At last the dove-gray dusk fell and the evening stars came out. I knocked hard on Damaris’ door, but no one came to open it. My disappointment was overwhelming as I thought she had changed her mind and broken her promise. Then I felt the door and noticed to my delight that it was not locked, so I went in and saw that the reception room was lit up.
But my nose met an unpleasant odor. The couch was covered with a ragged coverlet. The lamps had sooted the walls. The smell of stale incense was suffocating. I looked incomprehendingly around the formerly so beautiful room, but then banged impatiently on the gift tray. The sound rang through the whole house. A moment later, Damaris came into the room with her feet dragging, and I stared at her in horror. It was not the Damaris I knew.
She had smeared her lips stridently, her hair was tangled and untidy like a harbor girl’s, and she was dressed in a ragged gown which smelled of wine and vomit. Around her eyes she had drawn terrible black rings and with the same brush emphasized every line in her face, so that it was the face of a depraved, decrepit old crone.
“Here I am, Minutus. Your Damaris,” she said dully. “Here I am as you would have me. Take me then. Five copper pieces will be enough in payment.”
I understood what she meant. All the strength left my body and I fell to my knees in front of her, bowing my head to the floor and weeping over my impotent desire.
“Forgive me, Damaris, my dearest,” I said at last.
“You see then, Minutus,” she said in a gentler voice. “That was what you wanted to do to me. That was what you wanted to bring me down to. It is the same thing, whether it happens in a sweet-scented bed or among stinking pigs and urine with my back against the wall down at the harbor.” I wept my disappointment out of me with my head on her lap, no longer desiring her. She stroked my head consolingly and whispered tender words to me. Finally she left me, went away and washed her face, put on clean clothes and came back with her hair brushed. Her face was alight with such pleasure that I had to smile back with trembling lips. “Thank you, my dearest Minutus,” she said. “At the last moment you understood, although you had the power to trample me back down into my past. All my life I shall thank you for your goodness, for not taking away the happiness I had reached. One day you’ll understand that my happiness in Christ is more wonderful than any earthly happiness.”
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We sat hand in hand for a long time and talked like brother and sister, or more like mother and son. Carefully I tried to explain to her that perhaps only what we see with our eyes is real and everything else nothing else but illusive games of imagination. But Damaris just looked at me with her softly shining eyes.
“My mood alternates between deepest despondency and ecstatic happiness,” she said, “but in my best moments I come to a rejoicing which surpasses all earthly boundaries. That is my grace, my truth and my mercy. I need neither believe nor understand anything else.”
When I returned to the inn, still paralyzed by my disappointment, knowing neither what to believe nor what to hope for, I found one of the Pannonian soldiers from my escort waiting for me. He was dressed in a dirty cloak and had no sword. I could imagine how he had crept in terror past the innumerable idols and statues of Athens, super-stitiously terrified of the world-famous omniscience of the Athenians. When he saw me he at once fell to his knees.
“Forgive me for disobeying your express command, Tribune,” he cried. “But my friends and I cannot stand the life in the port any longer. Your horse is pining from sorrow and has thrown us every time we’ve tried to exercise it as you said. “We keep quarreling over the provisions money with the harbor garrison. But most of all it is the cursed Attics who rob us, so that we are like trussed sheep in their hands although we’re hardened to swindlers in Corinth. The worst one is a Sophist who has fleeced us to our bare bones by proving to each one of us quite convincingly that Achilles can never defeat a tortoise at running. We used to laugh at the conjurors in Corinth, who hid a gaudy bead under three wine mugs and let people guess which one of them it was under. But this terrible Attic is driving us mad, for who wouldn’t bet that Achilles could run faster than a tortoise? But he divides the distance in half, and then in half again, and so on and so on and proves that Achilles has always a little bit left to go and cannot get there before the tortoise. We ourselves tried racing against a tortoise and of course beat it easily, but we could not find fault with his evidence, although we hunted him out and laid bets with him again. Lord, in the name of all the Eagles of Rome, take us back to Corinth before we go out of our minds.”
His flood of complaints did not give me a chance to say a thing. When he had finished, I reprimantled him sternly for his conduct but did not attempt to solve the tortoise riddle for him, for I was not in a mood even to be capable of it. Finally I let him take my luggage on his back, setded my bill at the inn and left Athens without saying farewell to anyone, and in such a hurry that I forgot at the wash two tunics which I never saw again.
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