but remembered the successive entries and departures in the cabin only for the ray of light which had disturbed him each time that a hand pushed the blind. Like a man accused of a crime I strove to account for each hour: some dictation, a reply to the Senate of Ephesus; at which of those phrases did that agony take place? I tried to gauge the play of the footbridge under his tread, to reconstitute the dry bank and the flat paving stones; then the knife cutting the curl at the edge of his temple, the inclined body and knee bent to allow the hand to untie the sandal; the unique manner of opening the lips as he closed his eyes. It must have cost a desperate resolution indeed for so fine a swimmer to smother in that black silt. In my thoughts I tried to go as far as that revolution through which we all shall pass, when the heart gives out and the brain stops short as the lungs cease to draw in life. I shall undergo a similar convulsion; I, too, shall die. But each passing is different; my attempts to picture his last agony came to no more than mere fabrication, for he had died alone.
I fought against my grief, battling as if it were gangrene: I recalled his occasional stubbornness and lies; I told myself that he would have changed, growing older and heavy.
[Hadrian 204a.jpg] Hadrian at Middle Age Alexandria, Greco-Roman Museum
[Hadrian 204bc.jpg] Panorama of Ruins of Antinoopolis Engraving by Jomard, in Description de L?Egypt
[Hadrian 204d.jpg] Antinous as Osiris Dresden, Albertinum Museum
Such efforts proved futile; instead, like some painstaking workman who toils to copy a masterpiece, I exhausted myself in tasking my memory for fanatic exactitude, evoking that smooth chest, high and rounded as a shield. Sometimes the image leaped to mind of itself, and a flood of tenderness swept over me: once again I caught sight of an orchard in Tibur, and the youth gathering up autumn fruits in his tunic, for lack of a basket. I had lost everything at once, the companion of the night’s delights and the young friend squatting low to his heels to help Euphorion with the folds of my toga. If one were to believe the priests, the shade was also in torment, regretting the warm shelter of its body and haunting its familiar habitations with many a moan, so far and yet so near, but for the time too weak to signify his presence to me. If that were true my deafness was worse than death itself. But after all had I so well understood, on that morning, the living boy who sobbed at my side?
One evening Chabrias called me to show me a star, till then hardly visible, in the constellation of the Eagle; it flashed like a gem and pulsated like a heart. I chose it for his star and his sign. Each night I would follow its course until utterly wearied; in that part of the sky I have seen strange radiance. Folk thought me mad, but that was of little consequence.
Death is hideous, but life is too. Everything seemed awry. The founding of Antinoopolis was a ludicrous endeavor, after all, just one more city to shelter fraudulent trading, official extortion, prostitution, disorder, and those cowards who weep for a while over their dead before forgetting them. Apotheosis was but empty ceremony: such public honors would serve only to make of the boy a pretext for adulation or irony, a posthumous object of cheap desire, or of scandal, one of those legends already tainted which clutter history’s recesses. Perhaps my grief itself was only a form of license, a vulgar debauch: I was still the one who profited from the experience and tasted it to the full, for the beloved one was giving me even his death for my indulgence. A man frustrated was weeping over himself.
Ideas jarred upon each other; words ground on without meaning; voices rasped and buzzed like locusts in the desert or flies on a dung pile; our ships with sails swelling out like doves’ breasts were carriers for intrigue and lies; on the human countenance stupidity reigned. Death, in its aspect of weakness or decay, came to the surface everywhere: the bad spot on a fruit, some imperceptible rent at the edge of a hanging, a carrion body on the shore, the pustules of a face, the mark of scourges on a bargeman’s back. My hands seemed always somewhat soiled. At the hour of the bath, as I extended my legs for the slaves to shave, I looked with disgust upon this solid body, this almost indestructible machine which absorbed food, walked, and managed to sleep, and would, I knew, reaccustom itself one day or another to the routines of love. I could no longer bear the presence of any but those few servants who remembered the departed one; in their way they had loved him. My sorrow found an echo in the rather foolish mourning of a masseur, or of the old negro who tended the lamps. But their grief did not keep them from laughing softly amongst themselves as they took the evening air along the river bank. One morning as I leaned on the taffrail I noticed a slave at work in the quarters reserved for the kitchens; he was cleaning one of those chickens which Egypt hatches by the thousands in its dirty incubators; he gathered the slimy entrails into his hands and threw them into the water. I had barely time to turn away to vomit. At our stop in Philae, during a reception offered us by the governor, a child of three met with an accident: son of a Nubian porter and dark as bronze, he had crept into the balconies to watch the dancing, and fell from that height. They did the best they could to hide the whole thing; the porter held back his sobs for fear of disturbing his master’s guests, and was led out with the body through the kitchen doors; in spite of such precautions I caught a glimpse of his shoulders rising and falling convulsively, as under the blows of a whip. I had the feeling of taking that father’s grief to myself much as I had taken on the sorrow of Hercules, of Alexander, of Plato, each of whom wept for a dead friend. I sent a few gold pieces to this poor fellow; one could do nothing more. Two or three days later I saw him again; he was contentedly picking at lice as he lay in the sun at the doorway.
