the more the temperature rises, the more his reason begins to fail.

  The group reaches the city when the worst has already arrived. The roads are rivers of terror, sweaty flesh and aching lungs. Verus has been daydreaming for months of the wealth and unchecked luxury. Of the houses of the rich, for which they break their backs every single day. And now that he has them in front of him, he realizes they look like so many shining prisons, each one with its roof covered in burning rocks, ready to crush those foolish enough to be underneath them still.

  Fire in the sky and on the ground, fire everywhere.

  Verus darts through the alleyways and passes the insulae at the entrance to the city, unfortunate homes already touched by ruin. One unlucky victim is the color of crimson; he has crawled outside, but not quickly enough. His flesh, hair and face are a single mass. Where once there was a person, now there is only smooth, scalding matter, mouth throbbing and agape beneath a burnt, gray veil.

  Mutilated human beings turned to statues by the ferocious impact, or by the caress of the growing fire.

  Verus knows that entering the house is a big risk, but he also knows if he does not find water it will all be over for him.