January 1, 2083
New Year’s Day
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Dong!
Two thousand eighty-two
was gone, two thousand eighty-three had arrived, and long before the bell’s reverberations
died out in the four corners of the city beyond its razed walls, a loud hurrah rose
up from the ground and bounced off the marble ears of Saint Vitalis and Saint Apollinaire,
standing atop the two columns at the eastern end of Ravenna’s main square, la
Piazza del Comune.
Saint Apollinaire noticed
that New Year’s Eve had been unusually clear without a hint of fog; he had not
seen the stars in the night sky on New Year’s Eve for two dozen decades. This year
marked the beginning of Apollinaire’s seventh century in the square of Ravenna after
Archbishop Filiasio Roverella unveiled the statue of Saint Apollinaire at midnight
on New Year’s Day, 1483. The Archbishop had taken great pains first with the Venetians
who had invaded and ruled the city, and then with his own Curia, to erect a monument
to Ravenna’s first patron saint and give Apollinaire the place of honour and devotion he
merited. Bishop Roverella knew he would get some help from the Archbishop of Milan
who had been born a Nardini in the nearby town of Forli’. Archbishop Nardini had responded immediately to
Roverella’s petition and sent two stone bases for statues. When the twin
Lombard pedestals were freed of the packing straw, Bishop Roverella was delighted
at what he found though even he saw they were so out of style that Archbishop
Nardini was obviously getting rid of them. Though sturdy, they exuded the airy
grace of two delicately decorated marzipan
cakes when Bishop Roverella had them placed harmoniously side by side in the
square. You were drawn to walk between them, and you were naturally led into
the portico under the town hall the Venetians had built, and then under the arcade
cut through the town hall, a passage from the Main Square to the Square of the
Eagle.
Nardini’s two sets of three
circular tiers of pure white marble were girdled with symbolic bas reliefs, gorgeous
curling vines and elegantly framed signs of the zodiac, practical farmer putti,
playful monsters and niveous blooms. These unfashionable but round ziggurats supported
two granite columns that Bishop Roverella had “redeemed” from the ancient
basilica of Saint Euphemia on the outskirts of town. Next Roverella had an
artist balance triple pulvin capitals of Corinthian, Geometric, and Doric design
atop each column and then had the veiled statues firmly cemented on the gorgeous
piles of marble and stone.
At the stroke of
midnight on New Year’s Day 1483, the town square was filled with blazing
torches when the Bishop pulled twin cords to unveil the statue of the Ravenna’s
patron saint Apollinaire on the left column, and the statue of the Winged Lion
of Saint Mark on the right column lest the populace forget that the Venetians ruled
and administrated the region.
An hour or so before
those canvasses dropped to the cobblestones on New Year’s Eve 1482,
Apollinaire’s soul had condensed into a humid sheen and evaporated off the
mosaic image of Saint Apollinaire in his Byzantine Basilica of Saint
Apollinaire in the country. Apollinaire’s soul drifted into town, blending into
the heavy fog that always rose and cloaked the fields on New Year’s Eve through
a series of low clouds.
Apollinaire meandered into
the square in the form of ragged wisps of fog just as the canvas tumbled to
reveal the two statues. His soul swirled around his three-dimensional effigy
atop the towering columns and liked what he saw. What was left of the saint’s
soul in the form of mist dispersed to envelope the bronze statue. Apollinaire’s vantage point atop the columns was
far more intriguing than peering down from his portrait into the Byzantine
penumbra of the basilica named after them, a church that was more often empty than
inhabited even by a single person, much less crowds.
The pellegrinated transmigration
of Apollinaire’s soul from his remains started almost eight centuries previous
in the year 524 AD. Apollinaire’s soul had evaporated into the decomposing exhalation
from what was left of his cadaver in a clammy rural tomb and wafted to a
portrait of him in a freshly cemented hieratic mosaic. A Barbarian king had decreed Apollinaire should
be placed on the walls of an urban church, which the Arians built in Ravenna in
the early sixth century. The Arians had just barely managed to consecrate their
church to Christ the Redeemer when Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora in far-off
Byzantium decreed that the Arians convert to the trinity of orthodox
Catholicism or ... be put to death. The Arians’ momentary hesitation allowed
Emperor and Empress to have the offending sect deftly murdered and then claim
their orphaned riches for the Byzantine Empire, thus replenishing their imperial
and personal treasury. The local Curia
then changed the name of the church from the Church of Christ the Redeemer to
the Church of Saint Martin; Theodora had the image of Saint Martin cloaked in
gold and leading the procession. The message was clear: rural Christians in
Romagna must remember the absolute authority of the distant Byzantine Potentates
over their lives. No one should entertain the idea that the populace there, or
anywhere, could form its own independent opinion about Jesus or God.
A mere half century
after Apollinaire decided to embody this first mosaic portrait of him in the
Church of Christ the Redeemer/Saint Martin, his soul transmigrated again and abandoning
the church of Saint Martin. The Curia of Ravenna had constructed a magnificent
basilica in his honour and name near the port of Classe. The church officials
moved the remains of Apollinaire’s body to a majestic sarcophagus imported from
Asia Minor, a marble tomb big enough for half a dozen putrid martyrs.
Apollinaire preferred the flattering personification in the allegorical
pastoral portrait in the spacious basilica though he had never tended sheep in
his life.
In his basilica outside
the city walls, Apollinaire stood dead centre in a stunningly verdant earthly
paradise encrusting the apse. For almost a millennium, surrounded by a flock of
sheep, Apollinaire had kept his arms upraised in prayer over faithful worshippers
in the chilly basilica, who huddled and mumbled while priests with varying
degrees of devotion and piety intoned the liturgy and collected money for
meals, their illegitimate children, and the His Holiness, the Pope.
Three centuries later in
the ninth century, church officials opened Apollinaire’s tomb in the crypt of
the Church of Saint Apollinaire. All they found of Apollinaire was his skull,
and it was declared a miracle. Saint Martin of Tours had lost his local charms
after Charlemagne became the Holy Roman Emperor, so the Curia renamed the
Church of Christ the Redeemer/Saint Martin a third time, this time calling it
New Saint Apollinaire. Apollinaire’s fragile cranium was moved back into town
but Apollinaire’s soul and animus stayed in the country. The cruelty he saw
outside the city walls was natural and not institutional, so he stayed in the
country; his remains did not constitute his soul, no matter what the church
authorities might have to say about rising incorruptible in this millennium or
the next.
Apollinaire leapt at a
place in the literal sun on New Year’s Day 1483 after spending centuries in
light obfuscated by alabaster windowpanes. Apollinaire had no other possible
images to embody, since no one made effigies of him after they finished
decorating the brick apse of Saint Apollinaire with glass, stone, and marble. Apollinaire’s
name came to be completely forgotten except for the grand but remote basilica
of Saint Apollinaire, tucked away in an isolated corner of what became the Holy
Roman Empire and then the Venetian Republic and later the Papal States, and finally
the Republic of Italy. There had been only one other calling for Apollinaire in
the nineteenth century when he had had the opportunity to incarnate a tonic
water named for him. However, Apollinaire far preferred the looming vantage
point of his pedestal, over lowly commercial ubiquity.
On the other column in
the square next to Apollinaire, stood Saint Vitalis but since he had not been a
member of any hierarchy, his remains had been lost forever. Vitalis’s corpse had been photosynthesized
into spelt and poppies a few decades after his martyrdom on the road to
Felsinea in the third century. His commemoration remained dormant except for
the occasional construction of the odd roadside altar to him that invariably
crumbled to the earth after twenty years, while Vitalis’s soul rose from his hastily
buried remains to become dew in a field of grain.
Two centuries later,
that same serene setting of dual parades of martyrs and virgins in the Church
of Christ the Redeemer/Saint Martin/New Saint Apoillinaire beckoned Saint
Vitalis to return to human society in the line of martyrs where he stood behind
Saint Apollinaire. Vitalis was reunited with his sons who walked behind him in
the mosaic; they were all wearing the robes of martyrdom and bearing its crowns,
while Saint Vitalis's wife and his boys’ mother Valeria was depicted across from
them, another richly dressed virgin proceeding towards the Holy Mother in a
solemn pavane.
Two decades later when Justinian
reclaimed the Arian temple for the True Faith and Church, the ecclesiastical
powers in Ravenna and the Imperial authorities in Byzantium chose to
commemorate Saint Vitalis again in glittering tessserae in the apse of a new
church they would name for him. Vitalis’s image was surreal: the Paleo-Christian
bishop Ecclesias was handing an adolescent Jesus a model of the very church in
which St. Vitalis and Ecclesias were standing. Christ was seated on the sphere
of the heavens resting on the earth with its four rivers, as He handed Vitalis
a crown of martyrdom inlaid with cabochon sapphires and brilliantly cut emeralds.
Vitalis looked directly into the congregation from the apse while the ornate
bejewelled wreath hovered over his hands, draped in white and gold brocade.
Like Apollinaire, Vitalis
too had presided over centuries of worship in the darkness of his octagonal
church, as it sank ever lower into the marshy soil of Ravenna. The Curia
finally replaced the floor a few centuries later so the faithful would not get
their feet wet when they said their prayers, listened to sermons, and made
their offerings.