Messages flooded in; Pancrates sent me his poem, finished at last; it was only a mediocre assemblage of Homeric hexameters, but the name which figured in almost every line made it more moving for me than many a masterpiece. Numenius sent me a Consolation written according to the usual formulas for such works; I passed a night reading it, although it contained every possible platitude. These feeble defenses raised by man against death were developed along two lines: the first consisted in presenting death to us as an inevitable evil, and in reminding us that neither beauty, youth, nor love escapes decay; life and its train of ills are thus proved even more horrible than death itself, and it is better, accordingly, to die than to grow old. Such truths are cited to incline us toward resignation, but they justify chiefly despair. The second line of argument contradicts the first, but our philosophers care little for such niceties: the theme was no longer resignation to death but negation of it. Only the soul was important, they said, arrogantly positing as a fact the immortality of that vague entity which we have never seen function in the absence of the body, and the existence of which they had not yet taken the trouble to prove. I was not so certain: since the smile, the expression of the eyes, the voice, these imponderable realities, had ceased to be, then why not the soul, too? Was it necessarily more immaterial than the body’s heat? They attached no importance to those remains wherein the soul no longer dwelt; that body, however, was the only thing left to me, my sole proof that the living boy had existed. The immortality of the race was supposed to make up in some way for each individual death, but it was hardly consoling to me that whole generations of Bithynians would succeed each other to the end of time along the banks of the Sangarius. We speak of glory, that fine word which swells the heart, but there is willful confusion between it and immortality, as if the mere trace of a person were the same thing as his presence. They would have had me see the resplendent god in place of the corpse, but I had created that god; I believed in him, in my way, but a brilliant posthumous destiny in the midst of the stellar spheres failed to compensate for so brief a life; the god did not take the place of the living being I had lost.
I was incensed by man’s mania for clinging to hypotheses while ignoring facts, for mistaking his dreams for more than dreams. I felt otherwise about my obligations as the survivor. That death would be in vain if I lacked the courage to look straight at it, keeping in mind those realities of cold and silence, of coagulated blood and inert members which men cover up so quickly with earth, and with hypocrisy; I chose to grope my way in the dark without recourse to such weak lamps. I could feel that those around me began to take offence at a grief of such duration; furthermore, the violence of my sorrow scandalized them more than its cause. If I had given way to the same tears for the death of a brother or a son I should have been equally reproached for crying like a woman. The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.
We came back down the river to the point where Antinoopolis was beginning to rise. There were fewer boats in our party than before; Lucius, whom I had seen but little again, had returned to Rome, where his young wife was newly delivered of a son. His departure freed me of a goodly number of curious and troublesome onlookers. The work already started was altering the line of the shore; the plan of buildings-to-be became visible in the clearings between mounds of earth dug up everywhere for foundations; but I no longer recognized the exact place of the sacrifice. The embalmers delivered their handiwork; the slender coffin of cedar was placed inside a porphyry sarcophagus standing upright within the innermost room of the temple. I approached the dead boy timidly. He seemed as if costumed: the stiff Egyptian headdress covered his hair. His legs tightly bound in strips of linen were now only a long white bundle, but the profile of the young falcon had not changed; the lashes cast a shadow which I
