The Orange Tree

The Two Numantias

THEY, the Spaniards, are a coarse, savage, and barbarous people whom we Romans lead, whether they like it or not, toward civilization. Thanks to the Greeks and Phoenicians, there is some development in the peninsula’s coastal areas. But just penetrate this surly, arid land the slightest bit and there’s nothing: no roads, no aqueducts, no theaters, and no cities worthy of the name. They have no idea what wine, salt, oil, and vinegar are. Which is why our soldiers have such a hard time of it in the Iberian campaigns. They’re forced to eat barley and rabbit boiled in salt water, so dysentery has become endemic among our troops. Our satiric poets laugh, but so do our ordinary foot soldiers. We’re fertilizing Spanish soil with Roman shit. And one more thing: the Spaniards never bathe.

But they are brave. We found that out during the hundred years (a hundred and four to be precise) of our constant war against Spain: from the moment Hamilcar Barca crossed from Africa to Cádiz and challenged us by sacking Spain and turning it into a base for Carthage’s campaign against Rome, until the fall of the hardheaded and suicidal city of Numantia to the cohorts of our hero Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus.

They live on an island. Or almost. Surrounded by water on all sides except the narrow but thick neck of the Pyrenees, the Spaniards are insular beings. Or peninsular, to be precise. To them the world matters nothing. Their land, everything. And to the world they matter nothing. It’s possible we Romans might have left them in peace: let them choke to death on their barley and boiled rabbits. But Carthage intervened and transformed Spain into a gamble and a danger. The road to Rome from Africa runs through Spain. In Spain, Africa defeats Rome. And after conquering Rome, there will be nothing more to conquer. That was the threat, and Carthage placed its bet on Spain.

They always viewed themselves as the end of the world, the tail end of the continent. That’s how they wanted to be seen, and that’s how they were seen. The farthest point, the limit, the corner, the hole, the ass end of the known world. What a shame Carthage chose Spain to defy Rome. Rome had to come to Spain to defend itself and to defend Spain.

Hannibal, son and successor to Hamilcar, marched on Saguntum, surrounded the city, and laid siege to it. The Saguntines gathered all their possessions in the forum and burned them. Then they left the city to fight instead of dying of hunger. They were decimated by Hannibal. From the city walls, the women watched their men die in unequal combat. Some of them threw themselves from the rooftop terraces, others hanged themselves, still others killed themselves along with their children. Hannibal entered a ghost town.

That’s the way they are. That’s how Carthage’s war in Spain began and also how it ended: Saguntum was the prophetic mirror of the siege of Numantia.

* * *

YOU people don’t know how to tell history from legend. Rome feels it’s civilized. I, Polybius of Megalopolis, Greek of ancient lineage, tell you you are mistaken. Rome is an immature nation, as coarse and barbaric as the Celtiberians. Less so than they, but in no way comparable to the refined Greeks. And yet, something that has abandoned us Greeks has taken its place in the heart of Rome: Fortune, what we Greeks call Tyché. In matters of history, Tyché leads all the affairs of the world in a single direction. All the historian has to do is provide an order for the events determined by Fortune. My great good fortune (my personal luck) consists in having been a witness to the moment in which Rome became Fortune’s protagonist. Until then, the world lived under the sign of dispersion. Beginning with Rome, the world becomes an organic totality. The affairs of Africa are linked to those of Greece and Asia. All these facts lead to the same end: the world united by Rome. That is history’s very reason for being. All of you are the witnesses of my good fortune. In fifty-three years (which is how old Scipio was when he reached Numantia), Rome has subjugated almost all of the inhabited world. Fortune gave Rome dominion over the world. If I respect the goddess Tyché, I would have to say: this occurred because Rome deserved it. You will remember this history. I leave the rest to antiquarians.

* * *

WE Romans began and finished the war against Carthage in Spain and then against the Hispanic resistance once Carthage was swept from the peninsula. We, the young Roman republic, wanted to infuse into our undertakings a tradition of both military power and civilization. Luckily, we could count on heroes from the same family, the Scipios. Two brothers, Publius Cornelius Scipio and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus, were the first to whom the Senate and People of Rome assigned the mission of subjugating the Hispanic tribes and incorporating their territories into the Roman republic, wiping out proud Carthaginian ambition forever. The two Scipios brought the war against Carthage to Spain. They arrived with sixty ships, four hundred cavalrymen, and ten thousand infantrymen. The Carthaginians sent Hasdrubal with thirty masked elephants. The Scipios killed many elephants, which were blinded by masks that were supposed to save them from the vision of fear. But death killed the two Scipios.

The two of them were taking their ease, as is usual in wars when winter comes. A tacit truce is established, and the adversaries take refuge in mountain passes. Sometimes the power of the storms is so great that the wind smashes the very eagles against the flanks of the mountains, and their feathers fall like a dark rain on the snow. A real warrior, however, is not disheartened by the whims of the seasons. He’s devoured by the worm of war. Publius Cornelius, nervous and stiff with cold, decided to catch Hasdrubal the Carthaginian by surprise. But Hasdrubal, even more nervous, had already come out searching for Publius Cornelius: Hasdrubal surrounded his force and killed him.

* * *

THE other Scipio, his brother, Gnaeus Cornelius, knew nothing of what had happened. Moved by an obscure fraternal instinct, he marched out to reconnoiter the frozen countryside. He was guided by a dread apprehension. The Carthaginians attacked him, forcing him to take refuge in a tower, which they immediately set on fire. There that valiant man died, amid the flames and the frost. Thus we confirm that in winter truces, there can only be rest if one of the adversaries abstains from fighting, because it is certain that the other will always be lying in ambush. Who can understand the fatality of these mortal games?

The collapse of the winter truce was an evil omen. Five Roman commanders followed one after another in Spain. Marcellus came with a thousand cavalry and ten thousand foot soldiers. He failed resoundingly, to such a degree that his defeats gave virtually all of Spain — except for a tiny corner in the Pyrenees — to Carthage. That’s how we discovered that in Spain a perverse Archimedes’ Principle obtains: give me a tiny corner, however dark, however small it may be, from which to fight, and from there I’ll move the world …

No one wanted to follow Marcellus’s path to disgrace. In Rome the alarm spread. What cowardice, what decadence is this? Once again, it was a Scipio who stepped forward: Noble family, we shall never cease to praise you and to tell of the fame and fortune you’ve given us!

