Chapter 12 — Saturnalia

On the day before the festival he sealed the tabularium for the holidays with his own hand, both keys, wax over the hasp — the office shut by law and older than law; even the writing rested — and stood a moment in the cold street amused at himself, because he had pressed his seal into the wax with the care of a man closing a wound, and the racks were only going to stand there in the dark for six days, being what they were, which was the one thing in the district that kept no festival.

Cardena put out its lamps' worth of joy that evening and became, for six days, a town he had not yet met. The courts were shut, the schools were shut, the chest in the basilica stood closed even to penitents; the ordo had voted the public tables — Silo's faction paying for most of it and collecting, in the coin of being seen to pay, every sesterce back — and the smoke of the cook-fires stood over the forum from noon. Dice came out of tunics onto every doorstep in the town, publicly, legally, the year's one licensed shamelessness; the potters had been selling the little clay figures for a market beforehand, and the candle-sellers' stall was stripped to the boards by the first dusk. Slaves went about in their masters' streets with their heads up, these days of the reversed world, and the daylight hours themselves — he noticed it walking, and was pleased with the noticing — had gone short and blunt and companionable, the winter sun keeping festival hours too, up late, down early, doing nothing thoroughly.

He kept the feast in his lodgings on the first evening, because it was owed: his clerk of the works, his two servants, the door-keeper's boy, and Philon, at one table, with Marcellus standing the wine and — the custom being the custom, and older than anyone's dignity — serving the first course with his own hands, to the private, perfect delight of the door-keeper's boy, who would remember all his life, Marcellus suspected, the evening a commissioner of the Augustus put lentils in front of him and got the ladle wrong. The wine was good and he poured it without stinting; the nuts came out for the dicing, and then, the wine being what it was, real coin; and Marcellus played and lost with decorum, and his clerk lost noisily, and the boy won and could not hide it, and Philon — Philon played exactly. That was the only word for it. He staked small, drew when the sums said draw, stood when the sums said stand, expressed neither grief nor joy, and rose from the table at the evening's end the only man at it richer than he sat down, having beaten the festival itself at its own game by declining, with perfect courtesy, to treat it as one. Marcellus, watching him stack the winnings into a neat column — even his luck kept books — thought: there is no holiday in him, and thought it as praise, and heard, a half-second later, like a man hearing his own door close behind him, the other reading; and did not follow it; the wine was good, the fire was high, it was the festival. It would be a year and a night before he learned what he had been looking at — a man husbanding the one commodity the reversed world returned to him for six days, and spending none of it where the master could count the spending.

He gave the gifts on the fifth day, as his father had always done, wax candles to the household in the old plain style and the silly clay figures on top of them — a gladiator for the boy, who was transported; a mule for the muleteer, who swore at it with love — and for Philon a cloak. He had thought about it, which made it worse afterward and made it better too, being at least the failure of a real attempt: a good winter cloak of the grey local wool, thick-napped, well made by the widow who made his own, warm and unremarkable and cut, he had specified it, exactly like a freeman clerk's; a sensible, decent, considered gift, the gift of a man who had observed that his secretary worked in a cold room and dressed thin, and had measured everything about him except where he lived. Philon received it with both hands and thanked him in the form exactly suited to the gift's value, the giver's rank, and the day's license — a sentence Marcellus would have sworn was warm; he was two years from being able to hear its joinery — and folded the cloak over his arm the way the racks held rolls, and wore it thereafter every cold day of his service, without one word more, so that only a man reviewing years of such sentences by their outcomes, much later and much changed, would reckon at last what had and had not been in that thanks; and by then Marcellus kept a register for such reckonings.

