Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  They crossed over the river’s muddy tract, its olive spine branching away to black eddying pockets. Jim loved the sensation of straddling the city on a bridge and took Masako’s arm as they walked across, stopping to watch a passenger ferry make roiling tracks downriver. High-rise slabs interfaced office towers and media emporia on both banks, but it was the river that held his eye, the same polluted one into which Heliogabalus had reputedly been thrown. Jim found himself wondering at what point along the shore the river would have deposited the remains of his body. A leg here, an arm there, an involuted scroll of organs on some lip of the shore? Heliogabalus’ body had been dismembered like Osiris’, and he felt it his duty to find the lost components and restructure them out of the city’s burning grid.

  Caught up in the frantic pace of the Trastevere, they made their way to various landmarks, including the Villa Farnesina, built by Baldassare Peruzzi for the Renaissance banker Agostino Chigi, and stayed a long time there taking in lunettes featuring scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Sebastiano del Piombo and Chigi’s horoscope constellations, frescoed by the building’s architect.

  From there they made their way under a glowering violet sky to the top of the Janiculum Hill and looked out from that high place over the city’s stacked skyline. They found a small cafe in a piazza and sat outside under an umbrella that reminded Jim of a blue-and-white-striped petunia. They were both hungry and settled for generous portions of vegetable lasagne and a bottle of Chianti.

  They talked and ate, and as Jim undid the stitches on his past so Masako followed, unpicking a seam fraction by fraction. He told her that his earliest memories were of the sea and of the rhythm of the tides that had punctuated his childhood days spent in Shore-ham. His had been a lonely upbringing, and something of this had followed him into an equally estranged youth.

  Masako had come from a large family and had three sisters and a brother. Her father, a wealthy Tokyo dentist, had left her mother for a leggy Californian blonde when Masako was ten. While she had continued to enjoy a privileged upbringing and education, the vulnerability she felt at the loss of her father had translated itself into an insecurity that required therapy. She described it as an acute undercurrent, the unsettling sensation of being vulnerable to a fear that was constantly there as a reminder of the grief she felt over her father’s desertion. She called it a father-shaped hole, a drop through which she had dreaded to disappear.

  They began to learn rudimentary things about each other, selecting with care the molecular building-blocks on which relationships are founded. The construction was by its nature tenuous, but Jim could sense a rightness in the process that made confession easy rather than unnerving.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Masako said after they had finished their meal, and they took a bus back to the Ponte Sisto and walked over the bridge with the lights on and the sky smelling of rain. The city was now a digital rainbow of imagery, a modem connecting the collective conscious of its inhabitants to their teeming informational highways. They watched an aircraft lowering on the city, its fins dipping in and out of cloud.

  They bussed back from the other side, with the storm still building. A hollow rumble of thunder earlier had come to nothing, and when they got back Jim threw open the bedroom shutters on the oppressive heat. The city’s roar came up to meet him as an electrifying sound-scape, a medley of signatures dominated by the hot blast of traffic.

  It was steamy indoors, and he noted how, on sitting down, Masako popped the top fastener on her button-fly jeans and lay back exhausted on the sofa. He took a bottle of wine out of the fridge and collected glasses and a corkscrew from the kitchen. As he did so, he had another flash of the image he had come to associate with Heliogabalus. It was so clear this time that he was left without any doubt as to its identity.

  He poured out the chilled wine and heard Masako say, ‘We’ll find Heliogabalus tomorrow. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘I believe you,’ he said, as he looked out at the unshuttered skyline with its film-set architecture, gantries and shape-shifting digital screens. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but I have this hunch we’re narrowing in on his trail. Do you think he’s seen us in the crowd?’

  ‘I’m sure he has. He’s waiting for us to signal our presence. I’ll tell you tomorrow where I think we can find him. I have a street in mind.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Jim asked, thinking for a moment that Masako was losing it.

