The Last Cato (41 page)

“When we find the current Cato, I’m going to tell him a thing or two about his spies.”

The old men split their sides laughing. I turned my back on them, furious.

“Professor, Doctor. It’s time. Remember—the blue line starts in the middle of town, at the spot where the race started in 1896. Stick with me until then, okay? Ready?”

“No!” I declared. “I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for this.”

The Rock gave me a scornful look, and Farag quickly interceded. “We’re ready, Kaspar. Say the word.”

We stood there for a few silent seconds, not moving, while the Rock stared at his watch. Suddenly he turned, gave us a nod, and started running. He began at a smooth pace that Farag and I imitated. The heat didn’t do me any good. With each stride, I gave a prayer for my knees; they seemed to receive the impact equivalent to a couple of tons. Resigned, I told myself that, no matter what, I had to be a good sport.

A few minutes later, we came to the Olympic monument, where the infamous blue line started. The monument was a simple white stone wall with a heavy, burning torch in front. There, the race started in earnest. My watch read 9:15, local time. We followed the line into the city, and I couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed at what people must have thought when they saw us. But the residents of Marathon didn’t seem the least bit interested in us. They were used to seeing all kinds of things.

At the starting point, when we were running on the same highway we’d driven on, the captain picked up his pace and pulled away. I, on the other hand, slowed down until I nearly stopped. Faithful to my plan, I adopted a light pace I planned to keep up all night. Farag turned to look at me.

“Something the matter,
Basileia?
Why are you stopping?”

So he’s calling me
Basileia
again, eh? Since Jerusalem, he’d only done that a couple of times—I’d kept track—but never in front of other people. So now it was clandestine, private, only for my ears. Just then my pulse meter beeped. I had gone over the recommended pulses. My running pace didn’t warrant it, my heart did.

“Are you okay?” babbled Farag, looking worried.

“I’m perfectly fine. I did my own calculations.” I stopped my charming contraption’s beeping. “At this pace, it’ll take me six or seven hours to get to Athens.”

“Are you sure?” he stammered, examining me.

“No, not completely; but once many years ago, I did a sixteenkilometer run and it took me four hours. That’s a simple rule of three.”

“But the terrain is different here. Don’t forget the mountains surrounding Marathon. Besides, the distance to Athens is more than twice sixteen kilometers.”

I redid my calculations and didn’t feel as sure as before. I vaguely recalled I was half dead when I finished that run, so the outlook wasn’t very good. I wished with all my heart that Farag would take off running and get far away from me. But apparently he had no intention of leaving me alone that night.

For the past week, I had desperately forced myself to concentrate on what we were doing and forget those crazy, unsettling feelings that wouldn’t leave me alone. Visiting Jerusalem and seeing Pierantonio had helped a lot. However, I noticed that those feelings that I was constantly trying to hold back made me feel terribly bitter and sapped my strength. What started out in Ravenna as a joyful emotion was now affecting the way I reacted to the world. One can fight back an illness or one’s destiny, but how was I supposed to fight back the feeling that was pushing me toward that fascinating man? There I was, my obedience to God growing more fragile with each stride I took on the race to Marathon.

Although the blue line was drawn on the asphalt highway, we prudently traveled on the wide tree-covered sidewalk. Soon the sidewalk ended and we had to run on the highway’s shoulder. Fortunately, the number of cars passing us decreased. We were running on the right side of the road, in the same direction as the cars driving up behind us, which we shouldn’t have done. But the only real danger, if you can call it that, was the dark. Here and there, lights were still on at a bar or on a highway near a town or at a little house on the outskirts, but soon they also began to dwindle. Maybe it was a good idea that Farag didn’t leave me.