The young Cornelius Scipio, as he lamented the death in Spain of his father and his uncle, who had mocked Carthage, swore to avenge them. The Senate, holding fast to the law (justice is a shield, but sometimes a refuge for cowards), pointed out that the young Scipio, at the age of twenty-four, did not have the right to command troops. Whereupon, the youth challenged the old men. If the old men prefer it that way, he said, let them take command. No one did so. The youth departed with five hundred horse and ten thousand foot. Spain, tired of African domination, awaited him with joy. Cornelius Scipio took advantage of their temperament, adding his own, which was highly dramatic. He says providence is inspiring his actions. He mounts his horse, sits bolt upright, speaks in the name of the gods, and stirs up the troops with his youthful presence. He fascinates with his graceful body that barely tolerates the heavy bronze muscles of his breastplate and with the golden down of his legs that seems to blend with the body of his blossom-colored horse. Then he takes up his position opposite New Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast, with siege machines, stones, darts, catapults, and javelins. Ten thousand Carthaginians defend the gates of the city. Cornelius takes advantage of low tide for a surprise attack from the rear and takes the city using only twelve ladders, while out in front the trumpets bellow as if New Carthage had already fallen.

And New Carthage does fall. In a day. Just four days after Cornelius Scipio reaches Spain. He captures provisions, entire arsenals, ivory, gold, and silver (which the Spaniards disdain and the Carthaginians adore). Money, wheat, and docks with thirty-three warships. Prisoners. Hostages.

The young Scipio frees the prisoners in order to reconcile the two peoples. He wears a saintly expression. He does it very well. He does everything well, but this inspired expression is the one that works best. He dominates our splendid rhetoric, the double source of our politics and our literature. From the walls of New Carthage, he exclaims, “Do not forget the Scipios!”

He consecrates himself. He consecrates, by prolonging it, the glory of the family line. And by doing that he consecrates Rome, her law, her arms, her Senate, and her people. He is the worthy son of the sacrificed Publius Cornelius. Who could reproach him for his triumph? Outside the walls of Carmona, the young general acts as if he were in an amphitheater. He wears his best expression of inspiration. He says he’s waiting for a divine sign to attack. As if Jupiter himself were directing, a flock of blackbirds passes at that instant, spins into a circle, and screeches. Cornelius imitates the birds, running around in circles, making noises. The whole army imitates him, amid astonishment and laughter. The passion of victory inspires them.

But from the rear, a great number of Africans advance. Discourses and inspirations are just not enough. The birds, like all actors, have moved on to the next town. Cornelius dismounts, hands his horse over to a boy, takes a shield from a soldier, runs alone into the open space between the two armies, and exclaims, “Romans, save your general in danger!”

Moved by a thirst for glory, or fear or shame, we rush to rescue our commander from a danger he himself invented. Eight hundred of us die at Carmona — along with fifteen thousand Carthaginians. Victory would have been unimaginable if our general, acting on his own, hadn’t exposed himself unnecessarily to death …

Cornelius Scipio is a favored man; he has youth and beauty, inspiration and courage, a theatrical gift, rhetorical power, and the ear of the gods. But every hero has his Achilles’ heel. Linked by the neck of the Pyrenees to the continent, Spain, as we’ve noted, would be an island without those mountains. But that throat is vulnerable, as was that of our hero Cornelius Scipio in his next battle, against the Ilurgians, our allies, who went over to the Carthaginians. Cornelius conquered their town in four hours but was wounded in the neck, the only exposed place between his trunk and head: helmet, breastplate, shield, and short sword transformed our commander into a metal beast. But he had an Achilles’ neck.

Wounded by their leader’s wound, our men forgot to sack the town and instead, without being ordered to do so, slit the throats of all its inhabitants. The blood of Ilurgia flowed out of the slashed throats of its men, women, and children.

When Cornelius fell ill, Marcius took his place. He was weak and could not control our men. Deprived of the fascination our young hero provided, they drifted into an indiscipline which they would never dare to exhibit, which they perhaps repressed, when Cornelius Scipio stood before them. The hero would not have wanted to do what he then had to do, namely, to abandon his sickbed to restore order among the unruly troops. First came whipping. Then they were skewered to the ground through the neck and decapitated. All that made Cornelius ill. He lived just one moment beyond the glory allotted him. He knew it and withdrew. Cornelius Scipio dominated the rhythm of time. He measured his own, and four years later, at Zama, he defeated Hannibal and Carthage forever and was granted the glorious title of Scipio Africanus. That was the grandfather of the Scipio who besieged and destroyed Numantia.

The hero Cornelius Scipio and the weak Marcius were replaced by the young Cato. He wanted to emulate the hero and began with a dramatic gesture. He ordered the fleet back to Rome and announced to the soldiers that they should fear the absence of ships more than they feared the enemy: there was no way to return to Italy.

The audacity of Cato the Younger, who inspired his troops more with fear than with hope, succeeded in having all the cities along the Ebro River pull down their walls rather than be sold into slavery. Even so, the triumphs of Cornelius Scipio and Cato were demolished by the blind infamy of Galba in his so-called Lusitanian War. The trick of this commander of ours, lacking all honor, was to befriend the Iberian peoples, propose peace treaties, tell them he understood the reasons for their rebellion — the result of the poverty in which they lived — and promise them fertile lands if they would yield. Alter they did so, he would assemble them in an open place where he could divide them into groups and then kill every single one of them.

A rebel named Viriatus escaped from one of those contemptible ambushes. During eight years of fighting, he kept us in check. He set up his headquarters in a freshly planted olive grove called the Mount of Venus. He defeated our commanders, beginning with Vitellius. Accustomed to the elegance and beauty of the Scipios, no one recognized their successor in that old, fat man. Because they did not recognize him, the Spaniards killed him, Plautius, who followed Vitellius, fled Spain in complete disorder. Right in the middle of summer, he declared, “It’s winter,” and ran away to hide. But since the seasons were not subject to his commands, Viriatus paid him no attention and occupied the entire country.

At first, his guerrilla tactics, now familiar to all, disconcerted our generals. Used to formal warfare, face-to-face, cohorts lined up, and limiting feinting movements to the logical pattern of flanks, vanguard, and rearguard, we were, at the outset, slow to understand the style of the guerrilla fighter. He would attack by day or night, whether it was hot or cold, whether it was raining or whether the earth was dying of thirst. Sun and darkness were equally useful to him. His troops were lightly armed, his horses swift while ours were slow and weighed down by heavy armor. He was invincible, so we offered Viriatus a generous peace. Fabius Maximus Servilianus declared him our friend, promising land and peace to his followers. But Caepius, the next commander in chief, decided those agreements were unworthy of Rome and Rome’s greatness. He started the war again, and one night managed to introduce our spies into Viriatus’s camp. The Spanish leader slept fully armed, always ready for combat. The murderers plunged a dagger into the only unprotected spot on his body: his neck. When he was found the next morning, his people thought their chief was still sleeping. But this time Viriatus was only a fully armed corpse.

