A Surreal Multicultural Short Story for Holidays by Anne Hart
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Multicultural stories linking media with culture through fiction
1. Time Traveling the Ancient Mediterranean with Paul of Patmos and his Dog, Xanthe.
The Antikythera Device: The Day St. Paul of Patmos Taught Me to Pray for the Gift of Being Able to Trust in a Power Higher Than Human Who Doesn't Think of Me as a Snack
More than two-thousand years ago my present mitochondrial DNA inhabited a woman named Calliope of Patmos, whose family invented, owned, and gave up to the sea, one of the rare, Greek Antikythera celestial navigation gears used for nearly three thousand years by Greek and later, Roman sailors. The antikythera device served as a mechanism of complicated gears physically representing the Callippic and Saros astronomical cycles.
It's not only gears I wanted to mesh. So let me take you back there again for a few hours to peruse the human condition. Some of my distant Greek family members still carry the ancient Greek name of Photiades. For clarity Photia, could mean "source of light" as in "light an oil lamp and walk out of the darkness," or the enlightened' one. Intimate glimpses of the human condition may be found in numerous art galleries.
In the many incarnations of my ancient DNA, the molecules lived in many bodies of generations well before the "common era" on the small Greek island of Patmos, , surrounded by the Aegean Sea at the time white-haired Paul of Tarsus once sought a bowl of broth at my family tavern of sustenance serving food for the sensibilities.
My beliefs there on Patmos emphasized good deeds rather than complex creeds. I had been a builder of dreams seeking practical applications, but so far ahead of my century, that I actually found time-travel a gift of destiny.
For me back then, the daughter of a proper Greek widow who could write well. My mother copied numerous scrolls and letters that Paul of Tarsus on Patmos brought into the tavern. As a follower, mother would give me copies of some letters. My windowed mother, Xanthe committed herself to faith, keeping the family together in spite of all odds, and putting bread on the table.
Here on Patmos, the family goal focused solely on commitment. We all followed Paul's when he came near our tavern for his bowl of broth and a listened to the whisperings of his talks and writings. And yet I longed to be an explorer and observer of comparative thought in faraway places and future times.
As girl of sixteen alone in the world, and having arrived as the new tutor in a wealthy Roman household villa in the far westNeapolis, the only way I could study the human condition consisted of gawking at works of art where I could reflect. I kept a treasure hidden with methe prized antikythera navigation gears.
For it is written: Five hundred years before that time of Paul, my father's father-fourteen generations removed, invented the antikythera celestial navigation device, and in those years, it served well as my treasure.
Not only had I been granted Roman citizenship because of the treasured Greek family name appearing in writing in three languages as the celestial navigation gear's inventor, but now, on my first job as Greek language, poetry writing, and history tutor to a child in the wealthiest Roman family in Neapolis, where many people also spoke Greek.
The older child had a separate mathematics tutor, and a tutor for engineering and building bridges. But I was assigned to teach the five-year old to read, speak, and write poetry as a healing tool in Greek.
So begins my proper passage at sixteen from adolescence to womanhood as a tutor in ancient Rome, the last outpost of civilization to my senses. See any similarity in this holistic adventure to a timeless search for the perfect nurturing mother?
Look at your deeds, I heard my mother once say to Paul of Tarsus when he lived and wrote on Patmos, the island of my birth. I told Paul that our art shows us the human condition. And peace in the home feeds the growth of consciousness. Now, I found myself in Rome, hidden in villa gardens so far from my family. Yet my letters to Paul where still sent as often as my letters to my own mother whose life focused on commitment to family and faith.
Often, I wore that plain iron ring and carried the scrolls that set me apart from the denizens of slaves who also served as tutors. Because of my citizen-ring and the signed papers, none of my father had ever been slaves of the Romans.
Look at me at sixteen, a Roman citizen with signed deeds to my antikythera invention attributed to my family and me as the only heir.
Yet as a proper Greek girl, and not a slave, invitations abounded to dine as the daughter of the long missing-at-sea Apollodorus. There were no more men left in my family to work as well-paid Greek architects contracted to draft the plans for villas in Neapolis for the wealthiest aristocrats as there had been for generations. I passed the precious time writing letters to Paul of Tarsus on Patmos as he wrote letters of his own that one day I would read.