This portrait of Vitalis
resembled him no more than the images of Apollinaire looked like him. The mosaicist
had been ordered to use the head of Theodora’s favourite eunuch as the model
for St. Vitalis’s visage. The veteran katamite had been charged as the imperial
emissary in Ravenna to oversee construction of the church; the artist added a
five o’clock shadow and long greyish locks lest Saint Vitalis look too much
like the castrated official who kept his hair raven black with the art of his Empress’s
considerable battery of cosmetics.
Though Vitalis’s figure was one of the largest figures in this great
cycle of mosaics covering the chancel and apse of his church, greater care and
theatrical flair had been lavished on the “minor” figures of the Emperor
Justinian and his Empress, the reformed, repentant exotic dancer, and former
showgirl Theodora. The Imperial Couple had been alchemized into tiny bright
hued gemstones, set in the enormously overwrought gold finding of their court, blessed
by the exaltation of the Agnus Dei and an apse with its monumental Jesus and
angels. Vitalis thought his place on this youthful Christ’s right was a great promotion
over his place in the line to hand over his crown of martyrdom in the Church of
Christ the Redeemer/Saint Martin for the first three years.
Vitalis had been relegated
to a minor role in the collective unconsciousness after his death when Justinian
was persuaded that a little-known Christian martyr from Milan had just enough anonymous
piety to create a monumental altar to his and Theodora’s eternal glory. It was
unlikely a cult would build up around Vitalis: he was only vaguely known to elite
literati among the priesthood and Vitalis was also far from his home in Milan.
With her perspicacious, shard-like cunning, Theodora asked her Imperial
Husband: “Who in Christendom is going to remember an eel monger from Gallia
Cisalpina, much less revere who he was – unless we force them?” (Centuries
later, Vitalis had also been immortalized in two frescoes and an oil painting
where he was being buried alive and disembowelled rather prettily. The martyred
saint also had a swat at being the patron saint of a hair cream in the twentieth
century, but that was once again, a little too common even for a common man
like Vitalis. Saint Martin had been the lucky saint: he got to embody a dreamy
island in the Caribbean sun... with hurricanes!
After the squares of
glass and stone had been skilfully pressed into the wet cement on the bricks of
the apse of the Church of Saint Vitalis, Saint Vitalis’s soul had sublimated
from the humidity glistening on his image in the Church of Saint Martin. When the wet droplets evaporated, the vapour
rose and was borne by a spring breeze to the small irregular cubes of ruddy glass
and marble in his portrait in the Church of Saint Vitalis. Then the vapour became a sheen of water that glistened
on the mosaic portrait’s uneven surfaces. Vitalis had then stood against the
brilliant gold tessserae while the cast of earthly characters on the walls
below him on his left and his right died and eventually flitted to their images
in the church, images that were all physically beneath him.
The first soul to arrive
after Vitalis was Theodora. In her mosaic she was arrayed in purple and scarlet
and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls: she bore a large golden chalice,
which she was sombrely bearing toward a darkened doorway. Her head was turned
so her gaze directly penetrated the congregation. Theodora had not been much
revered after her death: she was greatly feared during her life and loved only
by the intimates of her court and her abjectly devoted husband whom she reigned
over in death as she had in life. Her seven ladies in waiting formed a
kaleidoscopic backdrop on her left in the mosaic depiction, while General Belisarius
and his adopted son, Theodosius, representing Roman military power flanked her right.
This backdrop provided unparalleled architectural sumptuousness and sparkling articulate
grandeur for the ten characters in her retinue, a most appealing frame for an actress
who was neither pretty nor beautiful. Though Theodora had never bothered to
visit the backwater of Ravenna and see the mosaic for herself, she had painstakingly
planned the final effect with the artist while the church was being constructed
in that distant town near the sea. Theodora had purposely liberated her soul from
her body not even three years after the mosaic had been completed, by
copulating over and over with beasts. Her meagre little damp cloud of moisture darted
to Ravenna where she knew that this timeless icon awaited. She kissed her portrait’s
lips and Theodora’s breath and soul entered the regal image and her carefully constructed
portal to eternity.
Theodora was pleased
with her portrait and setting whose sole purpose was to glorify herself.
Eccentrically placed under a silken canopy fit for Venus, Theodora majestically
dominated the entire stage of the chancel. Hers was the one image the
congregation’s eyes were drawn back to again and again and again. Vitalis, looming above Theodora’s right, kept
his mouth shut; he recognized her immediately. He had heard the priests’
sermons, and the scriptures that described her perfectly. Vitalis was only
waiting for confirmation that she actually corresponded to what had been said
and written. Vitalis knew that this Empress
would never pay any attention to an eel monger from the Milanese plain, anyway.
The next soul to arrive
was Antonina, Theodora’s confidante, bosom friend, and former showgirl in arms
(and legs). They whispered merrily like two virginal maidens; Vitalis was at
first enchanted by their tone of simple candour as they commented on the piety
of the priests and the garb of the ladies who attended the masses below. They
were soon joined by the soul of Antonina’s husband Belisarius standing on
Theodora’s right. Belisarius, a courtier with social savoir faire, had ensured
that Justinian met Theodora and remained happy with her. He was a man of
military action and political conquest.
The power he wielded psychologically and politically over Justinian was
a direct result of the enormous booty Belisarius had amassed in gold and lands
and slaves, wealth he used to perfection, giving Justinian whatever he desired.
In return, Belisarius had almost as much power as Justinian, though not as much
glory and twice the peril. Belisarius knew that political leaders, satraps like
Justinian, simply took what they wanted anyway; through his own generosity with
the Emperor, Belisarius soon became his factotum. Belisarius was endowed with such
enormous strategic perspective that he eventually died in his bed as an old man,
though he had been blinded by Justinian. Even so, dying of old age was a unique
fate for anyone at Justinian’s court. Belisarius had never aspired to the
throne and lived a far happier life as Justinian’s confidant, and Antonina’s
husband. Belisarius never had much to say, content to glory in the reflections
and illuminations of what he considered his church even though it had not been
named for him. Without Belisarius’s wily puppeteering of Justinian and Theodora,
the church of St. Vitalis would never have been built, that much was certain.
The years passed
uneventfully until Justinian arrived in his mosaic directly facing Theodora on
the other side of the church’s altar, and then Justinian was followed by the
swath of priests and soldiers that formed his retinue along with his third
cousin, the Bishop Maximian whom Justinian had appointed as the highest church
authority in Byzantine Ravenna. Maximian stood on Justinian’s left, bearing the
cross and what Maximian believed was the true faith, though he knew perfectly
well that Justinian had only used Christianity as a masterful ploy for
achieving and maintaining power.
The bickering began.
Maximian had held ecclesiastical sway while the church of St Vitalis was being built
and decorated; he had been the bishop of Ravenna under Justinian, who, like his
Empress consort, had never bothered to visit the tiny town, even after Emperor Justinian
declared Ravenna the Capital of the Byzantine Empire in the West. Theodora’s reliable
web of liturgical scholars and lay bureaucrats reported that the mosquitoes
would attack you under the full sun at noon; the Empress refused to budge from
Byzantium.
Theodora’s multi-faceted
glamour would have been wasted on Ravenna’s society of retired legionnaires and
their agrarian housewives; she needed a lustrous court where her false humility
could glow. Why bother living in a dinky little village near the shallows of
the Adriatic Sea? Byzantium was the only place she and Justinian were relatively
safe. The crowd which had almost torn them to pieces at the Hippodrome one day,
was placated only when Justinian finally let Theodora speak to the mob for the both
of them as well as the Byzantine Empire. Rome was unthinkably precarious, so
easily was it invaded. Theodora went everywhere with Justinian and when she put
her foot down, Justinian always knelt down beside her and grovelled in worship
of his Empress.
Now that Bishop Maximian
was dead however, he was no longer under the thumb of Byzantine or
ecclesiastical authorities who could threaten excommunication and inflict righteous
torture and sanction death. Maximian finally
had his say about Theodora and her nefarious past.
“I know how you clawed and
licked and strangled your way to fame and fortune and power, I know,” he hissed
at her across the altar. “My priests told me, my confessants told me, every
harlot and eunuch I ever met from Byzantium told me. Your shameless appetites and
vital tenacity awed everyone. They told me how you slathered your youthful body,
your Temple of the Holy Spirit with honey, strategically embedding almonds and
hazelnuts and sunflower seeds in the creases of your flesh, waiting until they
dried fast into a tempting crust around your breasts and loins. Then you draped
your limbs and trunk in innocent white gauze and herded a gaggle of starving
geese onto the stage at the Hippodrome in Byzantium, skipping as nonchalantly as
a shepherdess tending her father’s flock in a meadow. You would toss almonds
from a pouch hanging at your waist to the geese. But the geese were not sated
and began to peck at the pouch, nipping at your dress, and stripping the flimsy
materials off your body, aiming for the nuts strategically buried between your buttocks
and encircling your breasts in dried honey. You shooed the geese away, initially
jumping stage left and stage right in cavorting grace as the honking birds
turned more and more rapacious, ravenously ripping shreds of gauze off your
frame and seeking their plunder closer and closer to your pudenda.”
