The Fourth Circle (26 page)

WE'VE GOT A real masquerade going on here.

The toga of the previous arrival is nothing compared to the costume of the new one. A good ten or so milliseconds slipped by before I finally managed to dig it out of my history memory banks: the dress of a sixteenth-century Flemish nobleman, no less!

All of it ever so ornate and frilly—in total contrast to Sri's cotton T-shirts and bermudas, even to the Buddhist robe that he almost never wears now, though Buddha in person is his guest. The Flemish chap has a tricorn hat with some rather revolting feathers curving backwards on it; I wonder which particular bird they had to pluck to get them? The jungle is teeming with exotic birds, but I haven't seen anything quite as lurid as these on any of them.

The silliest part of the latest guest's costume is right below the hat: an enormously wide collar, all pleated and stiffly starched, like the plaster brace hospitals put on people who have broken a neck bone. Because of this, he holds his head unnaturally high in an attitude of extreme haughtiness. He certainly must be very uncomfortable in clothes like that in this hot, moist climate, but it apparently never crosses his mind to take them off. The sacrifices men are prepared to make just to keep up with fashion...

All his other clothes are also oversized and weighty. To begin with, a thick linen shirt, hairy and rough, without a collar; if he's got no undershirt on under-neath it, then I can't imagine how he puts up with the constant scratching it must cause. I get goose bumps just thinking about it. Over the shirt he wears a rough waistcoat of heavy cloth, embroidered and ornamented, with a profusion of small pockets where he keeps a variety of stuff, including a little bottle that he takes out from time to time to sniff at the contents, which makes him shudder a little in obvious pleasure. Recently this has been accompanied by a rather embarrassed expression, probably because no one else at the temple does this.

Over the waistcoat he wears a sort of long jacket or short coat of dark blue, made of some stiff cloth, brocade perhaps, with lots of cloth-covered buttons and puffed upper sleeves; it was probably designed to narrow at the waist but it's hard to tell since the man is about ten kilograms overweight—by the standards of our time, that is—and who knows what was considered appropriate in his.

(Clearly he is also a time traveler, like the old Sicilian, but we're agreed: no questions on that point....)
On top of all that he wears a cloak or mantle, with dark red lining, the hem streaked with dried mud. As the monsoon rains are now over, this must be a memento from his own world and era. The man from Flanders takes it off only in the evening when he goes to sleep and uses it as a blanket.

Of course I offered him normal bedding, but an unforeseen problem arose, so that he now doesn't use any bed at all. Thinking he would like it, being a traveler from afar who must be tired, I gave him Sri's favorite mattress with built-in vi-brators, which oscillate in a deep-sleep rhythm, but this scared him so badly that he jumped out of bed as if he'd been shot and fled in panic into an empty corner, devoid of technical devices, where he's been sleeping ever since.

There he simply lies down on the bare floor, covering himself with his cloak.

At first I found this terribly embarrassing; what kind of a hostess was I if my guests had to sleep on the floor? Later, as our Fleming evidently didn't mind, I decided to play it cool. After all, Sri, as the head of the family, didn't give a hoot.

On the contrary, he found it all extremely funny; when our poor guest was first scared by the vibrating mattress, he clapped his hands over his mouth and rushed out of the temple together with Buddha, the two of them fairly doubled up with laughter. Fine behavior for high-minded devotees of Nirvana.

I was almost tempted to do the same on another occasion. When, again thanks to the baby's intervention, I saw the new guest for the first time in the clearing in front of the temple where he and his sort materialize out of nothing, what most caught my eye, not counting the frilly clothes, was his hair. He has a head of hair any woman would envy: long silvery locks down to his shoulders forming a luxurious mane. For this sort of hairstyle, you first need excellent hair, and then to spend hours at the hairdresser's. Only rarely does a woman have the good fortune to look like that naturally, so it's most unfair when a man can boast of that kind of hair.

Just one look at the Fleming after his first night in the temple was enough for me to realize that something was wrong with his hairdo. All right, nobody looks great in the early morning, but with him it wasn't just that. His hair had not lost its wonderful waviness, it lay somehow unnaturally... askew.

