Boy Caesar (21 page)

He was determined, before Annia arrived, to spend time with Valentino, one of the boys he had met recently down on the docks. Valentino wanted to be a hairdresser, had come to Rome from Tuscany and had lived with a number of older men in the course of working as a hotly desired rent boy. He felt in some way responsible for this youth, who also gave him advice about his hair, discussing styles and methods of going blonder than blond. He himself would like the world to have existed of nothing but tiny details, and Valentino, he felt, understood the significance of his obsession in which a colour, a scent, an item of dress or some culinary flourish were of major importance in the universal scheme of things. He doubted from the little he knew about Annia that she would have any leanings towards his world of unashamed camp. Her character, although deferential, struck him as conditioned by disciplinarian parents. She lacked the humour to hold good with his entourage and was without the flair to take colour from his outrageous coterie.

Vesuvius got off the bed abruptly and took a lazy, swaggish roll into the adjoining room, where a platter of pheasant and goose-liver was waiting to stop his appetite. Heliogabalus bit into a black fig, tasting the seeds like they were memory cells infiltrating his saliva. The sensory associations took him back to childhood, to his mismatched relationship with Julian and to remembering the smell of sunlight as it came to meet him in parcels of photons.

Vesuvius came back to the bed and repositioned himself in a way that was redoubtable as it was slack. All of the taut wiring that could cause a fuse to blow in an instant was visible in every charged nerve. The coat looked like a solar-storm had erupted over the fur. The eyes were the green of high grasses bleached by the sun. It was the
animal’s brain’s compact slaughterhouse potential that interested Heliogobalus, the fact that it could be triggered into killing by a spontaneously coded impulse and that he himself was not exempt from being butchered if the wrong switch was thrown.

He had beside him his favourite cookery book – Apicius’
De Re Coquinaria.
Apicius remained his authority on good food, and he delighted, too, in the author’s accounts of the dishes enjoyed by the emperors Otho and Vitellius, who also served as role-models for his exacting curiosity about cuisine. He himself liked nothing better than to inject camp repartee into the kitchen and to introduce an air of stagy irreverence into the proceedings. He was also fascinated by the eccentric practice of one of his predecessors, Antonius Geta, who ordered dinners according to single letters: goose, gammon, gadwall or pullet, partridge, peacock, pork, pig’s trotters.

As he leafed through Apicius’ compendium of recipes his desire to recreate the dish that Vitellius had called ‘Shield of Minerva the Protectress’ was renewed. He read again of its contents: pike livers, pheasant brains, peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt. He was determined to meet the challenge and prepare it one day for his inner circle. Certainly tonight was not the time, as he intended to downplay the occasion and formalize it only with the preparation of a cold buffet underlined by artichokes, asparagus, salad and a variety of fish. He would rather have amused himself with his history books, his coterie of pretty boys and the inexhaustible prizes in his cellar than attend a buffet aimed to please his bride.

He was interrupted in his thoughts by Antony coming into the room to tell him that Valentino had arrived. He carried a jewelled leash to harness Vesuvius and led the lopingly acquiescent cat off into another room. Valentino was terrified of the leopards, panthers and lions he had encountered in Heliogabalus’ rooms and had threatened never to return unless they were locked up for his visits. Heliogabalus watched his pet slope off in a rippling blaze of emeralds and sapphires, the claw-pads raining amplified blows on the tessellated floor.

When Valentino came in his hair was arranged in blond curls
and his eyebrows were two black horizontals. He looked tired, as though his work as a rent boy had forced him a long way down into himself. Heliogabalus had noticed over the months how Valentino’s mood fluctuated according to the treatment he received from his clients. He could be elated one day if his earnings had unexpectedly peaked or totally despondent if the sex had involved abuse or the failure to be paid. Tonight he looked strained with worry lines etched above his nose in the form of a deep-set W, indicating the problem was centred there in that particular site.

Heliogabalus poured out wine himself rather than call for a servant and had Valentino sit down beside him on the couch. There had often been occasions when they had talked instead of having sex, for their ages were similar, no matter the difference in their stations in life. He sensed that tonight was to be such an occasion, and he gently lifted Valentino’s hand and placed it in his own. He could see that the boy was nervy and strung out and in need of being comforted. He watched him drink hard and fast in the attempt to have the wine wipe out his anxiety.