That’s how we conquered rebellious Spain: we killed her leaders and prepared to conquer the last focus of resistance: the tenacious, stubborn, and, for all that, terrible capital of Celtiberia, the proud city of Numantia.

* * *

HE knows very well what’s going on in Spain. But above all, he knows what’s going on in Rome. I don’t know if you’ve taken the trouble to count the number of troops sent over the course of a century to fight in Spain. Between infantry and cavalry, beginning with the command of the two Scipios and ending with that of Fabius Maximus Servilianus, it comes to ninety-three thousand soldiers. A thousand per year. Few ever came back. He knows that. He feels that. He feels and knows Rome’s disquiet over the interminable Spanish war: a whole century, enough is enough … But the troops keep pouring in. The terrible thing is that now they’re fighting a single city, and that one city is eating up as many thousands of soldiers as the entire peninsula once did.

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.

You know your own insecurities. What? Could there be any security greater than that of being the grandson of Scipio Africanus, the victorious hero of the Second Punic War, the conqueror of Hannibal? You are his grandson, but only by adoption, and the mirror confirms that. You are someone else. You inherited nothing. In other words, you cannot be sure that through heredity your gifts will come to you naturally, biologically. Your grandfather Scipio Africanus says that to you every day from heaven: You will have to conquer the inheritance of our lineage on your own. The name Scipio is still not yours by right. You will have to earn it. You will have to emulate our virtues, be worthy of them. And to be worthy of the Scipios means as well to be worthy of Rome. In any case, simply by being a citizen of the capital of the world you would already have that obligation.

You see your image as an eighteen-year-old in the mirror your fifty-seven-year-old hand is holding, and you admit that everything, not only the stain of adoption, conspires against your obligation to be great. You’re apathetic. You learn with difficulty. It’s true that your adoptive family has subjected you to the rigors of the best patrician education, which is Greek. You have studied rhetoric, sculpture, and painting. You have learned to hunt, ride, and take care of your dogs. But your inclinations are not toward the disciplines but toward the pleasures. On horseback, in a forest, chasing a wild pig, with the dogs bringing up the rear, you are a happy boy. You add the pleasure of the other bodies to your own. That of the captured animal, whose cadaver you revive by embracing it. The cold nose, the warm spittle, the melancholy eye of a hound are your body reflected in another body that never thinks of the soul. Does a dog have a memory? Does a dog pass sleepless nights thinking about the divorce of its body from its soul? You pat the neck of your lead dog. It throbs in peace with itself. It is a single thing. You are two. You touch your neck. It has no bristles that would make it ugly, either at dawn or at nightfall. What you do have is a fear of uncertainty. Where does your soul begin, where does your body end? In the tremor of your body, the union of your mind and your guts? You exile the life of your flesh to south of your neck. But your head is left empty, divorced.

Son of consuls and censors, your true father, Lucius Aemilius Paulus, divorced your mother, Papiria, two months after your birth, as if you were the cause of the divorce. Abandoned, you and your brother, you were both adopted — by different families. How lucky you were to enter the clan of the Scipios, to inherit the fame of the conquerors of Hannibal and Perseus. Secretly unlucky, as your inheritance divided your soul from your body even more. Will you someday learn to whom you owe your spirit, to whom your flesh? You will deliver flesh to play, hunting, galloping, indiscriminate sexual love, the company of dogs that do not suffer as you do …

A Greek prisoner is delivered to your house, Polybius of Megalopolis, once leader of the Achaean League, the last effort for the independence of his nation. Your family chose him as a slave because they wanted to read his books. That’s how Polybius earned the protection of the Scipios. At first you avoided his company. He spent his time in the library, you in the stables. The tension between the two of you began to grow. He was fifteen years older than you but still young and goaded by the memory of his military experience in Greece. You laughed at him: bookworm, effeminate, owner of his head only, not his body. You didn’t need him. In those days you wanted to break a wild black stallion which had come from Africa along with other presents from Prince Jugurtha, nephew of Masinissa, ally of Rome and your family since the wars against Hannibal. What happened was foreseeable. The horse threw you. Polybius mounted and broke him. On the librarian’s bare chest you saw the scars left by Roman lances. Polybius’s chest was the map of his homeland.

“I will teach you to speak and comport yourself so you will be worthy of your ancestors.”

That is what this man, to whom you owe everything, said to you. In him, matter and thought, Greece and Rome, were united. He was not your lover, only your teacher, your mentor, your father. He calmed your anguish about the divided world, which had been the legacy of your childhood and the succubus of your nights. The sentiment your animal strength was already expressing, the power of your body, he reconciled, harmonized, infused with thought and reason: To honor Rome. To serve her. To obtain for your nation glory, fame, and military triumph.

But Rome had no books, only sentiments. Her literature did not exist; it was only rhetoric. The urns of triumph had to be filled, like the cask of the body, with the wine of thought and with poetry. Polybius taught you to think and speak like a Greek in order to act like a Roman. Hand in hand with him, you visited the Garden of Epicurus, Zeno’s stoa, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Plato’s Academy. In the garden you learned to think and speak pleasure; in the lyceum you learned to moderate pleasure; in the stoa you discovered you were imperfect, although perfectible through virtue; and in the academy you learned to question everything. For example, though Polybius thought the logic of history was the unity of the world through Rome, thanks to the support that Fortune gave your country, he would instantly doubt his own assertion. History, he would say, has not only logic but meaning, and meaning consists in teaching us to withstand integrally the vicissitudes of Fortune by reminding us of the disasters of others. You will recall that lesson for your own campaigns. Your pride in what you are learning and in the person teaching it to you leads you one day to ask Polybius: “What shall we name our school?”

He answers that it will not be a school but a circle: the Scipionic Circle. You two will do important things, especially the translation of Greek thought into Latin terminology and the attempt to achieve poetry through public speech. Oratory would be the Roman school of virtue and action, which would be inseparable. Polybius and you spoke as well of the events of the day. The growth of the city of Rome. The arrival of slaves from conquered provinces to till the soil and the subsequent migration of peasants to the city, which congested it. The growth of luxury and financial manipulations. From Greece came knowledge but also the urge to live luxuriously. Many young men, Polybius would say, thought that being like Greeks was a matter of dissipating their energies in love affairs with other young men, courtesans, or in music and banqueting. A single example will suffice to show to what level of degradation Roman youth had fallen: it cost more to pay for the favors of a male prostitute than it did to buy a parcel of farmland, and if the daily wage of a peasant was thirty drachmas, a pot of pickled fish cost three hundred.

