The Last Cato

by Matilde Asensi

  I was speechless with shock and horror and lowered my eyes to the table.

  “I’m so sorry…,” I managed to stammer with difficulty.

  “Well they… they are no longer suffering. My father is now the one suffering. He’ll never get over it. Yesterday when I called him, he begged me not to return home to Alexandria; he begged me to stay here in Rome.”

  I didn’t know what to say. In light of such unfortunate events, what are the right words to say?

  “I liked my job. But if I’ve lost it, as I most likely have, I will start over. I can do so in Italy, as my father wishes, far from danger. In fact, I also happen to be an Italian citizen. On account of my mother, as you already know.”

  “Oh yes! Your mother was Italian!”

  “From Florence. In the mid-1950s, when Pharaonic Egypt came back into vogue, my mother had just finished her studies in archeology and got a grant to work on the excavations at the birthplace of Oxirrinco. My father, also an archeologist, spent a day visiting the site, and they met. And here I am! Life can be so strange… My mother always said she married my father because he was a Boswell. She was joking, of course.” He smiled again. “My parents had a very happy marriage. She adapted well to her new country and her new religion, but deep down she always preferred the Roman Catholic rituals.”

  I was very curious to know if he’d inherited those deep navy blue eyes from his mother—many northern Italian women have blue eyes— or from some distant English relative. But it didn’t seem like the right time to ask.

  “Professor Boswell,” I started to say.

  “Why don’t we call each other by our first names, Doctor,” he broke in, looking me straight in the eye, as always. “Everyone stands on such ceremony around here.”

  I smiled. “That’s because here in the Vatican, personal relationships are developed within very strict boundaries.”

  “Well, what do you say we jump over those boundaries? Do you think Monsignor Tournier or Captain Glauser-Röist will be scandalized?”

  “I’m sure they will!” I said between hiccups of laughter. “But let them!”

  “Then it’s… Ottavia?”

  “Pleased to meet you, Farag.”

  And we shook hands over the table.

  That day, I discovered that Professor Boswell—Farag—was a delightful person in private, completely different from the public Professor Boswell. I understood that what intimidated the professor wasn’t people, but groups. The bigger they got, the worse he was. He stuttered, choked, blinked, pushed up his glasses over and over, doubted himself, lost his voice, and was simply a social mess.

  Glauser-Röist returned from Brussels the next day. He showed up at the lab with a forbidding look on his face, his brow knit into a frown and his lips pressed into a practically imperceptible thin line.

  “Bad news, Captain?” I asked. I looked up from the folio I’d just received when I saw him come in.

  “Bad, very bad.”

  “Please, sit down and tell me.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” he muttered as he let himself fall in a chair that groaned under his weight. “Nothing. I didn’t find a clue, not one sign of violence, no forced doors, no clues of any kind. It was an impeccable robbery. I was unable to find out if any Ethiopian citizen entered the country over the last weeks, either. The Belgian police will question the residents of Ethiopian heritage to see if they can supply any information. They’ll call me if there’s any news.”

  “It’s possible that this time the thief wasn’t Ethiopian.”

  “We thought of that. But we have nothing else.” He looked around, distracted. “How’s it going here?” he finally asked, looking at the folio that lay on my table. “Gotten very far?”

  “We’re getting faster and faster,” I answered, satisfied. “Really, I’m the bottleneck of the operation. I can’t transcribe and translate and keep up with the rest of the team. These are very complicated texts.”

  “Could any of your staff help you?”

  “They have enough on their hands with the paleographical problems! Right now, they are working on the second Cato.”

  “The second Cato?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “Oh yes. Mirogenes died in the year 344. The Brotherhood of the Staurofilakes elected a certain Pertinax as archimandrite. Now we’re working on him. According to my staff, Cato II (as he called himself) was a very cultivated man, with an exquisite vocabulary. The Greek used in Byzantium had a very different pronunciation from the classical Greek that was ultimately the one that set the linguistic and lexigraphic norm.” The captain looked puzzled, so I gave him an example. “What happened then was what is happening now to modern English. Kids have to learn to spell words and then memorize them because they are pronounced nothing like they are spelled. After so many centuries of modifications, Byzantine Greek was equally complicated.”

