An oil lamp trembles on the threshold as if it were breathing, its spilled light licks the mosaic tiles and on the wall the gold seems to sweat, outside Rome never sleeps and even so there is a silence that sticks to the tongue, a silence made of myrrh, of reheated wine, of damp wool, of footsteps that disguise themselves beneath the arcades and in the inner courtyard, where the fountains repeat the same gesture of water, someone has left an abandoned veil over a statue, and the covered marble becomes more alive than the living, modesty is another form of nakedness.
Then she appears, not the way a queen appears but the way an idea appears at night, with the speed of rumors, and a perfume of living history. She is the third wife, she is Messalina, the one who crosses the warm air and everything that looks at her wavers for an instant, from hunger, because desire is politics and wears no toga, and also because no one is sure which part of her face is true and which part is mirror, and they say her name in a low voice and in saying it they stain it, they turn it into a tool, they push it toward the mouth of the people so the word can do the dirty work of judging her. She, instead, walks as if words could not reach her, as if her body were a country with shifting borders, and every brush of contact a signature.
In a room of the palace, behind heavy curtains, men gather who smile believing themselves safe, and women who lower their gaze without giving up listening, and the oil lamp trembles again when someone comes too close, as if recognizing the danger of joy; and there is a brief laugh, almost childish, that cuts off when someone speaks the name of Britannia, the absence of the emperor becomes a hollow where any excess can fit, any clandestine ceremony, any pact. She sits and does not sit, rests her hand on the table and the warm oil of a nearby cruet seems to answer, everything in that house is made to last and yet everything is consumed, bodies, promises, the letters on the wax tablets where favors are recorded, accusations, invisible lists that later are called fate.
Whoever looks at her believes he sees a beast, whoever touches her believes he is touching a wound, and perhaps she only tries to put out with skin her ancient thirst, a thirst that cannot be quenched because it was not born in flesh but in the memory of a fallen house, in poverty disguised as lineage, in the schooling of fear that asks with a smile for what should already be its own, and if Claudius’ love was a bandage, she learned to use it to cover the blood, and the city knew it and celebrated it and hated it at the same time, because Rome demands spectacle and then punishment, bread and then morality, and the oil lamp, tiny witness, stays there, leaning with every draft like a tired scribe.
Later the night changes neighborhood and skin, Subura smells of flour and sweat, of old fish, of iron, and the same myrrh appears mixed with the smoke as if there were no difference between palace and street, only a different way of lying; so, she enters without a crown, under a borrowed name that bites like a rabid animal, and in the doorway a man mistakes her for any other, that instant frees her and condemns her, because being nobody is also a form of power and a form of falling… and the oil lamp here is not polished bronze but clay, its flame has a lower color, more human, and looking at it one understands that desire does not distinguish marbles, that flesh knows nothing of genealogies, that need makes even crime democratic.
A small scene stays lodged like a thorn, a young soldier with dust on his sandals, black under the nails, the clumsy gesture of someone returning from another kind of battlefield, she wipes his forehead with a cloth barely damp and for a second there are no empresses and no prostitutes, only two animals recognizing their fragility in the half light; then the wheel returns, the coins return, the names spoken halfway return, the witnesses return who tomorrow will tell the story with a precision no one saw, because Rome writes the way it dreams, it exaggerates so it will not feel the void… the city manufactures an endless Messalina, multiplies her until she becomes a noun, and in doing so spares itself the task of seeing her as a woman, the one of marital failures, and of hearing her breathing when at last she is alone, seated on a bed that creaks like a ship, looking at her hands as if they belonged to someone else, smelling on her fingers the warm oil, this time mixed with a bitterness that was not there before.
Scylla also fell before her, whose name was the same as that of the female monster cited by Homer in The Odyssey, who swallowed whole the men who crewed the ships that passed through the Strait of Messina, the nickname obviously a clear allusion to the prostitute’s sexual capacity. That night, after having been possessed by 25 men, Scylla gave up and Messalina emerged victorious, for she surpassed the count near dawn and still wanted to keep competing because after having received 70 men she did not feel satisfied.
She thinks, or I imagine she thinks, about time, which is a beast larger than any appetite, a beast that devours even those who believe themselves immortal by a name, and she thinks about how the body keeps accounts the mind does not want to read; in a corner someone repeats a number like a prayer, and numbers are always invisible crosses, nails in the tongue of the one who listens, because the number pretends to order disorder, and in ordering it turns it into accusation. She smiles with fatigue, a strange serenity falls over her, but not as regret, it is the lucidity of understanding that desire can also be a cage when we ask it to save us from the past.
Dawn arrives, and over the roof tiles the sky lightens with a cruel patience, the rumor runs faster than the carts, it clings to tunics, slips into kitchens, reaches the tribunals, and the oil lamp finally goes out, leaving a thread of smoke that seems like a signature in the air, a signature no one will be able to erase completely, not even the historians of hate, not even the lovers of morality… and that smoke remains, the faint scent of myrrh now spent remains, a woman remains who was once unique and now is a word others use to wound, and Rome remains, always Rome, learning to forget while it pretends to remember.
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