At this point Theodora
would start to intone the Lord’s Prayer softly over and over, joined by Antonina
and Antonina’s daughter Joanna and the other five ladies in waiting, for weeks
on end while Maximian continued his story repeatedly. “The aromatic honey
frenzied the geese, and the almonds and the seeds you had blazoned over your
heart and womb hungered them even more. When they started to attack you to peck
off the luscious nuts, you escaped in comic horror, leaping about the stage, shrieking
and gambolling. Then you gradually lost your aversion to the beaks aiming at
your lap and you slowly gave in, until you had a gaggle of long silken white
necks plunging at your private parts. Prostrate, naked and quaking on the
stage, you raised your legs towards the audience and shook them, trembling your
limbs in the air as if you were attaining the acme of carnal ecstasy for minutes
at a time. Who knows? You’re so depraved that you probably did. The crowd
initially roared with laughter and then they hushed when the great orgasmic
spectacle they were witnessing sent shivers up their spines, as your screams of
dismay turned to peals of rhythmic joy and utter abandon. The evenings you
performed on the stage, the bordellos of Byzantium overflowed with customers
and gold, gold that then flowed into the coffers of jewellers dealing in gold
and silver and precious stones and pearls; luxurious spicers selling cinnamon
and odours and ointments and frankincense and wine and sumptuous drapers purveying
fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet and merchants selling wine and oil
and fine flour and wheat and vendors of beasts and sheep and horses and
chariots and slaves and the souls of men. Merchants, those merchants of sybaritic
delicacies who waxed rich were the only ones who mourned your death. They still
mourn you and miss you, wincing and wailing. But they are the only ones.”
Justinian had heard of
all this though he had arrived too late in Byzantium to see it. Theodora had
long converted to Christianity by that time and become a gloriously meek
penitent when he met her, a veiled woman humbly spinning flax and wool, softly
murmuring gentle pieties to those who came and revered her wisdom. Justinian saw right through her and subtly
mocked her. In return to his sarcasm, she bestowed the most strategic wisdom
that he had ever heard from her charming lips: false humility does perfectly
well when even a shred of true humility is lacking.
The honour guard of
soldiers on Justinian’s right listened in rapt fascination as the court
officials bore Maximian out. They had witnessed Theodora’s erotic pastorale and
it was every bit as lurid and sublime as Maximian had described it. Antonina
and Joanna and the other five ladies-in-waiting chanted the Ave Maria, intoned hymns and recited the beatitudes with Theodora
to drown out the men’s voices. Antonina’s husband Belisarius revelled at the
theatrical goings on before him, at the denouement of the plot that he had orchestrated,
the crowning glory of his military and political career: an outpouring of unbridled
emotion and passionate conflict with no bloodshed. It was also honeyed revenge
for the uxorial indignities Theodora had inflicted on him through his wife
Antonina. Their whole setup in the church was like being back in Byzantium
again, like being alive again for all of them. It took the two retinues facing
one another centuries to tire of their tales and spats and to finally arrive at
the truths.
Justinian couldn‘t even begin
to care what they said about Theodora now, although he regularly had her
detractors’ tongues pulled out. Justinian had never been enchanted by anyone as
much as he was inebriated by the wrath released in Theodora’s sodomy. Justinian’s
very own human chalice of drunkenness now stood before him for all eternity,
sporting the fabulous aigrette of golden feathers he had stolen from a temple
goddess in Persia for her. Her enormous eyes pierced his pupils, the gold necklace
he had exhumed from his Aunt Euphemia’s grave at Theodora’s request, sported emeralds
as large as walnuts scintillating on her neck. Her delicate hands supported the
fabulous Scythian bowl he had requisitioned from the treasury of a Parthian
satrap and donated to the church, an emerald encrusted golden receptacle that
Theodora had filled with the abominations and the filthiness of her fornications.
Justinian knew exactly who Theodora was and she thrilled him even in death.
“She was, and she is, pure diva, pure empress, pure majesty.”
“A tainted vixen! A pitiless sorceress! The Mother of Harlots!” retorted Maximian. “That’s
the truth. No, Theodora, we all know who you really are, what your goal really
is. You have done nothing less than to turn the church into your beast of
burden so you can ride on it, clad in your very own purple hues and scarlet trim
and use our Lord as your saddle. The insipid image of Christ above us in this
church, seated on the heavens resting on the many waters is merely an excuse
for your image to exist here.”
Nothing perturbed
Theodora. After several decades, Vitalis came to realize who stood before him:
the greatest thespian of all time and her supporting cast, among them, her
husband, one of the most inflexible and avid rulers the world had ever known. His
famed code had only one purpose: find every law that would justify his
murderous elimination of all dissent. Theodora instead, had aimed for nothing
less than immortality wrapped in a shroud of royal purple, which she attained
through one of the most absolute forms of power: fornicating with kings. Theodora
had ascended to the throne, using every part of her body, from the dark sludge
of her lowest entrails to her beating heart of obsidian and the flawless diamond
of her hubris. Theodora told the artist specifically not to even think that Christ
be clad in as much Tyrian purple as would hang from her body. She ensured that
Jesus had been carefully depicted with as little character as possible, just a
handsome young man, effortlessly upstaged by a veteran diva who knew where to
tread the upstage planks of the ages.
Theodora had stopped at
nothing while she was alive: no murder was too pointless, no sexual practice too
painful, no sentiment too hypocritical to thwart her conquest for a place in
the eyes and minds of men and women for millennia to come. She meant to rule for
eternity. Bishop Maximian finally tired of insulting her a century later, and
she sweetly responded to his accusations, softly expostulating her theories
with that same comforting, maidenly modesty that had completely enchanted all
the men, and almost all of the women who had ever heard her speak. More than a
millennium later, when Vitalis escaped to the statue on the triple capital and
column in the middle of the square where he now stood, Vitalis actually heard
Theodora’s voice again in the Square of Ravenna.
One warm summer evening,
a delegation from the conquering army of Americans hung a large white curtain under
the clock tower in front of Vitalis, as part of the commemoration celebrations of
the eighth anniversary of the Canadian’s liberation of the town from the
Germans. They put a small machine at the foot of Vitalis’s pedestal that shot
light instead of projectiles, and created a moving picture on that tarpaulin ,
a moving picture that also talked. Vitalis immediately recognized Theodora’s soothing
timbre and subtly exotic accent when he heard the Belgian thespian portray a
princess of the blood royal on that picture moving on that white sheet, a moving
picture entitled Roman Holiday.
“The simple, very lowly truth
is, Maximian, is that there is only one power greater elan vital, than people’s desire to become one with one another and
the universe and God, something you would call love in your great ingenuity. There
is only one force that will raise you higher than bringing joy and fulfilment
to the senses and the soul: denying that desire, forbidding its joy, and declaring
such fulfilment as sin. Once you master the imposition of total abnegation, you
can turn all human emotion into abject obeisance and pure hate. You can
imprison the grandest of ladies in temple bordellos run by lecherous priests and
almost all women will put up with it. But take those same young ladies, high or
low of rank, sharp or dull of wit, beauteous but vapid or plain but charming,
take them and close them up into a chaste nunnery and you attain one of two
results: total devotion to your hierarchy or their virgin suicides. After you
have convinced the novices that they are the ones making their own choices,
either choice gives you complete control over everyone beneath you. Nothing is
more dangerous than open discourse and reasoning, nothing is more
uncontrollable or wilier than people who speak the truth, but there are dozens
of tasty ways to destroy your unwitting enemies: serve them hemlock, crucify
them, disembowel them, bury them alive, and feed them to the lions. Or even
better: do it to their children and make them watch. Once you are finished, you
can forgive them publicly and canonize the foolish dead as faith mongers, as
symbols of unsullied Christian passion, which they are of course, as symbols of
true intellect, as repositories of the truth and what is best for mankind. Then
you can corral all your martyrs and saints and passion and truth all within a modest
basket woven from denials of the pleasures of the table and the mind and the
bed, for everyone to see, but not to touch. Only at this point can you get the people
to do anything you want and can bend entire countries just as you please. We
instituted heresy only to eliminate resistance, and subjugate all of Christendom
to Our Monolithic Will. Thus can whole populations be annihilated for the
greater glory of God and the claim to their lost power shall rise to us and to
us alone. The Masses are the Opium of Religion.”
Maximian and Belisarius
and the guards and the other priests and the ladies in waiting, listened spellbound
to Theodora in the apse of eternity as they had listened to her in the
antechamber of their lives. The contrast of her majestic appearance against her
humble tone completely and heartless insight fascinated her cohorts, and persuaded
all of them of their debt to Her Majesty, yet again.
Theodora had even convinced
Justinian to close the schools of philosophy in Athens. No one could have been
more perilous or damaging than Socrates or Plato or Aristotle, and their
teachings were even more unwieldy. Reason was treacherous and time-consuming to
manipulate, but emotions and desires were like putty in your hand, if you knew
how to stroke and squelch them. No one knew this better than Theodora, and no
one knew better than Theodora how to imitate every possible human feeling and
deploy it to her advantage. She achieved this by speaking as simply and
demurely as a guileless, consecrated novitiate.
“I never did care for
you Justinian as a man though I worshipped your power. You were just the dais
for my own immortality, and you dimly realized how I was going about
things. The majority of men are ruled by
their genitals and their stomachs without the advantage of their minds. Early
in my life I gave kings what they wanted, and I got a fair amount in return.
