Translated by Anne Milano Appel
I
The spring breeze was still blowing but there were no longer nebulas of fine, powdery dust rising from the ground. The sand had become heavy. It was drenched with blood.
The entire expanse of the arena, more than 3,600 square meters, had been bloodied by hundreds of dead animals. The carcasses of forest predators—bears, tigers, leopards, panthers—lay next to the herbivores whose flesh they had been tearing at just moments before. A few hung on, in the final shudders of their death throes. Below the marble galleries, a disemboweled lioness, though soaked in her own blood, persisted in sinking her teeth into the femur of a wild ass. At the opposite end of the elliptical arena, a lion with its throat ripped open widened its mouth in a suffocated roar, searching for air and its enemy at the same time. The tragic bulk of a slaughtered elephant, already flayed by hooks, dominated the space, surrounded by heaps of ostriches with their necks broken. Nearby, a litter of baby pigs sprang from the belly of an eviscerated sow. The animal gave birth and died. The death blow from a double-edged blade had made her a mother. The piglets, slick with blood and placenta, came into the world in a cemetery at its peak, among the remains of a hecatomb of beasts. They themselves would not last long: All around them, dogs, intoxicated by the blood, howled madly—the only creatures still living besides the sow’s offspring. Along the edges of the arena, in the stands, seventy thousand human beings, intoxicated in turn, were no less mad than the dogs.
It was at that moment that the human forms appeared on the sand. Three males. One wearing a cuirass and additional armor from head to toe, and two half-naked, covered only by loincloths. After making his way through the animal carcasses to the center of the arena, the soldier gave one of the two prisoners a short sword. The armed man immediately began chasing the other. When he caught him, he disemboweled him. Then he returned the sword to his jailer. A third prisoner was brought in. The newcomer was given the sword, still bloody, and, after a short chase, slew the first killer with it. The scene was repeated numerous times, always the same. On that blood-drenched sand, victim and executioner were one and the same: a slave in a loincloth prostrated in death before thousands of satisfied spectators.
Then everything became confused. Two crosses appeared in the arena. One more than three meters high and a smaller one, both planted in the sand. A man on each cross. On the taller one, a body nailed head up was set on fire. The flesh, smeared with pitch, flared up like broomcorn. On the shorter cross, a man hanging upside down was offered to a leopard. The leopard tore off his face; swallowed it.
At that point, seeing the face of the condemned man disappear in the leopard’s maw, Donald McKenzie, a fifty-six-year-old citizen of the United States, on a pleasure trip to Rome, fainted. The man, a native of Shelbyville, Indiana, where he managed a Wal-Mart, woke up in a bed at the San Camillo hospital, in a private room, with an intravenous drip stuck in his right forearm and an electrocardiograph attached to his chest to monitor his blood pressure and heartbeat. From time to time the patient, though he was safe and far from the place he had visited in that terrible vision, still displayed arrhythmias and brief fibrillations. A few hours earlier, as he was visiting the Colosseum amid the group with whom he had traveled from the United States—and in the company of a thousand other tourists from around the world—a vivid hallucination had brought that scene of carnage to Donald McKenzie’s eyes. Though once he recovered from the fainting spell he was able to report the details of what he had seen with calm and precision, McKenzie’s fixed stare proclaimed that, from that day on, this peaceful resident of Shelbyville, in the state of Indiana, would never again believe his eyes. For him, the ancient bond of trust between the eye and the mind was broken. Irreparably.
The extent of the trauma was immediately clear to all those who had just heard McKenzie’s testimony: at his bedside were the head of the hospital’s intensive care unit, the chief of psychiatry, a senior official from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the American vice-consul, John D’Anna, accompanied by a uniformed officer of the U.S. Army, and Angelo Perosino, a young researcher of ancient history at the University of Rome. A man and a woman in dark suits and dark glasses, who had not yet identified themselves, stood apart, next to a window covered by Venetian blinds. The woman was looking out, toying with the rays of light filtering through the slits.
They all gave the impression of knowing perfectly well why they were there. All except the unfortunate Donald McKenzie and Angelo Perosino, who had been picked up a few hours before by Italian police at his tiny office at the university—“my loculus,” he called it—and taken to the hospital. Along the way they had explained only that his counsel was required. They had chosen him, he was told, not only because of his expertise on the gladiator games of Imperial Rome, but also because he spoke perfect English, having earned a Ph.D. in paleography at Yale University.
