The Dream of Scipio

by Iain Pears

  Bronsen had turned to politics now. He had that morning been at a meeting at the finance ministry and two days previously had met the new Italian leader for the first time.

  “What did you think?”

  Bronsen paused, enjoying himself. Julien had learned that there was no point expecting an even conversation on such topics; Bronsen believed firmly that the person who knew most should dominate. To give him credit, he deferred to Julien on the subject of ruins and paintings, but would brook no interruption on more worldly topics. It made conversations with him sometimes a bit like miniature lectures. “I was impressed,” he said. “Truly I was. He looks like a bit of a fool, but clearly isn’t. He knows what he’s doing and what he expects everyone else to know as well. That clarity is refreshing. It makes a change from the normal squabbling and bickering. Decisions get taken and acted upon. You don’t know how rare that is. God knows this country needs it. France could do with some of the same, I fear. Someone like Mussolini would make mincemeat of the corrupt incompetents we manage to put into power.”

  Julien shrugged and looked away. “Politics bores you?” Bronsen said.

  Julien smiled. “It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven’t tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  “Me? In particular?”

  “Yes.”

  “My contribution is to go into the archives and read old manuscripts. To collect paintings—one of which I would like to show you later on to get your opinion—and try to communicate the importance of such things to other people. To persuade people that politics is the waste product of the ferment of civilization, unavoidable but dangerous if not properly contained. To be a teacher, in fact, which is probably what I will end up doing when I go back to France.”

  “That’ll frighten them, no doubt,” Bronsen said with a smile.

  “I mean it,” he said, trying to cover his earnestness with a worldly smile. “Civilization needs to be nurtured, cosseted, and protected from those who would damage it, like politicians. It needs constant attention. Once people stop caring, it withers and dies.”

  “So? The world burns and you sit in a library?”

  “The world did burn,” Julien replied. “I was at the cremation. And it would have been better if I had stayed in a library. One person, at least, would be alive now who is dead, because I wouldn’t have been there to bayonet him.”

  Bronsen grunted. “I admire your clarity—though not the experiences which brought it to you. My horizons are bounded by making money, because it is something I know and am good at. I become thereby something of a caricature, which distresses me, but not enough to deter me. I am all too aware that a Jew without money is even more vulnerable than a Jew with money. Not that any of this is so very interesting. I would much rather hear what shape your defense of civilization is taking these days. So tell me. What news from the archives?”

  “I thought I had,” Julien replied. “But he had just dropped into the conversation the little detail about your getting married. I don’t think I was quite so keen to gratify his vanity after that. I did give him a chance to tell me, though. At least, I gave enough hints.”

  She laughed. “Oh, dear. Did you never notice that he didn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘hint’? That subtlety was not part of his makeup?”

  “I thought it would be rude to ask.”

  “And he thought it was rude that you didn’t. Therein lies a lesson for us all.”

  “Is this a characteristic you’ve inherited?”

  She considered. “I am, perhaps, a little bit more civilized than he is. But only up to a point. You may, perhaps, have realized that now.”

  No such possibility even arose with Ceccani and Olivier de Noyen, although each had a genuine though ill-defined affection for the other. There the distance was much too great. It was impossible for a man such as the cardinal to have friends; there was no one with whom he could share. He was bound by the strictness of his relations; disparities of power were evident in all his dealings with his fellow men. Popes and kings required deference and respect, which shrivels friendship like vinegar on the oysters he loved so much he stopped eating them. His fellow cardinals were also his rivals, requiring constant watching. Others were his clients and his servants, and the rest of humanity simply did not exist.

  Similarly, the gap between Manlius and Syagrius was too great, because Manlius regarded his secretary as a son, and no true friendship can exist between fathers and sons. Indeed, in the Dream, he excluded such relationships specifically from consideration when he touched on the subject of love. There duty took pride of place as the great motor; children fulfilled their fathers’ wishes, ensured that their names and fame continued. There was no room in such a vision for anything more tender. It was because of this that his treatment of the young man was also so harsh and distant, for Syagrius was his opportunity and his reproach.

  Manlius had no children of his own, and it is possible that this lack determined many of his actions and decisions. For the twilight of the culture he held so dear was paralleled by the extinction he himself faced. The Christianity he affected, and which others of his age adopted with greater conviction, had no power to conquer such fears. When his name ended, there would be no one to take offerings to his grave, hold an annual feast in his honor, give him the eternity he craved and which he did not believe his new religion would confer.

  The night his wife miscarried for the fourth time all his training as an aristocrat and a philosopher left him. He went to the cemetery and poured oil on the grave of his father. It was the only way he could apologize for his failure and the looming end of his entire line. When he slept, he saw the tombs crumbled on the ground, the low-born taking them to build their barns, the weeds growing all around.

  He accepted his fate nonetheless. He did not divorce her, although he could easily have done so and few would have blamed him. Even she would not have minded so much, coming from a family that knew the importance of continuity. She would have gone to a woman’s house to pray, and been happy. But he kept her with him, made plans to adopt Syagrius, and soon afterward turned back to public life.

