Desiderata could not hide her feelings. As soon as she became aware of Feli’s presence, she showed her delight, smiling from ear to ear. Sometimes Desi woke up first, from the prattling of the children around them on the landing, and because Rome was a noisy place that you couldn’t ignore once it got going in the morning. And sometimes, less frequently, it was Felicitas who woke up even earlier from the light of dawn pouring in under the eaves of the roof and through the small window at the front of the staircase. In both cases the girl that woke up first would immediately shake the other one’s shoulder. And in both cases Desi’s welcoming smile was the first thing Feli saw at the start of the day.
However, there was no time to dwell on all that; they had to get up. They were hungry; being poor was hard work; they needed to get cracking. They rolled up their mattress and brought it back inside their tiny apartment.
“PF! Mater! Are you awake?”
“We are now,” Sextus would grumble.
The girls went down to empty the chamber-pot and draw fresh water from the nearest public fountain. This was the only moment of the day when they served their parents or masters willingly, and both of those were grateful for it, especially as they lived on the fifth floor. Then they would all breakfast on the bread and olives left over from the previous day. Soon they would leave their garret and go on their different errands. Poor Romans like them lived on the streets, mostly, and only went home to sleep at night.
Sextus led the way and closed up the place, securing the wooden latch with a wedge as best as he could. Their front door didn’t have a lock with a key: that was a luxury they could only dream of. Instead they hung a wax tablet on the hook next to it, with a message promising unspeakable plagues from the gods for any trespasser. The last time Sextus had read out his latest malediction to his daughter, she’d roared with laughter and translated it for the slave, who’d sniggered silently. Hardly the desired effect.
Anyway. First he’d go to his usual barber for a shave. He went straight to a cosy open shop under an arcade at the end of his street. Even poor, a proper Roman wanted to be clean-shaven, and wouldn’t dream of taking care of this himself—sharpening and wielding a shaving knife was better left to a professional. And he’d want to have his face whitened a bit with chalk powder, and his lips rouged just a smidgen so he’d look healthier; his eyelashes blackened just enough to make him look smarter and seductive. His barber, fortunately, didn’t expect to get paid until his customer came into funds again.
Speaking of which. Sextus was expecting a windfall. Rumour had it that the emperor had just issued a new coin to honour his dead little daughter Claudia Augusta and his wife Poppaea Sabina. This would be a silver denarius at least: you didn’t issue copper or bronze to honour your loved ones. Now the nice part was: when Nero issued a new coin, he would give a few to each citizen who came in to pick up his free ration of grain, and as luck would have it, on that day Sextus was due to do precisely that. And that was why he was even wearing his white plebeian’s toga, a gift from his patron Canio.
And by the way. When he mentioned his high hopes to his barber—you had to give the man something to look forward to—the other customers waiting for their turn started to exchange all the latest gossip about little Claudia’s death.
“They say it’s the Christians who cast a spell to make Nero’s daughter die… You know, that Judean sect they talk about… they sacrifice human babies on their altars and drink their blood, as everyone will tell you.”
“Yes, but why would they have wanted poor little Claudia to die?”
“Because they believe in nothing! They are demon-worshippers; they hate Rome… despicable people, all of them!”
Sextus was sceptical about this story and said so. But he had to admit there was something fishy about the poor little mite’s death. You’d expect that the emperor’s baby had received the best care in the world, and that when she got poorly, the best doctors and mages of Rome would have done their utmost to save her. Yet she hadn’t lived longer than four months.
“But that’s what happens all the time when you have kids,” someone remarked, “it can happen to any of us, so why wouldn’t it happen to the imperial couple as well?”
“Careful what you say, Mucius… the emperor is not like you and me.”
“I know, Sextus, I’m not saying he is! Just that his grief is the same as ours, that’s all.”
“True. And he deserves our full sympathy.”
After his shave and ‘touch-up’, poor Sextus had to go out to the Campus Martius, outside the city walls, to a special warehouse, the Porticus Minucia Frumentaria, to pick up his monthly ration. Passing through the Porta Ratumena, he made his way to the sprawling complex, where he had to report to one of the 45 offices situated under the arcades. There he waited for his turn, and then he had to fill in a wax tablet with his name, ‘address’—a brief description of where he lived—, the date of this appointment and the number of the office he’d been assigned to: XXXIII.
“You already know all that, man,” he grumbled to the familiar clerk.
