Threshold of Fire

by Hella S. Haasse

  The leader, Pylades, lying full-length on a camp bed, kicks off his stained, wrinkled stage cloak. “Shut your mouth, trash, idiot good-for-nothing….”

  The dwarf comes rolling up to him as quickly as his costume will permit to pick up the covering and spread it carefully over the actor’s feet. “Why is it that all at once I’m not good enough for you any more? You’re ashamed to appear with me. You don’t need me.”

  “Stop your drivel, I’ve had enough! It’s not normal for them to keep us waiting such a damned long time.”

  “The two of us — Bacchus and Priapus — we have to stay together and do our ventriloquist number — that’s always a success…. What good do they do us — that cheap whore and Balcho, that fat ball of grease, stupid as the hind end of a pig — the only thing he knows how to do is gorge himself. We did so well for each other with our own acts —”

  “Our acts? Everything you do you’ve learned from me. You’re nothing, you don’t know anything, I pulled you out from under the bridges …”

  “I’m not grateful enough to you for that? Don’t I do everything — all you need to do is ask? I’m your doormat, your dog. Now you want to tell me to go to hell?”

  “Don’t whine! You know what I have against you. Don’t meddle with things that don’t concern you. J give the orders here. No one told you that this time we needed an extra one.”

  “But I thought you had the schoolmaster in mind for the goings-on outside in the fresh air, boss. I swear —”

  “You’re lying! I had completely different plans, and you just can’t swallow that. You wanted to get him out of the way. That damned venom of yours could cost us our heads. He’s not a tramp; he’s not an illiterate or a runaway slave or a backward yokel who lets himself be led like a cow to the slaughter. How did you get it in your head —”

  “But we had to bring the altar and the cocks …”

  “That was enough in this case. I had my arrangements.”

  “This fellow got on your nerves — admit it, boss.”

  “I said that he was hard to catch but I’m damned if that isn’t better than sickly jealous toadying. Anyway, I was just beginning to get a hold on him … with him I could have staged something entirely different from these miserable shows where I run a big risk because of your dangerous stubbornness. Now he can get us into deep trouble.”

  “I swear that I haven’t let anything slip. He doesn’t know anything. I haven’t talked to him, I only sent him a message through a third person supposed to come from Marcus Anicius Rufus — it was to lure him into the garden…. If they make him confess the story of the anonymous message, we’re protected and the Prefect will be satisfied. He’ll be able to send all the lords into exile. It won’t be the first time it’s happened like this …”

  “Idiot, you want to make everything too pretty! Don’t you realize what it means to be summoned a second time, to be subjected to a new interrogation — this has never happened before! There’s something behind it. The Prefect is suspicious, he’s interested in this man who apparently hasn’t revealed anything about himself — and he’s given a false name too. And you choose the moment when it’s in our interest to know as little as possible about him — you choose that moment to throw out information about him — to tell where he lives, what he does and exactly what we said to him. Do you imagine that the Prefect will show mercy to informers who don’t understand their business? We’re in for it!”

  “What then? What then, Pylades?” pleads the dwarf, now in tears.

  The giant Balcho steps out of his corner and runs his hand with lightning speed across his throat, accompanying the gesture with a death-rattle. Urbanilla, screaming with laughter, points at the dwarf. She cannot quiet down. From behind the distant gate a soldier of the watch orders them to be silent.

  8.

  Urbanilla, child of the City. She cannot remember her parents. She has always lived in the streets, under the bridges or the arches of the aquaducts, roaming from one district to another with groups of homeless people — mostly freed slaves from the provinces come to seek work in Rome; refugees from bordering territories taken over by barbarians; every kind of beggar. There are hundreds of children like her: cast out, left behind, run away, orphaned. Living among grownups, a skittish, hardened mob — street-wise, quick-fingered, with sharp nails and teeth. Their ranks are always being thinned through sickness and accidents; deformed children are seized at once by beggars; the cleverest and most agile end up sooner or later in groups of thieves or bands of acrobats. Half-grown boys and ripening maidens face other dangers: the slave market, the bordello, the press-gang for sailors.

