The Tongues of Men or Angels

Thirty-four Years after the Crucifixion

Useful checks the time by the sun in the sky. It is later than he had thought. It’s always later than you think. But it’s hard not to get distracted by the atmosphere when you’re out on the streets of Rome, strolling amid the grandeur and the vagabonds, the graffiti and the statues of emperors.

Though Useful couldn’t claim to be among the comeliest of men, he would perhaps not fare so badly among the company of recent emperors: Tiberius’s tired overbite is probably the best of them; Caligula, who came after, looks as fat-faced as a baker’s son in the busts; and amphora-eared Claudius’s chin recedes into a neck that threatens to engulf it. He looks as though, had he continued in his corpulence, he might have become entirely composed of neck. Perhaps it was rather in kindness that Claudius’s buttered mushrooms were poisoned, if those rumours are true.

But now the emperor is Nero, and even in the statues — which are surely idealized portraits — his face is cruel. Above a chin-strap beard, a thin, grim mouth smirks, as though contemptuous of those not his equal, which is to say: everyone else.

This visible malice of Nero’s visage is a blemish on the surface of Useful’s world. A fear that spoils what otherwise would be perfection. Because Paul has appealed to Caesar for his case to be heard and sooner or later it must be. On the other hand, Useful trusts in Paul: he can make the very birds believe his words. So powerful and palpable is Paul’s own faith that anyone who hears him cannot help but be carried along. As Useful has been: gladly and gratefully surrendering to the initiation ritual of baptism and emerging into a new spiritual world, losing fear and strife, gaining a surging sense of belonging, a binding commitment to worship, and the unfathomable solace that is the promise of eternal life. Perhaps that’s how it will be with Nero too. Paul himself has every hope that he may convert the emperor when the time for his hearing comes — if, that is, the risen Christ does not return to earth first.

Beyond the row of emperors are some statues of satyrs. They are hairy and leering and their cocks are carved all curled up, like those of swine boars. A crooked man stands among them, cleaning spittle from a kitten, which isn’t his but is a stray. He wipes the bag of bone and fluff with the edge of his robe, grinning at this moment of difference in his day. And passers-by stop too, though they have all seen cats before. Still, it is not every day you see one so small and alone as this one on the street. And the passers-by make suggestions as to how best to reunite the kitten with its mother:

‘Put him on the wall and she’ll find him.’

‘Don’t keep wiping him — you’ll make him smell of you.’

‘Hide him in the crook of that tree. He’ll be safe there and she’ll surely sniff him out.’

They make such fuss now, yet the kitten will shortly be forgotten by all of them and perhaps even the creature itself will eventually forget that it was once a kitten, should it survive to be full-grown, to fight and filch and fuck with the rest of the Roman cats. Cats were scarcely known of in Colossae, but in Rome — transported on grain-ships from Egypt — they approach commonplace. Though still not so rife that a kitten can’t draw a little gathering.

Useful has a mission, though: he shouldn’t linger any longer. He has been sent to buy more parchment, for the glorious work he does with Paul. His chest uprushes with the very thought of that work. Useful is filled with love, not only for his new God but also for his new life and the splendid task of recording this story. Because suddenly Useful is a person of significance and now he can leave an impression on the world. The world as we know it is soon to transform, of course, but Useful will still have made his mark upon it.

He falls into step behind a group of slaves formed about their master. The group clears a path through the throng of the streets, like the prow of a ship, which makes progress easier. Though Useful tries to keep a distance between himself and the slave who carries the sponge on a stick, jauntily slung over his shoulder like a soldier’s spear and waving as he walks. Such sponges are used by the rich — or, rather, used on the rich by their slaves — for the cleaning of the fundament after defecation and Useful would sooner not catch it across the cheek.

Split in two by the Tiber, but divided all over, Rome is a polar place, a city of opposites, perhaps more so than anywhere else that Useful has been. And he visited not a few cities in his travels with Philemon, his old master. The wealthy of Rome are among the richest of the entire world. People pass in sedan chairs, accompanied by retinues that might have made Cleopatra question the expense, and they are probably only going to visit a friend a few roads away. The toga, the civic dress, is just an elaborate show of how much cloth you can afford. And yet, because of the monthly corn-dole, Rome simultaneously supports a magnitude of poverty seen nowhere else to quite the same degree. Citizens of Rome can survive with nothing else to their name save that citizenship. If they could sell it, it would fetch them a sufficient sum to live in comfort a good few years. But they can’t do that — though the state itself can; their station as a Roman allows huge numbers to survive in levels of destitution well below the point where others would be forced to flee a city or go into voluntary servitude.