“It’s for the record, Sextus, you know the rules. But cheer up, the rumour you’ve no doubt heard about a money handout is correct!”
And with a flourish the man handed over two clay tokens to the smiling ‘beneficiary’. One was the tessera frumentaria that entitled him to a grain ration, the other a tessera nummaria for the gift in cash. Sextus went inside the building. He had to wait in line in front of a table guarded by two uniformed members of the urban cohorts, where another clerk gave out the money in exchange for the tokens. When his turn came, Sextus collected nine denarii, for a household of three. In wonderment he looked down at the freshly minted silver coins in the palm of his hand, and said to the attendant, “Isn’t this the prettiest thing in the world?”
“Next!”
Hurriedly he cleared off and went over to the corner of the hall where they were distributing the grain. He gave an attendant his token and an empty, folded sac he’d been carrying with him all along, and that was filled with wheat by a public slave. Then he had to lug the full sac back to office number XXXIII, where the clerk made him press the seal of his signet ring—the one he’d inherited from his father—into the wax of the tablet he’d filled in earlier, and gave him the token he would have to show the next time he came, a month from now. Finally Sextus was off with his haul.
The sac was heavy, containing enough grain for two loaves of bread a day. He had to bring it to his baker, who every day would take a portion of your wheat, and for a modest fee would grind it and bake your bread for you. Each bakery had a millstone operated by a donkey tethered to a wooden beam and turning round and round in the courtyard, day after day. It seemed kind of symbolic. As he carried the heavy sac on his shoulder, stopping every hundred paces to take a breath, sweating profusely in his thick, woollen toga, Sextus reflected that being a subsidized citizen was damn hard work! And where was your accursed slave when you needed her help to shoulder your burdens?
Feli was having a great time with her mistress Desiderata. They both had something very specific on their minds: urine. That morning, when they’d taken down the chamber-pot so willingly, they hadn’t emptied all of it in the great urn by the entrance of the building. They’d gone into the backcourt of their insula, their apartment block, and there they’d emptied a part of “the family pee” in a smaller pot of their own. The big urn on the street, out in front by the entrance, was owned by the local launderers, who took away the smelly production of all the tenants as soon as it was full. They needed big quantities of stale urine, reeking of ammonia, as a detergent to scour their customer’s clothes.
After breakfast, and after the PF and Claudia had gone off on their errands, Desi and Feli sneaked back into the backcourt. They retrieved the pot with urine from its hiding place behind a pile of junk, then slipped down into the cellar, that was only used as a storeroom by a local potter. There they took off their regular tunics and changed into old rags, remnants from their childhood that were full of holes and way too small. Then they went over to a wall that had a big patch of saltpetre on it. In the dim light coming in from a small basement window you could just make out the fluffy white powder. Feli scraped some off and dissolved it in the urine with a little stick. Finally the two girls started rubbing the smelly mixture in their hair, on their faces, shoulders, arms and legs. Desi signed to Feli, “If you’re going to rub it all over yourself, you want it to come from your own folks.”
“Certainly!”
The saltpetre had been Feli’s idea: if you wanted your skin to look like a peeling wall, why not use the white stuff that ‘grows’ out of such a wall? It worked like a charm; as the mixture dried, they both looked like genuine lepers: their skin had taken on a kind of flaking aspect. They looked repulsive! From the hiding place in the backcourt they now retrieved a pilgrim’s walking stick and a beggar’s bowl, and Desi picked up a cheap little bell made of stoneware. They were ready to go.
For a short moment Feli kept a lookout around the corner of the backdoor, with Desi right behind her, until they were able to leave the building unseen. They didn’t want people to know about their secret lives, but the entrance archway was quiet: most tenants were off to work or out to the shops. So they hurried into the street and went straight to the ‘Argiletum’, the main thoroughfare in their neighbourhood, where they could melt into anonymity, no longer Desi, the blind one with the sharp tongue, and Feli, the deaf and dumb one, but just two ordinary little beggars of Rome.
The Argiletum was incredibly crowded and cluttered, like always. The main streets from the Quirinal, the Viminal and the Esquiline hills came together here, in the lower part of town, and this narrow street led straight to the Forum. So it was bustling with crowds of pedestrians moving in both directions, some of them hauling heavy loads and bumping into other people. The rich were being carried in litters by sturdy slaves, preceded by guards who shooed away the passers-by in front of them. Groups of women were clustered by the shops and makeshift food stalls, examining the wares and chatting, and urchins at play ran everywhere and got in everybody’s way.
