In the Hand of Dante

by Nick Tosches

Genres: Literary Fiction; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

The discovery of an original manuscript of Dante's Inferno in the Vatican archives finds writer Nick Tosches heading for Rome to authenticate the find. 50,000 first printing.

Release date: September 4, 2002

Publisher: Little, Brown

Print pages: 384

Sample

MY WIFE, YOUR GRANDMOTHER AELINA, AND I HAD GROWN apart through the years. No man who serves an emperor can be a good husband. I saw to it that she and our young son, your father, were well provided for in every way. Duties, and idleness, at the palace had kept me from home for long periods, but she and your father were very dear to me. On the quay at Ostia, when I bade them good-bye before boarding for Judea, I shared with them my sincere belief and hope that I would be with them again soon. My duties in Caesarea Maritima would not be so consuming as they had been here, and I would be able to return to visit them in a matter of months. It was truly my desire to renew my family life, and I declared this to Aelina while holding her close in my arms. From the ship I saw that she wept, and your father consoled her. I was never to see her again.

It was not long after I left that Tiberius withdrew to Capri to rule in absentia, leaving Rome to Sejanus in his stead.

Was it fear that drove the princeps Tiberius from Rome, or was it, following the death of his son, a complete loss of concern for the world? Or was it both?

The conspirator and the emperor now shared the consulship, the one as a dictator in Rome, the other as a man who now pursued little but the gratification of his senses, and who dwelled on an island that was many miles and far away.

The diviners said that Tiberius would never be seen again in Rome. He had a great palace built for him on remote Capri. He called this palace but a villa, and he dedicated it in name to Jupiter, the foremost of the gods, the god of sky and storm and thunder.

In the same year that Tiberius left Rome for Capri, an equestrian of the Pontii family, Pontius Pilate by name, succeeded Valerius Gratus as prefect of Roman Judea. He lived in a palace built by Herod, the murderous client king of Judea. As king of the Jews, Herod had hated his kind as they had hated him. He had a succession of ten wives, and sons by most of them. He killed two of these sons with the same nonchalance with which he killed many rabbis. After his death, other sons of his reigned as client kings throughout Judea.

Valerius had been Tiberius’s man, and had served more than ten years under him. Pontius Pilate, appointed in the eleventh year of the reign of Tiberius, also formally served the emperor, who was now in self-imposed exile. But he was Sejanus’s man.

It was he, Pilate, born like me to the equites order, whom I was condemned to serve in a god-forsaken land. But before ever I came before him, I felt myself drawn to him. It was not my will, nor my desire. It was merely something that I felt, a vagueness, a feeling beyond which I could not see.

My voyage, by light, fast-sailing liburna rather than by heavier galley, was good. The moon and fine summer winds were with us, filling our sail for long spells. The oarsmen were strong, and preferred the pain of hard rowing to the pain of the lash. There were days, a good many of them, when we must have made a hundred and twenty sea-miles or more.

To a Jew banker not far from the harbor I sold a brooch of emerald set in gold, my golden serpent bracelet with eyes of black onyx, and one of two rings, each of gold and with a ruby flanked by a pair of six-pointed Indian diamonds. The rings were identical. They had been given to me by Tiberius, in the ninth year of his principate, at about the time I first sensed madness overtaking him. They were, these rings, an astoundingly generous and sumptuous presentation that indicated both my rank in the equestrian order and my place of high distinction in his court. The inner bands of both rings were inscribed with my name, his, and the year.

The ring that remained is mine still, and is destined to be yours.

Also in my possession, sewn into my cloak, were three magnificent pearls, the most precious and valuable of all jewels, and these, from the Indian ocean, were the most precious and valuable of all pearls. These, as always, I kept in secret, never mentioning them, and never losing sight of my cloak.

After all his tedious wheedling, weaseling, lying, and arch imposturing, it was only by forming a sort of consortium with two of his neighboring hagglers-in-avarice that the Jew banker could summon sufficient money to satisfy my desire and demand to be only modestly swindled.

I wandered slowly in the general direction of the palace, which I could see atop a promontory that jutted out into the sea. The well-guarded residential palace of the proconsul and those under him was called the Palace of Herod, after he who had built it.

