Pilate's Wife: The Gospel According to the Eyewitness

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XLIX

Day before the Nones of Aprilis. Second hour of the night. Wednesday, April 4, c. 7:00 p.m.]

No sooner had I put these things away than L. V-- sent one of the house girls in to me. She inquired if he could speak with me.

I did not get up for him. I waited sitting on my couch.

"I beg your pardon. But this matter can no longer wait."

I knew what he would ask. But the unvarying calm of his voice startled me: "Tomorrow evening I will put my life at risk. I must know who came to your father's house that day."

I shook my head.

"You remember, Marcia. It has already appeared before you as vividly as the day you saw it. You heard voices. Shouts. You took up your knife and held your child to protect her. They came in on you. Two men. You can see their faces before you now. Junius Blaesus is one of them. Sejanus's cousin. You know him. You can see him."

The water basin on the table beside my bed shattered. I stood over it, the shards at my feet. I saw those shards in the mud. In that alley. Lightning.

I knelt. For a moment I imagined I was searching the fragments of the jar Florentina had dropped in my dream. I held a large shard. In an instant of madness I thought that I could rip my veins with it so violently that no physician could rescue me.

He wrapped my wrists with his long fingers, as though he had observed this thought. "Marcia," he whispered. "What did you see?"

I heard my labored breath. The silver movement of a knife. Then lightning, a terrible whiteness. The white face of the transvestite.

"You saw it just now."

"No. Perhaps men were there. Perhaps they came in on me. But I cannot see them." I waited for what seemed an infinitude.

In that time I entered another room. Around me I saw the images, half-finished, as though the painter had taken a respite from his work. Bones and shards. The white face. Images less formed. Perhaps the most obscene image.

I stand in that room. Silent. I must not give the sanction of words to the thought that possesses me. Otherwise this will all be painted in the deceiving hues of truth.

I do not know which was unable to sustain that silence: Madness, or reason.

And so: "It is possible that I was already mad."

"No," he said quietly. "What you saw made you mad." He held my wrists firmly, as though saying, This moment has substance. "Marcia. You have your reason now. Soon you will have your daughter."

The pain that pierced me at that moment confounded his intention. It was as though the spike of madness had been driven through my temple. Yet madness is not painful. Only reason can enable such suffering.

I could not speak for some time. He waited for me.

I said, "It is possible something else happened. In Rome. I was at my stepmother's townhouse in the Esquiline. She had brought me there from Baiae when she discovered that I was pregnant. To avoid gossip." I heard my own bitter laughter. "This woman who encouraged every private vice feared nothing more than public scandal."

"She was born there," he said. "In Metilia's townhouse."

"Yes."

"She was born alive."

"Yes."

"After the birth you were both brought to Baiae."

I ripped my arms from the seduction of his hands and leapt up. The shriek of my voice was more terrible that the Jewess' lament in their cave. It was the screaming of all the evil stars. "I don't remember! Perhaps I was never in Baiae! Perhaps I never gave birth at all! Perhaps you and I are merely phantoms of some dreamer's madness! Perhaps the very stars are mad!"

I wept then, each sob suffocating.

He held me. I was given a drink, and slept until the pain awakened me.

I have risen to write this. But this thread of words, which alone has guided me through the labyrinth of delusion, no longer serves me.

I am lost.

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