by Nick Tosches
“Born of dirt, son of nothing,” he added.
Surmising that, like most of his countrymen, his Latin was wanting at best, I had spoken to him with words of Greek preceding my name when introducing myself; and it was in Greek—a slovenly and a heavily accented Greek, but Greek nonetheless—that he now said what he did.
It was perhaps his intention to make mockery of the manner in which I had introduced myself, but I felt no insult. I was indeed pleased to have evidence of his own innate gift for words, wry as they were.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I come seeking you.”
Pretense left him. He appeared to be puzzled, in a wary way.
“Tell me,” I said, looking round, then back to him. “Which of these saviors will save you?”
He beheld them, the messianic rabble, with the same mean smile with which he had met my initial gaze. That smile seemed to extend not only to the confusion of expectation and disappointment, impatience and resignation, ranting and yowling, that filled those streets, but to the dusty foul air itself of those streets. Three small, slender shadow-figures, fast and furtive, fled past us.
In answer to my question, he gestured to the dirt in which he had written his name, much of which already had vanished in the wind and the dust.
“Such was my hope,” I said.
He sighed wearily, echoed my words guardedly: “Such was your hope.”
“It can do us no harm to eat, drink, and talk.”
“I no longer play the catamite for money,” he said. “These buttocks lack meat, but they are not for sale.”
“It is not your buttocks I want. It is your soul. And it is not money I speak of, but riches. The sort of riches that would make their sort seem as paupers by comparison.”
I threw a slight nod of my head to the northwest, in the direction of the synagogue courtyard where I had sold my jewels—the direction of the Jew money-lenders and currency-traders.
“A new and vaster kind of temple-wealth,” I said.
Again from him, that weary sigh.
We chose an inn. It had not been his fortune to eat there, he said, but he assured me that I should like it, as it was owned, tended, and frequented by men of Rome. We took a table and benches apart from the others who ate and drank. A few, mostly Roman soldiers, regarded us askance, but with little malice or pronounced disapproval. I could not tell if it was because he was a Jew, or because he was unwashed and disheveled, or both. We were told what was on offer. I took a portion of roasted baby pork, he a plate of deep-sea oysters and garum. Two fresh breads were brought to us, oyster-bread for him, bread of emmer for me, and wine.
“I am forbidden by the Book to eat such things,” he said, gesturing to the oysters.
I looked at him.
“All that have not fins and scales in the seas, they shall be an abomination unto you,” he said in a tone of mock gravity. Then in the tone that was his own: “So commands the Book.”
He savored the oysters and garum, tore off a piece of bread, ate it, washed it down with wine.
“And the swine,” he said, returning to his tone of mock gravity, “though he be cloven-footed, he cheweth not the cud, and thus he is unclean to you.”
I cut off a piece of the charred suckling pig, placed it with my knife on his plate. His eyes closed with pleasure as he ate it.
“It seems to me that your Book denies you much,” I said.
“It denies me nothing. It denies to my people any delight in this world which their God is supposed to have created.”
He told me of a legendary hero of the Book, a man named Job, on whom the one true God, as a sort of game, inflicted all manner of torments, woes, and pains, taking from him everything: his family, his property, his health. But not once did Job raise his voice in protest or anger at this God. For this he is an exemplar, much to be admired and much to be praised.
“That,” said he, “is the one true delight of the Jews under their one true God—to suffer.”
We laughed together, he more meanly than I. He offered me an oyster, which I took, without garum. It was fresh, delicious, pulsing yet with life from the sea.
Eating the rich, warm bread, he told me of a bread of his people, unleavened and bland, called massa, not to be confused with our good barley-bread of similar name. This tasteless bread is to be eaten during their holy spring feast, when no other bread is permitted.
“In the Book, it is called ‘the bread of affliction.’ It is true. The Jew’s delight is to suffer.”
I told him of our Altar of Bad Luck, Mala Fortuna, on the Esquiline, not far from the old necropolis.