When we came to the next city, Pandeleimonas, we were engaged in an interesting conversation about the Byzantine emperors and the general lack of knowledge that existed in the West about the Roman Empire, which lasted in fact until the fifteenth century. My admiration and respect for Farag’s erudition was growing. After a long, gentle ascent, we ran through Nea Makri and Zoumberi immersed in our chat. Time and kilometers were passing without our noticing. I’d never felt so happy; never had my mind been so open and alert, ready to leap at the least intellectual challenge. By the time we got to the sleepy town of Agios Andreas, three hours had gone by. Farag started to tell me about his work at the museum. The night was so magical, so special, so beautiful, that I didn’t even feel the merciless cold of the dark Greek countryside. The poor light of the waning moon was no help. Still, I wasn’t worried or scared; I traveled along totally absorbed in Farag’s words. As he shined his flashlight on the ground in front of us, he talked passionately about the Gnostic texts written in Coptic found in the ancient Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt. He had worked on them for several years, locating the second-century Greek sources they were based on and comparing them, fragment by fragment, to other known writings by Coptic Gnostic writers.

We shared a great passion for our work, as well as a deep love for antiquity and its secrets. We felt called to unveil them, to describe what had been lost over the centuries out of abandonment or profit. He didn’t share certain nuances of my Catholic focus, and I didn’t agree with those postulates he professed on and on about a picturesque Gnostic origin of Christianity. True, nearly everything about the first three centuries of our religion is unknown, and those great gaps have been imaginatively filled with false documents or manipulated testimonies. Even the Gospel had been touched up during those first centuries. They’d been molded to the dominant currents in the nascent church, causing Jesus to commit terrible or absurd contradictions—contradictions that had often gone unnoticed. I couldn’t accept that everything needed to be brought to light, that the Vatican’s doors had to be open to any researcher who, like him, didn’t have the faith necessary to give the right sense to what he discovered. Farag called me a reactionary, a retrograde. He didn’t accuse me of usurping humanity’s patrimony, but he came close. Still he didn’t do it with acrimony. We laughed and laughed, we attacked each other from our respective ideological fortresses with a mixture of tenderness and affection that softened any steel bullet we might have fired at one another. The hours passed by unnoticed.

Mati, Limanaki, Rafina… We had just about reached Pikermi, the exact middle of the marathon. There was no more traffic on the narrow highway, and no sign of Captain Glauser-Röist. I was starting to feel a great fatigue in my legs and a light pain in my back and my glutes, and my feet were burning, but I refused to acknowledge it. During a forced stop, I discovered a couple of huge spots on my feet that had been rubbed raw and had become blisters sometime during the night.

We kept going: one hour, two hours. We didn’t realize we were running slower and slower. We had turned the night into a long stroll where time didn’t matter. We passed through Pikermi. We left Spata, Palini, Stavros, Paraskevi behind… The clock kept up its impassive march. We didn’t realize we weren’t going to reach Athens before dawn. We were giddy, drunk on words. We didn’t care about anything but our dialogue.

After Paraskevi the road curved slowly to the left, a curve that embraced a leafy forest of very tall pines and was precisely ten kilometers from Athens. Just then Farag’s pulse meter went off.

“Tired?” I asked him, worried. I could only see the outline of his face.

He didn’t answer.

“Farag?” I insisted. The little machine kept emitting its insufferable alarm. In the silence, it sounded like a fire alarm.

“I have to tell you something…,” he murmured mysteriously.

“Well, stop that racket and tell me.”

“I can’t…”

“What do you mean, you can’t? Just push the little orange button.”

“I mean…” He was stuttering. “What I mean is…”

I grabbed his wrist and stopped the alarm. Suddenly I realized something had changed. A hushed voice inside me warned me we were treading on dangerous ground. I didn’t want to know what he was going to say. I remained mute like a dead woman.

“What I have to say…”

His pulse meter went off again. This time he turned it off himself. “I can’t tell you because there are so many hurdles, so many obstacles…” I held my breath. “Help me, Ottavia.”

His voice didn’t register. I tried to stop him, but I choked up. Now
my
hateful pulse meter went off. We were a symphony of beeps.

“You know what I’m trying to tell you, right?”

My lips refused to open. I unhooked the pulse meter around my wrist and took it off. Otherwise it would have never stopped going off. Farag couldn’t stop laughing as he imitated me.