And then it dawned on me!

How could I have been so stupid? But of course! The man has a wig! I had a strong desire to laugh. I'm like that sometimes; I think I probably get rid of accumulated tension that way—through unrestrained, almost hysterical laughter. It really gets on Sri's nerves, which in turn makes me laugh even more, which un-nerves him further, making a feedback loop—sometimes one very difficult to undo.
Luckily, I managed to stop myself at the last moment. I think the Fleming would have been vastly insulted, not so much because I'd discovered his secret—obviously men were not secretive about wearing toupees in the epoch he comes from—but rather because he would have concluded that I think that that decorative object of which he is so proud doesn't suit him.

Since that first night when he was so distracted he forgot to take off his wig, he's taken the greatest care of it before going to bed on each successive evening and in the morning spending a long time in front of the mirror, titivating and arranging every curl. His natural hair, by the way, is short and already thinning, with a large bald spot on the top of his head. Serves him right—I can't help thinking maliciously.

There have been some culinary problems with the Fleming, too, but quite the opposite of the ones with the old Sicilian geezer. Not only has he made outlandish demands, but I've actually had to beg him to taste the food from my microwave ovens. It's not that he shares Buddha's ascetic convictions on food, no. On the contrary, the man is as hungry as a wolf: he practically drools, watching en-viously as the old-timer greedily polishes off dish after dish from my menu, one more exotic than the next.

(I must admit my vanity was flattered when finally, after I'd made something like ten attempts, he mildly praised the quality of the cheese I had synthesized, remarking that "probably nothing better could be expected at such a distance from Sicily": this, though I did it without those all-important pregnant cow droppings....)

In all likelihood, the unfortunate experience with the mattress has caused our man from Flanders to distrust all and any technology, so that he spent a good two days without food, until finally his endangered biology drove him to take a bite, thereby easing the prejudices and fears caused by what seemed to have been a severe bout of future shock which, surprisingly, seems to have missed the Sicilian.

That old chap has been having a lot of fun examining and trying out every device he can lay his hands on, quite undeterred by several sputtering, sparking shorts caused by his inexperienced attempts, or even a minor fire, which Sri put out in time so that no serious damage was done.

He especially enjoys communicating with me, though that began rather slowly, since I was not what you'd call well-versed in classical Greek, although I've been getting better from day to day.

We've started some very interesting and learned debates on various subjects, from ethics to gastronomy, and in these I have to be careful not to confuse him by stepping out of his age into a more recent era. Apparently he isn't even aware that
he's been moved into another time; he believes that he died, in fact that he's been killed, and is now in a sort of paradise, or something of the kind. I haven't tried to dissuade him, especially since I myself am not too sure about quite a lot of things.

I think that it was in fact the Sicilian's lack of inhibition in his approach to me—much more than Sri's efforts to persuade him—that finally got the Fleming to come over to my keyboard. This was for some reason very important to Sri, while I must admit I felt a bit embarrassed, at least in the beginning. It looked to me rather as if he were offering me to the guest, to make his stay in our home more enjoyable. As if we were Eskimos, God forbid!

Luckily, it turned out considerably more innocent than that, and I didn't meet with a fate worse than death. What it came down to was that Sri had written a very simple program, to which the Fleming has devoted himself completely. So much so, in fact, that nothing else seems to exist for him.

I don't believe I'll ever understand men. What is it in them that tethers them so fast to some moronic interest of theirs that they completely lose sight of all the other beautiful things in the world? What does this gaudy, jittery Fleming see in Sri's trivial program for computing decimals of the number
π,
that has made him give up his days and nights to it, practically never taking his eyes off the monitor, across which the numbers march in a slow, unending procession? And how is it, after staring so much at it, that he doesn't develop an ache in that head stuck in that ghastly collar?

INTO SILENCE AND darkness I sank, though not for long.

From a great distance, far, far away, a familiar voice seemed to be calling me, though I could not recognize whose, nor even if it was a woman's or a man's.