But then I learned to hold back what they wanted most, I got what I most wanted
from them. If only I had had more than my seven pulsating orifices to offer
them, and then deny them, I could have ruled the whole world while I was alive,
even without you Justinian. Diva or
whore, Empress or pious hermitess spinning webs of unholy deception, I reign as
Your Majesty, the Queen of Time Immemorial. I paid the price for that by taking
my life while I was still Empress and Your Majesty. Oh my widower, I stand as a
queen, I am no widow, and I shall see no sorrow, wrapped in Tyrian purple, that
I will never be without. I need not struggle anymore; I need not prove my
purity or my wisdom or my faith or even my allure. My personality, my anima,
the very essence of my soul has overcome the eternal. “
“I have attained life everlasting
thanks to the blood Christ shed on the cross, Eucharist blood I held in my
mouth during transubstantiation and piously bore to the imperial apartments
where I spat it into this fabulous bowl I bear. All of you surrounding me, the ten
members of my family and court and the twelve mortals behind Justinian, have
also achieved eternity because I knew how to manipulate Christian redemption
and corporeal passion. Though I ordered that the men’s portraits be commissioned
against backdrops of architectural fancy and solid gold, remember, just
remember that you are merely the frame for me; the whole church is. You all would
have turned to dust and no one would have fashioned anything lasting to recall
any of you, without me: I am Your Eternal Mystery. You are my retinue and I am
your God though I have no man’s penis.”
“Even the Magi, Christ’s
benefactors have been placed at my feet, embroidered on the hem of my cloak.
They are not bearing gold and frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child, but to
the essence of me between my legs, Theodora
Maesta’ as I lead you all towards the threshold of the purple expanse of the
never ending cosmos on my right. I am the abusive Majestic Madonna of all harlots
and abominations: harlots and abominations of the earth are each of you who
follow me now forever; I have given you eternal life. And now, now you will
glorify me for the rest of time as I ride into the infinite, astride this
church and Jesus seated on the sphere of the heavens resting on the firmament
and its rivers at my feet. Anything I can straddle, I can dominate. And I have
straddled and I have dominated. And I am straddling and I am still dominating.”
Justinian, with his
jewelled crown swinging its pearls, responded:
“For all eternity
Theodora, Your Majesty you are mine, ever exquisite, ever standing before me,
ever gazing into my eyes and I ever penetrating yours. This is the only
paradise that I have wanted since that day I saw you on the staircase at the Hippodrome.
So what if you don’t love me? Love, true adoration is selfless, we know that, my
ardent passion is satisfied by having the object of my idolatry close to me,
and forever will you be before me. I do know this though; no one else, no pope,
no pharaoh, no saint, no one could have given you half of what I have given you
and that is why you cleaved to me, that’s why we are still together. I had what
you want; you possess it only through me and you are my Empress, you are my
Goddess. You will always be majestic no matter how many beaks have nipped at
your clitoris, no matter how much martyrs’ blood has dripped into your debauched
mouth, or no matter how many prophets’ tears have washed over your fingers. No
matter whom you may have tormented or sorrowed, I am the one who has given you
what you really wanted, and in return you gave me your entire self and now I
have you for all eternity.”
Antonina smiled softly
and kept her thoughts to herself, her hand poking out of her richly figured
veil, the same scintillating gold and white brocade that the mosaicist had
draped over St Vitalis’s hands as he received his crown of martyrdom. Antonina
was the true sacrifice here, the real gift to Her Majesty of the Apse. Having
Theodora close by still made Antonina and her daughter Joannina heady with
unrealized passion and unfulfilled desire, centuries and centuries after their
deaths. The very day Theodora had put Antonina’s husband Belisarius into his
place in a windowless prison in Byzantium, Antonina and her daughter Joannina and
the other five ladies in waiting clad only in honey and their rings and
bracelets and necklaces, had slowly worshipped each of Theodora’s lovely orifices,
consummating their passion for Theodora and the ostentatiously charmed spoiled lives
that they led. They splashed at every unnatural taboo they could think of as
they lovingly caressed one another in Theodora’s giant porphyry bathtub filled
with warm asses’ milk. The thought of this mortal acme still made Antonina
swoon, it still inflamed Theodora’s passion, and it still piqued Joannina’s immobile
frenzy. It was Theodora's final victory: their secret for all of eternity,
their secret reason for being immortalized all in a row, all together, each of
them primly proceeding closer and closer to the Empress. The disembodied heads
of Theodora’s seven ladies in waiting were the only ones who knew what was in
Theodora’s gem encrusted bowl: they proffered it to their Empress as she sensuously
drooled Christ’s blood into it; they had spread the legs of philosophers’
corpses so Theodora could cut their testicles off with her bronze poniard
enamelled with the zodia, they thrilled when she allowed them to push the eyes
out of the martyrs with their ringed thumbs, so she could lick the blood off
their nails before they dropped the eyes into the bowl in Theodora’s hands and
then caressed Theodora’s seven orifices with their thumbs. Antonina knew that Theodora
had no intention of taking the bowl into a church; she was going to drink it
dry in the purple sweep of eternity beyond the dark doorway on her right. Let
Justinian have his say; Antonina had Theodora’s passion and lust for life. There
was no reason to gloat, Antonina would now be forever young and beautiful,
constantly inebriated with an abomination that gurgles to life each time a saint
bleeds, a desire that flows steaming from each of Theodora’s seven orifices for
the rest of time, in secret, ardently consumed by supreme blasphemy.
Vitalis had kept his
mouth shut century after century while the other immortals beneath him in the
church eventually exhausted all the insults and tendernesses and curiosities
and intrigues they could possibly have about themselves. Personalities never
came to embody the angels and icons around them; none of the figures had even
been inspired by an animus or imbued with the gift of eternal life. There were
no individual angels in San Vitalis’s church, just stock figures from the
artist’s repertoire. There had never been an actual agnus dei, and there
were far too many, far better images of Jesus for him to embody than the bland portrait
of him as a post pubescent boy in the Church of Saint Vitalis.
Thanks only to Theodora
had Vitalis obtained cosmic fame as well, and he knew that without that image
of her, forever glittering on the wall before him, even Justinian’s famed codification
of laws that the Emperor had used to justified enforcing measures against heresy,
would have remained a footnote, and he Vitalis, only an even more minor figure
in the constellation of saints, centuries ago. Vitalis was not sure whether his
eternal fame was a blessing or a curse: Theodora’s court had tired him.
Saint Vitalis joined
Apollinaire in the square thirty years later in 1513 after the Venetians handed
this land over to the Papal States. Bishop Roverella has been biding his time
however, and on New Year’s Day thirty years after 1583, he unveiled the statue
of Vitalis who replaced the Winged Lion of St. Mark. On New Years’ Day 1513 Vitalis’s
soul misted and joyfully evaporated off the mosaic portrait of him in his
Basilica of Saint Vitalis four hundred yards away in town. Saint Vitalis’s soul
mingled with the smoke from chimneys and bonfires in town, borne by chilly
breezes to the square.
That evening the Bishop
and his flock celebrated their Pyrrhic victory over the Venetian Republic,
which had renounced its claims on what the Venetians had realized, were the rather
useless little towns of Romagna. The costs of administering this backward region
far outweighed any commercial advantage that could be attained from its people
who were definitely ungrateful to a Republic who tried to improve their lives
and lot. The Venetians gladly handed Romagna over to the Papal States, which
immediately demonstrated bureaucratic acrimony and atavistic avarice as they
squeezed every drop of blood and lymph from this people and their lands. The Venetians also relinquished the region
just in time for the Church to lose a bloody battle to the Spaniards there, though
Roverella celebrated the long-term victory of exiling the French from Romagna
until Napoleon would come back three centuries later.
Vitalis leapt at the
chance to escape Theodora and her court and to embody the Roman soldier on the
top of the column where he did not have to hear history recounted again and
again and again by the same people, where he did not have to hear the same
masses, sung or intoned again and again and again, without participation,
without enthusiasm, without devotion.
Seventy years after he
ascended his column, when the 16th Century came to a close, Vitalis realized
that standing in the square of Ravenna in the wind and rain and sun, under the
stars or wrapped in fog was a far better destiny than overhearing and overlooking
the intrigues of the Byzantine Court for another century - or five - ruled by the
nemeses of St John the Divine, even if taking his place in the Square meant
portraying someone that he was not.
The rout after the
battle of Ravenna in 1512 gave Bishop Roverella the opportunity to move Lion of
St. Mark off the Pedestal in the Square next to Saint Apollinaire, now that the
Venetians had finally left Ravenna. Archbishop Roverella had decided long ago that
its main square should have another statue and another patron saint: he would
place Vitalis the Christian Soldier (The Holy Roman Empire) to keep the town
safe (from the Venetians, the French and the Tuscans) alongside Apollinaire the
good shepherd (Rome and the Church) to keep the city pure. The Bishop knew
perfectly well that Vitalis had never served in the military even though he had
Vitalis portrayed as a legionnaire. Everyone had forgotten who Vitalis really
was anyway. Although the Archbishop had commissioned the statues ex novo, his rather savvy legate from
the Marches found two sculptures lying next to one another in the wet vault at
the far end of the Episcopal gardens, saving time and money. The statue of Vitalis
had originally been intended to adorn a loggia of the Da Polenta family’s
country house and had been requisitioned by the Venetians before they abandoned
the town and region. The graceful statue of the beautiful boy had been
“reclaimed” from them by the Archbishop whose patron was after all, a Da
Polenta. The legate found Saint Apollinaire’s statue, an Old Testament prophet Josiah,
was originally destined to stand on the façade of Saint Maria Maggiore, warding
off evils from the attacks of the invaders, be they the Holy Roman Church, the
Holy Roman Empire, the Longobards, or the Tuscans anxious to extend their
domain to the north, or the Germans or the French seeking lands to the south.