In a dark by-way, I came upon my loiterer. The marble of the palace, which glowed pale blue in the distance, was immediately overtaken by something that glowed pale brown, like amber, in his eyes.

If there was thought in my mind, it left me in that moment. He saw my gaze and smiled. It was a smile of faint, aloof malevolence, a curse of a smile.

As I had wandered vaguely toward the palace, so thought, vague and wandering, returned to me.

The shabbier streets of this place and time were filled with ranting or mumbling messiahs, with howling or gesticulating claimants to prophecy, some of them alone and ignored, some of them drawing a sparse group of passing listeners, some of them gathering crowds. I thought of gods and men.

This sort of thing was not unknown in Rome, though it was much less noticeable. Among my earliest orations for Tiberius was one on the occasion of his decree abolishing the cults of the Egyptians and the Jews. The oration justified this on the grounds that the increasing proselytizing of these cults posed a dangerous threat to the established, time-honored nature of Roman worship and thus to the integrity of the traditional fabric of Roman society itself. Public displays aside, he himself believed in no god or gods, except perhaps, later, himself. His true concern was that the growing number of Roman converts to the Egyptian and Jewish cults was a peril to the foundations of his own power, which rested on the authority of the autochthonic gods.

The Jews claimed that they sought no converts. But their forced conversion and forced circumcision of the multitudes of Idumaea, conquered by them under Hyrcanus II, the high priest and king of Judea, spoke otherwise. Herod was of the Phoenician-Syrian stock of Idumaea, where he was born. His grandfather was among the conquered.

All who embraced the Egyptian and Jewish cults were ordered to burn their cultic vestments and destroy the idols and other accessories of their worship. Priests of Isis were crucified, the statue of Isis in the great Iseum, in the ninth administrative region of the city, was demolished, and the Iseum itself was shut. As for the Jews, who were a more numerous and significant presence in Rome, the actions taken against them were less severe. Some Jews of military age were drafted and removed to the most unhealthy marshes, there to die more than to serve. Some Jews of elderly years who did not worship the gods of Rome were simply expelled from the city under the threat of being reduced to slavery if they remained or revisited.

But Isis returned to Rome, as did the principal god of the Jews, who in their Book and rites had a confusion of many names, some of them denoting plurality and some singularity, one of which, rarely uttered, was an incomprehensible guttural muddlement, like the attempt to speak of a man whose tongue has been torn from him.

And new converts they did make, for unfulfilled by one thing, man will seek fulfillment in another. An old toga will be put away for a new one, though there be little or no difference between the two. As from one wife to another, so from one god to another.

But of late in Rome, and all the more intensely here, one could sense among the Jews a growing search for a portent, a promise, a coming of the new. A new day, a new life, a new age? Were they waxing weary of their weary old god himself, or gods themselves? Old gods do die, and new gods do appear.

Anxious anticipation was rife in the air. For a thousand years, their Book had promised them a final, consummating savior. His time, many felt, had now come. Unbeknownst to them, endless expectation may have been their truest and most enduring captivity. Enough of this ancient promise, this eternity of waiting, complaint, and moaning. They wanted fulfillment of a thousand years’ prophecy. They wanted it now.

There was among them a history of redeemers and deliverers. The demigods of their Book were such. All histories are lies. We have our she-wolf, our Romulus and Remus. The Jews favored a history of oppressions and slavery. Their Book tells of captivities in Egypt, in Babylon. Captivities that never were. Deliverances from them that never were. Yes, histories are lies, but the nature of the lies that are embraced tells us something of the nature of those who embrace them.

Perhaps they had come to see themselves as captives under Roman dominion. Only rarely were they slaves. The slaves of Rome were then as now brought in their greatest numbers from Asia and Africa, with lesser numbers from Spain and from among the Gallic, Germanic, and later the Britannic tribesmen. And there have been many natives to our own soil to be enslaved for theft or debt. Jews were free in their own land to work and worship as they would. Julius Caesar himself had bestowed legitimacy on their cult. Far more Jews owned slaves than were slaves themselves.

Whatever it was they sought, the long-overdue fulfillment of prophecy—their final, consummating savior—was central to it. This was evinced by the mangy messiahs thick as flies in the offal and shit of the streets.