If you looked up along the sickly facades with their bawdy graffiti, you could see the street at its prettiest. Balconies and windowsills decorated with pots of flowering plants; clotheslines with towels, handkerchiefs and underwear fluttering brightly in the sun, and beyond the red rooftiles of the eaves, a narrow strip of deep-blue summer sky. But it was better not to look up for too long, or you would be overrun by the relentless tide of the moving mobs.
It was heavy going on the flagstone pavement. There were high kerbs, stepping stones across the roadway at each corner, and deep ruts that had been carved out by the wheels of countless wagons and carts. The street was dusty and smelly too, littered with garbage and hazy with smoke. The food stalls were belching acrid smoke straight into the open. There were all kinds of businesses housed in arcaded shops on the ground floors of all the apartment blocks lining the street: a riot of odours came from the bakeries and smithies, the laundries smelling of urine, and the even more pungent public latrines. Then there was the noise, the clamour: haggling, cursing; even normal conversations were held in the loud and pushy tones typical of the Romans.
And suddenly, adding to the confusion, two mangy-looking creatures appeared on the scene. Beggar girls straight out of the sewer, that you wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. One was clearly blind, helpless, with horrible slits where her eyes should have been, the other was scrawny and shifty, her squinting eyes darting left and right. Both in rags, unkempt, with stringy hair, their skin scaly-looking. The blind one had a little bell jingling in her hand and probed her path with a stick, the other one held on to her shoulder but seemed to be led as much as she was leading her companion. Bizarre pair. People hurriedly moved out of the way as they passed. You wouldn’t want to come into physical contact with these repulsive creatures; they looked like they might spread all sorts of awful diseases by mere touch. As they progressed down the street, a path opened in front of them through the crowd and bustle; probably the guards clearing the way for the wealthy and mighty couldn’t have done a better job. At some point, being in a playful mood, the skinnier one made them rush forward, running in the middle of the roadway, pulling her blind companion’s arm. People dashed aside, scattered in a panic… for Desi and Feli the most difficult part was to keep a straight face, a tragic mask even, instead of bursting into helpless giggles.
But it was not all play. Rome was a dangerous place, especially for two unchaperoned girls of marriageable age. The fact that they were wearing young girls’ tunics that left their arms and legs bare didn’t make it any better, on the contrary. As Feli remarked, “Marriageable? In my case that would be: ravishable!” Her sign for this was rather crude; her language could be very graphic sometimes.
“Ravishable? Not as long as I have anything to say about it,” Desi replied, “and Mater, of course.”
The truth of the matter was that Sextus could in theory do as he pleased with his slave, but at the same time this protected her from unwelcome attentions elsewhere: no one would want to interfere with another man’s property.
Still, as they walked down the street both girls were extremely vigilant; danger lurked everywhere; this was no joke. Feli kept scanning the street left and right, on the lookout for any threats; Desi kept her ears open. You had thieves and louts and gangs, the girls were the ideal target, completely defenceless, but on that day at least they also looked repulsive, which was an advantage. And then you had to keep an eye out for the police, the patrols of the urban cohorts, who might not look kindly on alleged lepers roaming freely through the streets of Rome. At least these cops were easily spotted by their bright red tunics and the crests on top of their helmets.
The girls had become very proficient at disappearing from the scene when needed. If Feli identified any threat coming their way, and she had a sharp eye and an uncanny ability to anticipate trouble, she would rap her knuckles on top of Desi’s head and Desi would prepare to run. The rap on the head was a very subtle signal, because it could easily convey a wide range of alarm levels. In its softest form, it meant they would suddenly veer off, at a brisk walk but without running, into a narrow side alleyway, hardly visible to a casual passer-by, or into a building’s archway, leading to a backcourt. A sharper rap and a tugging would have the two girls galloping at full clip in the opposite direction they’d been following. In a sticky situation, Desi became totally attuned to her guide’s directions and together they were able to react to danger with perfect coordination. And when she heard something alarming happening, the crash of some accident, of something falling, and the cries of the bystanders, she would rap her knuckles on Feli’s head and immediately point in the direction where the noise had come from, so her friend could see if there was any danger for them.
But on that day they reached the Forum without problems and crossed it as fast as they could. Desi stopped ringing her bell, Feli steered them clear of the cohort patrols that were always present there, and so they quickly melted away between the buildings on the other side. They were going to a place where they hoped to make some money.