Do you know the place? Have you been there yet, to that old disreputable stretch between the old altar and the old necropolis? We caroused there many a night, we boys of the age you are now, roaming amid the cheap wine-shops and the young whores who haunted the dark overgrown grounds of the necropolis in their diaphanous unsashed gowns of salacious mourning, caressed by the summer moon, and by us. One warm night my father caught me about my idle mischief there. After a good stern calling-out and a clap to the side of my head, he laughed and mused aloud how he had gone about the same boyish carousings there more than thirty years past. I tell you, those were good days. There was continuity between generations then, shared passages between father and sons.
“Yes,” I said, more to myself in reminiscence, than to him in conversation, “the Altar of Bad Luck.”
“Here there is no other kind,” he said.
He shook his head as if it were beyond his understanding, all of it.
“Bread of affliction,” he muttered.
“Why do you cultivate a beard?” I asked.
“Because it is the custom of my people. It is believed to be a sign among them that one has renounced vanity.”
“So it is, therefore, an affectation, a vanity of its own?”
“Yes.”
“You speak of ‘my people’ but of ‘them’ and not ‘us.’ Are you not one of ‘them’?”
“In blood, yes. In belief and ways, no.”
“You do not believe, then, in the many-named god, or gods, of your people?”
“I left behind me those fables when I was little more than a child.”
“So why, again, the beard?”
“To appear to be one of the many. To be indistinguishable.”
A very good reason for a petty thief and cutpurse, which I surmised him to be, and which he was.
After chewing intently, he corrected me, saying: “It is not a matter of god or gods. My people believe in only one God, almighty. The plural names of the oldest days, the days of other gods, have been artfully if unconvincingly explained away. He has for very long been held to be one, and one alone, and the one true God.”
“And you do not believe in him?”
“If I believe in anything, it is as the Persians believe: that there is a force for good and a force for evil at play in this world. I do not believe in the Persian gods, but at times, yes, I believe in the forces that they embody.”
“You are an educated man,” I said. “To know of Persia, to know of what Persians believe.”
“I have kept my eyes open, my ears open, in this world. I have learned much beyond what the rabbis teach.” He paused. “We have taken much from what they, the Persians, believe. Much of Persian source is to be found in some of the scriptures of our Book.”
“You know the Book very well, it seems.”
So much was obvious, and I said this only to maneuver the conversation.
“The fables of the Book are like nursery songs that are put early into us. But they are nursery songs that haunt us from the cradle to the tomb.”
“In the Book, there is truly the prophecy and promise of a coming savior?”
“It is written in the Book, in the scripture that is called the book of Isaiah. He speaks much of the wrath of our God, this Isaiah. And he prophesies the coming of a great savior, and he tells of the signs, the deeds and attribut
es, by which this savior will be made known.”
We had, then, in this Isaiah, map and manual for the journey before us. He would be the Vitruvius of our kingdom come. As had been prophesied, so we would fulfill; and the words I would give to the voice of the Messiah would further attest, beyond all refuting, the truth and the grandeur of him.
I laid open my scheme to him. All my thoughts, all that passed through me in the fulminous infinite moment I had experienced, I laid open to him.
As I spoke, words came forth from him as well. Words of ridicule, words of querulous dismissiveness. His declarations grew calmer and less frequent, and were overtaken by questions. These questions were at first cynical and disputatious; then full of doubt and hesitance; then, in the end, complicitous.
He sopped the last of the bread in what was left of the olive oil, and drank the last of the wine. There was but one more question from him:
“So tell me, Gaius et cetera et cetera, son of this one, grandson of that one. How are these hypothetical riches to be divided between us?”
I slowly raised the blade of my knife and just as slowly lowered it vertically to cleave in twain the air between us.
“Straight down the middle.”
Those eyes of his glowed, as if there were no wine in him, and he smiled.