After hearing the gruesome story, Perosino, frightened by the American’s delirium and close to an attack of claustrophobia, felt a nostalgic yearning for the amber light that at this moment would be spreading over the hills of Rome, heralding evening. So the researcher gently took one of the two doctors by the arm. He got what he was looking for.
“Professor Perosino, you are here because our friends at the American embassy suspect that some psychically unstable subjects,” the psychiatric chief explained in Italian, “strongly affected by the ruins of the Colosseum and overcome by the intense heat, may have developed hallucinatory visions of scenes that, based on what they were told by the guides, they imagine took place in antiquity on the sand of the arena.”
“Why do you say ‘subjects,’ doctor?” Perosino replied, irritated by the absurdity of the situation. “There’s only one patient that I can see.”
“This is not the first case,” the doctor whispered.
“English, please!” The demand came from the far end of the room, from one of the two individuals in dark suits: the woman.
“Yes, Professor Perosino, perhaps it is only fair for you to know that this has also happened to others in recent weeks. Persons very different in age, social class, and profession, who have never met one another.” Speaking now, in a soft, refined English, was Vice-Consul D’Anna. “In this case, however, there is something that doesn’t add up. And it is for this reason that we would like your advice, which will be well remunerated, I assure you.”
Perosino studied the two figures at the back of the room, then gestured for D’Anna to continue.
“What we cannot explain, apart from the nature of these visions, is their content. The atrocities described by Mr. McKenzie do not at all resemble the gladiator matches…”
Angelo Perosino shook his head, visibly annoyed by the man’s ignorance. “You see, sir, on any given day of the spectacles, in addition to the actual skirmishes between gladiators that took place in the afternoon, the Colosseum presented animal hunting and fighting during the morning program. The beasts were brought to Rome from every corner of the Empire and, sometimes in the space of a few hours, hundreds of them were exterminated. Furthermore, the scenes of torture described at the end of the story recall the executions of murderers, fugitive slaves, Christians—spectacles that filled the interval between the morning and afternoon programs. During the break between the venationes—the animal hunts—and the gladiator duels, while the populace feasted in the stands and the well-to-do left to go eat in taverns, some were slaughtered. Just like that, to pass the time.”
“Are you telling us, then, that the hallucination experienced by Donald McKenzie corresponds to the scientific knowledge we have in our possession about what took place in the Colosseum in the days of ancient Rome?”
“Absolutely,” Perosino decreed, hoping to be able to regain his freedom this way. “A philologically correct hallucination, I would say.”
As Angelo Perosino was escorted out, he noticed that the two individuals in dark suits were whispering animatedly to one another. They appeared to be in open disagreement about a matter of utmost importance. The man was arguing with barely contained passion in favor of some hypothesis, while the woman responded with cold, decisive gestures of denial. The researcher managed to catch only a few words, spoken loudly by the man, who was obviously vexed by the woman’s dissent.
“…remote viewing … remote viewing,” he nearly shouted at her, taking off his dark glasses for the first time.
II
Angelo Perosino had been wandering for hours among the ruins of the Colosseum along with the two mysterious individuals who had introduced themselves to him as Agent Stone and Agent Miller, obviously fake names. A telling incident had reinforced the young scholar’s conviction that they were agents of the CIA. After a brief huddle with the Italian police stationed around the metal detector at the entrance to the Colosseum, the weapons that both Miller and Stone carried in underarm holsters had been returned to them. And so Perosino found himself acting as guide to two armed agents in what remained of the largest theater of antiquity, a structure built with the blood of tens of thousands of slaves on two imaginary axes of 188 and 156 meters, for an overall perimeter of 527 meters.