And I, never really alone at sixteen with my mother's copies of Paul's letters nearby, spent a few nights on special feast days at the house of Salonius, a wealthy Roman and distant relative of the prosperous Cornelius family. His vast fortunes came from building many summer villas for still wealthier Romans in Neapolis overlooking the sea. Salonius, with wife and children shared this large villa.
At those times of my first few days on trial for employment as a tutor to my five-year-old playmate, Octavia, I lied awake, well protected, I thought, close to Octavia and to her rotund mother, Velia, an Etruscan who married into the old Latium family of Salonius Cornelius. As chaperoned children, we slept in the roped, rutted wool and feathered torus next to Velia.
"What's that you're holding?" Velia asked me.
"My Antikythera device," I said timorously. "It's a navigational tool for Greek sailors."
"Give me that!" Velia quickly removed it from my tiny fingers and pocketed the device.
"But it belongs to my father. It's been in our family for four hundred years." I quickly grabbed it back from her hands and placed it inside my goatskin purse.
"Well, now it's mine. Give it here." Pursy Velia huffed, pulling the gears from the sack strung around my waist.
"Go ahead keep it then," I sighed. "If you don't know how to use it right, there's the danger that any ship that misuses it might sink. I must not lose this. It's all that stands between my freedom and slavery. My Roman citizenship scrolls would be worthless without proof that my family line invented the device."
"Then I'll sell it so you won't envy this evil eye in front of me," Velia teased.
I used my own family members as models by memorizing the fruits of our family slogan of deeds, not creeds. I jostled the words to Velia without understanding their impact.
"Our Greek family travels only to study and understand the human condition for inner peace. And you can only learn about the human condition by studying what is in the art galleries of all peoples. Our goal is peace in the home.
You have to practice it in every room if you ever want to grow world peace. That's why you must return the antikythera to me or my mother or our friend, Paul of Tarsus who is now living on Patmos. The gears point the celestial direction of navigation. It belongs on a ship. Our family invented it for the purpose of growing peace."
"You grow peace, like a vine or a tree?" Velia looked up in surprise, grinning crookedly, but not smiling with her eyes.
"That's right," I told her eagerly. "You heal yourself into peace in an art gallery, not in a pantheon. Otherwise you're talking to yourself. Don't you know that the purpose of life is to understand the human condition?"
"You certainly can't do anything about it." Velia squealed with impatience. "You're just a crupper, a strap holding a riding saddle steady," Velia said impatiently. "I've heard about Paul of Tarsus. And I know all about your poor, widowed mother. You know what you are? You're trying to steady yourself on what Paul has taught you. I heard him speak on Patmos."
"So you know his followers."
"I've heard more than you understand about the oral traditions," Velia smirked as she retraced the sign of the fish by dipping her ring finger into a goblet of wine and tracing the x-tailed fish on the shiny edge of a platter of black figs.”
“You're only a sixteen-year old girl a very wealthy and smart girl for a foreigner,” Velia continued. “Luckily, you are not the slave of our oldest son's tutor. He's from Attica. Maybe you can fix some of the broken furniture around this house. What's more of a human condition than that torus I sleep on arriving back from repair full of vermin?”
"My friend, Paul of Tarsus told me and my mother ten years ago that the purpose of life is to take care of one another. That’s why Paul of Patmos gave me his little dog, Xanthe as a present when I sailed west."
"So that's how you repair what's broken," Velia laughed, admonishing me. “You take care of that filthy wolf cub. Romans prefer cats in the kitchen, not predators. Keep that dangerous wolf-dog in the atrium.”
“My half dog half wolf puppy will guard me well. I’ll put her in the garden house for now, but she is loyal and bonded to me. Look how beautiful her brushed fur is, like the silver rays of the moon.”
"That's a lot of strange information about she wolves and dogs from a Greek young woman. Learning architecture might not be a useless plan after all for a Greek woman nowadays. Times are changing for women here in Neapolis. Women have more freedom here than in Rome. Have you heard about the new changes in property inheritance laws for women? Probably notI bet all you can teach my five-year old daughter is the purpose of life. Well, what is the purpose of life? I suppose all you can do is spout ideas that can't be applied to real work around my house."