In the breadth of an instant, an ocean of thought seemed to be mine. Or was it but the single crashing down of one immense wild wave of envisioning?

I saw the high priests of the cults of Rome—the riches of Mithras, the riches of Cybele, the riches of the pontiffs of the temples of the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. I saw the riches of the high priests and the rulers of the synagogues of the cults of the Jews in Judea, compounded by riches gotten through those with whom they were in league, the usurers and money-merchants in the yards of their temples.

I saw wealth beyond imagining. I saw the principate of the other world, and the vast treasures of the real world that derive therefrom.

I saw that every prayer was a profession of the ignorance and benighted folly of he who knelt, that he who prayed avowed himself a fool for the taking. I saw lambs to the slaughter. I saw fortunes falling from the hands of believers into the coffer of the believed.

I saw many things in that lightning bolt of an instant, that fulmination of a breath between a lowering and rising of the lashes of my loiterer’s eyes.

I had given Tiberius dignity, had given him counsel and fine words of commanding and enchanting powers. I had created the lie of him and the illusion of him. What I had done, I could do in the dream-world. Different words, different calculations, but the same game.

What I had done, I could do again. I had cultivated a god in whom no one but himself believed. I could mold and fashion of other clay a new prophet, to whom those seeking a new prophet, and then the masses beyond them, would flock. With no master to serve, no master to restrict or command me, my craft would be free to flourish to the fullest.

It was strange, but there was no uncertainty in me as to this unsavory loiterer with his eyes that seemed, like obsidian, to hold in them the magic of the most powerful of the elements—earth, air, water, fire—commingled. He was my man, this loiterer. There was something eerie in my sureness. There was something eerie in it all: this place, this moment, the sinister otherworldliness in the late afternoon air, the weave of light and gloom. A sense of presentiment moved through me, then was gone.

I returned his look with one in kind, and I strode casually to him. As I approached, he regarded me with a slightly different but no less malevolent smile, one that implied I was soon to be a victim, perhaps not of him directly, but of something of which I knew nothing.

We were face to face. He no longer smiled in any way, nor did I. Without words I told him that he was nothing, no one, a lowly Jew peasant in thrall to almighty conquering Rome, and that he stood before a Roman citizen of rank.

He absorbed this wordless meaning written in my stern face and stance, and suspicion came over his demeanor.

And so we faced each the other. I introduced myself to him.

“I am Gaius Fulvius Falconius, son of Marcus, grandson of Lucius.”

He did not speak. I looked into those lambent eyes, the likes of which I had never before seen.

He was toying aimlessly with a plane-twig, holding it in both hands, or moving it occasionally from one hand to another. Now in the unpaved street, he used it to write six Greek characters.

“I am he.”

I read aloud the name in the dirt: Iesous. It was the common name that we would render as Iesus in Latin. He corrected me, saying it rather as something like Iesua. I took this to be Hebrew, but I was right only in ignorance. I was later to learn that a dialect called Aramaic had much displaced Hebrew as the written tongue of the Jews, and that much of their Book was written in this related language.

Hebrew, however, was the spoken tongue among them, along with Greek and often Latin. I also was to learn that the common name of Iesous, or Iesus, or Iesua, was but a form of the commoner Ieosua, or, as we have it, Iosua.

I can only trust that you have heard, or will hear, these names, Iesua and Ieosua, pronounced by a Jew in the Hebrew tongue, as their true sounds are not represented by any combination of characters in Greek and Latin, and our spelling Iesus gives rise to nothing that sounds of his name, unless perhaps in the case of a grave speech impediment. It involves a rising of the tongue toward the palate that I have encountered elsewhere only among a few unlettered Germanic and lately Britannic tribals.

Yes, it would be good for you to have his rightful name, as he and I here begin to travel forward in this account.

That you could hear the sound of my own voice is a dream that can never be.

My loiterer raised his head from the name he had written in the street, but did not look directly to me.

“Born of dirt, son of nothing,” he added.

Surmising that, like most of his countrymen, his Latin was wanting at best, I had spoken to him with words of Greek preceding my name when introducing myself; and it was in Greek—a slovenly and a heavily accented Greek, but Greek nonetheless—that he now said what he did.