As they wandered among crowds of tourists in shorts and bogus Roman centurions in cheap costumes posing for pricey souvenir photos, Perosino could not help mentally reviewing the information about “remote viewing” that he had acquired on the Internet. A brief search had been enough to discover that the term referred to a variety of techniques and protocols used to produce and control extrasensory perceptions. In remote-viewing phenomena, it was believed that a “viewer” could acquire multisensory information on an object situated anywhere in space and time without having previous knowledge of it. The pseudo-scientific explanations for these parapsychological phenomena referred to the alleged ability of the individual consciousness to connect to a supposed “matrix,” a field of pure information, which, like the realm of the mythical ether, is said to be found beyond the illusory space-time continuum that we conventionally call “reality.” A conceptually elaborate form of clairvoyance, whose scant credibility had, however, been reinforced by a top secret project financed by the American government during the Cold War years. The project, initially launched in the early 1970s with the name Stargate, under the supervision of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), was intended as a response to experiments that had been performed by the Soviets with clairvoyants, psychokinetics, telepathics, and child prodigies in support of espionage and counter-espionage activities and security systems associated with them. Later, the project passed to the control of the CIA, under the name SCANATE, and then, in the mid-’90s, was shut down. This according to official versions. But on the many websites devoted to these topics, fans of parapsychology claimed that, following the attacks of September 11, research in the United States had resumed, with even more advanced and more covert protocols and projects.
Angelo Perosino was almost run over by a small horde of ecstatic Japanese tourists on a photographic safari. The more the researcher contemplated the reasons he found himself at the Colosseum on a muggy August day, the more they seemed like a load of nonsense. Instinctively, he turned his back to the arena and directed his gaze toward the exit. A hand gently harpooned his right forearm. Agent Miller, beautiful and icy as always in her mannish Armani suit, was staring straight ahead at the stands on the other side of the arena.
Surrounded by a small group of fellow travelers who were making useless attempts to reassure him, a man of sturdy build, apparently terrified, was shouting as if possessed and pointing to a spot in the middle of the arena where, two thousand years earlier, gladiators had duelled to their deaths. In that spot, only a mound of dusty soil parched by the August sun could now be seen.
“Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la!”
Seventy thousand people were shouting in unison, chanting the invocation with a hypnotic three-syllable rhythm. As if with one voice, seventy thousand men, women, old people, and children, of all social classes, turned to the Emperor’s dais and let the guttural sounds rise up in that single voice. A hoarse voice. The stands of the Colosseum had been sprayed with a mixture of water and wine spiced with aromatic essences, and the sweet fragrance of saffron was married to the acrid odors of sweat and blood.
In the center of the arena, a man kneeling in utter despair awaited death, his torso bare, his muscular arms hanging loosely at his sides, his head thrown back to offer up his throat, eyes closed and mouth gaping. Until just a few seconds earlier, the man had fought vigorously. He had challenged, attacked, and threatened his adversary. He had even mocked him, displaying his genitals with the hand that gripped the sword. Now he was offering the second man his throat. He knelt before him like an object discarded in the dust.
After kicking aside the double-edged sword, the long rectangular shield, and the broad-visored helmet taken from the defeated man, the victor stood towering over him. He was bare-chested as well, and wore leg pads up to his thighs to protect his lower limbs; in his left hand he gripped a small round shield; in his right, a short, curved sword, like a dagger. His features were hidden by a helmet that covered his entire face, leaving only two small openings for the eyes. The victor raised the blade of the curved dagger to within a few inches of his own nose, as if a bestial myopia drove him to smell the adversary’s blood on the weapon that would kill him. The crowd worshipped him. He reciprocated, hardening into the unmoving madness of a stone idol.
“Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la! Iu-gu-la!”
Everything remained fixed for a few interminable seconds—the despairing defeated man, the exalted victor, the ululating public—a moment suspended in time as in a horrific infinity. Then, suddenly, that picture of unyielding savagery came to life again. The Emperor rose from his throne and held his arms out before him as if to embrace the entire amphitheater. A silence fell. Absolute. The most powerful man on earth, who could dispose of anyone in that arena however he wished, turned to the people, taking their views into consideration. At that moment, even the lowest of the excrement-befouled plebeians could express an opinion. The decision depended on him as well. He, too, was called upon to decide life or death. The Emperor radiated divine power, shedding it over everyone in the Colosseum. The people would be part of the spectacle, would descend into the arena and decide the match.
“Iu-gu-la. Iu-gu-la. Iu-gu-la.”
Once again the cry broke the silence. The people had decided.