  Urbanilla knows all the blind alleys and lanes of the Subura quarter, all the hiding places in the hills bordering the city and along the banks of the Tiber. In bad weather she found shelter in sewers, ware-houses, cellars, or in the open air in ditches, behind bushes or in the arcades of forbidden abandoned temples. She stole her food from street stalls, searched through rubbish for scraps.

  She does not know how old she is, nor how she came by her name. She first menstruated at the time the Goths attacked the City. During the famine, she was one of those who knew how to hold their own ground without mercy. Like a rat, a ferret, a fierce, nervous beast of prey, she crawled, crept and climbed to reach her goal, kicking and biting anyone who tried to share her plunder or grab at her. In the chaos that followed the invasion by Alaric’s troops she was separated from her teenaged companions. Whenever she ventured too close to the barbarian camp (looking for food which she believed was plentiful there), she was raped by everyone who could get hold of her.

  After the barbarians departed, she huddled again, now here, now there, with the bands of vagrants — until the day when, in a pit behind the City wall, she gave birth to a child that did not live long because she could neither feed it nor care for it. A beggar woman, an herb-gatherer, helped her end a second and a third pregnancy.

  The ruins were green again; new buildings rose on burned-out patches of land. In her torn shirt, Urbanilla sauntered past the taverns, looking to catch customers; she was not choosy. When the dwarf stopped her and offered money, she had to shriek with laughter at his audacity and the absurdity of the situation, but she went along.

  A man in multicolored clothing, whom the dwarf treated respectfully — he called himself the master mime — promised her a life without worries if she was willing to “perform” with him whenever he wanted her to, in rich people’s villas. For the first time, real shelter — a bed, meals, visits to the public baths. While the dwarf struck a cymbal or plucked a zither, Urbanilla danced the steps her master had taught her. Now, made-up, her hair tinted, curled and carefully coiffed, she played the roles of goddesses and nymphs — of whom she had never heard and whose names she could scarcely remember — before continually changing audiences which were sometimes bored, sometimes drunk, or watching in breathless excitement as the master (Bacchus, Jupiter — all of Olympus) leapt upon her.

  The dwarf hates her and the large fat fellow who acts as aide and bodyguard would be delighted to get his paws on her, but does not dare and won’t get the chance either. For her part, Urbanilla spits on the fat one, is afraid of the dwarf (although she doesn’t let that show) and feels uncomfortable with her employer’s indifferent distaste.

  Who cares anything about how she lives? She’s nobody, a leaf on a tree, a pebble in the riverbed, a creature without rights. Only the here and now exist for her. The street is her domain, the only place where she really feels at home. Restless, inquisitive, quick to react, she becomes one of the crowd, and runs with them whenever there is anything to see, inspects all the merchandise in the stalls without buying anything, takes part in all street scuffles and manages to run away at the right moment, without worrying about the decent clothes she has been wearing since she joined Pylades’s troupe — cape and robe and veil.

  Her face is the face of an alleycat, pale brown, triangular, with wide cheekbones, bright hungry eyes, sm
all pointed teeth. Her body is wiry and voluptuous at the same time; her ribs can be counted, but she has round breasts. In repose, resting nonchalantly on one hip, she reveals the curves of her loins and belly, but she has the arms and legs of a hardened fighter and climber. Even in the garments which befit her new position as actress, she looks slovenly: her black coiffure stringy, kohl smeared on her eyelids. Pylades has forbidden her to solicit and has placed her under the supervision of the publican Apicius. She lives above his cellar and helps in the kitchen on those days when the actor does not need her.

  Urbanilla never thinks about herself or her fate. She knows so little that she does not realize that she has no talent for dancing or acting; she is unconscious of her real power, which is skilfully exploited by Pylades in the mime show: a unique mixture of savagery and perversity — sometimes as spontaneous as a child or as uninhibited as a bacchante, and then again docile as a house pet, languidly willing, a thing which allows itself to be formed and moulded.