It was perhaps his intention to make mockery of the manner in which I had introduced myself, but I felt no insult. I was indeed pleased to have evidence of his own innate gift for words, wry as they were.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I come seeking you.”

Pretense left him. He appeared to be puzzled, in a wary way.

“Tell me,” I said, looking round, then back to him. “Which of these saviors will save you?”

He beheld them, the messianic rabble, with the same mean smile with which he had met my initial gaze. That smile seemed to extend not only to the confusion of expectation and disappointment, impatience and resignation, ranting and yowling, that filled those streets, but to the dusty foul air itself of those streets. Three small, slender shadow-figures, fast and furtive, fled past us.

In answer to my question, he gestured to the dirt in which he had written his name, much of which already had vanished in the wind and the dust.

“Such was my hope,” I said.

He sighed wearily, echoed my words guardedly: “Such was your hope.”

“It can do us no harm to eat, drink, and talk.”

“I no longer play the catamite for money,” he said. “These buttocks lack meat, but they are not for sale.”

“It is not your buttocks I want. It is your soul. And it is not money I speak of, but riches. The sort of riches that would make their sort seem as paupers by comparison.”

I threw a slight nod of my head to the northwest, in the direction of the synagogue courtyard where I had sold my jewels—the direction of the Jew money-lenders and currency-traders.

“A new and vaster kind of temple-wealth,” I said.

Again from him, that weary sigh.

We chose an inn. It had not been his fortune to eat there, he said, but he assured me that I should like it, as it was owned, tended, and frequented by men of Rome. We took a table and benches apart from the others who ate and drank. A few, mostly Roman soldiers, regarded us askance, but with little malice or pronounced disapproval. I could not tell if it was because he was a Jew, or because he was unwashed and disheveled, or both. We were told what was on offer. I took a portion of roasted baby pork, he a plate of deep-sea oysters and garum. Two fresh breads were brought to us, oyster-bread for him, bread of emmer for me, and wine.

“I am forbidden by the Book to eat such things,” he said, gesturing to the oysters.

I looked at him.

“All that have not fins and scales in the seas, they shall be an abomination unto you,” he said in a tone of mock gravity. Then in the tone that was his own: “So commands the Book.”

He savored the oysters and garum, tore off a piece of bread, ate it, washed it down with wine.

“And the swine,” he said, returning to his tone of mock gravity, “though he be cloven-footed, he cheweth not the cud, and thus he is unclean to you.”

I cut off a piece of the charred suckling pig, placed it with my knife on his plate. His eyes closed with pleasure as he ate it.

“It seems to me that your Book denies you much,” I said.

“It denies me nothing. It denies to my people any delight in this world which their God is supposed to have created.”

He told me of a legendary hero of the Book, a man named Job, on whom the one true God, as a sort of game, inflicted all manner of torments, woes, and pains, taking from him everything: his family, his property, his health. But not once did Job raise his voice in protest or anger at this God. For this he is an exemplar, much to be admired and much to be praised.

“That,” said he, “is the one true delight of the Jews under their one true God—to suffer.”

We laughed together, he more meanly than I. He offered me an oyster, which I took, without garum. It was fresh, delicious, pulsing yet with life from the sea.

Eating the rich, warm bread, he told me of a bread of his people, unleavened and bland, called massa, not to be confused with our good barley-bread of similar name. This tasteless bread is to be eaten during their holy spring feast, when no other bread is permitted.

“In the Book, it is called ‘the bread of affliction.’ It is true. The Jew’s delight is to suffer.”

I told him of our Altar of Bad Luck, Mala Fortuna, on the Esquiline, not far from the old necropolis.

Do you know the place? Have you been there yet, to that old disreputable stretch between the old altar and the old necropolis? We caroused there many a night, we boys of the age you are now, roaming amid the cheap wine-shops and the young whores who haunted the dark overgrown grounds of the necropolis in their diaphanous unsashed gowns of salacious mourning, caressed by the summer moon, and by us. One warm night my father caught me about my idle mischief there. After a good stern calling-out and a clap to the side of my head, he laughed and mused aloud how he had gone about the same boyish carousings there more than thirty years past. I tell you, those were good days. There was continuity between generations then, shared passages between father and sons.