  ‘Mmm. Of course I am,’ Masako stated, giving him the impression she was busy image-scanning her thoughts. ‘I have an idea and I’m going to commit it to my dreams. When I looked at the streetmap earlier, I was sure I had found the place.’

  ‘I believe you totally,’ Jim said, feeling the wine come up assertively in its lift. ‘I think I’d follow you anywhere.’

  ‘I would see things even as a child. I used to think it was normal, but on the rare occasions when I spoke about it I was told I was being crazy. It’s like a window I look into. I’ve seen a house and a street and I know we’ll find Heliogabalus there.’

  ‘The reincarnated Heliogabalus …’ Jim mused, sucking on the prospect like a sweet. ‘What will he remember, I wonder? Everything or nothing?’

  ‘Fragments. It’s all that any of us remember. The pieces and not the whole.’

  ‘I had no idea that you had access to the psychic world,’ Jim said, amazed at Masako’s ability to insight her thoughts about death with such clarity.

  ‘Mmm. It’s not something I’ve learned, it’s something I know,’ Masako replied, sleep starting to film her eyes.

  Jim sat looking at his glass, making it the only point of focus in the world and looked up as a half-unbuttoned Masako made for the bedroom. The desire in him remained as a powerful reminder of what had taken place during their siesta, but the urgency had been replaced by other preoccupations arising from their talk about Heliogabalus and the dead. He felt marginally dissociated and had the sensation that only a part of him was really there in Rome, while the other part was marooned back in London attempting to make sense of his disrupted life.

  By the time he went into the bedroom and undressed Masako was already asleep. Her discarded jeans looked like two disconnected lengths of piping draped over a chair. She was lying face down beneath the duvet, an open streetmap placed beside her on the pillow. Still doubting the reality of things, Jim slipped into bed quietly and fell asleep to a freeze-framed image of Heliogabalus daring him to follow down a sunlit alley to the muddy, fast-paced river.

  9

  Even as he lay back waiting for Annia Faustina to arrive, he knew he had made a big mistake. While there had been no marriage contract, and he had, in addition, refused to accept a dowry, he had exchanged vows with Annia before returning home alone. His mother and several of his council had been witnesses to the occasion, and he had effectively breached protocol by not attending the festivities that would lead to Annia coming to him later that night.

  His pet leopard, Vesuvius, lay beside him on the couch, the animal’s streamlined musculature uncoiled and flexing in a stretch that placed its forepaws out like two studded fists. He had no fear of a creature that could kill him on impulse but, on the contrary, felt secure in its presence. Most people, excepting his inner circle, backed off at sight of Vesuvius pacing the floor like a contained holocaust of energies, and he had little doubt that Annia would bolt from the room on sight of a leopard pounding across the marble floor.

  Her father, a descendant of Marcus Aurelius, had insisted on the marriage celebrations taking place at his villa, and Annia was to be conducted to the palace by a procession of musicians and torch-bearers.

  Heliogabalus picked at the tondo of baked dormice arranged on a silver plate for his pet and fed the plumpest to Vesuvius, who responded by dispatching the canape with a single incisive bite. He felt no desire at the prospect of Annia coming to him on what was their marriage night, only a sense of obligation in having to pretend to perform the functions of a husband. The situation was addition
ally strained by the fact that Annia’s previous husband had been put to death under Heliogobalus’ government, and he wondered if her motives for marrying him were in part inspired by a morbid attraction to himself as nominal executioner.

  Not that he really cared. His mother had suggested he remarry in the interests of pleasing the Senate, and he had acted on her advice. Annia was not only a widow, but she was middle-aged, conventional by his standards and doubtless little prepared for his unusual lifestyle. That he was prepared to spend all day arranging flowers in his room, disputing with the chef about the exact qualities of porcini mushrooms or deciding with Antony on the merits of a particular blond hair-dye, would, he imagined, exasperate any woman expecting a show of masculinity from her new husband.

  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 tr
ashing 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.’