  He knew that Syagrius would carry on his name only; nothing of true value, for the boy was kindhearted but utterly stupid, dull in conversation and simple in thought. He never read and, in all the time he stayed in Manlius’s villa, never said a single word of any interest; nothing beyond the commonplace ever dropped from his lips. No cliché, no imbecility was too hackneyed for him, it seemed; the most trite remark would cause him to nod his fair head in agreement, any phrase of elegance or profundity would elicit only puzzlement. He tried hard, certainly, was keen to please, was liked by Manlius’s wife, had many merits. But Manlius could not but compare him to what his heir should have been, and the difference made him curt, and unjustifiably rude. Syagrius put up with it; indeed, he had little choice and still got the better part of the bargain. For in return for earning Manlius’s disappointment, he got his name, and would in time have his estates as well. He had been lucky; had Manlius waited a few years until his character was more formed, he would not have chosen him, but he had been misled by his flaxen hair and open smile into thinking that a beautiful face must indicate a refined and noble soul. This was Manlius’s mistake, for the boy was kind and honest and tried to please. But he was part of a different world, and could see nothing of value in the refinement and cultivation that lay at the core of Manlius’s being.

  When Manlius turned back to public life, it was not with total enthusiasm, for he was also mindful of other aspects of Sophia’s teaching, which appealed to him on a more profound level. Her eternity was different, a search for completion with
out ever knowing the goal until it was attained. She taught by parable and by discussion, as her father had before her, using the simplest of forms to begin the task of approaching the most complex ideas. One of her favorite techniques was to examine the myths, to discuss them and dissect them through the lens of philosophy to seek out the truths that lay therein. One day, Manlius found himself talking of Hélène, who fell in love with Paris because the Trojan shepherd had won a promise from Aphrodite. It was a matter of moments for Sophia to dismiss the story as nonsense, of course; the divine does not intervene in the life of men in such a way, either by entering beauty contests or, she said with a smile, by parting the seas or turning water to wine.

  “But can we see anything more here? As we have concluded that the higher does not intervene with the lower, does this mean the story is foolish and without merit? I remind you that literature is full of such tales. Why do Dido and Aeneas fall in love, an event which Vergil also attributes to the gods? Why does Ariadne betray everyone she holds dear for love of Theseus?”

  “I have read,” Manlius said, “that it is sickness, a disease of the blood. Is that not what Hippocrates wrote?”

  She nodded. “But why do we contract this illness? The way the lover is drawn to the beloved, suffering sleeplessness, sweating, a loss of reason, an overwhelming desire to be united with the other person that can cast all normal behavior aside? An illness, I grant you. But we must go further. Why a particular person? Why this person and no other? Why only one person at a time? I have heard of many strangenesses in man’s behavior, but I have never heard of lovesickness for two people at once.”

  And she went on from there, weaving in the speech of Aristophanes in the Symposium, in which he says that men were once spheres but were cut in two by the gods to punish them. Thereafter, they must search for their other halves, and can never rest until they are reunited. And the myth of Er in the Republic, in which men must be reborn time and again until their souls learn to ascend to the heavens and escape the prison of the body. Again not to be taken literally, of course—nothing she said was literal—but a metaphor for the quest that the soul must be engaged upon if it is to embrace the transcendent. In its dissolution lay the immortality Sophia had to offer, and which Manlius chose to pursue through his deed.

  Manlius avoided so long his public duties because he was afraid of how he would discharge them. His father had known he had enemies, but did nothing until it was too late; he was killed by those he was trying to save. Manlius knew that he would not make such a mistake. He would then be faced with a decision, and a conundrum: Can one act unjustly to achieve justice? Can virtue manifest itself through the exercise of harshness? He did not know how he would answer these questions. All he knew was that his father had answered wrongly and paid heavily. Whatever virtue he had possessed was dissipated in failure.

  She had told Julien she was potentially a good painter, and her self-confidence was not misplaced. By the late 1930s she was beginning to be known as such, although her reputation was still small. She had, it is true, studied in Paris at the Académie Colorassi—the Mediterranean cruise with her father was to mark the end of this part of her apprenticeship, and the beginning of the period in which she truly began to learn to be a painter—then was an early student of Matisse, a man she admired and who even attracted the approval of her father. After this she went her own way; she did not follow the necessary route to fame, was disdainful of the associations and connections that artists must have to make their mark.

  Someone once said that being wealthy had been her ruin as an artist, and in her heart she agreed. Not because it had stunted her vision, or affected what she painted, but because she could afford to ignore the dealers and the critics who make artists great. She paid little attention to them; they returned the compliment. Had she worked at it a little harder, the posthumous reputation that began to form in the 1960s around her surviving work would have crystallized earlier.

