She gave a cry and covered her face with her hands. Simon hurriedly ordered her to waken, gave me a penetrating look and then asked, “You’re not practicing witchcraft yourself, are you? With your lion protecting you so jealously? Don’t worry. You need have no more bad dreams if only you remember to call on your lion in the dream. Was what you have heard what you wished to hear?”
“The main thing I heard,” I admitted. “And that was a pleasure to me, whether it was the truth or not. But I shall certainly remember you and your daughter if I ever find myself mounted on a black stallion in a shouting crowd.”
Simon the magician now turned to Aunt Laelia and spoke her name. “Now it’s time for you to rise from the spring,” he commantled. “Let your friend pinch your arm as a sign. It won’t hurt, only sting a little. Wake up now.”
Aunt Laelia woke slowly from her trance and felt her left arm with the same rapturous look as before. I looked at her curiously and on her thin arm there really was a large bruise. Aunt Laelia rubbed it and trembled all over with pleasure so that I had to turn my eyes away. The priestess Helena smiled at me with her lips appealingly half-open. But I did not want to look at her either. I was confused and felt prickly all over. So I said farewell to them, but I had to hold Aunt Laelia’s arm and lead her out of the magician’s room, she was in such a dazed state.
In the shop, the priestess picked up a small black stone egg and handed it to me.
“Take this as a present from me,” she said. “May it protect your dreams when the moon is full.”
I was seized with the greatest reluctance to take anything from her. “I’ll buy it,” I said. “How much do you want?”
“Just a strand of your hair,” said the priestess Helena, stretching out her hand to pull a hair from my head. But Aunt Laelia intervened and whispered that it would be better if I gave the woman money.
I had no small coins so I handed her a gold piece, and perhaps she had earned it with her fortunetelling. She accepted the coin indifferently.
“You set a high price on your strands of hair,” she said scornfully. “But perhaps you are right. The goddess knows.”
I found Barbus in front of the temple, doing his best to hide the fact that he had this opportunity to take a drink or two of wine so that he staggered unsteadily along behind us. Aunt Laelia was in a gay mood and she stroked the bruise on her arm.
49
“Simon the magician was more gracious to me than he has been for a long time,” she explained, “I feel enlivened and refreshed in every way and haven’t a single ache in my body. But it was a good thing you didn’t give a strand of hair In his shameless daughter. With its help she could have visited your bed in n dream.”
She put her hand to her mouth in fright and glanced at me.
“You’re already a big boy,” she said. “Your father must have explained these things to you. I’m certain Simon the magician sometimes bewitches a man to sleep with his daughter. Then that man falls completely in their power, even though he in exchange has received success of another kind. I should have warned you beforehand, but I didn’t think about it as you are still a minor. I didn’t realize until she asked you for a strand of your hair.”
After the meeting with Simon the magician, my bad dreams did not occur again. When a nightmare tried to take possession of me, I remembered Simon the magician’s advice in the dream and called upon my lion. At once it came, lay down protectively beside me and was in every way so living and real that I could stroke its mane with my hand even if, when I woke up from my light sleep, I noticed I had been stroking a fold in my covers.
I was so pleased with the lion that once or twice I called on it just as I was falling asleep. Even out in the city, I could imagine the lion walking along behind me and protecting me.
A few days after the visit to Simon the magician, I remembered my father’s request and went to the library below Palatine. I asked the crusty old librarian for the history of the Etruscans by Emperor Claudius. He was contemptuous at first because of my youthful attire, but I was already tired of the superior attitude of the Romans, and I snapped at him that I was thinking of writing to the Emperor himself to complain about not being allowed to read his works at the library. So he hurriedly called on a blue-clad slave who took me to a room in which there was a large statue of Claudius, and showed me the right section.
I was left looking at the Emperor’s statue in amazement, for Claudius had had himself represented as Apollo, and the sculptor had in no way beautified his thin limbs and drunkard’s face, so the statue looked more absurd than imposing. At least the Emperor was not vain, allowing a statue of himself such as this to be erected in a public library.
50
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