They talked about scandals, couples separating, illicit affairs, but also about the continuity of the family as an institution and their admiration for the matron Cornelia, daughter of your grandfather Scipio Africanus and mother of the Gracchi, your cousins. “May we see your jewels, madam?” “My jewels are my sons, sir.” Weren’t they both a bit strange, these impatient, rebellious young brothers? Didn’t they talk about equality? Can there be equality if there is no immortality? Is it only death that makes us equal? No, immortality itself can be selective: only select spirits rise to the celestial domain. Does that idea disgust you? Don’t you think at least that fame confers immortality and that, therefore, fame is always rather badly distributed? Do you accept fame but demand equality as well? Polybius suggests an intermediate route to you: Serve your nation well, use language, the gods’ gift to men, well, and you will have served both fraternity and glory.

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.”

I had twenty thousand razors and tweezers confiscated from the troops. I started wearing a two- or three-day beard to give an example of roughness, and in doing so I renounced one of my most sensual habits, one I’d practiced since the age of twenty: keeping my neck clean-shaven. Here we would all let our beards grow until Numantia fell. I banned mirrors.

I threw out the masseurs, who went their way giggling nervously, on the lookout for new bodies. I informed the soldiers that they would no longer need massages to reduce their obesity because from now on we would be eating only roast meat and that no one would be allowed to have more tableware than a copper pot and a plate.

I forbade the use of beds, and I myself set an example by sleeping on common straw.

I arranged things so that each man would bathe himself without the help of whores, masseurs, or orderlies. Only mules, who have no hands, need other hands to wash them.

I ordered daily exercise beginning at dawn for each and every soldier. I urged them on with switches. I used them to discipline those who were Roman citizens. Those who weren’t I ordered to be beaten with rods. But they would all be whipped, whether they deserved it or not, as part of my plan to harden these troops that I had found flaccid, milky, and sleepy.

The daily marches were carried out in perfect formation, and what was previously carried by mules was now carried by the men.

But nothing disciplined them as well or prepared them as well for the long siege to come than my decision to fortify new encampments every day and then have them destroyed the next. First there were expressions of astonishment, instantly followed by disillusion. Then came incipient apathy, which was held in check by the exhausting repetition of the same useless work. All of that told me I’d achieved what I wanted: to temper them against the repeated failure that awaited us before we won our victory.

I organized a geometry of the useless, a physiology of the absurd. Every morning, my men (they were beginning to earn my affection) would dig deep trenches only to fill them up again in the afternoon. They would then immediately march back to our encampment, dragging their feet and grumbling to themselves, first against me and then against their own uselessness. A good soldier should see his first enemy in himself.

Every day they raised high palisades out on the plains: they defended us against nothing and offended no one. We all knew that. The waste was exemplary. The gratuitous acts were perfect in their consummate disinterest. In war, it’s essential to be ready at all times. A soldier is like unclaimed property.

All the neighboring territories from which Numantia received provisions I sacked, destroyed, and then occupied. The brave young men of another Iberian city named Lutia rushed to the aid of their brothers in Numantia. Their courage contrasted with the apathy endemic among our troops. I captured four hundred young men from Lutia, and I ordered the hands of each and every one cut off.

I built seven forts around the city. These I did not order destroyed the next day. When my troops realized that, they cheered me. My acts of discipline had not been, ultimately, gratuitous. The fact is that nothing is gratuitous if it is backed by power. I then gratified the melancholy of my supporters. Their efforts were no longer useless. They never had been. What seemed capricious had merely been an exercise in how to adapt to the possibility of failure. We cannot act unless we have the horizon of failure in mind. Nothing can guarantee constant success to anyone. Actually, failure is the rule, success the exception that confirms it … It’s a sad nation that thinks it deserves the felicity of success. I learned Polybius’s lesson.

I divided the army into seven parts and put a commander in charge of each division. I warned all of them not to abandon their position without prior orders. I would punish withdrawal with death.

The first objective of the forts was to keep anyone from ever leaving Numantia. All exits would be marked by day with a red flag on the tip of a lance. At night, fires would be used. That way everyone would be aware of the danger and we would all close ranks to keep even a single Numantine from leaving.

The first time I was inside Numantia, during the campaign of the unfortunate Lucullus, I noted that its inhabitants used the Douro River to bring in provisions and men. The Numantines were skillful at swimming underwater without being seen and knew how to use light skiffs propelled by sails filled with strong winds.

It was impossible to build a bridge between the two shores. The Douro was too wide, too swift. I gave up on the bridge. Instead, I ordered two towers built on opposite sides of the river. And from each tower I ordered large tree trunks tied over the river, connected to the structures by thick but loose ropes. I covered those trunks with knife blades and lance heads, turning them into wooden hedgehogs. They were untouchable: any hand would avoid contact with that prickly, razor-sharp device. The spiny trunks were in constant movement because of the force of the current. It was impossible to go over, under, or around them.

Let no one be able to leave or enter, no one, let no one know what goes on inside or outside Numantia. (Not even me?)

I finished off my plan by surrounding the city with ditches and dirt walls. That boundary wrapped tightly around the perimeter of the city, which measured twenty-four stadia.

It was then I got the idea that decided Numantia’s fate. Around the city walls, I left open a free space that duplicated the area of the city and its perimeter. In turn, I enclosed that second field with walls eight feet wide and ten feet tall.

That way I established a possible battlefield in which the two armies, if in fact they met, would fight a war itself surrounded this time by the second series of towers and trenches. That is, there were now two Numantias: the walled city of the Celtiberians and the second city, the barren space that duplicated the city, surrounded by my own fortifications.

It was only then that I set up the siege machinery, the catapults, the ranks of archers and slingers, the mountains of darts, and javelins on the parapets.

Then the nephew of King Masinissa, Jugurtha, joined us, bringing that obsessive African contribution: ten elephants. I thanked him for the gesture, but I was afraid of a repetition of the disaster that befell Hasdrubal in his battle against my grandfather, the first Scipio. I invented other places, also hypothetical ones, to which he could take his pachyderms to put some fear into the Spanish people, who were potentially rebellious. For Jugurtha and his elephants, I invented thickets, slag heaps, fields enclosed by wire, all in the land of Arecans, Carpethians, and Pelendons. I think he’s still looking for them. They say elephants never forget, but first they have to remember something. Lost in Spain, Jugurtha’s nine elephants must still be wandering around, gigantic nomads in search of invisible fortresses and fields of mirage. So that I wouldn’t seem discourteous, I kept one elephant for myself, to hold in reserve opposite Numantia.