  “Ah, okay.”

  Not too shabby, I thought to myself, relieved. The Swiss Rock was catching on.

  “Pertinax, or Cato II, must have received a very nice education in some monastery where the manuscripts were copied. His grammar is impeccable and his style is very refined compared to Cato I, who seemed to have little formal education. Some of my staff believe Pertinax was more than any old monk. He could have been a member of the royal family or a cartier in Constantinople, because his ductus is elegant, far too elegant for that of a monk.”

  “So, what does Cato II say?”

  “I’ve just finished his chronicle. During his rule, the brotherhood grew unexpectedly. A large number of pilgrims poured into Jerusalem during religious festivals, and many of them took root in the Holy Land. Some of these pilgrims joined the brotherhood, and Cato II refers to the difficulties he faces in governing such a large and diverse community. He proposed imposing restrictions on admitting new members but apparently nothing was approved because the patriarch of Jerusalem was very satisfied with the growth of the brotherhood. Given the dates, the patriarch must have been Maximos II or Kyril I. I’ve already asked the Archives to review their biographies, in case we may find something.”

  “Has anyone searched for direct information through our databases?”

  “No, Captain. That’s your job. Don’t you remember you offered to do it?”

  Glauser-Röist slowly rose to his feet. His elegant suit, wrinkled from his trip, was disconcertingly sloppy, completely out of character. He almost looked depressed.

  “I’m going to shower at the barracks. I’ll be back this afternoon so I can get started.”

  “In a few minutes the prefect, Professor Boswell, and I are going to the cafeteria. Would you like to join us?”

  “Don’t wait for me. I have an urgent audience with the secretary of state and His Holiness.”

  After Cato II came Cato III, Cato IV, and Cato V… For some reason, the archimandrites of the Staurofilakes had chosen that strange name to symbolize the highest authority in their order. To the well-recognized titles of Pope and Patriarch, they seem to have added the lesser-known title of Cato. Professor Boswell locked himself away in the library for a day with the seven thick volumes of Parallel Lives by Plutarch. He studied the biographies of the only Catos known in history, the Roman politicians Marcus Cato and Cato of Utica. After several hours, he returned with a relatively plausible theory. Lacking anything better, we considered it.

  “I think there’s no doubt that one of the Catos served as a model for the archimandrite of the Staurofilakes.”

  We were in my lab, gathered around my old wooden desk, covered with hundreds of loose papers and notes.

  “Marcus Cato, called Cato the Elder, was a damned fanatic, a defender of the most debauched and traditional Roman values. In the way the stereotype of a southerner in America believes in the superiority of the white race and is a sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan, Marcus Cato despised Greek culture and language and everything foreign because he said it weakened all Romans. He was as hard and cold as a stone.”

&nb
sp; “What an image,” I commented, amused. Glauser-Röist looked at me. He seemed to notice how friendly Farag and I had gotten.

  “He served Rome as a quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul, and censor from 204 to 184 B.C. Although he had a large fortune, he lived with the greatest austerity and considered any useless expense frivolous. For example, he refused to give food to any slave who was too old to work, killing them instead, as a scheme to save money. He advised Roman citizens to follow his example for the good of the Republic. He considered himself perfect and exemplary.”

  “I don’t like this Cato,” affirmed Glauser-Röist, elegantly folding one of my sheets of notes into fours.

