Gore Vidal: Messiah

I breathed the air of early summer gladly, voluptuously. I lived my life in seasonal concert with this river and, after grim March and confusing sharp April, the knowledge that at last the leaves were foliaged and the days warm was quite enough to create in me a mood of euphoria, of marvelous serenity. I contemplated love affairs. I prepared to meet strangers. The summer and I would celebrate our triumph soon; but, until the proper moment, I was a spectator: the summer love as yet unknown to me, the last dark blooming of peonies amid the wreckage of white lilacs still some weeks away, held in the future with my love. I could only anticipate; I savored my disengagement in this garden.

But then it was time to go in and I turned my back resolutely on the river and ascended the wide stone steps to the brick terrace which fronted the house on the river side, pausing only to break the stem of a white and pink peony, regretting immediately what I had done: brutally, I had wished to possess the summer, to fix the instant, to bear with me into the house a fragment of the day. It was wrong; and I stood for a moment at the French door holding the great peony in my hand, its odor like a dozen roses, like all the summers I had ever known. But it was impractical. I could not stuff it into my buttonhole for it was as large as a baby's head while I was fairly certain that my hostess would be less than pleased to receive at my hands one of her best peonies, cut too short even to place in water. Obscurely displeased with myself and the day, I plunged the flower deep into a hedge of boxwood until not even a glimmer of white showed through the dense dark green to betray me: then, like a murderer, the assaulted day part-spoiling, I went inside.

"You have been malingering in the garden," she said, offering me her face like a painted plate to kiss. "I saw you from the window."

"Saw me ravage the flowers?"

"They all do," she said obscurely, and led me after her into the drawing room, an oblong full of light from French windows opening upon the terrace. I was surprised to see that she was alone.

"She'll be along presently. She's upstairs changing."

"Who?"

"Iris Mortimer… didn't I tell you? It's the whole reason."

Clarissa nodded slyly from the chair opposite me. A warm wind crossed the room and the white curtains billowed like spinnakers in a regatta. I breathed the warm odor of flowers, of burned ash remnants from the fireplace: the room shone with silver and porcelain. Clarissa was rich despite the wars and crises that had marked our days, leaving the usual scars upon us, like trees whose cross-sections bear a familial resemblance of concentric rings, recalling in detail the weather of past years… at least those few rings we shared in common, for Clarissa, by her own admission, was twenty-two hundred years old with an uncommonly good memory. None of us had ever questioned her too closely about her past. There is no reason to suspect, however, that she was insincere. Since she felt she had lived that great length of time and since her recollections were remarkably interesting and plausible she was much in demand as a conversationalist and adviser, especially useful in those plots which require great shrewdness and daring. It was perfectly apparent that she was involved in some such plot at the moment.

I looked at her thoughtfully before I casually rose to take the bait of mystery she had trailed so perfunctorily before me.

She knew her man. She knew I would not be difficult in the early stages of any adventure.

"Whole reason?" I repeated.

"I can say no more!" said Clarissa with a melodramatic emphasis which my deliberately casual tone did not entirely justify. "You'll love Iris, though."

I wondered whether loving Iris, or pretending to love Iris, was to be the summer's game. But before I could inquire further, Clarissa, secure in her mystery, asked me idly about my work and, as idly, I answered her, the exchange perfunctory yet easy, for we were used to one another.

"I am tracking him down," I said. "There is so little to go on, but what there is is quite fascinating, especially Ammianus."

"Fairly reliable, as military men go," said Clarissa, suddenly emerging from her polite indifference: any reference to the past she had known always interested her, only the present seemed to bore her, at least that ordinary unusable present which did not contain promising material for one of her elaborate human games.

"Did you know him?" I never accepted, literally, Clarissa's unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she seemed to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history's records, differed on the side of plausibility… the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she was literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death of Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not been preserved for us except in quaintly obscure references; while the virtue of the Roman republic and the ambitions of celebrated politicians, she set aside as being of only minor importance: currency and taxation were her forte and she managed to reduce all the martial splendor of ancient days to an economic level).

She had one other obsession, however, and my reference to Ammianus reminded her of it.

"The Christians!" she exclaimed significantly; then she paused; I waited. Her conversation at times resembled chapter-headings chosen haphazardly from an assortment of Victorian novels. " They hated him."

"Ammianus?"

"No, your man Julian. It is the Emperor Julian you are writing about."

"Reading about."

"Ah, you will write about him," she said with an abstracted pythoness stare which suggested that I was indefatigable in my eccentric purpose which, for some years, had been the study of history in a minor key.

"Of course they hated him. As well they should have… that's the whole point to my work."

"Unreliable, the lot of them. There is no decent history from the time they came to Rome up until that fat little Englishman… you know, the one who lived in Switzerland… with rather staring eyes."

"Gibbon."

"Yes, that one. Of course he got all the facts wrong, poor man, but at least he tried. The facts of course were all gone by then. They saw to that… burning things, rewriting things… not that I really ever read them… you know how I am about reading: I prefer a mystery novel any day. But at least Gibbon got the tone right."

"Yet…"

"Of course Julian was something of a prig, you know. He posed continually and he wasn't… what do they call him now? an apostate. He never renounced Christianity."

"He what…"

Clarissa in her queer way took pleasure in rearranging all accepted information. I shall never know whether she did it deliberately to mystify or whether her versions were, in fact, the forgotten reality.

"He was a perfectly good Christian au fond despite his peculiar diet. He was a vegetarian for some years but wouldn't eat beans, as I recall, because he thought they contained the souls of the dead, an old orphic notion."

"Which is hardly Christian."

"Isn't that part of it? No? Well in any case the first proclamation of Paris was intended…" but I was never to hear Julian's intent for Iris was in the doorway, slender, dressed in white, her hair dark and drawn back in a classical line from her calm face: she was handsome and not at all what I had expected, but then Clarissa had, as usual, not given me much lead. Iris Mortimer was my own age, I guessed, about thirty, and although hardly a beauty she moved with such ease, spoke with such softness, created such an air of serenity that one gave her perhaps more credit for the possession of beauty than an American devoted to regular features ought, in all accuracy, to have done: the impression was one of lightness, of this month of June in fact… I linger over her description a little worriedly, conscious that I am not really getting her right (at least as she appeared to me that afternoon) for the simple reason that our lives were to become so desperately involved in the next few years and my memories of her are now encrusted with so much emotion that any attempt to evoke her as she actually was when I first saw her in that drawing room some fifty years ago is not unlike the work of a restorer of paintings removing layers of glaze and grime in an attempt to reveal an original pattern in all its freshness somewhere beneath… except that a restorer of course is a workman who has presumably no prejudice and, too, he did not create the original image only to attend its subsequent distortion, as the passionate do in life; for the Iris of that day was, I suppose, no less and no more than what she was to become; it was merely that I could not suspect the bizarre course our future was to take. I had no premonition of our mythic roles, though the temptation is almost overpowering to assert, darkly, that even on the occasion of our first meeting I knew . The truth is that we met; we became friends; we lunched amiably and the future cast not one shadow across the mahogany table around which we sat, listening to Clarissa and eating fresh shad caught in the river that morning.