The town, those six days, was at peace with him. It came as a shock, like warm water. Men who had spent the autumn watching him sideways hailed him at the public tables and meant it, or meant it for the day, which in a valley is not nothing; the potter's wife pressed figures on his servants at half price out of pure standing goodwill; he was toasted twice in the forum, once by men who had amended their declarations in the fear-season and appeared, by the second jar, to have forgiven him the fear. Even the middle couch had suspended its arithmetic; there was no arithmetic anywhere; that was the festival's whole ancient craft, he saw — the year's accounts, civic and private, ruled off for six days by common consent, the columns forbidden, the reversed world washing every standing thing loose in its little licensed flood so that men could bear the standing things the other three hundred days. The town kept no watch those nights and needed none; the feast was the watch; Silo's tables did more for the peace of the streets than the town slave's staff had done all year. Order, it turned out, could be poured and carved. He wrote that down. And on the fourth evening, walking home late past the arcade, he passed the place where the Tarbessan's agent kept his market-day table, and the place was only stones — the table gone to Tarbessa for the festival like everything else in the valley that fed on it — and Marcellus stood a moment looking at the empty arch, and did the one sum nobody else in the drinking town was doing, because he had read the contract rolls all spring and knew what the wax knew: that half the private debts of the district fell due in these very days; that the festival and the reckoning were one season, an old economy of the two, the year's joy and the year's interest nailed to the same nail so that neither should ever be forgotten; and that up the dark valley this night, at hearths he had never seen, in houses the register lied about, the sixth day of the reversed world would end with a man in a good tunic at the door, patient, greeting the family by name, and the name and the sum in one breath. The wax in Tarbessa kept the feast the way the racks kept it. It did not.

Porcia's parcel and letter came up with the last road-traffic before the holidays, and he kept the letter to open on the quiet third night, with the lamp trimmed, as another man husbands a wine.

The figs are the estate's and the socks are my own work, and you will wear them, because the woman who sold me the wool says the valley you have got yourself sent to is famous for exactly two things and the other one is fever. Your son has four teeth now and uses all of them, and has found out doors; he goes at any open one like a barge going downstream, and your mother's chest of tablets is only safe on the third shelf. He called the steward papa on the Nones in front of everyone. The steward is more embarrassed than I am. I am not embarrassed at all; I am keeping the account; you will settle it in person. — The estate is well. The oil came in fair, better than the district's, which I do not tell the district. The hill parcel: not sold, and the man from Astigi has stopped asking, which I count my year's victory over a man who buys land for his living. — They speak of you at Corduba, Titus. My father heard your name twice at the basilica in one morning, and came home ten years younger; you know what he is. I am glad of it too. But I have been doing my own reading of it, wife's arithmetic: when a man's name travels, the man is standing still somewhere far off, or the name could not get away from him. The boy's teeth I have written of. The doors I have written of. There will be a spring, they tell me, even in Baetica. — Do not make enemies richer than us. And do not learn so well how to be paid in words up there that you forget we deal in the other coin at home. — P.

He laughed aloud twice, alone, reading it — the second time at the man from Astigi — and sat afterward a long time in the particular stillness her letters left, which was unlike any other stillness of his day, being the only one with a person in it. Then he took up the tablet to answer, that same night, while her voice was still in the room; and the reply ran easy and true through the news — the year closed, the delivery entire and acknowledged, I am content from the procurator himself in his own hand, the warrant standing, the survey proofs sound, his health good, the fever famous but occupied elsewhere — ran easy, gathering pleasure as it went, the year looking, laid out in a letter to her, like the thing it also actually was, a formidable piece of work honestly done; and then it reached the new assessment, and stopped.

He sat with the stylus up. Through the wall, faintly, the door-keeper's boy was teaching the muleteer a festival song, getting the words wrong, both of them past caring.

The quota is raised to two hundred twenty-five, which is a mark of confidence — he had written that much, and it stood in the wax looking up at him, correct, presentable, true the way the register was true. It was the sentence Silo would compose in his place, and would need at the Kalends. What it was not was the thing itself; and they did not write each other the register, he and Porcia; that was the whole worth of the correspondence. The thing itself he then attempted, in his head first, as a discipline, the September way, draft by draft. The quota is raised because I succeeded; my proofs priced the district and the price will be collected from it; the sixteen thousand I won stands converted to fifty-four owing; the press is set one turn lower and my own hand fed it, knowingly; and the first houses of this town will lie down at the Kalends liable for my diligence, and the man they will hate for it is the right man to hate, there being no form anywhere in which the machine itself can be made to stand answerable — and there the draft failed. Not for honesty. For want of any court to send it to. Every clause of it was true, and every clause called for the next, and the chain ran out of the letter entirely, out of the festival, out of the year, into country he had no words surveyed for yet; and a letter to Corduba was not the instrument, and the festival was not the season, and — he made himself finish the finding, since he was the man he was — she was not the reader: not because she would not understand it, but because she would; she had sent him the whole of it already, folded small, in a sentence about his name getting away from him, and to answer it in kind was to open, between Corduba and Cardena, in wax, at the year's turn, an account neither of them would ever again be able to close. So he did what the valley had taught him. He passed the flat of the stylus over the sentence about confidence, and wrote instead: The quota is raised for the new year. It will be work. The register must be corrected early, and I will be much in the vega with the surveyor when the season opens. All true. Nothing withheld that a wife of an equestrian officer of the fiscus would expect rendered. The letter went on and ended well, with the socks, and a good line about the man from Astigi that would earn her laugh, and love to the boy with all four teeth by name; and he sealed it and set it for the courier and sat looking at it, one more well-made article of the district's chief manufacture; and then, because there was by now no helping the man he was becoming, he opened the private register and entered the day.

