4th Act - Delicate Fingernails on the Soft Skin of the Inner Forearm. Orpheus Dazzling
I went to Herculaneum because it was warmer there, and I lived there for many years. I was old enough to appreciate that feeling, as if being wrapped in warm shrouds, that particular dense kind of heat that enfolds while stroking the skin; I liked that. I would take walks, bored and tired of my house, walking over by the waterfront, kicking stones and being licked by that soft ever-loving wind.
It was easier to feel playful then, letting the feeling fill, circle the heart, get lazy from feeling good. There wasn't a problem in Herculaneum of money, of people who would open their purse for me because they admired something that I had said or the way that I looked. It was easy to gain favor from people who were also drunk on how easy things were. I would stroll in my long red robes that were strange but not to me, because it was easier in Herculaneum, place between worlds, to be strange without being notably odd.
I made my own clothes, as I always have, buying the best things, and it was almost like Tuscany except that I wasn't mad. I was luxurious and bloated with the best stuff, things like silk and tiled floors and the finest rose colored marble that would warm up just the right way. I didn't have to think about anything, just lay back on my most expensive gold embroidery and be satisfied with it all. And I was, and I loved because it was so easy.
I would sit on my heels, sitting up looking at the moon through the trees in my central garden, surrounded on all sides by the noise of my general household. I would sit with my hands in my lap and I would look, and then I would dig my fingers into the dirt and feel consumed by grief whose color I didn't know, and children who I loved would come up to me and hug my back and I would feel that nameless feeling behind my eyes, pushing pushing. And I would say, "Vivi, go back inside," and he wouldn't.
In the beginning, the villa came with twelve house servants of various ages who promised to serve me and twittered at each other about all kinds of gossip about Herculaneum and various big people, and I thought that I could not have them twittering about me so I killed them all. Then the house was of course empty, so I purchased Vasvius off of a slave trader passing through and I could not have been happier with his perfect skill at washing blood off of lovely rose colored marble and he was not afraid of me because he was too young to believe in the idea that someone might kill you for absolutely no reason at all. It was lovely.
Vasvius had perfect little feet in his youth, and he would come up to my doorway and stand there, as if waiting for something, as if listening, and he would not speak very much, and I did not speak to him very much. I memorized the sound of his feet, and I could always tell where he was. He was good at running the house, even at that age, watching after things. There was no one to look after. Sometimes, there were things to get, but the important things I would go for myself, so often he would just sweep halfheartedly or play with the embroidery on the robes that I made him. He never played with other boys, and I would have forbidden it had he wanted to. He didn't want to. He was a very silent and obedient child. He was a beautiful child, with his long dirty blond hair, browner in the wintertime, long pale legs with delicate knees, soft skin. He did not mind being watched or studied by me in his youth.
Vasvius's character grew even more cold and austere in comparison to the second boy brought into the house. Vasvius was 13 when Vivacio was purchased, and of course he was right to think that I was replacing him because Vivacio looked quite like him, and Vivacio would still look quite like him if Vasvius would stop dying his hair that ghastly reddish brown color that just makes him look like some kind of deposed saint pretending to be something he isn't. Vivacio had the same hair, the same delicate little features, though with a narrower carriage somehow, narrower nose, higher cheekbones, lighter eyes, thinner, shorter, more frail than Vasvius, almost waif like, sometimes ghost like.
"I love him more than you," I said to him.
"You love a ghost, so who cares? I don't care if you love all the boys in the whole city more than you love me. If you can love a ghost who is blown by the wind, who follows you like a dog, then why should I care? Your love is worthless," Vasvius would say to me, these kinds of things, and then cry, and then break amphorae at my feet, break them and throw them at my face and cry more softly and shake.
He did not love me. He would not have left if he had loved me, but that was later, and before that he cared for all the boys and he watched me back for all the times I had watched him, much further aware of the things that some people will do when they are confused and lonely and full of disquiet.
***
Maybe I filled the house with beautiful children to spite him. I did not buy Escha because of Vasvius, though he accused me of it while I kissed him and he sobbed.
