Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

He knows the name of that city.

The reason for the new war was a repeated conflict. Segueda, a Celtiberian city, persuaded a number of smaller towns to rebuild within its urban perimeter, making it larger. The Roman Senate denied the Spaniards the right to found new cities. The Spaniards pointed out that they were not founding anything new, they were simply fortifying something already extant. The arrogant Senate answered that Spanish cities could do nothing — not even what had been agreed to by treaty — if Rome didn’t like it.

The Spaniards stubbornly colonized new lands. Quintus Fulvius Nobilior took up positions outside Segueda with thirty thousand men to stop the new settlements. Since the Spaniards hadn’t yet finished building their fortifications, they took refuge in Numantia.

Nobilior made camp there, about three miles from the city. The African king Masinissa curried favor with Rome by sending ten elephants and three hundred wild horses to the gates of Numantia. The Celtiberians watched them advance heavily toward the city and panicked when they saw how the feet of the pachyderms flattened everything in their path. But when the invincible herd reached Numantia’s wails, a huge stone fell on the head of one of the elephants. The animal went wild, that is, it stopped distinguishing between friend and foe. Spinning around like an obese dervish, the beast became faster in its madness. It shook its tentlike ears and then spread them wide, as if they weren’t ears at all but bat wings, as if it wanted to hear its own painful despair better.

The other nine elephants, alarmed by the high-pitched whine of their wounded comrade, all raised their trunks at the same time and let them fall like whips on the Roman infantry. Then they proceeded to trample our fallen soldiers. We were ants under those feet with their old nails — broken, yellow nails like the deepest vein in a mountain and the deepest throb of a jungle. With their trunks twisted and flailing they made our men fly through the air. All of us were their enemies. They turned the field around Numantia into the ancestral territory of their fear and their freedom. He knew then that the two things could be one and the same. He was informed of the disaster with the elephants, and he decided to separate fear from freedom forever. The discipline of law would be the arbiter between the two.

The Romans fled in disorder, pursued by the stampeding pachyderms. The city of Numantia became confident. Nobilior withdrew to the winter quarters of happy memory. Then fell the worst snowstorms in the history of Tarraconian Spain. The trees froze, and the snow drifted down from the mountaintops to the lowest corral, killing the animals. The soldiers couldn’t go out to cut down trees for firewood: both soldiers and trees were frozen. Locked in, shivering with cold, the soldiers of Rome finally asked for peace.

Marcus Claudius Marcellus, leader of a great family, reached Numantia with eight thousand foot soldiers and five hundred cavalrymen and found there what the Senate did not want: a readiness to make peace. The elephant incident and the cold had convinced both sides that man had even worse enemies than other men. No, said the Senate, replacing Marcellus with the ruthless Lucius Licinius Lucullus, man must be a wolf to man, his mad elephant, his merciless winter, his bat with sharpened fangs thirsty for the blood that throbs in the throat of humanity.

Lucullus brought him, the young Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, grandson of the man who conquered Hannibal, to the war against Numantia. Ambitious, nervous, quick-tempered, fearful, Lucullus was the worst commander for the conquest of Iberia. The young Scipio understood that the opportunity had been lost. Numantia wanted peace. Rome wanted peace. The Roman legions were dying of dysentery and cold. The gold Lucullus sought did not exist: there was none in Spain, and the Celtiberians did not value it in any case. Lucullus’s cruelty and deception hurt Rome’s reputation. He breaks all treaties. He promises a truce and executes whole towns. He disobeys the Senate, a rather easy thing to do given the uncertainty and wavering of that august body, more and more influenced by, on the one hand, an arrogant idea of Rome’s dignity, and, on the other, by the growing impatience and grief of the Roman people: when will the Spanish bloodletting end?

Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus seizes the opportunity to reconnoiter the land surrounding Numantia. Quintus Pompeius Aulus, who succeeded the dishonored Lucullus, attempts to change the course of the Douro River, along which come and go Numantia’s supplies and men. But the Numantines charge out in numbers no one could have imagined, attack the Roman sappers, and end up cornering the Roman army in its own encampment. Cold, diarrhea, and shame eventually run Pompey out of Spain. His successor, Popillius Laenas, does no better: he reaches a Roman fort surrounded by Numantines who dare to threaten the new commander with death if he doesn’t agree to peace. The next commander, Hostilius Mancinus, grants it on terms of equality. Rome becomes indignant. The commander is summoned to a court-martial. But it’s the Numantines who capture the Roman general and return him to Rome as a joke. They send him back completely naked. Rome refuses to receive her own general. Put into a boat, he’s condemned to drift without lowering his anchor until he disappears in the water. The humiliated commander in turn refuses ever to put on clothes again. He will die as he was born. Damned be Rome, bleeding to death in Spain …

The naked Mancinus is followed by Aemilius Lepidus, captured amid the Senate’s vacillations: one day he attacks; the next he sues for peace; the next it’s We’ve had enough of this disaster, the people will no longer put up with it; and a day later, Forward until we die.

“Ignoramuses!” Lepidus responds to the senators. They don’t even know where Numantia is.

Rome grows tired of Spain. Lepidus is surrounded in Palencia by the Celtiberians. He’s out of food. His animals die of hunger. The tribunes and the centurions use night as an opportunity to escape, leaving the wounded and sick behind. The abandoned soldiers hang on to the tails of the fleeing horses, begging, “Don’t abandon us!” At night, running around in circles, the Romans fall to the ground in each other’s arms wherever they happen to be. “Don’t abandon us!” But Rome is no longer listening. The noise of its war machine deafens all of them; the painful clamor of the people cannot be heard, nor can the screams of the soldiers abandoned while their leaders run away.

Five thousand with Marcellus. Twenty thousand with Lucullus. Thirty thousand with Caecilius Metellus. Thirty-five thousand with Pompeius. Thousands and thousands more with Popillius Laenas, with Mancinus, with Aemilius Lepidus: the casualties of the Spanish campaign fill the cemeteries of Rome. Ships sail away filled with life and return with the only certain fruit of Spain: death. It’s Charon’s armada. Mothers shriek from the rooftops; sisters march through the streets, rending their garments. The senators are insulted wherever they appear. Rome is weary of Spain: Spain threatens life, order, the very future of Rome.

And Spain is Numantia.

He, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus is chosen to subdue Numantia.

* * *

YOU are a man with weaknesses and insecurities. You look at yourself in mirrors and do not see what others say they see in you. You are going to die this very year, but your mirrors reflect a young man eighteen years of age, perfectly combed and curled, plucked and perfumed, who every day caresses his neck in order not to find, not even on waking up, the smallest bristle there. You have set yourself the task of being perfect twenty-four hours of each and every day. But your body is nothing but a metaphor for your spirit. From the time you were a child, you have been troubled, even to the point of nightmares, by the separation of soul and body. You live with that division without resolving it totally, you put yourself to sleep in order to believe that both are one and the same thing; but all you have to do is stare into a mirror, knowing that it reflects a lie, in order to know that it isn’t true. That reflection is another. And that other is also divided, if not between body and mind then between past and present, appearance and reality. You will soon be sixty-seven. In the mirror you see a boy of eighteen.