  When she can’t be in the streets, she likes to squat in a corner or in an open doorway, listening to sounds from outside, instinctively drawn to the ebb and flow of life in that sea of houses. Even without seeing anything, merely by sniffing the odors or feeling the air move over her skin, she can tell what is happening in the alleys, the time of day, any ordinary or unusual event.

  She cleans her teeth with a toothpick, combs the snarls out of her hair. Sometimes she just sits quietly, her arms crossed, her hands clutching her shoulders. The scent of open fields, blown on the wind from over the Tiber, stirs fleeting memories of the blackened fireplaces under the aqueduct, of the child she buried there, of the begging and whoring on the outskirts of Rome.

  On the day of the entry of the Emperor Honorius (Apicius’s vaulted cellars have been chock-full since sunrise), as she sets about frying the fish, stooping in the little space full of smoke and stink behind the brazier, the dwarf enters — followed by Balcho — to tell her maliciously that Pylades is sitting in the public house with a man whom they have picked up in the street.

  “For you to dance with, little darling, a handsome boy. You’re going to be able to play Eros and Psyche, Venus and Adonis —”

  “Get out, if you don’t want boiling oil in your mug…”

  But as soon as she has ladled the sardines out of the pans, she runs behind them, wiping her palms on her tunic, shaking her head and shoulders to divide her greasy hair into strands, two in front and two behind.

  Opposite Pylades at the table sits a drunken beggar, thin under his rags, staring absently into his beaker. Urbanilla, enraged at this trick, spits and swears at the tramp and flees back to her saucepans.

  Later, with her sharp infallible instinct for scenting trouble, she perceives that the master and the dwarf Homullus don’t see eye to eye; there is a difference of opinion between them which goes deeper than the ordinary squabble. She has known all along that the dwarf’s officious behavior — acting as if he were the master’s deputy and right hand — irritates Pylades. She knows too — she’s not stupid — that there is more involved in the performance than she has been told.

  The performances are regularly interrupted by the vigiles; the players, amid confusion and lamentation, are taken by torchlight to the prefecture. The girl and Balcho usually have to wait only a very short time at the gate before Pylades and the dwarf return from the upstairs room. She doesn’t know what goes on upstairs there; she never asks. She has her suspicions but she doesn’t care about it. For magistrates, officials, patricians, the whole apparatus of the state and all the institutions of authority, she feels only fear and contempt — nothing else.

  There comes a day — not long after the incident in Apicius’s tavern — when Pylades takes her aside and orders her to go and see a certain Pro Se or Ignotus in the Iulia tenement behind the Ten Taverns.

  “A schoolmaster, a starveling, a poor devil of a fellow, but if I’m right, not yet a wholly extinct volcano. Play up to him, you know a handful of love tricks, I’ll leave it to you. The rest is my business.”

  “The disgusting old fellow from the popina?”

  “You could be surprised. Anyway, I haven’t asked for your opinion. You just do as I say. And don’t put on airs. You’ve had plenty of others!”

  Sullen but resigned, Urbanilla goes on her way. She has to wait a long time in a dark corner of the third floor of a tenement house, full of flies, until, toward evening, the tenant comes home. He lights an oil lamp and looks at her over the flame in his hand, in silent annoyance. Urbanilla feels inexplicably overwhelmed by an urge to run away, to scream — not from fear but from a repugnance which goes beyond horror, a longing to change, to cease to exist, to be delivered from something invisible that clings to her.

  In the closeness of that small room, by the flickering light of the little lamp, facing the unknown one whose eyes offer her no assurance about her own reactions, she experiences herself for the first time as an “I”, alone and lost in strange, unfathomable depths. When the man rejects her, she stumbles hastily down the dark staircase to find her way back to the street.

  Pylades shrugs in contempt at her failure.

  “I thought that you could do one thing, at least. I was mistaken.”

  At daybreak Urbanilla plunges once more into the labyrinth of the Subura — not because she wants to repeat the unsuccesful attempt (had she really attempted anything?). She finds, next to the fruit market and not far from the bathhouse, the shed where — barely separated by a torn awning from the street busde — a half dozen youths (in rags for the most part) are gathered under the guidance of the equally ragged ludi magister.