"Don't take him into your bed, Leechtin. I won't allow it," he would sob, standing in my doorway like a ghost of who he was as a child, long and refined in the upper carriage of his body, but slouchy, as if crushed from above, crushed by his neediness, his rotten insides, "I will kill him and then I will kill you if you do it," and he tried to do it.
I killed Vasvius for trying to kill Escha, for being jealous of all of them. I twisted a blade into his intestines and he loved every second of dying. He cried and he hugged me while that blade was inside him, and he pressed against me. I'm sure that he thought he would be dead momentarily when he whispered that he was glad to be killed by me, and that he had always loved me, and that he had hoped, all that he had hoped to be. I told him to stop going to whorehouses and talking to river men and buying that awful bread full of the terrible little louse eggs that he couldn't see but that I could smell, and he was surprised to not be dead in the morning. I pushed him out of my bed and told him to get me my warm water that I always wanted at that hour. As if I wouldn't want it just because he was blinking hard at sunlight and feeling rather warm.
So Vasvius was already a blood sucking baby killer before I met Nataniellus, which explains why it was Vivacio who was incredibly jealous at that time and not his older, much more murderous and brooding brother. It wasn't a bother in that case because Vivacio, being the ghost that Vasvius accused him of being, only ever threatened to kill people and never had the balls to actually try to do it. Though talk of Nataniellus will be in a minute because Escha will be first as always.
***
Escha was too delicate as a child to be used for very much more than window dressing and I didn't want him for anything else. I had four boys at the time, not including Vasvius and Vivacio. Vasvius was too old then to considered a boy, but not old enough or experienced enough to be called a man of any sort. Vivacio was 12, barely with a personality.
Escha was not shy about me, but it was his way then to almost be. He would give these shy little smiles, but the sneer behind them had not developed. I don't think he ever had it before he died. He had long blond curly hair because the trader knew exactly what to sell about Escha and that was his natural quality of being an extremely beautiful, well mannered object who could not speak the local language. I, of course, wanted to dress him up and take care of him, but he put fingers in my heart that I have never wanted him to remove.
He was Galois, and though not yet aching for some kind of home that he had never known, he defined himself through difference. Where the other boys would later describe themselves as Roman, Escha has always described himself as French, though he never lived there as a child, and did not live there until many years later. He has never been anything but "Laurent" to anyone younger than his brothers, the four boys in Herculaneum who cared for him as someone weaker and more precious than they were, and even they have called him Laurent for many years.
I brought him home and washed him, and trimmed his hair. He was quiet, seven years old, used to being touched. I would hold his feet, looking up into his face, my Escha sitting up there on the fountain edge, and he would stare back, saying nothing. I made him white robes and tied them with a gold colored rope for his soft sash so that he stood out from all of the others. He slept in my bed, his delicate fingers clutching the sheets, so that I could watch him sleep and he never took meals with others, who teased him without malice but were something of resentful against him, because I favored him too much.
Vasvius tried to kill Escha by stabbing him in the throat. It was late in the evening, and we had been speaking of some matters of the house before Vasvius flew at me in a rage, showing me his kitchen knife and breaking more amphorae. His intention was to throw Escha on my bed and pin him to the sheets through the throat with that knife so he could listen to him die around it but it did not work out that way for him to say the least of it. It was a small victory for Vasvius to have me throw away Escha for the nigh,t who was clean and fresh smelling, for himself who was about to die and daring me to do it. He looked strung out and it all collapsed when he was so run through with that knife, that what he thought were confessions and secrets came running out that I had known already and which were never precious.
"I have loved you since I was a child," he would cry.
"Why did you do this to me? I have loved you since I was a child," he would sob.
"Why can't you see that I do these things because you no longer love me? I'm only wanting to be yours again," he would scream.
And I would whisper, "You are cold and bitter. There is no warmth in you at all."
But I could feel his warmth all over my hands, spreading out over my knees, soaking up into the sheets, soaking up into my robes, and he licked the knife when I offered it to him, dying on the bed beneath me. I don't know why I began to shudder, or why I cried while he died, and there was such tenderness in his kisses when I laid over him, and such softness in his hands that held my wrists so that I could not scratch at myself because of how much I hated what I was, and what I was doing, and he whispered "I know I know" into my ears. So I told him that I loved him.
But he was dying so none of it was real.