When in perplexity I opened my mouth to reply, to ask the many questions still swarming at the edge of my consciousness though eluding my will, a small hand was laid gently on my dry lips to check the vain words at source.

This feather-light touch drove away at once my strange, dreamless sleep, in which my soul seemed to dwell in the forecourts of Hades, and I slowly opened my eyes. As sight returned, my fettered memory awoke at once, and my hand moved quickly to my breast to touch the terrible wound the cross-eyed Roman had dealt me with his deadly sword but a few moments before. But there was no wound: not even a tear in my ragged robe, nor any scar under it on my wrinkled skin.

I looked up in surprise at Marya, for it was her hand on my questioning lips, but received no answer, only that old, double-edged smile, foretelling salvation and disaster. Left to my own poor devices, I glanced around for some explanation of this miracle, which had brought me unexpected deliverance, but found new wonders awaiting me.

We stood in the second circle of Hell, for here was not a trace of those swelling balls that served as stinking prison cells for the worst miscreants. Though no less dreary than the previous circle, as befits the kingdom of the underworld, at least this new place did not seem unearthly, for I at once recognized all that was in it.

Had I not known what I did know, I might have thought in my ignorance that we were in the middle of some damp chamber, such as princes are wont to keep in their castle fortresses, to torture their subjects into full obedience, which princes expect to receive by natural right from the lower orders and serfs.

I myself never was, thanks be to God, in any such terrible place although, long ago, my Master received from a depraved prince, known far and wide for his cruelty, a commission to adorn his torture chamber with scenes of the horrors of Hell, so that the wretches dragged thence should before being put to the test lose all hope of an easy or painless deliverance, even did they readily confess to everything. For that cruel lord was insatiable for torture and cared not a whit for confession, be it sincere or insincere.

To my great fright, my Master, the only man capable of faithfully depicting
scenes from Hell, as he was later to demonstrate when he portrayed it in all its ugliness in an another place infinitely more inappropriate, refused the commission for reasons unknown to me, refused with hauteur, so that we had to run under cover of night to seek sanctuary in a neighboring duchy. This merciless overlord issued the dire threat that he would one day seize us and force us to do the job, promising us a new reward for our trouble: doing us the special honor of first trying out on us each one of the diabolical tortures that the Master would be made to depict on the walls.

Finding myself in the nether kingdom, remembrance of this past event now chilled me to the soul because for an instant it seemed that the fatal threat of that bloodthirsty mountain prince had finally overtaken us in the worst possible manner and that he would at any moment appear in the shape of Sotona himself to carry out his horrid threat with the greatest pleasure.

And alas, wherever I looked I saw horrid instruments for this exacting of debts; tools that only the most perverse imagination could have invented for exposing the frail human frame to inconceivable suffering. On a blazing hearth were the glowing coals that give to heavy iron its white and raging heat, that it may leave its burning brand on quivering human flesh, the pain of which drives men quite mad. And there, the torturer's table with its iron-winched rack that serves to stretch the body beyond measure and tear its doomed victim apart, plucking his limbs or head from the body. I saw also a great pendulum, its cutting edge finely honed, designed to descend slowly but inexorably from the ceiling, cutting with every fatal arc a deeper slash in the soft body, but so slowly that a seeming infinity must pass before the edge of the pendulum reaches the other side of the poor wretch's frame.

Other devices of torture were there, the use of which I could not begin to divine but of an aspect so loathsome that those I recognized appeared in comparison to be but the harmless tools of some common trade. To what unimaginable anguish is the prisoner exposed in that narrow, coffin-like chest? Does the window in it, placed where the prisoner's face must be, afford the devil an opportunity to feed in cackling pleasure on the convulsions and screams of the hopeless sinner? What filth bubbles in that large cauldron, under which no fire burns? And what is that slimy, scaly thing within, which swims up to the surface from time to time to let out a harrowing, hungry shriek that instantly curdles even the bravest blood? And what mutilation is caused by those heavy boots, braced tightly with metal hoops, beside which a pile of human bones lies crushed and gleaming in spectral whiteness?