"My own tutors from Alexandria told me the purpose of life is to repair. But I wished Paul would have been my tutor."
"Paul is busy with more important things than being your tutor. So what did your tutors from Alexandria teach you about repairing the stench of life? My solution is to give the world our most practical Roman giftflush toilets and underground pipes for warm baths."
"We had flush toilets and pipes underground to warm water before you did."
"Why don't you repair your own world with those healing unguents or spices your tutor brought you from Alexandria? I know you have brought them to Neapolis with you. What's in that sack?"
I opened the bags with the air holes first. This first day with my new employer as a tutor began to feel as grey, tense, and tedious. "Watch how the she wolf dog stretches her body in a dance."
Paul’s gift of Xanthe, the wolf-dog puppy that I pulled from a perforated goatskin pack leaped from my hands, scattering across the mosaic floor. "Your five-year old daughter, Octavia will find that puppy is a good listener. The wolf dog is nearly twelve weeks old and is tame because Paul and I have cuddled and nourished the animal since she was five days old. Even her wolf mother was tamed. And this dog’s father is a Roman army Mastiff that served well on ships with the centurions."
I watched the slaves overstuff Velia's torus with swans down. They placed it upon the lectus so it would be high enough from the flagstones to be free from vermin and covered it with goat hide.
Velia had coarse, yellowed linens that scratched my arms and made me itch, and her bleached wool coverings reeked of the urine used to bleach it. The stench of sweat, roses, and myrrh still couldn't mask the bleaching with stale urine, no matter how many times the slaves beat the fabric underwater. Even when dried in the sun, the damp coverings smelled rancid. Fresh air couldn't erase what secrets those covers witnessed.
I watched in Salonius's villa as the carpenters made the first woodcut on the sopha and applied its moldings to match the room. Above, the ceiling murals of clouds on faded blue-green skies lulled me to sleep. I had my sixteenth birthday the day Octavia had her fifth, and we celebrated so that I was invited to sleep in the house of Salonius-Cornelius, chaperoned by Velia so that little Octavia, skinny me, and rotund Velia all shared and slept upon the same, soft torus on this enormous lectus full of wormholes. Velia even allowed Octavia to hold the kitten in the folds of her tunic.
Salonius, in the next bedroom slept with his 20-year old son in two separate lectus and torus far apart at opposite ends of the room. In the darkest hours of the early morning pouring rain chilled the room yet soothed the scraping of the crickets like nails on dry pumice stone and the erudite screams of the night.
"Remember when we played Suffering'? And I'd rub your belly, and your doll would be delivered like a baby?" Velia laughed and whooped her perpetual hacking cough from years of inhaling the dust of granite in her father's sculpture and stone mason industry. I rolled over, pulling my short dark hair from my eyes. Next to me five-year old Octavia soundly slept.
My mouth and nose felt paper-thin and raw as I trembled against the roar of thunder and the wintry rain pounding the roof tiles. Salonius tiptoed out of his sleeping chamber and crawled into bed with his wife. "What are you doing here?" I provoked him.
Salonius shed his tunic at the foot of the too-soft torus and climbed under the covers to have coitus with his wife. I knew about those acts at ten from enough spying through billowy curtains on Salonius's older son and one of the kitchen slaves.
Octavia woke with a start, rubbing her eyes. "Get out!" She raged in her five-year old, screeching voice. "Are you kicking me out?" Salonius stared at Octavia. His dark eyes bulged with unbridled anger.
"Look what you did," "frightened, beaten-down Velia interrupted with a whine. "You woke dragon dumpling."
"Shut up, you Etruscan whore."
"Don't call my little girl a whore."
"Better you should be crippled. You should have been born a boy. I'll kill you, you red-haired piece of garbage."
Salonius hurried his tunic back on and stormed out looking for something to smash. He found a hammer in the living room and began to smash Octavia's musical instrumentsfirst her turtle lyre. Octavia's birthday and mine todayI had almost forgotten.