Now both the statues had
been renamed by the Archbishop and literally rechristened. They were recognized
as Apollinaire and Vitalis by the entire populace. On occasion of the
anniversary of 1513, the Bishop had instructed an armourer to smelt a bronze
culverin the Venetians had left behind and fashion what he thought a Roman
helmet would look like if it had been made in the 15th century. The helmet was placed
on the body of the glorious ephebe from the garden, and the armourer fashioned
an elegant spear for the Saint to hold in this left hand. The same armourers then
borrowed Roverella’s mitre and crook and created an identical hat and crosier
for Apollinaire. These embellishments would make the two rather different
statues more homogeneous and pleasing to the eye. It would also emphasize the
military promise of Saint Vitalis and the pastoral mission of Saint Apollinaire.
The lumps of stone had acquired a name, an identity, and a role to play in the
collective unconscious of the town, the country and eventually the nation and
the world.
During the unveilings on
January 1, 1513, the Bishop explained that Saint Vitalis, the good Christian
soldier, was charged with protecting the city from infidels (meaning the
Venetians of course) who came to wreak havoc. Saint Apollinaire, the kindly
shepherd would continue to
watch over his flock of Ravennates to make
sure they remained as pure and godly as the lambs of God, as proposed to him by
the Holy Byzantine Empress Theodora in a dream. Neither conception had had
anything to do with the personalities or miens of Vitalis or Apollinaire.
* * * * *
Vitalis had been born in
Mediolanum, later called Milan: he was bright and quick but clubfooted. No one
ever thought of even suggesting he enlist in the army much less hold any sort
of a weapon.
Likewise, Saint
Apollinaire had been born in Syria and ended up being the first Bishop of
Ravenna mainly because no one else wanted to do it and the early church authorities
needed to give him something to stay busy. The cowardly curia was worried about
religious persecution. Apollinaire himself had never been the least interested
in controlling all the intrigues and sins that people committed around him and
he had never been much concerned about keeping people pure. Apollinaire’s
wandering intellect had then been permanently addled by the bleating of the
twelve sheep that had wandered about inside the church when the mosaicist
immortalized them in Grecian marble and stone in Apollinaire’s heavenly garden.
The few members of the court beneath him in the apse of the Church of Saint
Apollinaire in Classe could never make their voices heard over those motionless
animals in an earthly paradise constantly calling for food and drink and
shelter and mates. That would have driven anyone to distraction. Apollinaire,
who had never been particularly focused despite his great intelligence, ended
up as dull as a discarded millstone.
Both saints leapt at the
chance to take their places in the main square. Saints Vitalis and Apollinaire could
stand guard over beheadings, processions, market days and foreign troops as
they rolled into town in constantly evolving machines of war. Vitalis was
indifferent to the armaments; Apollinaire was thankful for the eventual
deliverance of the people and for their safety from bombings and target
practice. Mainly however, both saints were grateful to be freed of the Imperial
Court and the Earthly Paradise in their gloomy churches and to be returned to
the mortal world twenty-four hours a day.
* * * * * * *
In the 1890s a clock had
been installed directly in front of them at eye level, so unlike many spirits,
they always knew exactly what time it was and how slowly and quickly life
paraded before them.
Saint Vitalis now looked
down at two tipsy teenagers violently spitting and kicking one another. There
was nothing he could do to help either one; he could only keep his spot on the
pedestal and stand for whatever good, people might imagine he embodied. Vitalis
knew that almost no one thought of him. Ever since his martyrdom, Vitalis’s
existence had been a series of incongruous events. Shortly after his death, a
local farmer (and clandestine Christian) found Vitalis’s corpse in his spelt
field, and undertook to collect what he could of his head and torso and bury it
with the rest of his body before he sowed the field with spelt. From his grave
of dirt and roots Vitalis had visions of his wife’s corpse being raped by his
business competitor Marcellus, while Vitalis’s two sons, Protasius and
Gervasius, were sodomized and strangled by the Gallic mercenaries Marcellus had
hired to break into Vitalis’s shop and home.
After his death, people
had started drawing pictures of Vitalis with rocks in his lap because they
thought that he had been stoned to death. Soon thereafter they portrayed him
with his sons, Gervasius and Protasius, who had been buried in Milan. Soon
enough his sons had been disinterred, and their two skeletons and two detached
skulls were then laid to rest on either side of the Bishop Ambrose in the
Milanese cathedral (and the wrong skulls had been placed back on the wrong
bodies). Then people started to depict Vitalis being buried alive. Saint
Vitalis occasionally appeared in sermons and wayside altars before he was
finally immortalized in the hieratic glass and gold mosaic in the church of Christ
the Redeemer in Ravenna where he was depicted strolling in serene martyrdom.
At first, Vitalis had
been chagrined at being stuck in Ravenna; he would much rather have been in
Milan with his wife and sons, where he would have preferred to end his life but
even that wish was granted him when Valeria was depicted opposite him, and his
sons behind him in the Church of Christ the Redeemer/Saint Martin/ New Saint
Apollinaire. But that was not Vitalis’s fate. His martyrdom had been so long
ago that his personality had been forgotten, so it had been easy for Justinian
to manipulate Vitalis’s sainthood for Theodora’s own imperial ends. It had been
a brilliant stratagem for attracting the Milanese and borrowing Saint Ambrose’s
splendour for Justinian’s Byzantine capital in the West while Justinian and
Theodora lived a life of Asian luxury and self-righteous cruelty in far-off
Byzance.
Justinian had originally
thought he would have Vitalis depicted with a model of the church in his hand
offering it to The Church and Eternity until Theodora gently commandeered the
entire operation: “Justinian, My Emperor,
a saint has already given and should be receiving. Receiving something from
beyond our petty world, something no one could dream of: a priceless crown of
martyrdom. Vitalis isn’t giving Christ the church anyway; we’ll get Julius
Argentarius to foot that bill. All you need to do is reward Pius Julius with a
portrait depicting him as one of the disciples in your eternal rule. We’ll put Pius
Julius on your left.” Justinian had more important matters to consider and he
handed the planning of the church over to his wife completely, given Theodora’s
theatrical and political instincts. Theodora now did as she pleased, and the
Church of St. Vitalis crowned her eternal glory. The first thing she ordered
was that as Vitalis received his glorious enamelled wreath, his hands must be covered
in a brocade to match the gold embroidered Damascene stole Theodora had bestowed
upon Antonina to wear on high court occasions, and to keep for later use as
Antonina’s shroud.
None of it had anything
do with Vitalis: a Cisalpine eel merchant in the Roman Empire. His current
public personality, as a Roman warrior had as little to do with him as all the
previous representations. Vitalis knew that none of this mattered in the vast
horizon of eternity. His real personality had no role to play; Vitalis’s task
was to allow his image be manipulated to instil a feeling of hope or fear in
people.
During his lifetime
Vitalis had occasionally tried to intervene to make the world a better place,
and that destiny had been his downfall. Since boyhood he had travelled with his
father from Milan to Ravenna every other month to lay in a stock of the extraordinary
Romagnol eels. When his father aged and saw that Vitalis could be trusted, he
let his son take over the travelling, and pater
simply ran the shop in the shadow of a Milanese temple. It took a week to reach
Ravenna; and now his family was prosperous enough to command a cart and a mule so
his clubfooted son Vitalis could get to the coast faster, and bring back a
large selection of merchandise for the Mediolani.
The eels made the trip worthwhile.
No one had better eels
than the fisheries of Ravenna: fat, toothsome, and vicious. The Romagnols also
knew exactly how to salt them, how to smoke them, and how to brine them. Vitalis
also learned how to bring eels back alive and writhing, so that he could salt,
smoke or brine them himself in Milan and enlarge his profits.
As Vitalis travelled up
and down the Via Emilia connecting Romagna to Lombardy, he met many people, and
though not outgoing, he was a good listener. Vitalis was an introvert, happy to
have a living and a wife and healthy sons. He was also smug with his discovery
of Christianity.
The new religion was
exotically Asian; it was so un-Roman and un-Greek and even so un-African that it
especially appealed to a Milanese such as Vitalis, weary of Imperial Roman braggadocio.
There had been a certain frisson of excitement since the Christians had been
persecuted off and on for the last two centuries. Vitalis liked his religion; it
was so reasonable and practical that he could actually believe it and did not have
to listen to what others told him to believe. Having just one God simplified
things, especially prayers and altars. The idea of Jesus intrigued him too, a
real man who spoke and said sensible things, good things, about making the
earth a kind place to live.
Life could all be so easy,
if people minded their own business, literally. But there was always someone
who wanted what you had or at least, wanted control. Vitalis's big mistake had
been ignoring this basic truth.
On his last trip to
Ravenna, he had found a new fishery specializing in gorging its eels solely on rotten
entrails. This made the fishes’ livers grow to great obesity, filling them with
the bitter spleen fundamental to the garum sauce that every Roman legionnaire and centurion prized
and packed in their ditty bags along with their Lares and Penates (or statue of
Isis or cross or Mithraic bull). It was a staple in the personal stash of
condiments the soldiers took with them to war. The price of the eels was advantageous,
the quality was superior, and with this load he took back to Milan, Vitalis could
pay for instruction for his two sons.
Though he liked Christianity
well enough, Vitalis’s passion was music. Nothing was cleaner, nothing took him
to a happier place than dances and ballads and African percussion at the market
place. His wife Valeria had only a passing interest in music, but he shared his
love of this odourless, ethereal art with his sons Gervasius and Protasius, who
soon became anxious to learn the lyre and flute. Vitalis had managed to buy his
sons cheap little instruments but now, with this load of snapping eels and pots
of exceptionally good eel livers he would pound into exquisite garum, Vitalis should be able to afford
lessons from the new music master who was plying his trade in the
neighbourhood. It was with a light heart that Vitalis loaded up his cart and
drove out of town, passing the prison.
