Sacred Bones. Michael Spring
and under our beds, claiming us at night. An exorcist is younger, usually just starting his training for the priesthood, so the smaller bones must have been Peter’s.
The two Christians were beheaded for their faith during the reign of Pope Damasus, the thirty-fifth pope after Saint Peter. The executioner led them to a thicket overgrown with thorns and briars, where no one was likely to find them. Cheerfully, the martyrs went to work clearing space for their graves, then offered their necks to the executioner’s blade. They were buried on the spot, and would have been lost to us if two pious ladies, Lucilla and Firmina, hadn’t found their bodies and arranged to have them transferred to the chapel ad duas lauros (at the two laurel trees), along the Via Labicana, a short walk south of the city walls. They were buried in niches in the earth, one above the other, wrapped only in shrouds. Damasus learned all the particulars from the mouth of the executioner himself, who subsequently converted.
I explained all this to Luniso one afternoon, but he barely listened. This was today; the catacombs were yesterday. What had he to do with death?
SEVEN
One bright spring day, when the sap was running in the pines, I decided to leave the City of the Dead for a few hours, and spend a carefree afternoon among the living. After a week of heavy rains, Virgil’s sea-blue Tiber was sludge-brown. Half of Rome seemed to come floating down—uprooted twigs, carcasses of sheep and goats, even the bloated body of a child. Ducks fought their way upstream and drifted down again. I broke off a dead branch and tossed it into the current and watched it float under the Ponte Sant’Angelo and out to sea.
Then I stepped through the gates and entered the Imperial City, as Caesar had done, and Peter, and Charles. Massive chunks of brick had fallen from the mighty walls, exposing the rubble beneath. Grass grew on the ramparts. Bird droppings stained the stones where sentries once stood, guarding the capital of the world. I shuddered. If Rome’s walls couldn’t keep out the barbarians, there was no way to be safe. Night, sickness, death—anything could enter. There was no place to hide except in God’s hands.
A church bell rang. These bells keep devils away, I mused. Imagine a bell, stronger than the walls of Rome.
Wherever I went, workers were busy tearing down Imperial Rome and replacing it with the City of God. My teachers praised this transformation, but it was wrenching to watch. Streets were piled high with metal ties and clamps ripped from ancient buildings. Porticos were improvised from unmatched shafts and capitals. Ox-drawn carts clattered over the loose stones, hauling slabs of marble from the Temple of Minerva to Pope Leo’s new triclinium.
At a kiln across from the Pantheon, a crew of squat, stumpy Greeks was busy stuffing a Vestal Virgin into a red-hot furnace, reducing the marble to lime, for plaster. The priests had taught me that God humbled Rome to punish us for our godless ways, and that a greater city was rising from the ruins. But the burning of these immaculate limbs, these firm white breasts, seemed a kind of desecration.
Like our fallen city, I had no crown to lose, no power to usurp, so I wandered through the ancient streets, as free as a beggar. At the Pantheon I turned right and headed toward the Palatine. The dust from passing carts was thick enough to choke on. Old women sat in their windows, dressed in black, like crows. I turned away from their derisive laughter and headed to Trajan’s Forum, where Jews from Lyon were auctioning off some Bulgar girls. God had favored them with physical beauty, if you could ignore the gaps between their teeth. A blind man was reciting Virgil. I edged close to him, knowing he couldn’t see me peering into his sunken eyes. I had never liked Aeneas—he had run out on his wife, something a real hero wouldn’t do—but the portrait of him embracing his father’s ghost reminded me of the father I never knew, and left me close to tears.
I can still remember Aeneas’ words:
Your ghost,
Your sad ghost, father, often before my mind,
Impelled me to the threshold of this place.
My ships ride anchored in the Tuscan Sea.
But let me have your hand, let me embrace you,
Do not draw back.
At this his tears brimmed over
And down his cheeks. And there he tried three times
To throw his arms around his father’s neck.
Three times the shade untouched slipped through his hands,
Weightless as wind and fugitive as dream.
I needed to be alone with my feelings, so I raced to the market, tripping over broken flagstones along the way. It was here, among the traders of the world, that I spent my happiest hours. Smells of the East—cinnamon, cloves, camphor, musk—rose from every alleyway. Each sight, each sensation pierced me with an almost pagan joy.
A pride of clerics poked their fingers through a pile of purple fabrics, searching for their Sunday bests. A black man with pink hands squatted in the dust with his swan quills, scratching out letters and prayers for the cost of a loaf of bread. Burgundians reeking of garlic and onions sold sheepskins and furs. Greeks sat at tables piled high with pistachios. I found one of these exotic nuts lying on the street and sucked the sweetness from its salty flesh.
A swarthy-skinned Jew squatted beside a bag of camphor, promising to cure the world’s itches and pains. He barked his message in a dozen tongues. A man from the East, with a growth on his neck the size of a cantaloupe, tried to sell me a vial of oil from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. If only I had had the courage to talk to him, what amazing stories I would have heard.
I kept my distance from a penitent bound in chains who claimed he hadn’t washed for seventeen years. His smell would have sent the devil packing. An old woman blind in one eye swung a dead vulture around her head, screeching, “This bird was killed with a sharp reed, not a knife. Mix the brain with good oil, rub it in your nose, and your migraines will go away. Put its tongue in your right shoe and your enemies will love you.”
There was a world out there that was different from my own, that was sure; a place so strange and foreign that its sun must give off a different light.
It was in the Venetian quarter of the market that I saw my face for the first time, starring back at me in a sheet of polished brass. I had seen my image in water, of course, but never in a mirror. Who is this tonsured boy? I wondered. Great Romans have strong, angular noses; mine is weak and fleshy. No Roman senator ever had such watery lips.
The truth pierced me like a nail.
EIGHT
I was heading home, sadder but wiser, when I ran into my classmate Luniso and a pack of boys from the scrinarium.
“Crabs for sale,” Luniso shouted, taunting a cripple with stumps for legs and hands.
We laughed as we wove our way through the tenements, up to the foot of the Palatine, across from the Field of Mars.
Free from the tyranny of priests, we pushed each other into piles of steaming excrement, and splashed in streams of piss running down the wagon ruts. Armed with sticks, we became Roman legionnaires driving the Carthaginians from Sicily, or Israelites laying siege to Jericho.
We pulled ourselves up the broken steps of an abandoned apartment building and played in the debris. Luniso threw a stone at a fair-haired boy named Theodulf, a Frank, and drew blood. We laughed. Theodulf was too stupid to read the penitentials or martyrologies, and wore his hair long, like a girl. “Happy the nose that cannot smell a barbarian,” said Luniso, showing us his bright white teeth.
Wrestling