Velia had saved a few sesterces from the pittance she told me that Salonius gave her each morning and bought Octavia two stringed musical instruments for her fifth birthday. I hadn't been home to look at the presents my loving father bought me, but that surprise could wait. I spent the night after Octavia's birthday party simply because Cornelius was close friends with his most important scribe, Salonius, and my father had work to discuss with Cornelius. We all spent the night in the house of Salonius.
And now rage overtook Salonius as if possessed by an angry bull. "We Romans don't worship animals, nor do we let them pollute our households. Once in a while our Egyptian slaves let their kittens ransack the kitchens to scare off rats and buzzing insects."
Yet the look on Salonius's face was that of a mad, starved animal charging his prey. Normally he was a charming man to Cornelius, or in public, but at home, I've seen him change in an instant before the eyes of his wife and children. And an hour later, he denied anything was amiss.
When Salonius finished smashing the smaller turtle lyres, he went for Octavia's wooden kithera with its special echoing sound box, and then for her larger, barbitos lyres. These were presents my father brought Octavia for her birthday. Then Salonius shouted in pain as he kicked his bare foot through the thick and solid arms of the eleven-stringed phorminx lyre and the array of extra sheep-gut strings that Velia purchased for her older son's seventh birthday.
After a year or two of lessons, he gave it up. For years it had stood among her son's undusted toys, forgotten, until Velia asked me if I wanted it and told me the story of how Hermes invented the lyre and how many years it remained in her family.
I did want it at first, until I realized that Octavia wanted it more. So I made sure it stayed with Velia's family. I told my father not to bring it to our house, even if Velia offered it to us once more.
Salonius put his foot through the paintings and other instruments brought for Octavia's birthday. Finally, he grabbed the Egyptian kitchen slave's striped kitten that lost its way and wandered into Velia's room and held its belly against the hot pipes being installed in the new indoor bathhouse, until it stopped meowing.
I looked in on Octavia's mother, but Velia didn't move or respond to my presence. She laid there, one arm over the sobbing Octavia crouching against her mother. Velia gazed unblinking at the ceiling, and Octavia had told me many times that her mother said she had given up all effort.
I would never give up trying to find a life, an identity, a self, or a sense of belonging. I ran into the peristyle and Octavia jumped up and followed me, clinging to me for protection, a protection Velia didn't try to give to Octavia or to me as a guest in Salonius's home.
"Not my birthday presents. Don't smash my presents." Octavia cried, but now Salonius had spent his rage and returned, exhausted to his own room, but the respite didn't last for long.
The louder the sounds of her voice grew, the more angry Salonius became.
He began to chase Octavia first and then both of us all over his house waving this fasces a set of rods bound in the form of a bundle which contained an axe. Salonius's cousin, the bodyguard of a magistrate, carried the fasces.
He must have left it with Salonius for safekeeping when he went to visit his son's new baby in the countryside. Now he separated the axe from the rods and swung the axe over his head like a madman.
"If I catch you, I'll cripple you." Heads will roll before you'll become a tramp." He went for the axe in his private closet, putting the hammer away. Octavia and I scampered under a table and crouched there, sobbing. I didn't know how to defend myself or protect Octavia, being a scrawny boy scared beyond uttering a sound. Salonius seemed like a raging giant, a belching volcano spewing his poisonous gases at me and waving an axe.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, daddy," Octavia cried.
"Better you should be crippled than to be born a girl and make trouble for me.
I should have flushed her out into the Tiber. Better she wasn't made or born," Salonius ranted.
I sneaked back into Velia's sleeping quarters dragging Octavia by the hand. And we saw that Octavia's mother began to stir and shout to Salonius who still hunted us down from the next room.
"If I have to get up you two fighting make me sicker." She began to cough again. "Leave my baby alone." I shoved Octavia under the lectus and sidled under it myself. As children, even I at sixteen and she at five could crouch there, but a giant like Salonius would never be able to squeeze in that space.
Salonius, now angrier with Velia, took a swing at Octavia and me with the hammer, and missed because we moved deeper into the dark under the lectus. Salonius ran out of the room to retrieve his axe and in the instant of time I had to flee, Octavia and I darted from the kitchen and dashed out of the atrium into the garden.
