The Sheen of the Silk

Sixty-one

GIULIANO WATCHED UNTIL THE SLENDER, LONELY FIGURE of Anastasius disappeared into the distance, then he walked over the rough ground and climbed back up to the road, joining it farther to the south and west. Was that the true Golgotha on which they had stood? The desolation of it seeped into his bones, drowning his mind. Why hast Thou forsaken me? The cry of every human soul who looks upon despair.

Was the sad, powerful face on the wooden painting he carried really that of Mary? It didn’t matter. The passion was real. Who cared if it was this place or that place? This woman or another?

Why did the sight of Anastasius dressed as a woman trouble Giuliano so much? He not only looked so natural in the clothes, he even changed his walk and the angle of his head. The way he looked at the passing men was feminine, different. His character had changed. He was no longer the friend Giuliano had come to know so well. At least he thought he had. There were days at a time when he forgot that Anastasius was a eunuch. His sexuality, or lack of it, was of no importance. It was his courage, his gentleness, his intelligence, his quick wit and soaring imagination that mattered and made him who he was.

Now suddenly the whole issue was forced into the open. Anastasius truly was a third gender, neither male nor female. He could slip from one to the other as silk changed in the light, almost as if there were nothing innate that defined him.

But it was worse than that. It was something deeper, something within himself, that troubled him. He had found Anastasius dressed as a woman to be beautiful. He knew perfectly well that he was, if not a man, then definitely male, yet momentarily he had responded to him as if he had been female. He had felt protective and then been aware of the sharp stirrings of sexual attraction.

Giuliano was relieved that he had to go to Jaffa and there was no real question of his traveling to Sinai as well.

Yet the moment Anastasius, such a vulnerable figure, was gone, he felt strangely alone. He would soon be surrounded by people, but there was no one to whom he could speak of the burdens inside him, the guilt at having fallen so far short of being the kind of friend Anastasius needed and deserved.

Perhaps worse than that, cutting more deeply into the fabric of himself, he was not the man he himself needed to be. He had realized that perhaps he could not love, passionately or with lifelong honor and completeness, as his mother could not and his father did so unrequitedly. Perhaps the depth of that was not in him. But he had believed that friendship was another kind of love just as profound and just as precious. And he was wrong in that, too.

Had Anastasius the gentleness to forgive that? Out of the great well of his loneliness, the compassion Giuliano had seen in him so often, could he? And should he?