  “No. Me neither,” Farag agreed, shaking his head. “Without a doubt, the brotherhood focused on the other Cato, known as Cato the younger and also as Cato of Utica, great-grandson of the first Cato and an admirable man. As quaestor of the Republic, he restored honor to the Roman treasury after many centuries of corruption. He was decent and honest. As a judge he was impartial and couldn’t be bribed, for he was convinced that in order to be fair, one must simply desire to be so. His sincerity was so proverbial that in Rome, when you wanted to refute something soundly, you’d say, ‘This isn’t true, even if Cato says so.’ He ardently opposed Julius Caesar, whom he rightly accused of corruption, ambition, and manipulation for wanting to exert full dominion over the Roman Republic. He and Caesar hated one another. They were locked in a feud for years: One wanted to become the exclusive lord of a great empire and the other was committed to stopping him. When Julius Caesar finally triumphed, Cato retired to his home in Utica, where he commited suicide by falling on his sword. He said he wasn’t coward enough to beg Caesar for his life nor brave enough to apologize to his enemy.”

  “That’s strange.” Glauser-Röist was paying close attention to Farag’s story. “Caesar’s name, Cato’s great enemy, became the title for Roman emperors, the Caesars, the same way Cato became the title for the archimandrites of the brotherhood, the Catos.”

  “That is very strange,” I agreed.

  “Cato of Utica exemplified the essence of freedom. For example, Seneca says, ‘Neither did Cato, freedom dying, nor was there freedom anymore when Cato died.’ * Valorous Maximous asks, ‘What will freedom be without Cato?’” †

  “Could the word Cato be synonymous with honor and freedom, just as the word Caesar was synonymous with power?” I hinted.

  “Most certainly,” replied the professor as he pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose, just as I had done.

  “Strange,” Glauser-Röist repeated, looking from one of us to the other.

  “We’re starting to find some interesting pieces of this incredible puzzle,” I said, breaking the silence. “The most fantastic part is what I’ve figured out in the chronicle of Cato V. The Catos wrote their chronicles in the Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I nodded. “I already suspected something like that because a codex like the Iyasus had to have been written in a monastery or some great library in Constantinople. The vellum had to be cut and perforated with tiny needles that marked the first and last of the text on each page. They had to draw lines so that the text was straight and didn’t swerve. They had to draw or paint in miniature the large letters at the beginning of each paragraph. It was meticulous work that required expert personnel. And don’t forget, they also had to bind the folios. Clearly the Catos used the services of some specialized center. Since the content was supposed to be secret, it could only be a monastic retreat, as isolated as possible.”

  “But there are hundreds of monasteries that could’ve done that!” exclaimed Farag.

  “Yes, that’s true, but Saint Catherine’s was erected by the will of Saint Helen, the empress who found the True Cross. And don’t forget, that was where you found it. It’s safe to say that the codex remained in Saint Catherine’s and either the Catos traveled there to write their chronicle or the codex was dispatched to them, then later returned to the monastery. That would explain why it was later abandoned. Perhaps the Staurofilakes stopped writing their chronicles, or perhaps something happened that stopped them. The fact is, Cato V explains that his trip to Saint Catherine’s was particularly hazardous and difficult but that he couldn’t delay it any longer because of his advancing age.”

  “The relationship between the brotherhood and the monastery must have been very close,” commented Farag. “I don’t think we’ll ever know just how close.”

  “What else have we figured out?”

  “Well…” I consulted my scribbled notes, taken from the dense reports my staff had passed me. “There’s still a lot to translate, but I can tell you that the majority of the Catos fill just a few lines with their chronicles, others a page or a folio, still others a double sheet, and the rest a set of three sheets. But every Cato, without exception, travels to Saint Catherine in the last five or six years of his life. If one Cato happens to leave out something important, the next Cato tells it at the beginning of his chronicle.”

  “Do we know how many Catos there were in all?” Glauser-Röist asked.

  “We can’t be sure, Captain. The Department of Computer Analysis hasn’t finished reconstructing the complete text. But up to the capture of Jerusalem by King Cosroes II in the year 614, there had been a total of thirty-six Catos.”

  “Thirty-six Catos!” the captain said admiringly. “And what happened to the brotherhood during all that time?”