(Perhaps it was because of that fantastic joke that Jugurtha went back to Africa in a fury and rebelled against Rome, trying to liberate his native Numidia from “Roman political corruption.” But that’s another story.)

For the moment, from the top of the parapet, surrounded by archers and slingers, with the elephants at my back and the Roman army deployed around the seven towers that surrounded Numantia, I felt satisfied. With me were Polybius the historian, the chroniclers, Lucilius the poet, the engineers and sappers, five hundred friends. I myself was dressed not as a Roman warrior and patrician but as an ordinary Iberian commander, with a woolen cloak — the sagum, a simple black cape — over my shoulders to express my grief about Rome’s previous disasters at Numantia. I also ordered the troops to wear black mantles. May our ignominy end here. We shall purge the mourning of our defeats.

Quickly, in the final moment of the preparations, all these signs came together in me, offering me a double vision of the world. What had I done here? Only in the minute before the start of the siege, in the meridian of my mind, did I realize what it was. Before my eyes sprawled Numantia, the unconquered city. Around Numantia, I had constructed a purely spatial double of Numantia, the reproduction of its perimeter, a new space that corresponded precisely to that of its model. Now I was seeing, in the duplicated area, the empty phantom of the city devoid of time. In this divided Numantia, which was the city’s soul, which its body?

My old anguish took control of me. Was the empty space the invisible spirit of Numantia? Was the verifiable city its material body? Or was it just the other way around? The real city a mirage, and only real, corporeal, the space invented to make room for another, identical city?

At that climactic moment, overwhelmed by my own thoughts, I tried to tear off my black tunic and offer my own naked body in sacrifice to Rome and Numantia, to the lost battles of the past and to the virtual battles, lost or won, of the future …

I closed my eyes to stop the duplication of Numantia, my creation, from becoming a permanent, insufferable, mortal division between the body and the soul of Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, the abandoned son and the adopted son, the man of action and the aesthete, apathetic during his youth and energetic in maturity: Scipio, I, the materialist who loved concrete things, and Scipio, also myself, who was the patron of the most spiritual intellectual circle in the republic … The lover of war. The husband of the word.

Why wasn’t I one single thing, happy or unhappy, but indivisible: cherished son, epicurean, and warrior; or stepson, stoic, and aesthete?

The knives hung in the river were cutting me cruelly, finely, while I realized that I’d come here not to besiege Numantia but to besiege myself; not to conquer Numantia but to duplicate it. I reproduced my own self; I lay siege to myself.

I cleared away the suffocation in my lungs, the blindness in my eyes, the choking in my throat, and the whir of prophetic birds smashing against my eardrums, as the eagles smashed against the mountains during the winter campaign of my grandfather Scipio. I also smelled the stench of all the corpses from all the wars. I imagined in that moment the destiny of Numantia and asked why I was being forced, at the end of this chapter in our history, to do all these things. I knew all the tricks of the Iberians; they knew all the tactics of the Romans. Neither side could surprise the other. Political gambits had been used up. I was left with no other arms than discipline — first — and death — second.

I already knew all that. I merely wanted to disguise destiny with beauty. Beauty would be the final surprise of an exhausted politics and an exhausted war. I arranged everything (now I realized it) so that above the blood and stone, above the soul and the body, would ultimately float an aura of beauty, despite death. The wood bristling with knives. The army dressed in mourning. Red flags by day. White fires by night. The dark feathers of dead eagles studding the snow. And Numantia duplicated. Numantia represented. Numantia become an epic poem, acting itself out thanks to the spaces and things that I one day put at the disposal of history.

How to transform representation into history and history into representation?

I see my own answer. Numantia empty represents Numantia inhabited. And vice versa. My two halves, body and soul, don’t know if they should separate forever or unite in a warm embrace of reconciliation. In anguish I seek a symbol which would allow me to join my two halves. The gust of time carries the exact moment far from me. I’ve had to fight against the fatal, exhausted history that preceded me. I’ve tried to turn my experience into destiny. The gods will not forgive me that. I’ve wanted to usurp their functions just as I usurp Numantia’s duplicated image.

I give the order to attack. I, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, also duplicated, representing myself thanks to the spaces and things I’ve placed at the disposal of history: I give the order to attack — that, at least, is implacable, undivided. Thus I disguise my own divided self.

* * *

THEY thought that if they left Numantia, if they came out to fight, they would never return. The women would be raped by the Romans, the children enslaved, and the houses destroyed by foreign hands. Hadn’t this same general burned great Carthage to the ground? Better to resist. Better to die. Let the siege triumph. They themselves will give the triumph to Scipio. Without them, without their resistance, the siege would be a stage: a charade against nothing. Thanks to them, Scipio Aemilianus will find his own destiny. He will be the conqueror of Numantia. They are the allies of Fortune: they direct it with their tears, their hunger, their death. They, the men of Numantia.

* * *

YOU know how this story ended, and I, Polybius, who was there, am telling it now, because I never wrote it down, out of respect for the suffering of my friend General Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. I wrote the history of the Punic Wars and of Roman expansion in the Mediterranean. But I abstained from narrating what I saw in Numantia in the company of my disciple and friend, the young Scipio. I led posterity to believe I’d lost my papers. I am only giving an account of the young Scipio to exalt his virtues and our friendship: he was generous, honest, disciplined, and worthy of his ancestors.

I told nothing about Numantia because the truth is that once the city had been besieged and as the Numantines became more and more isolated because of the severity of the siege imposed by Scipio, we would only find out what happened within the walls when it was all over. However, I did take it upon myself to attempt to imagine what was happening in order to tell it, as fiction, to my friend, but also my disciple, General Scipio. If I hadn’t, I think he would have gone insane.

No one left Numantia anymore, except one brave man who one day dared to step onto that territory created by Scipio. A double, forbidden space is what it was, for the battle that never took place. On a foggy night, this Retrogenes, the bravest of the Numantines, crossed the prohibited space accompanied by twelve men and a folding ladder. They killed our guards and went off to ask for help from the other Iberian cities. None gave any. They were all afraid of Scipio. The eight hundred hands chopped off in Lutia were still not dust. The stumps of four hundred boys had still not healed. Retrogenes, punctilious in matters of honor, returned to give the news of his failure to Numantia. Of course he did not cross the imaginary perimeter of the city again. He was the only Numantine to die in the space of the invisible battle.