Even before the Emperor, coming down from his dais surrounded by vestal virgins, turned his thumb down, the defeated gladiator moved. Advancing on his knees, he clasped his hands around the victor’s legs. Then he bowed deeply and, with exasperating slowness, bent his head forward. As soon as the head’s arc reached the end of its course, the victor, gripping the knife with both hands, plunged it straight into the victim’s neck. Up to the hilt.
“Ha-bet, hoc ha-bet!”
From the stands, a howl like thunder greeted the death.
“What does iugula mean?”
One of the two presumed CIA agents, the male, approached the bed from which the man attached to the drip and the electrocardiograph had just finished describing his vision. His name was John Dukakis, and he was a forty-three-year-old former soldier, who had joined the Army after his college education was paid for by ROTC scholarships; he was a veteran of the two Persian Gulf wars, and a native of Medina, a town in the western part of New York State.
Agent Stone waited for the man’s reply in a room in a mysterious, small underground hospital connected to the U.S. embassy, on Via Veneto. Dukakis had been transported there after he fainted. Now, after he had been given the necessary care, and the medical personnel had been dismissed, he was being questioned. The only other people in the room, besides the two CIA agents, were the Army officer who had been present at the San Camillo hospital, Angelo Perosino, and an artist who specialized in sketching storyboards for film directors at Cinecittà, that Hollywood on the Tiber where all the great Italian films had been produced in the ’50s and ’60s by the likes of Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, and De Sica. The artist was busily translating into images the story he had just heard from Dukakis, but the former soldier seemed to have nothing further to add.
“What does iugula mean?” Agent Stone repeated.
“I don’t know,” Dukakis said finally. “I only speak English. Those fiends in the stands were shouting it as though possessed.” Then he turned his head away, swallowed with difficulty, and half-closed his eyes.
“It means sgozzalo, ‘cut his throat.’” Perosino chimed in. “The public at the gladiatorial contests shouted it when they wanted to demand the death of one of the two combatants.”
“And that cry at the end?” the agent inquired further.
“Habet, hoc habet?”
“Yes, that one.”
“It means ‘He got it.’ It refers to the sword thrust into his neck. The people shouted it when the defeated man ‘got’ the sword.”
The illustrator had finished. He handed the sheets to the two agents. The woman took them. A series of quick sketches perfectly reconstructed the entire scene that Dukakis had described, alternating long shots and close-ups, as in a film sequence.
The woman gestured to the others to follow her out to the corridor. She shook her head: “He’s a soldier who fought in the front lines, probably suffering from the trauma of a grenade or some variation of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and he must certainly be a fan of action films like Gladiator. The one with Russell Crowe as a Roman general sent to do combat in the arena. He is probably superimposing the film’s images on the scene of the real Colosseum.”
“But Dukakis doesn’t know Latin!” the other agent interrupted.
The woman quashed the objection with a quick hand gesture. Now she gazed severely at Perosino, her blue eyes like ice. It seemed that she would not allow her hypothesis to be proven wrong.
Perosino regretted having to do so: “I’m sorry to contradict you, but that’s not possible. The patient’s account is much more faithful to the historic reality than the film is. In a number of details. Even if you ignore the issue of Latin, Dukakis’s description of the death ritual does not appear in the film and his details about the equipment are much more accurate. For one thing, Russell Crowe, in the role of Maximus, appears in the arena with armor that was worn not by gladiators but by soldiers of the Roman legions. The gladiators in Dukakis’s vision, on the other hand, fought bare-chested, as they did in actuality—”
“Then you, too, Professor Perosino,” Agent Stone interrupted “believe that these subjects have ‘seen’ the past?”
Little by little, as the conversation continued, Agent Stone was assuming an increasingly animated air. He stared off into space as he spoke, as if he were expecting at any moment to be visited himself by one of those visions.
Perosino began to feel anxious. Though compelled to say that Stone was right, deep inside he sympathized with the skeptical position taken by Agent Miller. He decided that it was his turn to ask questions. “Do you think that what we have here are cases of ‘remote viewing’?” he asked point-blank.
“Our driver will accompany you back to the university. The agreed-upon sum will be credited to your bank account. You have been a great help to us. Good day, Professor Perosino,” Agent Miller said as she moved off down the corridor. Agent Stone followed her without another word.