He heard a man singing a
melancholy hymn of Christian joy and faith, of suffering and ecstasy. Vitalis
had heard nothing like it before, so he stopped his mules in their traces and
listened. Then the man stopped singing.
“Who goes there?”
“Oh, an eel monger from
Mediolanum, on his way home to sell goods at the market. Where did you learn
that hymn? It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a Christian hymn.”
“Are you a Christian,
too?” Vitalis responded.
That was the kiss of death
for Vitalis. The Roman centurion guarding the prisoner, an itinerant
philosopher, overheard Vitalis’s discussion of doing unto others as ye would
have them do unto you, and of what riches await in heaven. The poor philosopher
however, comforted Vitalis rather more and taught him three concepts Vitalis
had not learned thoroughly: forgiveness, sacrifice, and redemption. Vitalis had
been happy enough with the basic ideas of being good and answering only to one
God.
The guards conveniently misconstrued
Vitalis’s consolation for heretical intrusion into politics; this could be easily
construed to the guards’ advantage. The soldiers recognized Vitalis and knew
what merchandise he had in his cart. The guards knew just where to wait for
Vitalis as he made his way back to Lugo on the road for Milan, so they could set
troops on him and pillage his goods. Under Diocletian’s edicts, the soldiers’
mere suspicion allowed them to summarily condemn Vitalis to death as a
Christian. Vitalis’s eels, famed in Romagna as well as in Rome and Milan, would
serve them well after the soldiers’ slaves turned the livers into garum for their campaigns. When the soldiers
stopped Vitalis at a lonely bend in the road, he looked down at them from his
cart. He saw the evil in their eyes, and he knew he would not see the sun set
that day. There was no use in trying to explain; their glee at inflicting
complicated forms of pain would submitted to every torture and indignity
inflicted on him. He was thankful when they finally pulled out his intestines so
he would pass out before they half buried him, still alive. Dogs and birds
nibbled at his head and face while the centurions laughed. The pain was over
for him; it would take centuries for him to lose his empathy.
Over the passing first
two centuries, Vitalis grimly noted that any deviation from standard thought
threatened people enough to lead them to kill their fellow human beings. He had
not needed to hear Theodora expound on it. Gold was the primary reason for
murder, and second came grabbing for land, but nothing got people as infuriated
as having their beliefs questioned. Doubt took the very ground from under their
feet and no mongrel bitch whose puppies had been attacked was ever as vicious
as someone whose credo had been called into question. Vitalis realized this
even before he heard Theodora astutely delivering it as political doctrine all
those centuries in the apse.
What could Vitalis do?
He would try to get the Bible to flutter open to a certain passage, or make
coins drop from someone’s pocketbook in the square for the poor to discover.
But his actions in the life eternal never made much difference and he knew it. Vitalis
could only stand watch over the populace, century after century and be there in
the middle of the square for them to pray to when they needed something. Only
no one prayed to him, standing there in his Roman helmet. Vitalis had become an
insignificant though picturesque tourist attraction. The priests absentmindedly
intoned his name in the litany of saints but they didn’t know who he was. He could
answer prayers that were sent up in your his name, but the words of the ecclesiastic
supplicants were so generic as to have no effect on Vitalis’s soul.
“Happy New Year, Vitalis!”
Vitalis had never much
enjoyed Apollinaire. No one who knew Apollinaire ever did care for him because he
never stopped talking. There was substance to what he said, but its impact was
lost in his endless repetitions. He repeated commonplaces and remarked on the
weather and asked the same question over and over and over again. His voice
droned on century after century.
Like Vitalis, Apollinaire
was not from Ravenna either, but from a prosperous little village on the Syrian
coast. During his lifetime people had regarded him as miraculous: he was a
gifted healer. He could look at a blind child, and see the cause of his illness,
squeeze his skull and the child’s sight would be restored, while Apollinaire
yammered on and on and on. Everywhere he
travelled, everyone, including Simon Peter, tried to get rid of him because he
would not stop babbling. Even when the soldiers tortured him, he implored their
forgiveness, even after they gagged him he gurgled continuously so even they
gave up and let him live. Anything was acceptable as long as you could get away
from him. Vitalis was trapped and Apollinaire was oblivious to the fact that he
bored people literally to tears with his incessant bit and drill of concept and
reiteration. Apollinaire thought he moved them to tears - tears of joy - so he
just kept talking.
Apollinaire, the boorish
genius, was kind and good and tried to help people and he did have faith in God and the Holy Spirit, but
he also believed in Mithras and Isis and any other deity he happened to stumble
upon, including Muhammad and Krishna and Ron Hubbard. Though his IQ was easily
over 165, he never realized how much his image had been manipulated for
political ends. He wouldn’t have understood it even if it had been explained it
to him, and he assumed that Justinian was indeed, “a reincarnation of God as
all of us are, because the earth is one big womb, and everything is made of the
same matter, so we are either all God or all men and stones and trees which was
better, stones or trees, but probably trees because they had fruit and people
could eat fruit and even animals could eat the fruit which would become part of
them and the people would eat the animals so you see we are all actually just
one piece of the matter that we eat and then the earth eats us and we return
like Saint Vitalis to become a sprig of spelt like Jesus who even said it when
he gave his apostles bread, this is my body eat it because Jesus understood
that we are all made of the same thing, the earth, its fruits, and even
pastries and eels, but Vitalis knew more about eels than Apollinaire did
because Vitalis had been an eel monger you see and early Christians loved eels
and Christians and eels were all made of the same ....”
Apollinaire never let
up. Vitalis stood there holding his lance in his left hand, his right hand on
his hip, where he was forced to look at Apollinaire until the statues would come
off their pedestals in 49 years when the local Assessor of Fine Arts would have
them restored and cleaned. Christian martyrdom is not for the faint of heart,
and even though Vitalis had not aspired to sainthood, they were both his lot in
eternal life.
Why couldn’t Vitalis just have continued on to
Milan? Those rough Gallic mercenaries and his business competitor not only
murdered Vitalis's wife and sons, they had thought nothing about going three
steps further and violating his family, once Marcellus was certain that Vitalis
had been murdered. It wasn’t enough for Marcellus to eliminate Vitalis as a competitor,
and take over his shop, and his place in the market, and his preferential
relationship with the Romagnol eel merchants who would only deal with
Vitalis. Though Vitalis and his family
all had eternal life and fame, he really would have preferred to lead an unremarkable
life and die an uneventful death, like Bruno or Sabrina. Nevertheless, this
immortal sainthood was his public and eternal destiny.
“We are who we are and
we do what we must do and there is no escaping fate or tomorrow or yesterday,
we are all part of the same flux of action and reaction that has been pouring into
and out of the cosmos since the dawn of time, since the first drop or water met
the first clump of soil and life began, our life began because we are all part
of the same fire that lit up the heavens millions and millions of years ago,
and our lives are merely tiny sparks in the cosmos, sparks as big as the stars
in the night sky that bring warmth and love to those around us, or pain and
agony to whole worlds and populations without a past or a future, without a
history or a plan, without a chair or a table, without a mother or a daughter,
without a wife of a husband, almost nothing more than animals.”
Apollinaire was
sympathetic to Vitalis, but that only coaxed Apollinaire to console Vitalis, to
comfort him, to distract him, to uplift him, to reassure him, to mollify him,
to keep his spirits up with conversation.
Over the centuries, the cavalcade
of eternity and infinity marched before them, rolling away into the vast
Romagnol sky, down into the blood of the people at their feet, revolving in the
electrons of the atoms of the marble of the statues which represented them.
Going around and coming back again to the same place, to the same purpose, to
the same reality, Vitalis could see it all from the past until the present,
from the very beginning, from the first germ up to the people dancing at his
feet on the cold grey cobblestones of the main square tonight.
What did Vitalis really
miss most of all of life, of the life that had marched out before him, millennium
after millennium? He missed his wife and sons, but he knew he would be with
them on Judgment Day. He did not miss going to bed and awaking, he did not miss
his home and its comforts. He knew it was cold now, he could see that from the
frost on the windows of the police station but he did not miss warmth in winter
or coolness in the summer. He did not miss sex, he did not miss Theodora and
her entourage of corruption and lust and depravation and fame and intrigue and
glamour and cruelty and gore and glory. He did not miss the sun or the seasons.
They were eternally his from his pedestal high in the main square.
He did not miss music,
because it too, was constantly in the air around him, whether he had been
receiving his crown of martyrdom in the church or here guarding the square
although he had to admit the music in the square was superior and never ceased
to fascinate him. Music in the Church had barely evolved over the first millennium
and it was a repetition of solemn praise, lifeless joy, and sublime devotion
that no one felt while they were singing it or hearing it or playing it twenty
or thirty times or two hundred times. Music had to change if you were going to
enjoy it and Vitalis thrilled when he heard it change so often in the square.
It was the one thing that made his martyrdom passable, now that he was no
longer in the church.