“Yes,” I said, more to myself in reminiscence, than to him in conversation, “the Altar of Bad Luck.”

“Here there is no other kind,” he said.

He shook his head as if it were beyond his understanding, all of it.

“Bread of affliction,” he muttered.

“Why do you cultivate a beard?” I asked.

“Because it is the custom of my people. It is believed to be a sign among them that one has renounced vanity.”

“So it is, therefore, an affectation, a vanity of its own?”

“Yes.”

“You speak of ‘my people’ but of ‘them’ and not ‘us.’ Are you not one of ‘them’?”

“In blood, yes. In belief and ways, no.”

“You do not believe, then, in the many-named god, or gods, of your people?”

“I left behind me those fables when I was little more than a child.”

“So why, again, the beard?”

“To appear to be one of the many. To be indistinguishable.”

A very good reason for a petty thief and cutpurse, which I surmised him to be, and which he was.

After chewing intently, he corrected me, saying: “It is not a matter of god or gods. My people believe in only one God, almighty. The plural names of the oldest days, the days of other gods, have been artfully if unconvincingly explained away. He has for very long been held to be one, and one alone, and the one true God.”

“And you do not believe in him?”

“If I believe in anything, it is as the Persians believe: that there is a force for good and a force for evil at play in this world. I do not believe in the Persian gods, but at times, yes, I believe in the forces that they embody.”

“You are an educated man,” I said. “To know of Persia, to know of what Persians believe.”

“I have kept my eyes open, my ears open, in this world. I have learned much beyond what the rabbis teach.” He paused. “We have taken much from what they, the Persians, believe. Much of Persian source is to be found in some of the scriptures of our Book.”

“You know the Book very well, it seems.”

So much was obvious, and I said this only to maneuver the conversation.

“The fables of the Book are like nursery songs that are put early into us. But they are nursery songs that haunt us from the cradle to the tomb.”

“In the Book, there is truly the prophecy and promise of a coming savior?”

“It is written in the Book, in the scripture that is called the book of Isaiah. He speaks much of the wrath of our God, this Isaiah. And he prophesies the coming of a great savior, and he tells of the signs, the deeds and attributes, by which this savior will be made known.”

We had, then, in this Isaiah, map and manual for the journey before us. He would be the Vitruvius of our kingdom come. As had been prophesied, so we would fulfill; and the words I would give to the voice of the Messiah would further attest, beyond all refuting, the truth and the grandeur of him.

I laid open my scheme to him. All my thoughts, all that passed through me in the fulminous infinite moment I had experienced, I laid open to him.

As I spoke, words came forth from him as well. Words of ridicule, words of querulous dismissiveness. His declarations grew calmer and less frequent, and were overtaken by questions. These questions were at first cynical and disputatious; then full of doubt and hesitance; then, in the end, complicitous.

He sopped the last of the bread in what was left of the olive oil, and drank the last of the wine. There was but one more question from him:

“So tell me, Gaius et cetera et cetera, son of this one, grandson of that one. How are these hypothetical riches to be divided between us?”

I slowly raised the blade of my knife and just as slowly lowered it vertically to cleave in twain the air between us.

“Straight down the middle.”

Those eyes of his glowed, as if there were no wine in him, and he smiled.

He had no home. In bad weather, he explained, he lodged in brothels. In good weather, the vaulted recesses of the streets offered many a fine enough bedchamber. When he said this, he ran his fingers over the handle of the dagger in the sash of his rough and soiled linen tunic. As he did so, I became conscious of my own dagger, iron and double-edged, that hung in its sheath from my leather belt. Its grip was inlaid with gold and ivory, the golden claw of its pommel clutched a great single sapphire of deepest blue that I had brought back from Ethiopia in the youthful days of my military service. Like my one remaining ring of gold, ruby, and diamonds, and my secret pearls, my dagger would not be sold to any Jew. It would not be sold to any man, and no man would take it from me.

The hour was late. An owl under old eaves across the way seemed to lay claim to this lost little corner of deserted darkness, where there were very few lighted lamps.

