The Far Arena (66 page)
Under a glass case were a slave's bones encased in concrete. The volcano had come down upon everyone, covering all with dust. The flesh decomposed, but the form was recreated by injecting mortar into the spaces left by the disappeared flesh. It was a rough likeness. The slave - I could tell he was one by his belt -was about my size. I did not recognize him.
Looking down with me at this slave was Domitian. I could not believe it! That fat face, the handsome nose, the strong eyes, the weak mouth. Except of course it was not Domitian. For this man, while his face was pure Domitian, had a body as gigantic as Olava's. And then I knew it was very possible that Domitian's seed - not a hoarded commodity - had like other seeds gone on and on. Like the apple I had eaten in the car when my friend Lewus found me. Seeds in the apple. From all came seeds. Whoever was here now had ancestors who had lived once in my time. Each seed dying, yet it survived by being born again. Better than rock did it survive.
The man became upset at my staring and Olava explained. I could tell he was threatening even as he left, and I smiled most politely even though, if he should assault us, I could decorate these remnants of baths with his insides.
We went into a house said to be owned by the Vetti. I told Olava I honestly didn't remember. One room here had wall paintings of sexual acts, and most people walked out of it with grins. The house, although smaller, reminded me of my own peristilium and it was good to stand for a moment at the central garden and remember, although the smells were gone, and no longer did one smell human waste about.
I
tried to find the house of Messalus. He had had a daughter who was promiscuous, and there was a race to get her with husband before she was with child. They married her to a drooling boy barely eleven.
'How did it end?' asked Olava, as we passed the cold ovens of the baker's, large cones and tables and the grinding stone for once living wheat, now cold and useless. It was a good oven.
'How did it end?' she asked again.
'What end?'
'The daughter of Messalus and the drooling boy?'
'Like they all end, Olava. They end. The hot passion and the drowning avalanche of love, the daily caress and the screaming hate, the quiet boredom and the sufferance of another body. They end. Emperor's throne and slave's belt. They end. Like the legions and the flowers. Like even the stone some day. It ended. That is the end of all things. Words, too.'
And as we walked I talked of this house that had ended and that house, and this merchant and that one whom I had never known, and he had ended without my knowledge as he had begun. No, I did not know the poets and the historians, but they ended the same. The slave merchants and the lanistae, whom I did know, ended. Like Peter ended and Domitian ended, and Petronius ended and Miriamne, and like Olava would, untouched by hand of man, as the very same prostitutes down the street ended, and the vestal virgins ended, and I would end.
We walked all day throu
gh the little city. Finally, we
passed the gladiators' school; now we entered the arena. I took her to the very best seat at the closest edge, although all the seats were good here, most now covered well with the grass and the sand of centuries and centuries, just the bare stone unadorned by marble.
Still the form of this arena, old when I was here last, had held the original tight design. A gladiator's arena if ever there was one. It had lasted.
For me.
It was both right and fitting, in a world most unfitting. My age and city gone without a game or song to mark its passing, now I was here to give it its farewell.
With my hand, made great by them, known by them, and now forgotten partly through maiestas and the senate's decree, but most of all by their leaving with their memories and respect for me, I, Lucius Aurelius Eugeni anus, took blade in hand and, saluting the shades of their passing, raised blade to the sun-filled sky.
'For the eternal glory of the senate and the people of Rome, I now commit my flesh. Father and mother both, I honour you,
I
honour all of us.'
With blade in front of me, high and obvious to every seat, although only one was filled, I leaped from the little wall above the cinder and grass and gravel that had once held sand. As I dove down, the blade went handle forward to hit the ground first, the point directed at my chest.
I had always wanted to enter an arena like this but never found the situation quite right, because in later years when I controlled things I never worked in a small arena, and this entrance required a closeness of the audience.
I caught the upcoming point between my left arm and left side, and rolled over it. The beauty here being that the crowd could have seen the blade appear to come up through my back. Obviously it worked perfectly.
Olava screamed.
born Marit Vik;
daughter of Per Vik, physician,
and Kirsten Rud Vik, teacher;
member of the order of Saint Dominic;
graduate of Norwegian schools;
scholar at Oxford;
legal owner of no property on earth;
lover of the Creator of all things and
professed daughter of same,
shrieked as she saw her friend dive into the arena from the little retaining wall. The knife point came out of his back, and he rolled forward, and there was no blood. It was a theatrical trick, and it had worked.