There was a deep hole dug for an outdoor as well as an indoor privy and also a partially built storage room under construction. The workers had left for the night, and the hole in the garden soil was deep enough with enough dirt to cover us.
In the darkness, Salonius chased his daughter and me, gaining on me as I disappeared into the hole in the garden. We squeezed our small bodies into a partially filled dung pit, hiding inside back of an old barrel left there as it was still too new and unfinished to be used by anyone.
We covered ourselves with garden soil. I had a small space for air there in the barrel, and there was enough sawed out of it for me to see the lamp Salonius held high as he looked around for a few seconds, wild-eyed, wiping the beaded sweat on his upper lip on his forearm. "If I catch you, I'll kill you," he shouted in a tremulous tone. I brought my puppy, Xanthe with me and held her snugly. She protected me, and I protected her and brought nourishment to the 12-week old canis-lupus. This animal friend given to me by Paul of Patmos must be protected from other beasts.
From between the wide slats of the broken barrel, I watched as he swung his axe overhead. As he passed a work table, Salonius slapped the ax against his thigh a couple of times. Then he sighed and left it on the table. Finally, exhausted, he plodded back into the atrium. I petted the puppy and covered her with my stola. We kept silent, and the silence tangled us together with one fate like a fisherman’s net as the full moon watched over us.
The next afternoon, Salonius denied anything happened out of the ordinary the night beforeat least in front of my father, his architect and physician friends, and the construction workers in Salonius's garden. In fact my father had paid for the new addition as Cornelius was noted for his thriftiness and Salonius for his dutiful long hours as Cornelius's scribe.
I had to stay another day while my father finalized business ledgers with poorly paid Salonius, Cornelius and the architects. Salonius kept grumbling about me eating him out of house and home as I sat eating some cheese and figs from the kitchen slave's hands.
I watched Salonius stalk into the kitchen pawing after the Egyptian slave girl who kept looking for her missing kitten. I told her what I saw Salonius do to the kitten as I sneaked after him trying to hide in the room where the pipes heated the new pool. Suddenly, Velia, in her best shrill, let him have her words as if they were daggers.
"No sooner did I put the baby on your lap then you told me to take her off because she gave you a stiff ache between your thighs."
"You keep hounding me just because your step father came into your room to ask you whether or not you wanted to copulate with him when you went to visit your mother."
"I told him don't even think of it and ordered him to get out. He's your rich brother and insisted I couldn't tell him what room to go to in his own house."
"You could have told your mother."
"I didn't want to upset her. She had enough meeting me for the first time as a grown woman after giving me away to my father and step mother when I was two."
"What was wrong with you that your own mother kept the boys and gave away the only girl? When she married for the second time, she kept the girl she had then and gave her all the inheritance, didn't she?"
"Yes. She said because I made her look old."
"Why did your father divorce your mother?"
"He wanted to marry that Thracian redhead."
"So why didn't you kick your stepfather out of your room?"
"I did. I insisted he get out. Then I told him I expected to be treated as a guest while visiting my own mother. Don't you understand or believe me?"
Velia pleaded. "I threw him out, but you don't see him grabbing an axe or a hammer and chasing innocent children, scaring them for life. Would you want your daughter to marry a man exactly like you?"
"Girls only make trouble. You know how many times I asked the that Delphi hag who delivered you to check to make suremaybe she made a mistakemaybe Octavia was a boy?"
"Is that why you never held a conversation with your daughter or even smiled at her? Why do you distance yourself from your daughter? Not once in your whole life did you ever talk to the girl or show her that she's more than human garbage in your eyes."
"What about you going into your grown son's room to massage his feet every morning and comb the lice out of his hair?
"I'm a mother."
"He's twenty, and he tells me you're overbearing, you Etruscan harlot."
"I married you as a virgin. Don't you ever brand me with that word!"
"There was no blood."
"My skin stretches. I'm going back to bed."
"You have an answer for everything. I've run out of words, something I'll never do as Cornelius's scribe, but for speaking, you have to have the last word, just like a woman. And one of these days, you'll pay for that run-on mouth of yours with your life. Heads will roll. Where is Octavia?"