We took rooms at the inn where we had eaten. The rooms were small and shabby, but after my long voyage at sea, and compared to his usual sleeping arrangements, they presented themselves as luxurious.

I found in my satchel the perfunctory letter of assignment that I now knew I would never place in the hand of Pilate or his adjutant.

I slept with my wealth beneath the reed-filled mattress-sack on which the weight of my body lay. My tired thoughts, wending their way to dark dreams, were good.

I had nothing to lose. Or so it then seemed.

This excerpt from Under Tiberius copyright © 2015 by Nick Tosches


LOUIE PULLED OFF HIS BRA AND THREW IT down upon the casket.


There was residue on his hand. He hated that. He held forth his hand to the one bitch who was still on her knees. She closed
her eyes and licked the scum from his hand. As he stood over her, he could smell her hair, which had the same dirty cloying
stench of that coconut-oil shit those fucking Haile Selassie cabbies used inside their taxis. And he could feel the sticky
grease of whatever cheap shit she wore on her lips. He withdrew his hand from her.


Downstairs, on West Twenty-sixth Street, he stood awhile in the night. It was the dead of August, that time in New York when
the daylight sky was an oppressive lowlying glare of white, and the dark of night was a haze of starless ashen pallor. Louie
felt at one with it. He lighted a cigarette and drew smoke. It was late. But not for him.



Humidity and his own sweat began to gather on his skin. He looked at the moist glistening amid the hair of his bare forearm.
He looked longer at the hand that held the cigarette. He didn’t know which was worse, the traces of his own detested bodily
fluid or the slime of that bitch’s tongue. This would clean him, he told himself, feeling the gathering of humidity and sweat
increase. All he needed now was a good breeze from the river. That would be nice. He began to walk. He had not tucked his
shirt into his trousers, and he had not buttoned his shirt, and he did not do these things now. He carried his jacket of fine,
fine cotton and fine, fine silk, the one that he had paid two grand for in Milano. It had been made for him, by whatever the
fuck his name was. It was the color of the deep blue-green sea, and was almost weightless; but as he carried it, he could
feel the sag of weight in one pocket.


It was his favorite jacket. It was like wearing nothing, and you could wear it with anything, and only a guy with class would
see it for what it was. And it was the color of his eyes. Broads loved his eyes. Even now, even now that he was an old fuck,
the broads still loved his eyes. Some were scared of them, but some loved them.


Louie paused a moment when he reached the corner of Sixth Avenue. He lighted another cigarette. He turned downtown. He kept
on walking.


Yeah, sixty-three fucking years old last May. And here he was, walking down the avenue like a kid. He liked to walk, at night,
alone, even in this heat. It was nice. These nigger punks passing him by in the street: they got nothing on me, he told himself.
It was true. It really was. It was like the man said. You’re only as old as you feel.


He thought of that broad in St. Louis: that broad with no arms. He thought of that job in St. Louis: that son of a bitch would
not go down.


May. April. March. February. January. December. November. October. September. August. Well, ain’t that a fucking pisser. He

was conceived in this fucking weather. Who the fuck would fuck in this weather? Without even no fucking air-conditioning?
Jesus Christ.


But what the fuck was he talking about? He used to fuck in this fucking weather. Without no fucking air-conditioning. Yeah.
He remembered those smacking sounds, that puddle of sweat in what’s-her-name’s belly, him coming down on her hard and fast,
endless fucking hours, his own sweat-drenched gut coming up from that pool in her belly with a loud fucking smack, again and
again, faster and faster, harder and harder, louder and louder, like the suction blast of a goddamn force-cup plunger unclogging
a fucking toilet bowl.


Yeah, maybe he was getting old, after all. Conceived in August. Maybe that’s why he didn’t mind this heat, this stillness
of dead, heavy air that others could not take. Yeah. Conceived in August. Sixty-three years ago. No. Sixty-four years ago.


What the fuck had he ever conceived? It had all ended up on his right hand or in some cunt’s yap. Dead-baby juice. And now
it was too late. Born alone, die alone. He was better off that way. Shit, knowing him, he’d pay some broad to hold his hand
when he died. Money bought anything.


He made it to Fourteenth Street before he knew it. More niggers, more spics. Shit, in the old days you wouldn’t see a nigge