Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“So.”

I opened my eyes and looked around. No one. Across the creek, the morning had risen halfway to noon.

“So.” I didn’t turn around this time. “Did you find it, Ottavia?”

I didn’t need Tibor’s voice, real or imagined, to remember when I’d first heard that question, the day when Sister Francesca Splendida led us down past Mussolini’s Rose Garden to the Circo Massimo. There were twelve of us, hopping like sparrows behind Sister, down the granite steps and across the dusty oval. Along the middle of the Circo stood a crane with a cameraman on a seat. Below the crane, the most wonderful women — gowns, faces painted brighter than any in the frescoed chapels of Santa Sabina. And in front of them all, black and as large as a statue, sat a man. Sister Francesca Splendida led us up to him and stood to the side to present us for inspection. Immediately he looked at me. I knew he was looking at me.

He was different from the few men I had seen in my ten years at the convent, in spite of the black. The hair on his head was pulled back behind his ears. His beard climbed high up to his cheekbones. The whites of his eyes shone clear and direct. None of us could look away as he spoke, as he told us of seven treasures that were buried in the Circo Massimo — seven treasures that only we could find.

“Girls,” he said, “you have grown up your entire lives here in Rome, no?”

We all looked at Sister Francesca Splendida for guidance and nodded our heads.

“And you are good girls, no?”

Again a look and a dozen vigorous nods.

“But Sister Francesca Splendida and your other teachers have told you about sin, haven’t they?”

We were used to nodding by now, but did so with a little more hesitation.

“I am directing a spectacle in Rome, beginning right here in the Circo Massimo. It is a spectacle about sin, about a man in despair.” He saw our puzzled faces. “A man,” he explained, “who is confused. A man who doesn’t know which way to go. And so a teacher, someone perhaps”—and his eyes grew whiter—“like Sister Francesca Splendida, takes him on a walk. He takes him to a very special place where he sees all kinds of sin. But really, when it comes down to it there are only a few major, a few deadly sins.”

“Seven!” I didn’t raise my hand — I rarely did. Sister looked back at me fiercely, but Tibor smiled.

“So,” he said, “so small and already you understand the connection between sin and mathematics.” I didn’t understand what he meant until years later, when he repeated the story to others in an effort to make me blush. But that day, I was guilty only of the sin of pride. He was looking at me, talking to me. “Seven sins,” Tibor said. “Seven deadly sins. So girls. I need you to help me. I need you to look around the Circo Massimo, go exploring if you must. But come back to me once you’ve found an example of …”

“Lust.”

“Gluttony.”

“Greed.”

“Sloth.”

“Wrath.”

“Envy.”

“Pride.”

One by one, seven girls counted down what they had learned by rote rather than experience — although later I discovered that many of them had experienced much in the days before they had been rescued and brought to Santa Sabina.

“Ready?” Tibor asked us.

Twelve vigorous nods.

“Go!” he said. And with that, eleven girls ran off. Only I stayed, looking straight up past the beard and the hair into Tibor’s eyes.

“Didn’t you understand?” he asked me, speaking more distinctly, kindly even. I nodded again, and he turned to one of the women at his flank. But I stood there, and the woman signaled to Tibor. Now when he turned, the kindness turned to impatience.

“What?” he asked.

“I have found them,” I said. “You asked for an example of the seven deadly sins. I have found it.”

Tibor’s first reaction was incomprehension. I’m not sure that at ten years of age I understood completely. All I knew was that all the human frailties that Sister Francesca Splendida and our other teachers had warned us against were bound together by spiderweb and spit and the glue that holds together bird’s nests and the insides of atoms, bound inside the dark, dark energy of the dark, dark man sitting in front of me. Tibor understood. I saw the moment when Tibor understood. It was a moment of fear, a moment of discovery. But once discovered, once uncovered, Tibor smiled. It was a smile of recognition. Recognition of his sinful frailty. Recognition that I was someone who knew him, who, perhaps, was even a part of him, a potential companion in sin, a comfort.

“So.” The voice came to me thirteen years later, as I stood on a flattened boulder at the edge of the creek, mumbling past the first chirps of the morning birds as the air began to resuscitate the waking forest. “So.” I knew he was dead. I had seen the body before I ran, had seen it at least up to the lower jaw, the loose linen trousers and shirt, the empty tumbler, the specs sightless on the arm of the Adirondack chair, and above a darkness more complete than his beard and hair had ever been. “So.” I knew he was dead, but still the voice, the breath. “Did you find it, Ottavia?” Another treasure hunt. But what was I hunting?

While Malory was sleeping on that afternoon a month before, I took the gift he had brought me from Rome — the flash drive containing The Complete History of Septimania —and plugged it into my laptop in the cabin by the creek. I read again the Tale of Judar that Haroun had told Aldana. Like me, Judar was good at finding things. He found the three Moorish princes by the edge of Lake Karoon. And when the last of the princes survived, he traveled back to the Maghreb with him and found the treasure of Al-Shammardal, including the Magic Bag that held all the foods one could ever wish for. What did Tibor want me to find? The Magic Bag? I turned to ask him, but he was gone. He didn’t want to be found, or at least it wasn’t time.

I walked from boulder to boulder down the creek towards my cabin. Birds, early-morning shadows, water flowing slowly, still warm, even if the sun had passed into October. I opened the door and looked around my room. Muddy boot prints on the floor, powder and dust on all my books, the handles of my few pots. My toothbrush was missing. Someone had come searching for me, searching for my things.

I remembered the wheel.

Ten feet along the far bank of the creek, the shell of a Chevy 10 that had spent the past thirty years rusting into the leaves, stood wedged between a willow and a birch. Soon after I arrived at TiborTina, I realized that I needed a secret storage away from Tibor’s unexpected curiosity — the back rear wheel well of the rusting Chevy 10. The wheel was untouched, the leather pouch still there. I emptied the few contents onto my desk inside my cabin, the few things I valued — my passport, the marble apple from the Villa Septimania, a mosaic tile from Santa Sabina, the flash drive with The Complete History of Septimania .

But strangely, the treasures refused to stay still. As flat as my desk was, the flash drive slid down towards the floor, the passport flopped open, and the apple I had taken from the Villa Septimania resisted my attempts to set it down but rolled towards me, like a kitten insisting on being picked up. Only by securing them back in the leather pouch could I keep them from falling off onto the floorboards and through the cracks into the water. My treasures, I thought. Were they urging me to get out of the cabin, moving me away from the water as surely as Judar had moved away from Lake Karoon to a greater treasure? Were Judar and I adept at finding things, or were the things we’d found using us for their own purposes?

Holding the leather pouch, I crossed the meadow and went up the hill to the pond. The policemen, the others were long gone. I walked up the terrace. The wind had eddied the fallen leaves of the overhanging maples into hassocks along the steps. Some battered yellow police tape still cleaved to the rails. Everything had been cleaned at some point, cleaned of the worst before being abandoned once again.