He had no home. In bad weather, he explained, he lodged in brothels. In good weather, the vaulted recesses of the streets offered many a fine enough bedchamber. When he said this, he ran his fingers over the handle of the dagger in the sash of his rough and soiled linen tunic. As he did so, I became conscious of my own dagger, iron and double-edged, that hung in its sheath from my leather belt. Its grip was inlaid with gold and ivory, the golden claw of its pommel clutched a great single sapphire of deepest blue that I had brought back from Ethiopia in the youthful days of my military service. Like my one remaining ring of gold, ruby, and diamonds, and my secret pearls, my dagger would not be sold to any Jew. It would not be sold to any man, and no man would take it from me.
The hour was late. An owl under old eaves across the way seemed to lay claim to this lost little corner of deserted darkness, where there were very few lighted lamps.
We took rooms at the inn where we had eaten. The rooms were small and shabby, but after my long voyage at sea, and compared to his usual sleeping arrangements, they presented themselves as luxurious.
I found in my satchel the perfunctory letter of assignment that I now knew I would never place in the hand of Pilate or his adjutant.
I slept with my wealth beneath the reed-filled mattress-sack on which the weight of my body lay. My tired thoughts, wending their way to dark dreams, were good.
I had nothing to lose. Or so it then seemed.
5
YOU MAY THINK ME A SCOUNDREL, MY DEAR BOY. BUT LOOK into yourself and see, even at your own young age, your thoughts, your shames, your feelings of guilt. Know that all men are scoundrels, but that the honest among them are few. Never trust a man who claims to be pure in his thoughts or pure in his motives. To yourself at least, be honest and not a liar, and never a believer of your own lies any more than the lies of others.
The gods are imagined things, and all of them are false. Cupidity is real. I should rather be accused of fraud than of faith.
I want you to understand these things. I want you to feel the understanding of them in the marrow of your being.
Keep with you always the apothegms of the Seven Sages. Above all, the words of Bias: “Most men are bad.” And the words, too, of Thales: “Know thyself.” And of Pittacus: “Know thine opportunity.” Few have gone wrong under the guidance of the Seven Sages.
To seek wisdom is to pursue the greatest thing that a man can possess. To attain it is to achieve his greatest glory. To ignore it is to commit the greatest sin against himself and the fast-extinguished life he has been given.
Wisdom is like a snake that moves unseen in the grasses where we stand. Many men go their lives without even glimpsing it, and others, glimpsing it, flee from it. I speak not of the common little tamed snakes that are kept as pets in homes to catch vermin, nor of the common little tamed snakes that crawl openly in the places of the sick and in the temples of oracles. These and the snake of wisdom are not one. Tiberius kept a snake, of which he was quite fond. I was told, after I left the court, that he one day found it dead and much consumed by rats and ants. Yet Tiberius possessed no wisdom. His mind was in the same state as that of his dear snake, dead and much consumed by creatures that feed on the dead.
The snake that is wisdom, rarely seen, and from which many men flee, is no common tamed thing. It is more a horned viper. The snake that winds round the rough-hewn staff of Asclepius, the two snakes that wind round the winged herald’s staff of Hermes, our Mercury. The serpent round the spear-headed staff of Minerva, our embodiment of wisdom, our Sophia, or the serpent at her feet. These are representations of the viper of wisdom. In the case of the entwined snakes of the caduceus of Mercury, one indiscernible from the other to our eyes, the one snake is the serpent of ignorance, the other is the viper of wisdom. So alike they appear, so different they are.
Men saw Hermes as the god of thieves and trickery. Men see Mercury as the protector of thieves.
Regard well the caduceus. Listen well to what moves in the grasses near you. Fear not the viper, for what is deadly venom to the fool is nectar to him who would know wisdom.
And I? Be I wise man or fool? I do not know. But I do know that these are the words of a man too old to lie. Death is no longer the supreme terror. The supreme terror is being taken by death with a lie on one’s lips.
6
THE SKIES WERE KIND TO JESUS AND ME AS WE JOURNEYED. Storms were few. What little rain there was, refreshed. The late summer winds were pleasant. We moved easily, slept well. The early mornings brought us balm-dew.