"In the garden again."
"Let her rot down there. Lower your voice. We have guests."
Salonius didn't even notice I sat at the back of the kitchen in a corner eating my figs and cheese, watching him, following him as he staggered back to bed. Velia spent the rest of the day at her distaff spinning wool and following the slaves around, envying them. My bodyguard finished his business with Salonius.
By the next day the litter arrived for me to leave, and I felt a droopy feeling at letting Octavia go back to that ambiance while I returned to Patmos, utterly rejected as the new language tutor. My bodyguard soon revealed that Velia had hired a boy with dreams of studying architecture.
If only I could take my little friend with me. I wanted to leave so much, and yet, reluctantly, I sat one more afternoon alone and watched tiny Octavia, much too young for me to play with as a friend.
I turned to bid farewell to wealthy Velia who wore the same stained and disheveled dark stola she wore the day before. But it covered her shortness and rotundity, her flapping ham-hock upper arms and her enormous la banza belly. Velia had revealed Octavia's older brother by fourteen years had a short temper like his father's.
"My older son had a fight with me over you and Octavia making too much noise," Velia said.
"Me?" I shouted. "I didn't do anything to spoil Octavia's fifth birthday party."
"If you think Salonius shouted and smashed all of Octavia's birthday presentsfine musical lyres, some of them gifts from your father, my oldest son broke an amphora over my arm. I dared him to do it. Octavia saw everything. She crouched under the table to hide. She was whining, complaining for her brother to show her how to play trigon with the boys. He told her to go away, and she cried."
"Does Salonius know your son broke an amphora over your arm?"
"I had to tell him. So now he smashed Octavia's brother's learning tools and tore up his scrolls he needed to study to become an advocate."
"I'm too tired to begin my travel back to Patmos today." I shuffled into the atrium passing the dead bird in the green cage. Velia and Octavia followed me.
"It caught too much heat." You'll have to take it down to the garden, make a pyre and burn it. Octavia is too young to light fires, and the kitchen slaves have their hands busy with food."
I ran, sobbing, into the bedroom. "Listen, you little mouse. Want to take Octavia to see the Neapolis market before you go back to Patmos? I'll be with your retinue today." Velia took a plate of pickled eggs from the kitchen slave and offered me a heel of bread.
Businesses opened their shutters. Bankers seemed to pose like gossiping statues on the steps of the temples. Beggars hid in the recesses and shadows in back of the doors of open shops.
I wondered what all the trade gossip meant and realized that only accomplishments, benefits, and advantages were pondered. At the end of the day, everyone would probably do the same thing as the sun drowned. At least the fragrant jasmine of Neapolis masked the pungent garum fish sauce stench of Rome's sweltering rooms in the heat of summer.
Velia, Octavia, and I walked through the dusty shops looking at the baubles and silken wisps of cloth, the sweet, sickly stench of distinctive odors, spices, incense, and unguents. On her way I watched Octavia watch her mother, Velia steal from the vendors and shops lapis broaches, Scythian wolf earrings, a white stola so small it could never fit her rotundity, and tunics already woven and sewn for babies. When no one looked, she'd stuff clothing under her stola.
"I don't want any of the beads or perfume," Octavia whispered from the communal public privy. "They're cursed. You'll get bad luck."
Velia banged the shutter of each bakery we passed. "Your wealthy father only gives me grain for bread and a few lentils. How else can I live? He rewards the kitchen slaves with more than he's ever given me for spending. Can't you see he's in charge of who selects all the food in this house? I get a few asses for spending, but not enough even for a moldy dried fig."
I passed no judgment. Instead, I blurted out, "I'll pay for everything. Eat what you wish. I must repay you for inviting me to Octavia's birthday feast. Why don't you come back to Patmos with me and follow Paul of Tarsus while he is there? My mother can raise the funds needed to keep him in food and shelter while he writes and speaks to all who listen on Patmos." My body blocked the view of the litter.
