However, I’d quite innocently fallen into this misfortune. The change of diet and the medicines I was taking daily to relax my shrunken stomach and realign my knotted gut created a lot of heavy weather down there, causing me serious gyp when it needed to make a swift exit. You see, I didn’t think there was any harm in letting nature have its head, particularly since in the long run there’s no resisting such inner forces. Nor had my hermit given me any hints in this area (such visitations being rare in our lives), or my dad ever barred me from letting the lads (nature, heavy weather, etc.) have their way. So I’d pass wind freely and let anything else go that was looking for a way out. When I did this in the clerk’s office, though, it cost me dear. I mightn’t even have minded losing his favour if I hadn’t fallen into a bigger trap subsequently, as happens to all good souls who come to court, where the snake spells trouble for Nasica, Goliath for David, the Minotaur for Theseus, Medusa for Perseus, Circe for Ulysses, Aegisthus for Menelaus, Paludes for Coraebus, Medea for Pelias, Nessus for Hercules, even Althaea for her own son Meleager.
My master had another pageboy as well, a right rascal who’d been with him for a couple of years. The fellow was about the same age as me, and I became fond of him (Jonathan to my David, I thought). But with the great favour the governor showed me growing greater by the day, he began to resent my presence. He was afraid I might spoil things for him, perhaps actually supplant him in our master’s affections. So he’d throw me these jealous looks when no one was around and make plans how to knock my marble out of the way and gain ground for himself. I was all innocence; I also thought differently from him. I trusted him with all my secrets, which of course concerned very simple, childlike, pious matters of a kind that he could never twist to my disadvantage. We used to natter in bed together for a long time before nodding off, and once, as our talk turned to foretelling the future, he promised to teach me the art for nothing. First I had to put my head under the bedclothes; otherwise the trick wouldn’t work. I did as he said, eager for the spirit of fortune-telling to arrive, which lo and behold it did – through the nose! So powerfully, too, that I had to stick my whole head back out from under the covers. ‘What’s up?’ said my tutor. ‘You let off,’ I replied. ‘True. That’s what soothsaying means: knowing what’s going to happen. And you should have known!’ Rather than take offence (the word meant nothing to me at the time), what interested me was, how did he do it so quietly? ‘Nothing to it,’ my friend replied. ‘Easy-peasy. All you do is lift your left leg like a dog pissing at the corner, repeating Je pète, je pète, je pète at the same time and pressing as hard as you can. Then you quietly walk away – like when you’ve just nicked something.’ ‘That’s great!’ I said. ‘And if there’s a pong afterwards, people will assume some dog’s farted, especially if I lift my left leg really high.’ I remember saying to myself, ‘I wish I’d thought of that earlier – when I farted in the clerk’s office.’