Even more pitiable is the position of non-citizens, denied the corn-dole in their crises: ill-begotten creatures, hugging stall-fallen fruits to their chests as if they were babes. Others with babes by their sides, as uncared-for as stall-fallen fruit. Girls grown too filthy and skin-shrunken even to work as whores, at least by daylight, though by night outside the over-spilling taverns of the Aventine they might just scrape a meal from scraped knees.

Yet it is hard not to get swept away when you are in Rome. It is hard not to let the lustre get into your heart. Even the gutter in the middle of the street shines like gold in the sun. Useful becomes briefly bewitched by the beauty of it, more like lava than scum, though a handful of children beside it, at some game with stones and bone shards, look as if they only pantomime play. Too beset by hunger to lose themselves fully in imagination, too old already to produce more than a passable impression of childhood. Parents love against will and sense, it seems to Useful. It would be better to behave like beetles: to lay as many eggs as possible in some nook and hope that a few survive. To love in poverty is a commitment to a certainty of future pain. But Paul says that all of this is soon to change, in the blink of an eye. The Day of the Lord is shortly to come and Useful will stand with Paul when it does.

The parchment sellers ply beyond the slave market. By rights Useful should feel nervous, passing through that square, out in the open like this. But now he has fresh clothes and is fed and walks with purpose, no one will stop him. He looks just like any other slave out on his master’s business. A valuable fact of life: if you look like you know what you’re doing, no one will question you.

Not unaccustomed to barter from his travels with Philemon, Useful beats a reasonable deal from a trader with a disappointed slump and half-packed stock. And having saved Paul a good sum of money — probably enough to feed a family for a week — Useful thinks it not inappropriate to buy an apple to eat on the return walk. More so even than the apple, the scrolls of parchment under his arms feel prickly and delicious. It is easy to forget that these skins have been flayed from some poor beast. But, then, what is a beast, but a creation of God and what is Paul but God’s chosen apostle and Useful his scribe? Happy beast, then, to serve such a cause.

And happy Useful, upon the pavements of Rome. Among the spice stalls that burn and awaken the nostrils, free them from a self-induced sleep. Among the floury aromas of food booths, selling round Roman pie-loaf and hot pastries. Among the open-air barbers, shaving and tattle-sharing. Among the chained wine flagons, advertising taverns. Among the yellow songbirds trapped in cages of softwood. Singing of God’s creation, or to be free, or for a mate, or just because yellow songbirds are made to sing. What does the reason matter, when sing they do?

Useful dismisses the feeling that he is followed as paranoia, born from his weeks on the run. He ignores the sense that he is stalked, because whenever he turns to see, there is no such pursuer in sight. It is only as he knocks at Paul’s door, to be let in by Cyclops soldier Manius, that Useful catches the glance of a man who watches him. A man who visibly marks the portal at which Useful raps and doesn’t seem to mind being noticed. The watcher is elderly, or has a fistful of years over Paul at least. But if he is shrunken, in the state that Useful sees now, then in his days of glory he must have been a monster to make daemons scared of the dark. Probably a Jew, Useful would say. A giant, broken-nosed, frightening old Israelite, with cheeks drooping like a scent hound’s and eyes that know altogether too much. Eyes that continue to watch at least until Useful has gone in.

Useful wonders whether he should say something about the watcher, but it seems a bit silly somehow, once he is back inside, with the surly legionary guarding the door and Epaphras, Silas, Timothy, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke all on hand. Feels a bit daft to say, ‘Some old bloke was watching me come in and there was something a bit funny about him.’ The house is, after all, hardly unknown: several years already Paul has lived there, teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly to all who would hear him.

When Useful goes upstairs, Paul sniffs the parchment and rubs it between his thumb and forefinger; he has worked with skins himself in his time, though more in shop awnings and the like, but he knows a thing or two.

‘Pigskin,’ he says. ‘You’ve only bought bloody pigskin and me circumcised on the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews,’ but he seems rather more amused than angry. ‘Don’t worry. Swine vellum may serve just as well for our story, my boy — perhaps it is even appropriate.’

‘Thank you, Master,’ Useful says.

Paul waves him to think no more of it, with an affectionate smile. Great love and great ire seem to coexist simultaneously in Paul. Or perhaps they don’t coexist: perhaps they fight one another for dominance inside, as Paul says Jacob and Esau did in the womb.

‘Now then, where were we?’ Paul asks.