III
“It’s happened again.”
Angelo Perosino looked up from his Negroni. Standing in front of him in his Armani suit, Agent Stone stared at him from behind the shield of his inevitable sunglasses. Once again Perosino took offense. He had always gauged the meagerness of his salary as a university researcher by the cost of an Armani suit. It would take a month’s pay for one to buy an Armani suit. But only on sale at the end of the season. This is what Angelo Perosino thought whenever he felt discouraged about his work, and this is what he thought now when Agent Stone appeared before him.
“Have something. Can I offer you an apéritif, Agent Stone?” He spoke as though defying poverty. His own poverty.
Stone looked around. They were at Café Fandango in Piazza di Pietra, in the very heart of Rome, behind the Pantheon and opposite an impressive colonnade that once marked the boundary of a pagan temple but had later been incorporated into a structure less than a thousand years old. Café Fandango, owned by a successful independent producer, was frequented by writers and film people. Perosino went there often, hoping to be able to market one of his many stories of ancient Rome for a film.
“There’s something you definitely have to see, Professor Perosino.”
Stone was peremptory, as usual. Once again Perosino followed him.
During the drive to the covert hospital attached to the embassy, Stone and Perosino did not speak. Their silence was broken only when the driver deviated from the route and took Via dei Fori Imperiali in order to pass by the Colosseum.
“Do you like the Colosseum, Professor Perosino?” Agent Stone asked, indicating the seven concentric circles of arches that had once been adorned with huge slabs of travertine marble.
“The Colosseum is Rome. I was born here. These are things that happen to you. You don’t have the option of liking or disliking them.”
“You don’t believe that the past can reappear, Professor Perosino?” Agent Stone asked him after a brief pause.
“Rome is the Eternal City, I imagine you’ve heard it said, Agent Stone. When you live in eternity you don’t believe in anything,” Perosino replied.
Yet even as he spoke those words of deliberate cynicism, the researcher, confused by the noise of the traffic, had the momentary impression that he was seeing his city on the night before a spectacle, two thousand years ago. The blaring car horns sounded to him like the infernal din of the carts making their way from the animal parks of the imperial gardens, carrying the beasts toward the inevitable, their sole performance in the arena. Locked in dark cages, they would wait in the underground crypts of the Colosseum, already buried under the earth’s crust.
In the hospital room where the most recent hallucinator had been treated, Perosino and Stone found only Agent Miller awaiting them. This time the person shattered by the visions was a woman. A young woman, exceedingly pale, with huge green eyes, lying in a state of persistent catatonia. Maybe because she was covered with a white sheet, maybe because she was so beautiful and unreachable—like the ancient priestesses of the goddess Vesta, who took a vow of eternal chastity and were buried alive if they broke their vows—for a moment the American girl seemed to Perosino like a vestal virgin dressed in white. One of those eternal virgins who surrounded the Emperor on his dais during the gladiator games. In the end, Perosino said to himself, she, too, seemed to be buried alive in the grave of a psyche lacerated by the apparition.
“What do you see in these images, Professor Perosino?”
Agent Miller interrupted the flow of the researcher’s thoughts as she placed before him the visual transcription of the girl’s account, which must already have been heard before his arrival and recorded by the Cinecittà sketch artist.
Perosino looked at the drawings. He looked at them and was horrified. They portrayed a woman prisoner who, wrapped in a cowhide in the middle of the arena, was made to couple with an enormous white bull. In subsequent images, the body of the woman, already mutilated, was pierced by the tip of a red-hot spear, brandished by someone wearing the winged headdress of the god Mercury. Appearing next in the scene was someone with a bird’s beak, wearing a clinging garment and pointed leather shoes, holding a large hammer with a very long handle. This monstrous creature had seized hold of the unfortunate victim’s corpse and was smashing the skull with the hammer. Finally, the Colosseum workers, using big hooks, dragged the corpse out of the arena. The hooks were lodged in the flesh of the woman’s belly, already perforated by the bull. In the stands, surrounding the scene of carnage, the public was in ecstasy.
“What do you see in those images, professor?” Agent Miller repeated.