Later, a Numantine ambassador emerged to ask for peace.

“We have done nothing wrong,” he said to Scipio, “We are only fighting for the freedom of our homeland.”

Scipio demanded unconditional surrender: the Numantines would have to give up their city.

“That’s not peace; it’s humiliation,” responded the ambassador. “We will not give you the right to enter our city so you can destroy us and take our women.”

I say to the general: “The granaries must be empty. There is no bread, no flocks, not even food for animals. What will they eat?”

The siege of Numantia lasts eight months.

The first Numantines give up. They emerge from behind the walls like ghosts. For the first time, the only elephant Jugurtha left behind lifts his trunk and bellows horribly. But the dogs also bark, the horses whinny, and the ducks quack. They recognize other animals. Animals with long hair hanging to their waist, with skin eaten up by sickness. Many on all fours. Scipio refuses to fight with animals. He points to the sky: two eagles are locked in combat, turning martial circles. A fetid stench. Long fingernails clotted with excrement. Scipio chooses fifty Numantines to bring to his triumph in Rome. He sells the rest. He reduces the city to rubble.

“Great calamities,” I tell him, “are the foundation for great glory.”

“Shit,” he says.

* * *

WE, the women of Numantia, always knew our men were willing to die for us and our children. But we did not know exactly how willing we were to die for them. The siege lasted eight months. Soon our grain, meat, and wine were all used up. We began licking boiled leather, then eating it. From there, we went on to the bodies of those who’d died a natural death. We vomited: the sick flesh made us nauseous. We are afraid: when will we begin to eat the weakest among us? An old man gives us a lesson. He commits suicide in the main square so we can eat him without having to kill him. But his flesh is tough, stringy, useless. The children need milk. That’s the only thing we don’t lack: our breasts are prodigal. But if we women don’t eat, soon there will be no milk for the children. At night we listen to the creaking of our own bones, which are beginning to crumble from within, as if their burial ground were our own flesh. There are no mirrors in Numantia. But we see our faces in those of the others. They are corroded faces, devoured by cold and scurvy. As if time moved forward by devouring us, consuming bit by bit our gums, our teeth, our eyebrows, and our eyelids. Everything is falling away from us. What do we have left? A strange tree in the center of the plaza. A long time ago, a repentant traveler, Genoese to be precise, passed by here and made a big show of planting some seeds in the center of the main square. He said time was slow and that distances in the world we were living in were great. It was necessary to plant and to wait for the tree to grow and give its fruit in five years. He told us not to worry about the cold. The best thing that could happen to this tree was for it to go through a cold spell from time to time. It was a tree that slept during the winter. The cold doesn’t hurt it. It flowers and bears fruit in spring. Its annual growth ends in autumn and it goes back to sleep during the winter. What is its fruit like? Identical to the sun: the color of the sun, round as the sun … The memory of those words did not console us. This was the last winter before the tree, after five others had died, was to bear fruit. Would we last until spring? We had no way of knowing. Time, we women say, has become visible in Numantia. Its ravages are visible in our mangy skin, our calluses, and the mushrooms of our sexes. We uselessly scratch our anuses to find out if there remains a crust of excrement to eat. Snot, the sand in our eyes. Everything is useful. The earth does not abandon us. We are planted in it. Our eyes tell us our granaries are exhausted. Our noses have stopped smelling bread; they’ve forgotten it. Our hands no longer touch grass, our ears no longer hear the noise of cattle. And the tree planted by the Genoese will only bear its round, golden fruit next summer. But the soles of our feet tell us that the earth has not abandoned us. The world has, but the earth hasn’t. We Numantine women make a distinction between the world and the earth. We are eating the men who kill themselves for our sake, so we can eat them. The men who remain alive howl with grief: for the death of their brothers, for the horror of our hunger. We speak to them. When we do, we remember we have not lost language. Earth and language. They sustain us. The bodies we devour together with our children are earth and language transformed. The men don’t understand that. They are ready to die for us and our children, but they think we are all dying and that nothing will be left alive. We disagree. We see the world disappear but not the earth, not language. We, men and women, weep for the extinction of our city. But we celebrate the enduring life of a clay pot, a metal cup, a funeral mask. The metallic head of a sheep, a stone bull: these are the only cattle left to us. Empty urns, barrels of dust: this is the bread and wine we leave behind. We women weep for the extinction of the city. We accept that the world dies. But we also hope that time will triumph over death thanks to wind, light, and the enduring seasons. We will not see the fruit of this tree. But the light, the seasons, and the wind will. The world dies. The earth undergoes transformations. Why? Because we say it does. Because we have not lost language. We bequeath it to the light, the wind, and the seasons. The world revealed us. The earth hid us. We return to the earth. We are disappearing from the world. We are returning to the earth. From there we shall come forth to haunt.

* * *

SHE saw the last men leave Numantia: mute, bearded, filthy. She saw the last horrified women, the last emaciated children. They gave up because they lost language. They forgot how to speak; they gave up. She, with her dead child in her arms, approached the sterile tree buried in the depth of winter. They awaited the promise of the fruit in vain. Damned tree, sterile fruit. She spreads her legs and screams with her child in her arms. She lets the fertile blood of her vagina, the fruit of her womb, the moist and red mass of her menstruation fall onto the sterile scrub.

* * *

YOU ask yourself if everything in the universe has an exact double. It’s possible. But now you know that even if it is true, it’s dangerous. As a young man, you walked through the stoa and the garden, the Academy and the Lyceum. But you always knew that through a crack in all those doors and windows in the Greek paideia our minds escape us when we are most certain we possess them. Your military life was as true and direct as an arrow. Your spiritual life proved to be tortuous and unforeseeable. Is there a god that synchronizes the two? Are the connections between the body and the mind only apparent — an illusion created by the gods to console us? Is reality only the sum total of physical events — I ride a horse, I attack a city, I love a woman? Are mental events only and always consequences of those material acts? Do we fool ourselves by thinking that it’s the other way around only because, occasionally, the mental state precedes the physical event for an instant, when in reality the physical event has already taken place?

Polybius sees you suffer because you can’t resolve this dilemma. He suggests to you that centuries will pass without anyone’s resolving it. Men will torment themselves trying to separate, conciliate, or suppress the two extremes of their cruel split: this is my body, this is my spirit. Are we pure physical event? Are we pure mental event? Are both one and the same thing? At Numantia, Scipio presented himself as an integral man, at peace with himself. A Roman cives. But something betrayed him. A game, a perversity, a character trait, an imagination: he duplicated Numantia in order, perhaps, to avoid duplicating himself. To be the complete, decisive, efficient general he showed himself to be.