"I don't want to wear that evil bracelet, "Octavia cried. Velia, the Etruscan, would lay that green-eyed curse on Octavia when she misbehaved, at least in my presence, and then Octavia would punish me by having an accident. It seemed the tiny girl had lifted herself up so she could fall as a release of the tension and terror.
Laying the fear on Octavia with Velia's palms caused the fear, Octavia told me that day, and later Octavia sought relief by getting hurt, getting the accident over with. Only the curse, the evil eye stood forth, and the punishment the child inflicted on herself fired from deep within her like a cold well of truth.
"Here, stuff this stola in the belt of your tunic and put this outer tunic over it."
"No! I won't."
Here in the market place, cheap tunics fluttered in the breeze I the midst of a sunlit square. Velia dragged whining me into a dimly lit shop. The old couple who ran the shop brought out some fabric remnants, and when their backs turned for a moment, the longer of the remnant ended up inside Velia's stola.
She waddled into the street to see the shoemaker. Velia and daughter sat down on a cushion before the shoemaker's shop.
"Give me that skinny foot," said the shopkeeper, trying to shove one of the new little sandals on Octavia's dirt-caked foot.
"The soles are too thin," Velia complained.
"Leave me alone!" Octavia whined, storming out of the shoe section. Octavia shouted a horrible obscenity at the shop keeper, the same word I heard her father call her last night as I looked over my shoulder at the shopkeeper's expression.
"That filthy rat," he stammered.
Breathless Velia caught up to her daughter in front of the public cistern where a line of slaves and poor citizens, all women, waited their turn to bring water into the small rooms they occupied around the market district called the Subura.
"Please, Velia, as an Etruscan, come back with me to Patmos where as a foreigner you'll be freer than you are here."
"I can't give up the villa."
The Subura, a place to shop here in Neapolis, is just like the same-named Subura in Rome. Both became a stench of dried blood, moldy fruit, rotting meat, sweat, urine, and manure. In Rome when I was ten, our family took me to see it. To find the Subura in Rome, you enter the valley between the southern end of the Viminal and the western end of the Esquiline, or Oppius. Rome's Subura is connected with the forum by the Argiletum. It continues eastward between the Oppius and the Cispius by the Clivus Suburanus, ending at the Porta Esquilina. This Subura had the same look.
Now our litter ended up in the bakery district where we paused to find some shade. Velia chastised Octavia with a pointed finger. "Horse face, why by Jupiter did you say that?"
"He didn't have to call me skinny like in ugly," Octavia insisted, standing up for her reason for shouting an obscenity at the shoemaker. Velia threw her hands in the air out of frustration, or maybe she wanted to give up at that moment.
"Why did you have to wear that torn article of clothing outside the house? You're beginning to stink just like your father who's never taken a bath in years even with three pools.
The old stinker washes the bottom of his feet, his face and hands so Cornelius will think he's clean. He's afraid of water, says it makes his legs itch."
I listened in silence, then blurted. "Why doesn't he rub some oil on his skin if water makes it itch?"
Velia shook her head. While I observed but did not participate, she spent the day teaching Octavia how to steal clothing none of us needed from poor, old merchants who were overwhelmed with business or had no customers at all.
These merchants were too poor to own a slave to help them in their little shops, and most had sons who were killed in the wars. I felt sorry for them, but Velia only wanted this sensation she must have received from taking anything that didn't belong to her, and mostly nothing her size or Octavia's that she could use at home.
Everything anyone can buy from a shop could be found here. My eyes feasted on the sweets from the shops, but I had no coins with me.
I knew at any time my father left me a bag of coins I could have my bodyguards arrange for a litter and slaves to do the shopping for me. I knew Cornelius was a miser, as my father always joked, but I never realized that his wife had to stoop to stealing to get a thrill or a variety of raisin cake, or a bolt of fabric to sew Octavia her basic clothing.
"Where's your father, where's the bastard?" Velia whispered to Octavia.
"Probably doing scribe work for Cornelius. Or maybe Cornelius treated him to one of his flower shows."
"How brilliant of you to use grown-up words, Octavia," I said. Velia had to get her words in. "Some men go straight home after work. Salonius, he has his flower shows. Did you know he caught a brothel disease when Octavia's brother was five?"