In this empty stone arena, she had witnessed a perfect entrance. She called down to him that he should not have frightened her this way, and he did not answer her. Eugeni was performing for this little arena of ghosts. He slowly ran around the edge, his arms above his head as though giving himself to the games, as a witness they had begun.
And Olava knew these were the last games to mark the passing of the civilization he knew, not that it had disappeared without its strong echoes living still. Rather his friends and his enemies were gone, and most of what they believed was gone. And the great structures were but worn markers of what had been, like tombstones in a world they had once ruled.
Eugeni hopped easily from arena floor to wall. He was a tumbler, also. His feet made crunching sounds on the Vesuvian cinder that had replaced the white sand.
He stopped and saluted her, as though she were the emperor or local magistrate, whoever was the honoured personage at the games. He announced whom he would fight, this to be a succession of foes. And he paused and walked over close to her, the blade at his side. He explained, as he would to a friend, how the arena could be cut off, and where he wanted to be all the time during the match, and how this really was the best size for a long match, because here everyone could see everything and appreciate it. And then he told her something that put tears suddenly into the rims of her eyes, and she was glad they were so sudden he did not see them, because he was walking back to face an imagined retiarius with tridens and net.
He had said he was the best ever and that Olava should not worry. And then he told her what had made her cry, suddenly. He was glad he had a friend to see his last performance, and by that he meant that he had a friend. The tears were wiped away by the time he gracefully turned to salute her again, and then commanded that she should pay attention, because this was what was important in Rome, the likes of Virgil or Peter probably not even being able to fill this arena and certainly not to cause as much passion.
In the midst of defeating the imagined retiarius, with moves that seemed either overdrawn or very jerky, but which Olava knew too well were deadly, Eugeni stopped, tripped, and lost the blade. But the blade stuck upright, which showed he had not lost it at all. He got it back immediately.
From inside this arena where she sat, she could not see the surrounding modern town. The air was clean, and the seat was hard stone, and Eugeni's moves made a rhythmic shuffling sound coming to her from the arena floor so close.
She understood now what made a language dead and what made it live. It was not great thoughts, but the little things that made languages live, asking for directions or to pass the salt or how one felt that morning. That was what made a language live, and all the Virgil and Church edicts and precision of its structure could not add one breath of life as meaningful as when a person said;
‘
Not that door, use another
...
No, I don't want salt
...
Where did you put the shirt?
...
What did you say?
...
How many of these do you want?
...
I don't understand.'
Words lasted with great ideas, but languages did not. And in that, Olava had known she had done the right thing, and she was at peace with her God. This was the journey He wanted for her. It was her way of going home to Him, and she hoped she could bring her friend Eugeni with her. She would teach him about a living God as friend. She would also teach him of his poets whom he ignored when they were fresh. She would teach him living languages.
And she would take copious notes, releasing them at a better time. She would protect him from the world as much as the world from him, for being that great showman of Rome, he could do more damage to historical study, once sensing a profit, than all the revisionist historians who ever rewrote an old fact to fit a new trend.
She shuddered to think what he would do with some village priest. Probably sell the poor old thing pieces of the True Cross. Olava could, without stretching the imagination much, see Eugeni setting up a very profitable factory manufacturing pieces of the True Cross or medals blessed by Saint Peter himself.
Or in Moscow, Eugeni would have personally told of little communes or sworn before audience after audience that while slavery was bad, freedmen working for wages was even worse, and in socialism he personally had discovered what all men yearned for.
She was made and trained for this match with her friend Eugeni, this journey. This knowledge was what had brought peace to her back in Rome.
'Olava!' Eugeni called from the arena floor. 'Olava!' He wanted her to pay attention.
This was a perfect gladiator's arena, he said again. Did she notice how everything could be seen ?
She did, she said, and it was so. She felt right on top of him, at the first row of seats ringing the arena floor that crunched with ashes left from the disaster that had preserved it.
She saw how the arena could be cut into four parts, and how one could dominate by controlling the centre, how a match could take a long time, and how it could be short. She could see the quarters now, as Eugeni explained how he had the centre and would not let the imaginary retiarius with net and tridens move out of the quarter, but would keep him in that wedge. It meant something now.
She understood now why a giant arena like the one at the Vatican was so bad for a single gladiator. Who could see the moves? Even the Flavian arena would not let you see how important each move was.