The music was almost
enough, if only, if only he could still eat. More than anything else, Vitalis
missed his eels. He missed the smoked ones, he missed the ones he brined
himself, and he missed the roasted ones, eaten hot off a spike, the best ones,
still writhing in death throes. Even after he cut the eels’ heads off, many
continued to coil and uncoil for hours. It was living meat that electrified your
mouth as you chomped down on it. He missed teasing the vicious eels and
catching them and skewering them alive onto iron stakes that he would stick
into the ground over an open fire while he roasted them still squirming. Vitalis
missed his tongue in cheek haggling with the fishermen and the net builders and
the people who kept the eels in their seined pools. He missed cooking the eels,
and then putting little titbits on a little plate in the front of his shop
where his customers would sample the succulent white flesh, salty or smoked,
hot or cold. Though that last load of eels had brought him to Ravenna and left
him there for eternity, he still wished he could taste them. Vitalis missed them, even if the eels were why
he came here, and why he ended up staying here - forever.
Vitalis did share one
common trait with Theodora and Justinian and Maximian and Antonina and Joanna
and Belisarius and Apollinaire for that matter: none of them were from this plot
of Earth, this land on the banks of the Rubicon; neither were the Roman veterans
who settled here to live the bucolic dream Virgil had invented for Augustus,
nor were the invading Barbarian soldiers, nor were the Venetians natives of
this land, nor were the priests and nuns and monks, the younger scions of noble
families Vitalis had watched as they took over the region when it fell to the
Papal States, literally treating the dirt better than the peasants. Nor were
the French soldiers whom Vitalis saw as they invaded the region once again, the
French soldiers who left their language in the local dialect, nor was Napoleon
who stripped the buildings of their crests, castigating the very few wealthy
Romagnols who were every bit as haughty and ruthless as Theodora and Justinian.
Nor were the Austrians and the Germans, nor the Canadians and the Americans,
who came and finally, the whole rest of the world, the Moroccans and Egyptians,
the Chinese and the Filipinos, the Ecuadorians and the Poles and the Russians
and the Lebanese, who all came to conquer or seek asylum in this open plain by
the sea, finding themselves among this people, becoming this people. Vitalis
had watched the people being born here for almost 2000 years: Romagnols with
their hard-set ways, their immobile individualism highlighted in gold accents
on their clothing, and their solid delight in wine and meals. The great truth
everyone learned when they came here was that at the end of the day, you had to
eat. And if you didn’t eat well and enjoyed yourself, at some point during the
day, you had just lived another day in mediocre tedium. That was a waste of
living.
These people, these
Romagnols understood that. They were farmers at heart; almost all of them were descended
from farmers and many would become farmers and hand down a legacy through the genetic
soil that accumulated under their offspring’s fingernails. In the back of most
everyone’s mind that came to this fertile flat landscape was farming or at
least being close to the earth and fruit and grain and pigs and vegetables and
chickens and guinea hens. Even the way the ancient Romagnols raised their eels
was a way of farming the fish, trapping them and keeping them alive in seined
pools, feeding them the entrails and skulls and gristle and skins of animals
and the occasional cadaver. Eels fed off anything, turning the vilest remains
of life into their flaky white flesh.
The whole reason behind populace’s
existence had been planned and plotted by the Romans. They divided the low
swampy land into four by one square lots, four fields and one long farmhouse
perpendicular to the fields. Thus the centurions who had survived the wars
could lead their agrarian ideal of life: settle down in safety and till the
land for their own sustenance without having to answer to anyone except for nature.
That was the farmer’s great freedom.
But then the Christians
came. And after the Christians the Barbarians, and after the Barbarians the
Holy Roman Emperor, and after the Holy
Roman Emperor came the Venetians, and after the Venetians came the Church again,
the Papal States whose cruelty and ruthless domination of the people was still
vividly reflected in the Romagnols’ visceral anticlericalism four centuries
later. As long as the Romagnols pretended that the priests and nuns and monks
and bishops were their superiors, the Romagnols survived. Vitalis knew how
lucky these Romagnols were that Theodora had never deigned to visit their
marshy little city, though from afar she more than adequately instituted the
practice of perfidious obsequy. Theodora was the Grand Mistress of Self Serving
Hypocrisy.
But then, but then finally
came Napoleon to conquer and liberate the Romagnols, and tell them they would
be fine as long as they paid tribute, and monetary tribute alone. With Napoleon,
Vitalis saw a ruler whose interest was at one with his people, a ruler who
understood that levying tribute only worked if it was reasonable, and if you
gave people the right to lead the lives they wanted to lead. A happy people
need to profess their own religion, to have their own property, and to realize
that they’re a living part of their own society where their voices and
personalities counted. Finally Vitalis saw a rule of order and justice for
everyone for the first time in his conscious existence. Finally he saw the
church lose its grip on the populace who never again submitted to the yoke of
Christendom. It was the beginning of the end for Christianity as Theodora had
conceived it: religion as denial of individual power and physical pleasure,
denial of character, denial of people’s simple right to be who they were.
Napoleon, yes he had taken down all the coats of arms and crests in the city,
but the local nobles had never been much good to anyone except themselves, and
no noble bemoaned their tokens of power being scraped from the walls, as long
as they could keep their lands.
Vitalis smirked when the
Church fought back and of course, and cheered when the Romagnols fought back at
the Church. When Socialism finally decreed that Religion was an optional and a
bad one at that, the people were finally freed, freed to try to be who they wanted
to be, freed from being who their parents thought they should be. If he had
been alive and able to vote, Vitalis would have become a socialist but he was
content to see that humankind was evolving, that something was evolving in
addition to music and clothing. Sure enough, many of the Romagnols who started
out as socialists became the blackest of Fascists, and many, the fiercest of
Partisans as they moved from socialism to communism. But they were all against
the Church. And some, very very few, but
some Romagnols became fine Christians as Vitalis would define them.
Apollinaire had seen it
all, too and tonight everything was coming together in a new formation, as it always
did on New Year’s Day.
“People need something
to believe, people need a leader, people need Moses and Phtha and people need the
Madonna of Lourdes and Lao Tzu, people need to look at someone who is better
than they are, someone that they can emulate, and someone that they can aspire
to. That’s why St Paul and Saint Maria Goretti and Thomas Aquinas and Thomas
More and Sarah Bernhardt and Nilde Jotti, Charlemagne and Gandhi and Lorenzo De
Medici and Machiavelli and Sonmi 451 and SueEllen and Garibaldi and Mussolini and
Mohammed and Isis and Marilyn Monroe and Eleanor of Aquitaine and Martin Luther
and Martin Luther King and Voltaire and Nietsche are so important. And Jesus,
too. People need a model they can
emulate.”
“Like Mussolini and
Ellsworth Twohy and Donald Trump? Perhaps, but certainly not one like Theodora.”
“I never did get to know
who she was though I know she came from the country they now call Iraq, is next
to where I am from in what they now call Syria. No one ever speaks of Theodora’s
personality; they just talk about just her image, her fabulous portrait with that
gilded halo.”
“You’re lucky
Apollinaire, you’re lucky. Never was there anyone more perfidious or more
highly regarded. Not all models are good ones. Too many people have been
hypnotized by her penetrating gaze and her husband’s perfectly effective
policies and compilation of unjust laws. Too many women have implemented her ploy
of controlling the emotions of people around them. These women have learned how
to manipulate others so they can shine, decking themselves out in furs and
paint and jewels, with coloured hair and artful clothing. Theodora is the one woman
we all need to forget although she is the only woman that will never be
forgotten in this tiny town. Theodora will live forever, as long as her image
of cracked glass and marble and gold and mother of pearl remains cemented in the
wall. Her gaze is too compelling; her story too well known. She has raised
herself above everyone in this town’s history and she used me to do that. She
is the real centre of the egocentric realm of the universe beneath us. After
staring at her for two hundred years, I finally made out the inscription she
had incised in the tesserae of her forehead; ‘Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of
the Earth’ Theodora, the Great Whore of Babylon still straddles her Church and
holds Jesus’s blood in her mouth today, and she is still riding His bride, His
Church proudly, sanctimoniously, and placidly into eternity.”
“Apollinaire, surely you’ve learned that good
and honest and kind people just do not hold the interest of the populace. The
wicked and cruel, the sharp and shameless are the people who get noticed, they’re
the ones that people respond to at their cores. Haven’t you learned that people
simply don’t realize that it is enough to have something to eat and shelter to
be kind and be happy?
“But they do, Vitalis.
Look at them below us. They know they’re happy and joyful and rejoicing and
content and... .”
“Do you really think so?
I’m not so convinced. And Theodora is eternal living proof that goodness and happiness
do not win.”
“But even a flawed model
is better than nothing. Tis better to have a pair of sandals with holes in them
that to go barefoot.”
“Tis better to go
barefoot than use the heels of your boots to grind babies’ heads into the mud.”
That finally silenced Apollinaire for five minutes and punched a hole as big as his Byzantine Basilica in his logic. Apollinaire had seen four horses draw and quarter young soldiers beneath him in the square, he had seen soldiers in every century disembowel little girls for fun; he had seen little girls pull the wings off butterflies and laugh. Cruelty was a stain in human character as pervasive as kindness, though kindness always shone brighter than all but the basest of cruelties. Apollinaire knew that the basest of cruelties outnumbered the brightest of kindnesses; that there would always be more instances of blundering ignorance than acts of altruism. Still, Apollinaire clutched tight at his hope, which he knew would never stand the test of rational reasoning. That only made him hope even more. It was his highest expression of faith in the future, his hope that kindness would grow, if not exactly prevail. It had in the great beyond, and the souls of the dead had matured as well, and often became gentler and kinder once all had been revealed to them.