"What's a brothel disease?" I asked Velia.
"Caught it from a Cappadocian harlot, he confessed to his Egyptian kitchen slave. I overheard them. He told me it came back from his soldiering days. He thinks I have my mother's head."
"See this scar on my face?" Octavia grimaced.
"So?" I said. "It's ugly. Now no man will want to marry you with that wide, red scar on your face."
"That's because you cursed me last year." Octavia cried as she looked up at Velia's frowning face. "Did you think your curse would give me this?"
"Where by Hercules is your father? He's never home, the bastard."
Tears ran down Octavia's sallow cheeks. "I told you that stuff you steal brings me the evil eye."
"Shut up! The market's crowded with gossip. You'll be overhead, and it will get back to Salonius or Cornelius."
"Everybody calls me crazy," Octavia sobbed, taking great gasps of air. "When I grow up nobody nice will marry me."
"Just ask anyone you want to marry," I teased. "If you wait for someone to ask, no one will. Ha, ha. But you'd better have a lot of money to bribe them."
Perhaps I teased Octavia too much that day when she was five. It stopped when I returned to Patmos, and we saw little of each other.
I sighed and pulled out her drawing tablet and stylus from the litter. She began to draw a grotesque face with pointy fingers on her small art tablet. Poor Octavia Her entire world found solace in music and art, painting, playing the lyre, and sculpting. Now I watched the face she drew with her childish, but skilled fingers. The face was contorted with gaping month and reptilian.
"What kind of happy face is that?"
"I don't know. But it makes me happy to do it."
Velia watched her daughter draw as she whispered to me. "Last week my oldest son took Octavia on a trip. She told me that as they strolled together on a path, her brother stopped at the highest point on the bridge to gaze at the view. Suddenly my son gave his sister a shove and then pulled her back to safety before she could let out a wail. But the five-year old heard the whisper.
"That's right," Octavia squealed. "He has no right to scare me like that."
Velia scratched her head. "He denied it just like his father denies doing cruel acts. He started to sing to her. Then he lifted and dangled her as if to throw Octavia in the Tiber. She told me that she lashed out, flailing, screaming in terror. A passerby saw them horsing around, and she said he put her down harshly."
"I asked him why he did that," Octavia said, tossing her curls back like a rag doll. "And he said it was because I was his baby sister."
I vowed to find a way to help Octavia to a better life without adding more problems.
I felt the responsibility to help Velia and Octavia in any way I could. "I will talk to Paul when I get back to Patmos."
This became a heavy burden for my widowed, aging mother back in Patmos. But I would do my best as a family friend for this family that had rejected me as tutor because I happened to be a sixteen-year old woman seeking a man who would be slow to anger. And what they wanted focused on a boy that could inherit my family's generations of engineers, navigation inventors, and architects.
Kindness and peace in the home brings out a healthy glow and sweetness in any woman wherever she may be present. In a way, I felt responsible to do a good deed for Octavia and her mother. I feel now at a loss that Velia succumbed, eaten by her resentment, and Octavia quickly had been signed away by Salonius, now years later, honored by miserly Cornelius's insistence of having Octavia's hand in marriage.
Some cannot help themselves. I thought about the striped silvery kitten. Nearly ten years had passed, and today I gazed fondly at the spitfire bride, Octavia, forged in the fires of her father's perpetual pool of anger, her mother's weak, hacking cough, persistent complaints of resentment, and growing frailty.
I'm back on Patmos with my friendly wolf-dog, far from Rome or Neapolis. I'm reading copies of Paul's letters, and he still savors the broth in my mother's sweet tavern and cares to gently pet the tavern’s official greeter, our canis-lupus, protector of commitment to family, faith, and friends. With a dog in the home, there is harmony.
When in Rome, trust the volcano nearby as a better protector of Greek women than a slave rebellion on the loose. But here in Patmos, we sit in a circle and listen to Paul of Tarsus and those who follow.
In this village we are welcome to freely question, seek answers, and think for ourselves. Our symbols, like our gears, are our antikythera (from the Greek island of Antikythera long before we arrived on Patmos). They stand for exploration by celestial navigation. Our destiny is beyond the stars.
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