She wanted to yell out to him that she understood now, but there were so many Latin words for 'understand', each with a precise different meaning, from acceptance to comprehension in one manner or another.
He stumbled, but it was a practiced stumble. He showed how letting an arm dangle made him look wounded and explained that if he rubbed blood on it, she would swear he was damaged in that arm. She saw how blood could be used.
She now fully understood how, while he wanted to keep all this out of his private home, he could still take pride in his skill.
And she knew now, too, why he would not surrender the knife. It was not to kill anyone. It was the one thing he knew, had trained to know since he was eight. That was why he slept with it.
He would not kill randomly in the society with it any more than she would start a fire with a great manuscript. To use his blade against a person because he didn't like him would be murder. Yes, he would save his life. He would save the lives of others, But would not desecrate his sword.
His lanista was the first man to give Eugeni love and care, as brutal as it was. In return, Eugeni had given him
the
Eugeni, both dead and alive.
Dead because his audience was dead. Alive because he was alive.
He told her she was now a vestal, although the vestals did not come to Pompeii, if he remembered correctly. He finally trampled over the retiarius and waited for her.
But she would not signal for death, that thrust of the hand into the chest calling for dispatch.
And in that tongue that was now so natural to her, she said:
'I want him to live.'
'He lost. He dies.'
'Not if he's valiant.'
'He's wounded anyhow. It's kinder.'
'No.'
'Do it.'
'I am the virgin, not you, Eugeni. Not you.' He started to explain how she was supposed to follow the will of the crowd.
'Look out,' she screamed. And she had never seen anyone move so quickly. The knife snapped in a slash behind him, as his body turned simultaneously around it. He had turned around a blade! There he was explaining something, and then he was ready to right instantly. How many practised years had gone into that perfect move?
She dared not count.
But she smiled. She was now even for her fright.
His thrust, blade very straight, downward as though killing someone, was clear. It was like a very fast poke. The ideal stroke was the straightest. He probably didn't even remember when he had learned it.
And she realized from athletics in her own youth that this man had perfected delivering that simple stroke so that there was no grand preparation; rather the blade was just there where he wanted it in an instant. When he did do something grand, it was only deception for the crowds - the bigger the crowd, the bigger the deception. His real power was subtle beyond her amateur perception, she thought.
'Roman,' Olava screamed, orating to the little empty stone arena in this beautiful language, 'I want your liver, puny weakling.
In
my right hand, a whole tree ripped from a northern forest and seasoned rich in Roman blood. In my left, a shield seized from a legionnaire whose eyes 1 sucked like grapes. First you I devour, then these ugly little Romans now in the stands waiting like the slaves they really are.'
And with that she swung an imaginary club above her head and lowered herself into the arena.
'Only your body is giant,' yelled back Eugeni. "The spirit of Rome and the virtue of the sons and fathers and husbands of these good people of Pompeii shall give me the strength
1
need, though I am wounded and small. For their virtue is now coursing through my body.'
They have no virtue. They are cowards. Black-haired cowards.'
'I will show you their cowardice,' he yelled back, the conversation loud for the imaginary audience.
And so they did mock battle, Olava claiming that she had scored several victories with her club, knowing of course that if there were a real club she would not have touched him. Eugeni would not play that he had been struck fatally.
'I cannot do that, Olava, just as you could not playfully signal for another's death.'
She was panting heavily from the running, and Eugeni told her this was but a fraction of the tiredness she would feel if she were in a real arena, fear draining the body like a wound.
It was quiet, and from the arena floor they could see only the clouds and reddish evening sky above them without an intruding airplane in it.
They were in Pompeii on this fine spring evening, and the land was good, and the air and sky comforting, as it was in this part of the world at this time of the year - today as it was two thousand years before.
'I understand,' he said.
'What do you understand?' she asked.
"That I have been here, really here. So long ago. Once so long ago, now here, and now here.'
'Yes,' said Olava, and the term he had used for 'understand' was the one a person used to accept 'what was'.
She had completed her pact with Lewus and Semyonus. It was done.
They heard something in one of the stone tunnels coming into the arena from outside. A guard in a blue uniform, one of the many assigned by the tourist agency to this site, came to the edge of the retaining wall. He signalled they should follow.
They had to go, he said. The city was closing for the night, and everyone else had left.