Carlos Fuentes - The Orange Tree

They talk about the happy movement away from the Etruscan architectonic grotesquerie to the simplicity of the Hellenistic line. Various new basilicas have been built to speed the flow of the growing legal matters of the republic. On the other hand, there is a complete absence of theaters, a problem often brought up by the young author Terence, a member of your circle. Terence talks about his fear of playing his dramas to vulgar and noisy audiences. Polybius smiles and insists that fame is the thing worst distributed in the world. He amiably accuses you of being too modest. You and he and the young Terence know that you wrote some of the most famous works by the young playwright, who died at the age of thirty-six— The Women of Andros, for example, and The Brothers, comedies of manners whose permissive morality and urbane wit could offend more rigorous souls. Is that why you preferred that Terence sign them? Who in these cases is the debtor, who the creditor? You can dream that your dramatic ideas — a school to educate husbands; a rogue who fools his master but saves him from himself — will have long life and fortune …

But Polybius tells you that only a boy like the one the Greek found when he came, a captive, to Rome could combine the frivolity of drawing-room comedy and bedroom farce natural to his world with the formal and rhetorical perfection he knew how to distill from Greek teachings. Could a man like you — sensual first, intellectual thereafter — become a great man in war? The world will know you as a military leader. But the world separates you, divides you from yourself. Did you want to be only one thing? A privileged young man first, a glorious warrior immediately after, but one single thing, the one the consequence of the other?

All these questions arose from the company in the courtyard of your wealthy mansion in Rome: the circle of Scipio Aemilianus, where the cult of language would be a major factor in the creation of a Latin literary tradition. Properly speaking, there was no Roman literature until you surrounded yourself with people like Terence and Polybius, Lucilius the satirist and Panaetius, the Greek stoic. Until then, literature had been a minor affair, the work of slaves and freedmen. With you and your circle it became a concern for statesmen, warriors, aristocrats …

What shall we call our school?

The only answer Polybius of Megalopolis gives is some seeds he hands to you, requesting that the two of you should plant them in the center of the patio. “What are they?” “Seeds from a distant tree, Oriental, strange, named from an Arab word, narandj. A friend brought them to me from Syria.” “What is this tree like?” “It can be tall, with wide, perennial, shiny leaves.” “Does it have flowers?” “Few are as fragrant.” “And fruit?” “Delicious fruit: its skin is attractive, wrinkled, but as smooth as oil. Its flesh is sweet and juicy.” “So we can name this patio of our conversations, this circle, not this school: the Orange Tree?” “Wait, young Scipio, this tree will not bear fruit for six years.”

Time enough for you to become quaestor, a volunteer for Spain (where no one wanted to go with the unfortunate General Lucullus), and finally, at the age of thirty-nine, conqueror and destroyer of Rome’s nemesis, the once proud Carthage, as if you were reliving the destiny of your grandfather Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Hannibal at Zama fifty-six years earlier. You subjugated the city, razed it, and burned it. They say you wept when you saw Hannibal’s former capital city, now reduced to a center of commerce devoid of political power, disappear from the map.

What could be more natural than that the victory over Numantia be entrusted to you, the most virtuous and wise, the most valiant of Romans?

* * *

I reach Spain knowing a few things. This is what I’ve learned: the Spaniards are brave but savage. They don’t bathe, they don’t know how to eat, they sleep standing, like horses. But for that reason they know how to put up a stiff resistance. We’ve got to break down that resistance. No half measures. To their hardest resistance I’ve got to oppose something that’s even harder.

I know they’re brave, but only individually. They don’t know how to organize themselves as we do. I must fear their individual courage and disregard them as a collective danger. I must be on guard against the organization of their disorganization, the genius of their anarchy. They call it guerrilla warfare. They use it to give impetus to their individual courage and imagination. Attacks that don’t entail risk carried out day or night, in the heat or the cold, in sunlight or rain. They are chameleons, masters of imitation; they take on the color of the earth and the season. They move swiftly, without armor or saddles. I must hem them in where they can’t move. I must besiege them to take away their mobility and turn their will to be heroic into a will to resist within a circumscribed space. Let’s just see if it’s true that all they need is a tiny corner where they can take a stand to reconquer everything.

I know all their tricks. They’ve been using them against us for a century. What tricks do I have that they don’t know?

I must surprise the Spaniards. But I must not offend the Romans. We’ve wasted one hundred thousand men in a hundred years of war against Spain. We’ve wasted the tears of a hundred thousand Roman mothers and sisters. I will not bring any more men to Spain. I’ve boasted about leaving Rome without a single foot soldier or cavalryman. Everyone remembers the triumphant departures of twenty generals, from Marcellus to Lepidus. But they also remember their humiliating homecomings. I will depart modestly in order to return triumphantly.

I accept volunteers from our cities who come out of friendship. In effect, I’m creating a squadron of friends so they will accompany me. They are friends of great distinction. First among them, my teacher Polybius: he has become the most excellent of historians, living proof of how Rome embraces and assimilates the other nations with shores on Mare Nostrum. How she gives them the opportunity we also want to extend to Spain and its stubborn fanatics of independence. For that reason, Polybius commands the cohort made up of my friends. But there are also other friends of rank gathered around the orange tree in my patio in Rome. Accompanying us are the chroniclers Rutilius Rufus and Sempronius Aselion: so there will be no version of any event whatsoever that dies of squalid objectivity. Chronicles from now on will require the prophecy of memory, the affective quality of fiction, and the style of representation that are the soul of history. To that end, the poet Lucilius is with us, because poetry is the light that reveals the relationship existing among all things and connecting them. Rhetoric creates history, but literature saves it from oblivion. And sometimes, literature makes history eternal.

From our encampment, I look over the stadia that separate us from Numantia. My friends don’t have to tell me that, before a single javelin is thrown against the capital of the Celtiberians, I must hurl a thousand darts of discipline against the army of Rome in Spain. My first battle has to be against my own army.

First I expel the prostitutes, pimps, homosexuals, and fortune-tellers: there were more omen readers and purveyors of vice than there were soldiers. That army of murky pleasures was ejected from the Roman encampment to the mute shock of the troops, who needed them to raise their morale. Now I will give them a different morale, one that comes from victory. We’ve had enough of standing face-to-face with the Numantines, each side fooling the other, with no decisive moves made by them or us.

I order my soldiers to sell their carriages and horses, putting them on notice: “You are going nowhere except forward. And Numantia is only a few steps from here. If you die, you won’t need carts, only the benevolence of the vultures. If you triumph, I myself will carry you in a sedan chair.”