Heliogabalus knew that he had roughly two hours to himself before his wife was due to arrive and felt the need to maximize on that time. It was, in his mind, an interval standing between him and the loss of his freedom. He wanted, suddenly, to remember every word that passed between himself and Valentino as a record of a particular moment in his life.

It was growing dark outside, and he could hear a wind frisking the avenue of ornamental trees leading to the palace. He still hadn’t learned all their names, but he knew the plane, the cherry, the ash, the laurel, ilex and oak. Nature demanded nothing of him; it was just there as part of the regenerative and degenerative cycles of the earth. He could trust in it, as he could an elephant, a leopard or an ostrich.

Valentino let go and rested his head on his shoulder, and he could feel the boy’s trouble crumple in the process. He, who so wanted to be loved, was the victim of a loveless profession. Heliogabalus felt for him and the indignities he suffered as a rent boy selling his arse for money and at the same time expecting to receive love in return.

‘What is it?’ he asked Valentino, the woman in him surfacing to meet the hurt. ‘Is it something that’s been done to you? If it is, then I can step in and make my power felt.’

Valentino still wouldn’t come clean. His eyes had the blank stare of the mad, who withdraw so far into themselves that they are uncontactable.

‘Something terrible has happened,’ Valentino confessed, his eyelashes doing sonatas in time to his thoughts. ‘I’ve betrayed you,’ he said, biting on his lip sufficiently hard to draw blood. ‘Hierocles came to me yesterday and forced me to have sex with him in a way that was brutal. He really fucked me up.’

Heliogabalus savoured the irony of the situation like tasting a sharp grape. Neither he nor Hierocles were faithful to each other, but Rome provided sufficiently wide a cast of boys to prevent this sort of situation happening. He knew instinctually that Hierocles had done it as a form of revenge. His impulse to laugh was cut short by the intended nature of the hurt and by the anger he felt at Valentino for finding it necessary to confess.

‘Why do you tell me this?’ he rounded on the boy. ‘Aren’t there some things that are better kept secret? Who you fuck is your own business.’

Valentino looked shocked at the anger he had spiked. Heliogabalus got up from the couch and hot-footed it once around the room, the conflict of his thoughts tingling like pins and needles. He despised them both for trashing his feelings for, try as he did to deny it, he still loved Hierocles and needed him in his life.

He thought of throwing Valentino out on the spot but softened when he realized the boy’s vulnerability and his messed-up state. As the declared patron saint of rent boys, he could hardly turn on his own. Instead, he slowed his walk, toned down the drama and went over and took the boy’s hand.

‘I’m not a Caligula or Nero,’ he said. ‘Doubtless they would have devised a punishment so disproportionate to the crime as to make themselves butchers. Instead, I forgive you. Your wrong was simply in telling me something better left unsaid. If you can learn from this, some good has been achieved.’

He watched Valentino’s body unwind from its tautness, the W knotted above his nasal bridge starting to slacken and then collapse. Relief flooded his features, tempered by suspicion that he had been let off so lightly. He looked like he still couldn’t believe what he had heard and that there was a catch in it aimed at tricking him into a false sense of security. Heliogabalus watched him look up like an animal that had been dropped by its captor.

‘You mean you’re not going to punish me?’ he said, testing each word for its staying power.

‘No. What you lack, Valentino, is discretion, and the absence of it can wound others. I was luckier than you. I learned my lessons from studying Seneca. I know what you suffer and the need you feel to blame it on the injustices done to you.’

He watched the youth bunch up defensively like a hedgehog, its ball of needles primed. He realized he had made a mistake by hitting direct at the truth. He had got Valentino on a raw nerve, and it stung. He poured more wine and quickly switched the subject. ‘You may have heard I got married today to Annia Faustina,’ he said. ‘My mother insisted I do it to strengthen my position. That’s why I needed to see you tonight, to touch base and be reminded of my true identity.’

Valentino smiled. ‘You’ve been through all this before, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘You’ll never know what you want. Nobody does. My mother thinks I should marry. If she knew what I did for money, she would have my father kill me.’