  She worked obsessively, and generally in solitude. It was a life she had chosen at some cost to herself, for no husband could fit into such a schedule for long; there was not enough room. The marriage that so distressed Julien when he heard of it was a foolish mistake, partly a desire to escape the overpowering presence of her father, and partly a desire, for once in her life, to do the expected, to be like everyone else. Jacques Menton was, as her father told Julien, a diplomat with a great future in front of him. A good family, not too high, not too low. A man of intelligence, kindness, and even some wit. A Protestant originally from Alsace, with more than a bit of German in him. Not wholly French, as she was not, but in his case the sense of not quite belonging made him more conventional, straining constantly to be and appear perfect.

  But he loved her, in a diplomatic, cautious fashion, and she believed for a while that she responded. She felt a wish to belong, and he could show her how to do so; curiously her father said nothing against the match even though he found Jacques’s company tiresome and never for a moment believed it was based on any great love. Julien saw this and later remarked on it in a letter to her. “Of course he was unsuitable as a husband,” he said loftily from his desk in Avignon. “Your father didn’t mind him. You must make it a rule in the future never to fall in love with anyone unless Claude Bronsen detests him. The more he detests him, the more suitable he will be. If you are not prepared to meet your admirable father’s jealousy head-on, then you will have to wait until he is dead. He is a healthy man, your father. Good for many years yet. You’d better get on with your painting, I think.”

  His instincts were right, for while her husband indulged her painting, and judged it a fine thing to have an accomplished wife, she thought that he understood why she painted, and mistook his indulgence for something more profound, his silence on the subject for an instinctive understanding.

  “I’m not going to stop painting. It’s my job. It’s what I do.” This astonished comment replying to a casual remark he dropped into a conversation after they had been married for some six months, during which his disappointment grew that she had not changed her way of life one jot since their wedding. He had pointed out—perfectly correctly—that she did not have time to paint ten hours a day and fulfill her role as hostess at the parties he needed to give in order to rise in the diplomatic service. Let alone fit in children, which he wanted quite desperately.

  It was his light laugh that killed the marriage, stripping away all the make-believe. One slightly high-pitched whinny from his mouth, half choked off in the way he had learned, imbued with a cynical tone, lasting only half a second. He mistook her passion for an amusement, and her deep concentration for empty-headed vacuousness. Worst of all, he had no idea how good she was. That was something she would not tolerate.

  Perhaps she was wrong in her reaction; she never discounted the possibility. From a diplomatic point of view—her husband’s point of view, indeed—the unrestrained rage she let loose was unforeseeable, excessive, even a little coarse. But there was no forced melodrama, no striving for effect in the way her hands trembled and her voice shook as she tried to explain—to someone who could no more understand than a deaf man could understand Bach—why she did what she did, and why it was important.

  “Why are you people always so hysterical?”

  Centuries, if not millennia, were squeezed, dessicated, and distilled into that one offhand comment made merely to fend off her anger; the implications could write, and had written, many books. The words themselves, the tone of contempt, the mingling of distaste with a slight fear. All these could have been unraveled at enormous length. But there was no need to; Julia needed no interpretation and could see by the alarm in his eyes that he needed none either. He knew what he had said.

  She never talked to him again; there was no point. Nor did she ever divorce; there seemed little point in going through such a complicated ordeal, and for her husband’s career even an invisible wife was better than none at all. He had been, and remained, a decent, honest, simple soul; lo
ving in his way, and once the anger passed she could see his many fine qualities. But she had also glimpsed a darkness that, although she could forgive, she never wanted to be close to. Still, she had no desire to harm him. She was not vengeful and eventually felt somewhat apologetic. The fact that her rage had faded so swiftly convinced her she had never loved him in the first place; the whole messy business was her fault.

  By the time she told Julien, she could even laugh about it. He had been her confessor during this period, as she reopened the correspondence with him shortly after her wedding, ostensibly to explain why he had not been invited. She wrote him letter after letter justifying what she was doing, and he replied, sometimes consoling her with idle anecdote, sometimes giving reassurance, sometimes criticism. It was, Julia realized, the worst form of betrayal, an adultery of the mind and of the emotions, and the pleasure she gained from his letters was one of the main reasons that she ultimately decided to walk out.

  “You spend too much time trying to find a reason for things,” he said gently in one letter. “I suffer from the same fault myself, so I know what I’m talking about here. Listen to an expert. You want to run away. You have made a mistake. And that is the end of the matter. After all, no one around you will ever manage to be happy while you are not.”

  “Do you know why I’m a painter?” she said when they met a few months after she had finally packed her bags and moved into an apartment. “Do you know why I cover myself in brightly colored oil like some ancient Pict? It’s my sign. It’s so that people know immediately that I belong to nothing and don’t waste their time trying on me. My mother was as Jewish as can be, my father has cast all that off and regards religion as superstition and tradition as cowardice. So I am nothing. Thanks to him even the outcasts cast me out. So I have to do it all myself.”

  “Do what?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know. If I did, I’d probably know what I was looking for. And I wouldn’t have troubled poor Jacques by marrying him.”