You realize that Polybius is imagining what’s happening within the besieged city in order, perversely, to tell it to you. Perversely, but also charitably. The writer’s version, it goes without saying, is the one that passed into history. He was very clever. He established once and for all, at the very dawn of Roman historiography, that texts should never be quoted verbatim but interpreted. History is invention. Facts are imagined. Without fiction, neither you, Scipio, nor you, other readers, would ever know what took place inside Numantia. Unsatisfied imagination is dangerous and terrible. It leads directly to evil. We only hurt others when we’re incapable of imagining them. Which is why you wept one day before a Carthage in flames. Polybius tried to save you by giving you the imagination of your victory. Believe it. That is what happened. You’ve just read it. Your victims were flesh and blood. You didn’t fight against doubles, the phantoms of Numantia.

You failed.

In the same way you duplicated the city, you duplicated yourself.

You lived five years more, but you were never the poet you wanted to be nor the warrior you were. Did something diminish you? Did you lose forever the unity of your body and your spirit before the two Numantias? In one of them, a desolate space, an invisible time, nothing happened. On the other hand, within the city, there took place sacrifice, madness, and death. Ultimately, the second space was useful only to be crossed by the mute, savage survivors of Numantia. The procession of conquered defenders, transformed into animals. It must be terrible to see an abstention of yours converted into degradation and death. Thus, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, your presence before Numantia was in fact an absence. You never fought. You did nothing. And when Numantia fell, your saw the atrocious presence of what was an absence.

You quite properly used yourself up, conqueror of Carthage and Numantia. Quite properly, you never again lived in peace.

* * *

I wonder, as I remember the heroic enterprise of Numantia, what the perimeter I invented for the city without Numantia, its double facing it, might have been. A barnyard, a meadow, a farm — all or any of them peaceful and ordinary? Why do we choose one place and give it a name in history? I withdraw, conquered by my triumph. I can’t bear its weight. I look for new avenues for my energy. In the campaigns against Carthage and Numantia, I met many simple soldiers who held rather precarious title to the land they occupied. They weren’t large landowners; but the radical agrarian reform promoted by my cousins, the turbulent Gracchi, stripped bare both the owners of latifundia and small settlers without title to their land. I became their defender. I made lots of enemies, more invisible than the ghost of Numantia. But my external activity, once again, did not calm my own internal disorder.

I spend hours at a time sitting on my throne facing the orange tree in my courtyard in Rome. It’s about to bear fruit, and I want to be the first to see it flower. I shall make the orange tree my interlocutor during these afternoon hours. I’ve given up shaving; I can only think if I caress my neck, which is covered with bristles. The problem of duality obsesses me. I invent a theory of geometric duality. If it is true that any two lines define a point at their intersection and that any two points determine a line, it follows that when all points touch an ellipse they exhaust themselves. Their unity concentrates and immediately requires the protection of a double to shield and prolong that unity. From this it follows that all unity, once attained, requires a duality in order to prolong itself, to maintain itself.

I think I’ve resolved the problem of Numantia, and, as the afternoon declines and I feel cold, I wrap myself in my black Spanish cape, the one I used facing the besieged city. I go into my bedroom. I shut the curtains, but no sooner do I lie down in my bed than the noise of mice distracts me. How do I fight them? That is not my problem. Let me not be distracted or annoyed by mice hunts. What I wonder is if everything in the universe has an exact double. It’s possible. But now I know that even if that’s true, it is also dangerous. Twins staring each other in the eye would annihilate themselves without raising a finger. The unleashing of two identical powers would destroy both. That is the basic law of physics. In Numantia, I gave the inevitable doubles, generated by the geometric encounter between my forces and those of Numantia, the opportunity to see each other for only a moment in history. The cleverness of my strategy consisted in making the first Numantia believe that when she looked outside her walls she would see a second Numantia. The first Numantia was ready to lose her life in the clash with the second Numantia. But since that second city did not exist, she waited in vain and killed herself. My strategy consisted in transforming Numantia into her own enemy.

I tell myself that my time was that of a slow haste. There is, perhaps, no better rule for a field commander. I acted in the instant when my strength, by embodying Numantia’s double, destroyed her but not me. I found the exact point on the earth where a force, disguised as Nothingness, destroyed its opposing force, which was the real double of an absence traced by my military genius. Thus the two propositions combined, geometry and physics, in a purely bellicose action. The geometric intersection demanded a double to maintain unity. But the gravity of physics rejects the presence of two identical forces staring each other in the eye. I fooled geometry, which is a mental thing, and physics, which is a material affair. I proved that in any circumstance in human life NOTHINGNESS IS WHAT IS POSSIBLE.

I was quite properly received in triumph on my return. But then there was light. Now the afternoon reaches my bedroom only with difficulty. Glory, glory to the conqueror of Carthage and Numantia. Glory twice over. I hear the noise. Is it the mice? Is it the footsteps of those who received me in triumph? I hear footsteps. I caress my neck. I remember that as a boy I argued with Polybius and the other friends of the Scipionic circle about the nature of immortality. How curious: that debate arose because the Gracchi spoke about equality. Then we asked each other: Can there be equality if there is no immortality? Does only death make us equal? “No,” argued Polybius, “immortality itself can be selective. Only select spirits ascend to the heavens and know God. Does that idea disgust you? Don’t you think at least that fame confers immortality? Do you accept fame but also demand equality? Serve your country well, Scipio Aemilianus. Use language well, the gift of the gods to men. You were born to honor Rome, to guarantee her power through arms and her moral strength through language.”

Equality, immortality. I hear the footsteps. The curtain is violently pulled open. I caress the bristles on my neck. A single, long bristle, cold and hard, enters through my neck, and I think of Spain as I die.

* * *

YOU are dreamed. Dead, you have reached the celestial mansion, and there you see yourself again at the age of eighteen, when Polybius arrived with slavery and books at the house of your adoptive family and began to make you worthy of it. You dream of yourself when you were young. You want that to be your image for immortality: an eighteen-year-old boy who is going to attempt to be the perfect combination of statesman and philosopher. God receives you and praises you. He says that your name, first a mere inheritance, is going to be yours by your own right. You will burn and raze Carthage. You will besiege and conquer Numantia.

“Two destructions,” you say to God. “Is that to be my monument: death?”

God doesn’t answer you, but He does offer you the renewed vision of Numantia. What really took place in the besieged city? Numantia was isolated. Almost no one survived. You again see the survivors leave. Not only did they look like animals, they were animals. They never spoke again. Who knows what they did with their women and children. They no longer want to remember anything. From then on, they communicated only with vultures and wild beasts. They were animals. They never spoke again.