“I see the myth,” Perosino replied, casting a compassionate glance at the girl lying on the bed. She might be more or less the same age as the torture victim, and to have witnessed that scene must have been severely traumatizing.
“What do you mean, professor?” Agent Miller pressed.
“The scenes are mythological. The coupling between a woman and a bull recalls the myth of Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, king of Crete, who became infatuated with a bull she was given by Poseidon, and had herself shut up inside a faithful reproduction of a heifer, constructed by the architect Daedalus, in order to copulate with the beast. The creature with the bird’s beak is Charon, the demon who ferried the souls of the dead to the other side of the river Styx in Hades. In the beliefs of the ancient Romans, this figure, inspired by Charu, the Etruscan god of death, was almost always accompanied by the god Mercury, who appears here armed with a spear.”
“Now it’s all clear!” Agent Miller was elated. “This proves that our patients’ so-called ‘visions’ are actually inspired by concepts and images derived from previous knowledge. In this instance, the girl, a student of archeology at Stanford, drew upon sources of the classical myth that she must surely be familiar with.”
Angelo Perosino glanced again at the girl shattered by the apparitions, lost in sympathy. Then he shook his head vigorously. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case, Agent Miller. These mythological performances were actually staged in the Colosseum at the expense of some poor unfortunate. The violent copulation between the woman and the bull was made possible by the fact that the cowhide in which the victim was wrapped was first smeared with the blood of a cow in heat. It was the ancient Romans who believed in the reality of myths, not us.”
At that moment the girl was shaken by a paroxysm and began thrashing around in her bed.
“Maybe she’s trying to tell us something,” Perosino suggested.
“She hasn’t spoken since yesterday. She stopped talking right after finishing the account of her vision,” Stone informed him.
“Why did you wait until now to call me?” Perosino asked.
“Agent Miller felt that your advice was no longer needed,” Stone explained.
Using gestures, the girl asked to see the drawings. When she had them in her hands, she threw all except one to the floor. She turned the single sheet over to the blank side, took a pencil from the bedside table, and, with some difficulty, wrote a few phrases in Latin.
“Would you translate them for us?” Miller asked Perosino.
The researcher hesitated, still somewhat offended, then took the paper and read:
As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome will stand. When the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall. When Rome falls, the world will fall.
“What kind of nonsense is this?” asked Agent Miller, more intractable than ever. Her colleague Stone, meanwhile, clasped his hands in his lap, almost as if he were praying. He awaited Perosino’s answer with an eager gaze.
“It’s the prophecy of a wise man of late antiquity, who has come down in history by the name of the Venerable Bede.” Perosino moved away from the bed toward the other end of the room, where a halogen lamp gave off a faint light. “Unfortunately, it never came true,” he added. Then, not knowing what else to do, he turned the paper over and looked again at the drawing. “To be fair, perhaps there is an inconsistency,” Perosino concluded after a few seconds’ observation.
Agent Miller immediately rushed over to him, followed by Stone.
“Look here, in the stands, among the spectators,” Perosino said to Miller, indicating a woman, one of the vestals who surrounded the Emperor in their immaculate white garments. Like everyone else, the young priestess was staring at the scene of the woman and the bull. But unlike the others, she was watching the torture through a strange device that she held ten centimeters from her face, at eye level. The gadget, a slim metal rectangle from which protruded an oblong cone with a lens at the end, was some sort of optical device. Upon closer inspection, the mysterious object appeared to be a camera.
Agent Miller sighed with relief. “Did the girl also describe this detail to the artist?” she asked her colleague.
“This too,” Agent Stone was forced to admit.
“Excellent, there’s your proof that these are hallucinatory fantasies rather than remote viewing of the past,” Agent Miller ruled outright.
At that moment, however, the girl behind them began gurgling. Stone, Miller, and Perosino hurried to the bed. The girl was trying to say something, but the words were incomprehensible sounds burbling in her throat, almost choking her. Perosino, thinking she was spitting up blood, moved to ring the bell that would alert the medical personnel.
Agent Miller stopped him: “Hold on, professor.” The agent again handed the young woman the paper and pencil.
The unfortunate girl, her face waxen as a lily, scrawled a brief phrase: What appears in the visions is not the past. It’s the future.