He entered it without ornament, as was that book's whole style. That he had written his first letter of excuse. That it was to her. That everything in it was true, which was how he now knew the craft was in him: any clerk can lie; the letters of this valley had taught him the finished form, whose every sentence holds and whose sum does not carry. That the account between them was thereby opened whether she ever saw the entry or not — the account of the unwritten, wife's arithmetic, kept in the coin they did not deal in; and that he had opened it on the third night of the Saturnalia, in the reversed world, with the town at peace with him at last and singing through the wall — the season, said the old economy, when the year's joy and the year's interest come due together, and are paid at the same table, and the difference between them is only in who holds the stylus.

The festival ended as it always ended, everywhere: the candles burned down, the figures lost their novelty and their arms, the slaves woke on the seventh morning in the standing world, the courts opened, the chest opened, the wax softened at the first fires of the resumed year and took the first seals. On the last night, very late, he walked up alone to the north wall, past the sealed tabularium with the frost on the wax, and stood where the sentry-walk looked up the valley, and the valley was black and speckled: hearth-light, up the whole long dark of it, farther than he had ever ridden, the vega keeping the sixth night by its own fires with its debts nailed to the morning; and the sight did to him what the district had been doing to him since April, which was to arrive as a feeling and insist on becoming a figure. All those fires were in his registers. Every one — he knew it as a surveyor knows his stakes — stood on land the writing lied about, over or under, in one column or another; and in the spring he would begin at last to make the writing true, fire by fire, and the truth would come to each of them the way everything came up this valley, late, in high Latin, costing more than it said on the tablet; and they did not know yet. That was the thing he stood with, the last night of the reversed world, in the iron cold. The year had rewarded him: quota, praise, warrant, standing; a fire started in a strong-room in August had warmed him all winter. The register would reward him further; nothing in the shape of the seasons ahead was against him; and that was precisely its terror. The machine paid its stokers in advance. Down the wall the last public table was being cleared by torchlight, Silo's slaves stacking the trestles of the peace; the river ran under the bridge with everything it carried; and Marcellus stood between the sleeping town and the firelit valley counting lights until the cold drove him in — thirty, he made it, before the bend took the rest — and could not have said, and did not try to say, whether he had counted them as a shepherd counts, or as a wolf does, or as a commissioner, which was the trade that had been invented, he saw at last, so that a man need never find out which of the other two he was.

The frost held. The festival went out. In the first market of the new year the assessment of two hundred twenty-five thousand was published on the basilica wall, in the town's best lettering, and the town read it in silence and went home; and the year turned under them all, unmarked; and the wax of the year to come lay smooth on every table in the valley, waiting for hands.

Notice of reassessment, served in the pagus of the upper vega, October, in the fourth year of the Emperor Vespasian Augustus:

By order of Titus Aelius Marcellus, commissioner for the census and revenues of the district of Cardena, under warrant of the procurator of the Augustus: whereas the registers of this district have been examined and corrected, and whereas the parcels of the upper vega recorded in the census under the name of M. FVLVIVS, iugera XL, are found to be so recorded falsely, no such holder appearing in any roll of the living or the dead: the said entry is void. Those occupying the said parcels shall within thirty days show before the commission by what right they hold, or shall (i) enter their cause in the register of appeals for the assize of the proconsul, or (ii) accept tenancy of the said parcels under such holder as the corrected register shall establish, or (iii) quit the same. Rendered at Cardena; sealed.