In the meantime Claudia was on a mission of her own. It was market day all over Rome, like on every ninth day—the nundinum—and she had gone to a street market on the Viminal hill, where they sold raw wool in bulk. Not just any old wool, but fleece from Northern Italy, the best, famous for its silky sheen and soft feel. Of course it didn’t come cheap, but Claudia had a lot of money in her purse. She had organized a cartel of housewives in her neighbourhood and had collected the contributions of around twenty matronae like herself, who had learned to card, spin and weave from their mothers when they were little girls. The husbands found it a quaint women’s activity and had no idea how much money you could make out of it. Of course the ‘ladies’ had to compete with every domestic slave in Rome who was ordered to spend every idle moment carding or spinning. But Claudia had figured out that the wives of free citizens who actually liked the work could produce a much superior thread. What could you expect from overburdened slaves who were forced to work the cheapest wool while they craved a well-deserved break? So the plan was to work with the best raw materials available, and buy it in bulk so that you could get it at the best price, then distribute it among the participants of “the housewives’ cohort”, who would produce the finest yarn from it. As she sauntered from one stall to the next, fingering and comparing the goods, Claudia was already dreaming of setting up weaving looms. For the moment the cartel had to sell their yarn to professional weavers, and they got a fairly good price, but if they could produce their own cloth they could make even more profit. On the other hand, most of the members lived in cramped quarters, like she did, but you could set up a traditional vertical loom against any wall, and it didn’t need be expensive… still, it would be a big step… as things were now, each woman’s entire equipment and materials—raw wool, a pair of carding bats and a spinning spindle, plus the spools of finished thread—fitted into a single, average-sized basket… Finally Claudia selected a promising bale of fleece and proceeded to haggle with the stallholder. “No, no, you misunderstand, sir, I want to buy the whole bale, if you can send someone over to deliver it at my place… how much?”
If you went straight to the Tiber, taking the Vicus Jugarius from the Forum, and you turned to the right through the Porta Carmentalis in the Servian wall, then passed in front of the Marcellus theatre, you could soon cross a stone bridge on your left, to the island in the middle of the river. And there you had the famous temple of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing. Very potent and popular, this god, and his temple a crowded marketplace of ailments. Desi set up shop on the broad steps leading up to the colonnaded, Greek-style front portico; Feli went on the look-out at the top of the same stairs, leaning nonchalantly against a column with one shoulder.
The business plan was quite simple and straightforward. Hundreds of ailing people came here to be healed, and they knew that if you gave an offering to someone who was worse off than yourself, it would put the divinity in a better disposition to help you. And Desi, with her hollow eye-sockets, her scaly-looking skin and stringy hair, was clearly worse off than anyone else, including the other beggars, who put it on a bit, all of them. She didn’t smell too good either. On the streets, coming over, people had felt so much disgust at the sight of her, that she could almost hear their aversion humming in the air around her; now suddenly she was at the top of the game, the queen of the dung-heap!
She was sitting on the temple stairs, jingling her bell pitifully, with a little bowl in front of her. And in that bowl there were already a handful of small coins. That was the finishing touch for setting up shop. Mater gave her money in the morning, “Buy something to eat for lunch, sweetness, for you and Feli, and come home when you get hungry again.” She always seemed to have some cash to spare, and made sure the PF was not around when she gave it to her. And the thing was, if you already had a number of coins in your bowl, people were easily induced to give you some more, as they assumed that others had already done the same. Meanwhile Feli kept an eye on things, not even hiding, to make sure no one tried to steal their earnings.
People came to the Tiber Island’s temple not only from Rome itself, but from far and wide: its reputation had reached all the corners of the Empire, on a par with the original temple at Epidaurus, in Greece. The sick and the wounded, no matter what was ailing them, came to this place to be healed by the god, by the waters of the miraculous spring inside the dark, cave-like temple, by the priests and the snakes and the dogs. The priests, as far as Desi could make out, must have had oodles of experience and were effectively among the best physicians of the day. The serpents and the dogs also lived in on the premises, and once the patients had explained their symptoms, the priests burned incense, chanted incantations, and would make the sacred animals flick their tongues at the ailing spots or lap up the pain from the sufferers. And they would also give you drugs. Very often, it worked.