You hear these words that speak to you of the end of language and you quickly return to life. Your face shines, you know at the age of eighteen, young, what you did not know old at the age of fifty-seven, when you died. You ask yourself what shall be the monument to your glory, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. Carthage? Numantia? Two names buried in fire and hunger? Two monuments to death? You see once again the ruin of Numantia: storms whip it, the sun burns it, the winter freezes it. Time, the climate, add to its ruin; the elements destroy as they pass, ruining the ruin. And yet, what is it that shines in the heart of Numantia? You can barely make it out. A clay pot, a bronze mask, a stone bull, plant, tree, orange tree … Orange tree? Another identical to yours in the center of the city you destroyed? Is it an illusion, have you imagined your own orange tree in the ash-covered center of Numantia?

You open your eyes to see yourself dreamed.

No, you have only said an ancient, unknown, Arabic word: orange tree. The survivors left through the walls of Numantia and could no longer speak. By saving themselves, they died. They were animals without language. That was their defeat, their death. And you, Scipio Aemilianus, you don’t know, now that you’ve died, what you already knew when you were a boy filled with hopes about the future of your life. Weren’t you going to be the one to reconcile and harmonize the power of your body by giving reasons to the sentiment that translated your animal power: to honor Rome? And how did you intend to do it if not through language? Isn’t this your most profound reason for living, young Scipio, old Scipio, dead Scipio? Use language well, the gift of the gods and of men. Reach poetry through public speech. Turn your life into an epic poem. Sing to Numantia, restore it to life with language. That which destroys the material thing constructs the work of art: light, wind, seasons, the passing of time. Save stone from stone and make it into words, Scipio, so that the very thing that eats away the stone — storm, time, sun — confers life — poetry, language, time.

You are dying, but you know at last that you will always be the master of language, which is the foundation of life and death on earth. Burn the earth there, the residence of language and death. For you, on the other hand, the world has died.

* * *

HE dreamed himself being dreamed. Cicero dreamed him, the greatest creator in the Latin language, seventy-five years after the mysterious death of Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who won for himself the title of his grandfather, Africanus, and added to his dynasty a new title, Numantinus. Cicero honored him by dreaming him. By dreaming himself the day of his death, but also by seeing himself as a boy who dreams about heaven and eternal life. Such was the verbal monument Cicero erected to the man who best incarnated the qualities of the statesman and the philosopher in ancient Rome. Posterity’s monument to the ancient hero was to show him from the divine realm the composition of the universe: God made him see stars never seen from earth. Scipio recognized the five concentric spheres that, united, maintain the universe: Saturn, a hungry star; luminous Jupiter; red and terrible Mars; accommodating Venus and Mercury; Moon of reflections. Heaven embracing it all, in the center the Sun like a great orange in flames, and under everything a minuscule sphere and within it an even smaller empire, its scars invisible from on high, its wars and conquests whimpering with a voice of dust, its frontiers wiped out by waves of blood …

“What is that noise, so strong and so sweet, that fills my ears?”

Fame. It isn’t fame the hero hears from heaven. The universe is very large. There are distant regions of the earth itself where no one has heard the name of Scipio. The floods and conflagrations of the earth — natural, human — set about doing away with any personal glory. Who cares what those yet to be born say about us? Did the millions who preceded us say anything about us? Do you think that noise is fame, glory, war?

“If it isn’t,” asked the young Scipio, “is it the noise of reincarnation? Can we return to earth one day, transformed? Is Pythagoras right when he asserts that the soul is a fallen divinity, imprisoned in our bodies and condemned to repeat endlessly, circularly, a cycle of reincarnations?”

What ambition men have! God laughed on high. If they have neither glory nor fame, if they don’t have immortality, then they want to go through reincarnation. Why aren’t they content with living in heaven? Why don’t they listen to the celestial music? You have lost the ability to listen. Do you think that the vast movements of the heavens can be accomplished in silence? Men’s hearing has atrophied. Too concerned about what is said about them, they’ve stopped listening to the movement of the heavens. Look up, Scipio Aemilianus: learn now to look and to listen far off and outside yourself so you can finally reach yourself. Abandon glory, fame, and military triumph. Look up. You are rather better than the best you thought you were. YOU ARE GOD. You have what I have. Alert liveliness, sensation and memory, foresight as well, language and the divine power to govern and direct your body, which is your servant, in the same way God directs the universe. Dominate your weak body with the strength of your immortal soul.

And he, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, listened then to the music of the spheres.

* * *

WE saw the fall of Carthage and the destruction of Numantia. They were glorious visions. But they only postponed our own defeat.

* * *

YOU will remember this story. The rest I leave to antiquarians.

Valdemorillo — Formentor, Summer 1992

NOTES

1. Genealogy: The brothers Publius Cornelius Scipio and Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio fought against Hannibal in Spain and perished in the year 212 B.C. With his wife Pomponia, Publius Cornelius had a son, Publius Scipio, called Africanus because he defeated the Carthaginians during the Second Punic War (the battle of Zama, 202 B.C.). With his wife Emilia, Scipio Africanus had four children: Cornelia, Publius Scipio Nasica (consul in 162 B.C.), Lucius Scipio (praetor in 174 B.C.), and Publius Scipio, whose poor health kept him from taking up a political career. However, Publius Scipio adopted the younger son of Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his wife, Papiria, who were divorced shortly after the birth of the child, our protagonist, which took place in 185 or 184 B.C. He entered the Scipio family under the name Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. His older brother, Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus, was adopted by another family. Scipio Aemilianus captured and destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C. and conquered Numantia in 133 B.C. These two triumphs won him the titles “Africanus” and “Numantinus.” Thus there are two Scipio Africanuses: the Elder, the adoptive grandfather, and the Younger. Cornelia, the sister of Scipio’s adoptive father, was the mother of the Gracchi, leaders of the social reform movement of the year 133 B.C., which was opposed by their cousin Scipio Aemilianus, who died in 129 B.C. under mysterious circumstances. Rumor had it that he was assassinated by the followers of the Gracchi. Scipio Aemilianus was married to Sempronia, his cousin, the daughter of Cornelia and sister to the Gracchi. Did they have any children?

2. Bibliography: My principal sources regarding the life of Scipio Aemilianus and the siege of Numantia are: Appian, Iberica, book six of his History of Rome; Polybius, Histories; Cicero, “Scipio’s Dream,” in his Republic; and, of course, Miguel de Cervantes’s play The Siege of Numantia.