“Good idea,” he said. “I… You see,
Basileia,
this is very hard for me. In past relationships, I never had… Things went differently. But with you… God! This is complicated! Why can’t it be simple? You know what I’m trying to tell you,
Basileia!
Help me!”

“I can’t, Farag,” I replied, my matter-of-factness surprising even me.

“Okay, okay…”

He didn’t say anything else, and neither did I. Silence fell over us. We ran this way until we came to Holargos, a small town whose tall, modern buildings announced the approach of Athens.

I don’t think I’ve ever lived through a more bitter, difficult moment. God’s presence kept me from accepting the declaration Farag tried to make, but my incredibly strong feelings for such a marvelous man were tearing me up inside. The worst part wasn’t admitting I loved him. The worst part was that he loved me too. It would have been so easy! But I wasn’t free.

“Ottavia! It’s five fifteen!” His shout startled me.

For a moment I didn’t understand what he was saying. 5:15? So? Suddenly a light went on in my brain. 5:15! We couldn’t reach Athens before 6:00! We were at least four kilometers away!

“My God! What’re we going to do?”

“Run!”

He took me by the hand and pulled me like a madman. I stopped after just a few meters.

“I can’t, Farag!” I moaned, flopping down on the highway. “I’m too tired.”

“Listen to me, Ottavia. Get on your feet and run!” His tone of voice was commanding, not one bit compassionate or affectionate.

“My right foot really hurts. I must have injured a muscle. I can’t go on, Farag. You go. Run. I’ll get there later.”

He bent over and got down on my level. He grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me, and looked me straight in the eye.

“If you don’t get on your feet right now and start running to Athens, I’m going to tell you what I couldn’t say before. And if I do that”— he leaned gently toward me, so his lips were just a few millimeters from mine—”I’ll tell you in such a way you’ll never be a nun again for the rest of your life. You choose. If you make it to Athens with me, I won’t persist.”

I felt a horrible desire to cry, to hide my head against his chest and blot out the scary things he’d just said. He knew I loved him, so he gave me a choice between his love and my vocation. If I ran, I would lose him forever. If I stayed there, sprawled on the blacktop highway, he would kiss me and make me forget I had given my life to God. I felt the deepest anguish, the blackest pain. I’d have given anything not to have to make this decision, and wished I’d never met Farag. I took in so deep a breath that my lungs felt as though they were about to explode. I freed my shoulders from his hands with a light jerk, and making a superhuman effort—which took everything I had, and not because of the physical fatigue or the blisters on my feet—I collected myself, straightened my clothes with a decisive look on my face, and turned to him. He was still crouched down, an infinitely sad look on his face.

“Shall we go?”

He looked at me for a few seconds, without moving, without changing the look on his face. Then he stood up, a thin smile on his lips, and started to run.

“Let’s go.”

I don’t remember much of the towns we passed, except their names (Halandri and Papagou). I do know I kept an eye on my watch, trying not to feel the pain in my legs and the pain in my heart. Somewhere along the way, the cold dawn froze the tears that were streaming down my face. We entered Athens on Kifissias Road, at 5:50. If we kept running at that pace, we’d never finish the test. But that didn’t stop us, and neither did the sharp pain in my side which cut short my breath. I was drenched in sweat, and I thought I’d faint. It felt like I had knives jabbing my feet, but I kept running. If I didn’t, I’d have to face something I couldn’t deal with. More than running, I was fleeing—fleeing Farag. I’m sure he knew it. He stayed next to me when he could have run far ahead of me. But he never abandoned me. True to my habit of feeling guilty about everything, I felt responsible for his failure. That beautiful, unforgettable night was ending in nightmare.

I don’t know how long Vassilis Sofias Avenue is, exactly, but it seemed like an eternity. Cars were driving along as we ran in desperation, dodging telephone poles, streetlights, trashcans, trees, bulletin boards, and iron benches. The beautiful capital of the ancient world awoke to a new day that signaled the beginning of the end for us. Vassilis Sofias just wouldn’t end. My watch read 6:00 a.m. It was too late. I looked right and left, but I couldn’t see the sun anywhere. It was still as dark as an hour before. What was going on?