  “Oh, nothing major, apparently. Their main problem was the Latin pilgrims who arrived by the thousands. They had to organize a type of praetorian guard of Staurofilakes around the True Cross. Among other barbarities, as many pilgrims kneeled to kiss the cross, they ripped out splinters with their teeth to take as relics. Around the year 570, during the rule of Cato XXX, there was an important crisis. A group of corrupt Staurofilakes organized the theft of the reliquary. They were veteran pilgrims who had entered the brotherhood years before, people who never would have been suspected of boldly looting the relics if it hadn’t been for the fact that they had been caught in action. The old debate about admitting new members was reopened. Apparently, the brotherhood needed to filter out the Latin rabble ready to take a cut of the profits and prosper. But in the end, nothing was done, not on this occasion or in the following years. The patriarchs of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople pressed for the Staurofilakes to continue on as they were, for the Staurofilakes filled a much appreciated political function and no one wanted them to become a sort of private, restrictive club.

  “So, Captain,” Farag asked abruptly with a lot of interest, “have you found that additional information you were going to look for on the Staurofilakes?”

  Over the last several days we’d seen Glauser-Röist working feverishly at the computer, printing page after page then reading them over and over. I had expected him to tell us about some interesting discovery at any moment; but days went by, and the Swiss Rock had gone back to being the old Swiss Rock, silent and unalterable as ever.

  “I have looked, but haven’t found anything at all…” He plunged into very deep reflection. “Well, I guess that isn’t entirely the truth. I did find a reference, but so insignificant that I didn’t think was worth mentioning.”

  “Captain, please,” I protested, full of self-righteous indignation.

  “Well, okay, let’s see,” he began, and tugged at his jacket. “The brotherhood was alluded to in a curious manuscript by a Galician nun.”

  “The Itinerarium of Egeria?” I interrupted, sarcastically. “We talked about that work when we were investigating the monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai.”

  The captain nodded. “Yes, the Itinerarium of Egeria, written between Easter 381 and Easter 384. Well, in the chapter that describes the offices of Holy Friday in Jerusalem, she affirms that the Staurofilakes oversaw the care of the relic and watched over the faithful who approached it. The Spanish nun saw them with her own eyes.”

  “Co
nfirmed!” Farag declared full of joy. “The Staurofilakes existed! The Iyasus Codex is telling the truth!”

  “Well, let’s get to work,” Glauser-Röist grunted. “The secretary of state is very dissatisfied with our slow progress.”

  For the first time in my life, Holy Week arrived without my realizing it. I didn’t celebrate Palm Sunday or Holy Thursday or Resurrection Monday. I didn’t even attend the penitential commemoration or the Easter Vigil. Not having participated in any of that, I also didn’t make my weekly confession with good Father Pintonello. Since we were submerged in our work at the Hypogeum, we received dispensation from the pope, who exonerated us from our religious obligations. While His Holiness appeared in all the media celebrating the offices of Holy Week (proving to the world that he was in excellent health), he wanted us to continue working uninterruptedly until we solved the problem. Despite being tired, we continued with true zeal. We stopped going to the employee cafeteria because meals were brought down to us in the lab. We stopped going back home to sleep because they put us up in the Domus. We stopped taking breaks and days off because we simply didn’t have time. We were voluntary prisoners besieged by the fever of our impassioned discovery of a secret guarded for centuries.

  The only one who left with any frequency was the captain. Besides his regular meetings with the secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, to update him on our investigation, Glauser-Röist slept in the Swiss Guard barracks (officials and subofficials had rooms of their own). At times he stayed there for several hours, doing shooting practice and attending to other matters about which we had no idea. He was a mysterious guy— reserved, silent, nearly always taciturn, and once in a while even a bit sinister. At least that’s how he seemed to me, because Farag had a different opinion. He was convinced that Glauser-Röist was a simple, affable person, tormented by the type of work he had fallen into. In Egypt they had talked for long hours in the ATV as they crossed the desert, and although the captain hadn’t divulged the details of his position within the Vatican, Farag intuited that he wasn’t much a fan of his own job description.