But what interested Desi most, was that the square in front of the temple was also a marketplace of religions. People came here from all over the Roman world and were followers of a wide variety of gods and faiths. Most of them came to worship Asclepius beside their normal gods, because it couldn’t hurt to beg a specialist deity for help, but some hung around to make publicity for the healing powers of the competition. “Asclepius is old hat, the temple of Apollo on the Palatine is the place to be for what’s ailing you.—No! you should appeal to Isis and Serapis, I myself was miraculously cured.” Apart from the usual crowd of Greek and Roman gods, say all those living on the Olympus, you also had the likes of Cybele the Great Mother, Atargatis the Syrian goddess, or Mithras from Persia. Feli had told Desi that there was a tall obelisk from Egypt, covered with hieroglyphs, in the middle of the square, to add to the exotic atmosphere of this colourful marketplace. And to add to the confusion, some Judean enthusiasts from the Trastevere neighbourhood across the river came over to preach that there was only one true god: theirs! Desi found all this very entertaining.
And then some of the followers of these widely different religions wanted to recruit the blind beggar to prove their case: “My poor girl, you should try this or try that, go to such and such temple; your eyesight might be restored; wouldn’t that be wonderful?” But Desi put them back in their place implacably. She was a true Roman and defended the traditions of her people.
“I am not ill: I was born like this. Why would the gods want to heal me? It would only mean that they’ve changed their minds, and the gods never do that.”
Recently Sextus, judging his daughter old enough for such serious matters, had told her, “If you could ask one of the gods, ‘Why was I born blind?’ he or she would just shrug and answer, ‘Why not?’ That’s how indifferent the gods are to the fate of mere mortals. Believe me, the important thing is to worship them properly and keep your nose clean so that you don’t incur their wrath. But if you’re smart, don’t expect any sympathy from our gods!”
“That’s the Roman way,” she would tell the people who were pestering her with miracle cures. Some of them were put out, some impressed, even shaken. “Did your father teach you this? He must be a wise man!”
“Well of course: he is a true plebeian!”
Desi thought, “If only the PF could hear me singing his praises like this!”
When the obelisk’s shadow indicated that it was noon, Feli would decide it was time for a lunch break. Her stomach had been telling her the same for quite a while, but was not as reliable. So she would join Desi, count the money, tell her how much they had, and they would buy sausages and pastry from the food peddlers in front of the temple and stuff their faces. Then, still belching, they would ‘chat’ for a while. The people around them marvelled at those two, standing there facing one another, and playing endless rounds of ‘hand clapping’; they weren’t little girls anymore; they seemed way too old for such games. But Feli wanted to know what Desi had been discussing with her ‘customers’. Feli always wanted to know everything, and Desi accepted this: after all, there was no one else in the world who could tell her. So she reported the discussions about all those religions, and how she’d defended the Roman attitude, the idea of the indifference of the gods.
“Yes,” Feli commented, “the gods are hard on you people like you people are hard on your slaves.”
“Yes… but not me.”
“No… not you.”
A few hours later, as she’d taken up her vigil at the top of the stairs again, Feli spotted a group of youths crossing the bridge on the Trastevere side of the island. She’d noticed them before, on other days. They were a local gang of toughs; thieves of the purse-snatching kind. They would hang around on the temple square, by the stone parapet, feigning a great interest for the view across the Tiber. But they were keeping an eye on the beggars, waiting for an opportunity. At other times Feli had seen them following a beggar going home at the end of the day, at a distance, like a pack of wolves. Until now they’d never shown an interest in Desi, a mere girl, as blind as a bat. But on that afternoon one of them, the youngest and smallest, crossed over to the temple steps and passed very close by Desi’s spot, glancing into her bowl. They were scouting; time to call it a day and leave the scene as discreetly as possible. Feli stepped down and rapped her friend’s head with her knuckles, very lightly, meaning, “Something’s up; let’s go”.
Desi put away their earnings inside her belt, and the two girls crossed the bridge on the Forum side of the island. Then Feli led them down the incline to the riverbank and followed the Tiber. She knew a spot upstream from the main sewer, where the water was clean, more or less, although the river was very low. Without further ado they stepped into the muddy stream to wash the scales and the pee off their skin a bit.
The two girls liked the Tiber and the riverbanks a lot. Even when they were quite small they’d spent endless days playing here, roaming up and down the meandering stream, even as far as the countryside, outside the city. They were real river rats and felt at home here.
As they bathed, Feli thought of Claudia’s stories about gazelles in the wilderness