  Urbanilla hangs about, looking on from a distance, moving closer to see better, trying to overhear what is being said. She doesn’t know why she is doing it. In the following days, she repeats the foray, until Pylades orders her to prepare for an approaching performance.

  In the cortege of those who were arrested after the raid on Marcus Anicius Rufus’s villa, she recognizes that man. His presence increases the feeling she has of resentment and malice against Pylades, Homullus and Balcho. Something has gone wrong; she is filled with desperate hope.

  II.

  CLAUDIUS CLAUDIANUS

  1.

  The palanquin in which the Emperor Honorius was sitting had just gone by when somewhere in the crowd behind me, under the pine trees, the cry rose, “Munera, munera! … The games! The games!” For an instant, everyone seemed paralyzed. The endless procession of the Emperor’s officials, in multicolored togas, slowed their pace and then a kind of shudder went through the crowd. I, too, turned insofar as that was possible, stretched my neck, but couldn’t pinpoint any more than anyone else where those cries were coming from. I wouldn’t have believed my ears if I hadn’t been able to read, in the lifted faces about me, that sudden fierce attention, that air of expectancy one recognized from the arena. I was reminded of the sensation which used to overcome me whenever I had to work my way through the waiting crowds near the Circus. Tension, blood lust, the blind craving for diversion — all that gave off an odor more penetrating than the smell of sweat. Once again there was the undercurrent of excitement and desire which swirls and seethes, a phenomenon much more terrifying in a human mob than in nature — at sea, for example, when a storm arises or in the clouded sky just before the first clap of thunder.

  This didn’t last longer than a few moments; then the praetorians formed a cordon to keep the spectators under control. The procession began to move once again. In the distance I saw Honorius — a glistening golden doll bobbing above the heads of his soldiers and bishops.

  It was natural to think that those cries were the work of mischievous youths, or political enemies of the Emperor who were trying to rouse popular feeling against him by reminding everyone that he was responsible for the prohibition of an immensely popular public amusement. But for me, that hoarse cry of “Munera! Munera!” meant something entirely different from a real desire for the resumption of an unsavo
ry and cruel exhibition. The priests who walked before Honorius with their crosses and banners, began to sing again, but where I stood, there still hung in the air an echo of the shriek of protest, of deathly fear — because that was what it was — stifled, as if it were coming from the old place, or from behind the bricked-up doors of the temples. These cries brought me to myself. I became conscious of time and place.

  Fourteen years ago, I had walked behind Honorius over the very same pavement on the way to the Forum for his first ceremonial reception as Emperor in Rome. Then the City, elevated on its seven hills as if it were inviolable, had gleamed with marble and gilt. That was partly illusion. The obelisk, the galleries, the façades of the government buildings and, of course, the churches, were polished and richly decorated for the occasion. But in the temples, the statues of the gods were filthy and covered with cobwebs. I had a place of honor in the procession, where I walked with dignity in an embroidered tunic, in my hand the encased ode, calm, alert as always, self-assured and at the same time impressed because finally the City, the center of the world, had recovered her right to house the Emperor, to be the seat of court and government. I don’t care for Milan with its raw winter wind, I detest Ravenna with its swamps.

  As I walked in this bizarre procession — monks next to courtiers, armed barbarians side by side with senators — under the triumphal arches along the Clivus Capitolinus, to the Forum that lay before us in a glittering dusty haze, I swore a solemn oath to myself that I would never leave Rome again. That was when Fate should have shown me its second face, sent me a sign, a vision of the other entry of Honorius yesterday, fourteen years later: the same route but less well maintained, the same Emperor, but more faded, more nervous; the same temples, but fallen further into decay, boarded-up, overgrown with weeds; the same monuments, but despoiled, in the interim, of their gold and ornaments by the Goths; and I on the sidelines, on a shady slope under the pine trees, in rags, grey-haired, silent and motionless among the dutifully applauding people.