‘Most of Rome seems to know what I am,’ Heliogabalus laughed, reflecting on the downside of public image. ‘Not that it makes it any easier. I still get hurt by comments. Hierocles says they’ll do us one day, and I’m sure he’s right.’

He had deliberately risked bringing Hierocles’ name into the conversational radar in the hope of normalizing affairs. He watched Valentino inwardly flinch, as though an acupuncture pin had turned on a nerve. He clearly resented being reminded of his indiscretion, but there was no other way. He wanted him to learn, and to do so the needle had to be punched home.

‘I just live for the moment,’ Valentino said, deliberately avoiding
mention of Hierocles’ name. ‘I’m only concerned with sex, money and getting wasted. That way I don’t have to think too much.’

‘The mind is thinking all the time, even if it’s not in use,’ Heliogabalus said. ‘What goes on in the unconscious is a pointer to another form of reality. I value my dreams more than I do my conscious thoughts. I once had a dream in which I saw myself hatched from an eagle’s egg. I was high up on a mountain ledge, concealed in an eyrie, and the parent bird flew back to me with a purple toga in its claws. I’ll never forget it. The bird was golden and its wingspan huge like the branches of a tree. When I relayed the dream to my tutor, he said it meant I would become caesar.’

He could see that Valentino was slowly starting to relax, despite remaining fractionally on his guard. It was something Heliogobalus had observed in all boys of his profession, an inability to trust. They would only meet you so far before a reaction set in. He had known it so often, the temptation to fall in love with a boy and forget that distinctions were necessary and that emotional involvement was out. It was the awareness of this tacit agreement that helped prevent him from imagining he was in love with Valentino or any other of the countless boys who hung out at the bath-houses and docks.

‘The only dream I remember’, Valentino said, ‘was after my lover Paul died. I saw him standing in the crowd, and when I went over to kiss him he placed a hand over his mouth. I suppose you could call it a sign.’

‘Undoubtedly. It was his way of saying he’d moved on. Not that anybody really dies. They just change address. The priests at Emesa taught me that, and I’ve reason to believe it.’

Heliogabalus watched Valentino settle, now that the conversation had made tracks from its stumbling point. He could see that Valentino was erect, but sex wasn’t on the menu. There was something about this boy which fascinated him, largely, he suspected, because he was the personification of who he could have become under different circumstances. This, as he saw it, was the reason for his attraction to someone whom others viewed as a prescription for ruin. It was also why, in times of crisis, he had the boy over to companion the change. Valentino had, unknowingly, become the
witness to psychological factors which in turn affected affairs of state.

As they spoke, a zigzag fork of lightning spiralled across the skyline, its yellow voltage exploding above the city as an ionized fuse. The lightning was answered by a sizzling downpour rapping the spread fig trees beneath the terrace. He looked out, hoping the rain would cancel Annia’s procession to the palace, but the storm was short-lived and, having announced itself, took off again. He could see the sky was coloured a dusty yellow, like Vesuvius, with here and there blotchy blue-black clouds fingerprinting the horizon.

He called for food to be brought, sensing that Valentino was hungry. A servant came in carrying a platter on which two cold lobsters had been prepared. There were star-shaped seafood canapes spiked with flowers, a salad composed of primary colours and an almond cake for dessert. It was a light assemblage, for time was limited, and he had no intention of having Annia discover Valentino in his rooms. That truth would come later, and she would have to accept it or go back to her father. He was determined to make no compromises other than for the sake of formality on his marriage night. Anyhow, he imagined his reputation had preceded him and that Annia, who was past child-bearing age, would expect little of him sexually.

Valentino stacked his plate with lobster brought from the blue coves of Capri and set to with appetite. Heliogabalus preferred to watch others eat and then to do so himself in private. Instead he drank to cushion himself from the pain he felt over Hierocles’ betrayal. He knew from experience that if you drank enough the alcohol eventually reached the pain. It didn’t stay there long, but it finger-tapped the chemistry sufficient to bring about a change. Of more importance to him was that the moment was starting to register as something significant in his life. He found himself reviewing it like someone looking into the complex nature of time and attempting consciously to slow it down. He wondered if time had a shape like molecular configurations or sub-atomic particles and if the moment could be isolated in its particular form. He would like each distinct nanosecond of his time with Valentino to be transparent and teardrop-shaped like a diamond.