I remember the breezes and the butterflies and the birds, the stars and the fire-flies and the glow-worms. I tend not to recall as vividly the mosquitoes and the ticks and the scorpions and darting adders. Such is memory. Such are its ways.
As we traveled, he told me of things that were in the Book. At night, in silence, by our fire kindled with tinder scrub, flint, and pyrite, I composed the plain-sounding but carefully crafted words that would be his sermons, his teachings, his wisdom and his forewisdoms, his seeings and his foreseeings.
From the Way of the Philistines, the ancient trade route between Cairo and Damascus, we crossed the Sharon plain on the highway that led from Caesarea, past Narbata, to Gitta. There we took the southeastern road, which in time brought us to Sebaste.
When we reached the fork of the road at Sebaste, we veered to the left, which took us south on the Beth El-Shechem highway through the fertile valley east of Mount Gerizim. The way was lush with trees.
Just beyond the city of Shechem, we found springs of cool delicious water that issued from the rock of Gerizim.
Above one of the springs, there was a tree that grew out sideways from a crevice in the crag. The tree curved upward from years of seeking the sun. Beneath it, in a recess of smooth stone, there was a deep pool. We lingered there, and as we did so, it occurred to me to seize the opportunity to introduce him to cleanliness.
He demurred at first, but I would have none of it.
“It is good for a holy man to have about him the look of the ascetic, the humble, the scorner of worldly comfort. Yes, that is good. But no one wants a savior who stinks of his own shit.”
Removing my clothes, I told him to do the same. Lowering myself into the water, my garments in hand, I told him to do the same. Rubbing my wet garments against the stone, then swirling them about in the water, I told him to do the same. Laying them out on dry risings of stone at the pool’s edge, I had him do the same. Scrubbing all over my body, face, and hair with my hands, I had him do the same. There was a spreading film of scum in the water round him, and a millipede as well, though I was not sure that this slithering louse had not emerged from the elements rather than from h
im. I bent my knees and immersed my head beneath the water, then rose, splashed about a bit, and climbed out into the sunlight. He did the same.
After that baptizing plunge, we rarely came to a stream without his stopping to free the sash from his tunic and bathe. He became something of a dandy in this way.
He had not the usual coarse wiry hair common to the Jews of the region. His skin, too, was more fair. Indeed, looking at him, you might think that his true father were other than the man he believed to be his father. I bought him a wooden comb, and he took to combing locks and beard alike as he came forth from his ablutions. He cursed sharply to comb from his hair some scorpions of small size. He began to follow my example of breaking off sapling twigs, chewing their ends to pulp, and brushing my gums, teeth, and tongue with them. Going further, he gathered the leaves from mint and hyssop plants whenever he found them, and chewed them long and ate them, until there was an ethereal air in his breath and speech.
I told him of the finest and most lavish baths of Rome, built on natural hot springs. I told him of their tranquil cultivated gardens of exotic foliages, their dining-rooms of savory delicacies. I told him of their steaming heated rooms to bring forth purifying sweat, whereafter awaited cold pools to close the pores and invigorate the blood humor. I told him of the scrubbing-stones of tufa, of pumice, and of the sea-sponges. I told him of the scented balms, rare ointments, volcanic muds. I told him of the massagings of the bath physicians, the painstaking ministrations of the depilators with their razors and tweezers. I told him of the various specialized skills of the depilators.
“Ones to remove the unsightly hair that grew from nostrils and ears. Even ones to tend to the hair of the anus.”
He looked at me, unsure as to whether I had made this last statement in jest.
“Yes,” I assured him. “Depilatio podicis. The depilatory grooming of the asshole.”
“I should like very much to visit such a place,” he said.
“You will,” I told him. “Our way is long, but it leads to Rome. The wealthiest of Romans have all the facilities and attendants of the most luxurious baths under the roofs of their estates. So will you. You will witness the building of your own temple in Rome, and the building too of your own private villa. Then you can bathe away your life in luxury and leisure. Your riches will be such. As will mine.”