That finally silenced Apollinaire for five minutes and punched a hole as big as his Byzantine Basilica in his logic. Apollinaire had seen four horses draw and quarter young soldiers beneath him in the square, he had seen soldiers in every century disembowel little girls for fun; he had seen little girls pull the wings off butterflies and laugh. Cruelty was a stain in human character as pervasive as kindness, though kindness always shone brighter than all but the basest of cruelties. Apollinaire knew that the basest of cruelties outnumbered the brightest of kindnesses; that there would always be more instances of blundering ignorance than acts of altruism. Still, Apollinaire clutched tight at his hope, which he knew would never stand the test of rational reasoning. That only made him hope even more. It was his highest expression of faith in the future, his hope that kindness would grow, if not exactly prevail. It had in the great beyond, and the souls of the dead had matured as well, and often became gentler and kinder once all had been revealed to them.
* * * * * *
Reverberations from the last
note struck on the clock in front of Vitalis and Apollinaire echoed in the
square below. Steam from breath and perspiration clouded windows of the bars
beneath them in the square and turned the panes of glass into gleaming fuzzy swirls of colour as the people milling
around inside toasted and danced and sang and shouted and drank and celebrated
the year to come. The doors burst open
and the people streamed into the square, smoking, drinking, laughing, singing,
shouting happy to be alive, happy to be where they were, happy for the holiday
before them. No one looked up at St Vitalis, no one thought of anything but
themselves. No one saw the grand vista of the cosmos spiralling around them as
time and fate buffeted them between their desires and the rule of other people.
There was no thought of fighting or resistance tonight. Just the feeling, the
emotion of living the next five minutes: in the splendour of the moment, in the
glory of wearing red underwear, in the marvellous joy of hope and faith in the
immediate future and the ecstatic relief at leaving the bad dreams of the past
behind.
As Saints Apollinaire
and Vitalis looked down at the revellers, they saw the souls of the unremembered
dead gently, softly appearing in the vast volume of the square as wisps of fog
and steam and smoke and exhalations and vapours and scents and condensation. Reduced
to five pale streams of fog, Egidio led Valter and Gilda into the square from
via Carioli, to reunite them with Camilla and Eugenio joined wandering in from via
November 4. Nilde sublimated in the strong aroma of toasted barley in a hot cappuccino
in the Bar Roma, and Sabrina rose beside her from the dark aroma of cocoa sprinkled
on it. To the right of the clock, the magenta columbines on the police station
balcony breathed out their nocturnal carbon dioxide, and Isabella with it. Verdiana
and Alberto and Sergio had always stayed together even in the afterlife, and
they floated inside a cloud on the road from Sant'Alberto, curling up around
the bas relief medallion that graced the church of Saint Maria next to the
bank. Livia evanesced in a shimmer of perfume that passed through a pale orange
chiffon scarf and Professor Bedeschi rose to meet her in a faint whiff of the burnt
bologna molecules wandering out of a toasted sandwich. He always returned to
the square once a year after wandering through his endless cosmos of fire and
ice. Fabrizio issued from the exhaust of
a new moped swerving across the square while Edvige emanated out of the
patchouli eau de cologne of the young woman driving it. Mirco hung in the
moisture around the sharp blade of the charcuterie machine in the fragrance of
prosciutto that was launched into the air as the bartender made a sandwich,
while Fulvio was content to cling to the aroma of the prosciutto in that
sandwich as a bearded man ate it while Barbarina coiled herself in and out of his
breath in the chairs rusting in the cold around him. Libero and Enea and Anna
took the shape of curls of smoke describing impalpable arabesques in the air of
above the people with their tobacco cigarettes lit. The scent of blood oranges
in a screwdriver liberated Edda and Nieves as they ascended into a young
woman’s nostrils. Francesco and Nevio
mingled together in the perspiration rising from the left and right armpits of
a young man singing near the bases of the portico’s columns, finally cuddling
one another in the afterlife. Bruno evaporated in the scent of old aluminium
coming off of an Indian motorcycle standing near the post box. In the form of fruity cigarette vapours
Attilio searched out his friends from the university. Nina and Ugo and
Mariella’s souls exhaled into the visible breath of an elderly couple dancing a
lively mazurka and wafted off as a trio that whirled around the four corners of
the square. Giordano and Rachele hung about the drops of water clinging to the
pipes holding up the frescoed vaults under the porticoes while Tosca and Arturo
materialized in the smoke from a Tuscan cigar an old man was smoking beneath
them. Antavleva exuded in the sweat under his wedding ring. Alfredo Covazzi rose in the steaming rising
off a piadina someone carried out into the square and caught a whiff of incense
– so he knew Father Tadeusz must be nearby. Viviana exploded from the fragrance
in a piece of Parmesan cheese an old man was breaking to snack on at the
counter of the Bar Nazionale and Paolone jumped out to meet her in the alcohol
evanescing from a good glass of Sangiovese the man was drinking. Carlo elated
in from the suburbs and huddled under the frescoed vaults leading to the square
of the eagle, while Sandro condensed into sheen of water and stretched out atop
an unused cafe table, as Mirella slipped between the shutters of the offices in
the town hall as her mother floated past her in search of Giampaolo, who never
bothered to come back on New Year’s Eve. (Or hadn’t come back in at least seventy
years). Maria and Elvira and Primo and
Lorenzo came in the calm wind that rustled the Italian flag hanging from the
police chief’s balcony while Giuseppe arose from the finest sawdust and saliva a
termite had spewed from his mouth in the counter beneath the bar’s cash
register while and Vicenzina blended into a tear from the elderly cashier as
she wiped her eye with a handkerchief she had made from her mother’s trousseau
of Romagnol hemp sheets. Gaetano pulled his Ermelinda around the square four
times in gentle breezes, as they did when he finally managed to get her to come
north and live on this plain by the sea. Ornella and the buttless wonder Albertino,
whom she did eventually marry quite happily, ruffled the travel posters glued
to the walls while Saverio and Mirta cuddled, balsamic and invigorating in the
evergreens and laurels left over from Christmas. To the south, near the Golden
Cup, Purbia fell down from the heavens as cosmic dust and was slightly
moistened when Titi was exhaled as the breath from a puppy given as a Christmas
present last week and wandering over the cobblestones. Fausto needless to say,
wandered out of a canapé drenched in truffle oil to meet Gabriella embedded in
the scented face lotion of the woman eating the delicious canape. Adina turned into droplets on the window of
the jewellery store at the corner of via Cairoli and Rino hovered in a mist on
the other side, sorry that he did not have a credit card to get his wife what
she wanted. Sveva and Alessandro twisted around one another balletically as they
issued from the fragrance of a warm cup of vin brule that was evaporating into
the night air. Italina and Antonio were inhaled and exhaled by their great
grandchildren. Once they were united in death with their offspring, they never
abandoned them and their great-grandchildren never abandoned them. Bice condensed
in the drops of fog clinging to a burnt oatmeal tweed muffler while Lorenza
issued from the thick smoke of a woman smoking a long cigar. Becky and Loretta floated
in from via 4 giugno to circle the column under Saint Vitalis where they clung as
drops of wet fog to the gorgeous flowers on the pedestals while Emilia and
Giangiacomo were finally reunited for eternity in the oxidising bronze on the feet
of the statues.
The moon had slowly
climbed onto the horizon and a small wisp of a lip shaped cloud swept down the
centre of the square; ever so slightly tinged ruby red, Katia descended to the
cobblestones with magnificent grace, followed by Bianca who came to love her
adoring Mother even more after death and complete disclosure. Roberta whisked
into the square in the form of some very nasty cigar smoke and rose to envelope
the columbines and Isabella, the woman she had finally found to love her the
way she wanted to be loved. Klara was the scent of evergreens, far away in her
Alpine chapel. A group of elderly
parishioners walking out of the church with their priest into square emanated the
fragrances of tea rose and woodland pine, incense and Castile soap and Arpege, lily
of the valley and talcum powder, effusing into the square, all that was left of
Giulietta and Orietta and Domenico and Uberto and Lalla, and Fulco and Tina, happy
to find themselves finally together in the afterlife, after Domenico would have
nothing to do with his mother or his half brother during their lives. Some things
do turn out for the best. Amerigo and
Violy lingered over the pollen on the white lilies decorating the mayor’s balcony
while Maria Rosa and Gabriele twined around one another in the smoke rising
from the small bonfire, which a small knot of revellers were feeding with cast
off clothing and the tiny new paper databases, the latest form of communication
that had once again, been outmoded with tiny binary tattoos you could keep
behind your ear and touch whenever you needed information.
Every soul dissipated in
the obliteration of the other souls, merging in the fog that was now flowing
into the square from all six streets that gave access to it. The fog hovered over
the celebrants of life under the stars in the heavens above them. It was the
one time each year that all the forgotten auras from yesterday and today coexisted
for one fleeting grey moment, until they returned to their separate places of
repose, whether under the streets or in marble tombs or floating above grassy
knolls.
Romagna looked up at the
stars and them smiled at all her citizens since she was the only one who could
see everybody present and everyone past. She pulled her cloak of fog close
around her corners, hugging the mist to her buildings, pinning it tight with
the statues of Saints Apollinaire and Vitalis so that her populace could not
see too far into the murky future or too deeply into the muddled past. She let
out a faint muffled sigh and turned on her side to drift off to sleep while the
people danced in her squares on the plain and in the hills, near the sea and by
riverbanks. Tonight was a night for them to live and rejoice, and tomorrow
would be too.
