Two
I met him a week after arriving in Palestine. After military training in Rome, my birthplace, and commanding troops in Gaul, I received a commission to serve in Judaea under Pilate, who’d replaced the puppet king, Archelaus, when he’d proved incompetent. My head swelled with the honor of it—living at Pilate’s palatial headquarters on the Mediterranean coast, parading through the rabble of Jerusalem to remind the Jews whose empire they belonged to, spending the day wrestling naked soldiers and training in the governor’s gymnasium. Besides quelling riots now and then and presiding over executions, all I had to do was bark orders and look good.
My hopes were crushed, however, as I and a fellow officer surveyed Jerusalem for the first time from horseback. Beggars squatted at the city gates, pissed out in the open. The marketplace stank with overripe fruit and animal dung. Urchins ran naked through the streets, and toothless hags scrubbed linens at the wells.
Rome was not without its own squalor, but I had been exposed to little of it. I’d been raised outside the city in a magnificent villa with gardens, vineyards, and a superb view of the Apennines. The city drew me only after dark, when I needed a whore, when the lurid faces I passed in the night only excited my wild, drunken desires. In Rome, colossal buildings of marble overshadowed the ghettos. Fountains in enormous squares, mansions on the Palatine, the Circus Maximus, the baths of Caracalla, aristocrats draped in purple—the splendors of the city made up for its unpleasant corners.
While Jerusalem—aside from the temple (a shack by Roman standards), Herod’s palace, and a few mansions—had nothing to offer but rank slums.
I got drunk every night the first week, depressed about being stationed in Judaea for three years. To hell with standards of Roman discipline, I thought. I needed an escape from that hole. After carousing one night after Pilate had left for councils in Rome, I shook off the clingy Egyptian whore who couldn’t get enough of me and rode to the hills overlooking the city. A cool wind blew. The sky already burned pink on the eastern horizon. I dismounted, threw a blanket on a smooth rock, and passed out.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was setting. I’d spent a whole day sleeping off my stupor, but my head still pounded. A voice rose over a ridge just above me, a voice as smooth and sensuous as a wooden flute, a young man’s voice. I scaled the rocks to peer over the ridge. A stark-naked boy, who seemed barely 20, cavorted on a bluff, throwing up his hands, swirling his head, all the while chanting an eerie Oriental tune. His eyes were closed and I watched him freely for several minutes before he stopped directly in front of me and gazed down at the ledge where I stood, without a hint of shame in his handsome face.
“What’s wrong, haven’t you ever seen one before?”
He’d caught me admiring his dark circumcised cock, thick as a rope used to hoist building stones. “Not like that,” I said. “You’re my first naked Jew.”
“It’s a sign of the covenant,” he said with pride, continuing to stand unabashedly in front of me with his arms crossed.
“Covenant?” His Latin was crude and I thought I’d misunderstood him.
“Yes, the covenant between us and our God.”
“Demanding son-of-a bitch, if you ask me.”
He sized me up as though he might kick me in the face, then laughed instead, his taut belly quivering. He laughed until he coughed and wiped tears from his almond-shaped eyes.
“Help me up, damn it. I’m tired of balancing on this ledge.”
Still smiling, he offered me his hand, and I scrambled up to the bluff. He handed me a skin of water, exactly what I needed after a night of liquor and a full day of sleeping in the sun. Then we hiked to a lower level, leading my thirsty horse to a pool of water that had collected in a cave. He seemed to know every niche of the mountain, stepping with confidence in his dusty sandals across gullies and jagged stones. Still naked. In the twilight shadows at the mouth of the cave, his sinewy form and his long, unkempt hair seemed to belong to a wild man who roamed the mountains.
“Are you one of the crazy Essene cave dwellers I’ve heard about?”
“What makes you ask?” He stroked the neck of my horse as it lapped the water.
“Don’t tell me all Jews prance around on mountaintops with their peeled cocks flopping.”
“No, just me.”
“And why is that?”
“I’m strange, they say. I’m drawn to the mountains, up above Jerusalem. You can laugh, but I sense God here, even more than in the temple.” He nodded in the direction of the city.
“Which god?”
“There’s only one.”
“Ah yes, a Jew idea. So you toss off your clothes when you feel the presence of your god?”
He smiled. “I go a little mad. Down there inside the temple walls, God seems confined. I know I feel confined.”
“Watch out, Jew boy, you’ll be stoned for heresy. I hear that’s part of your religious code.”
We secured my horse and climbed back to the summit where we’d met. It was too dark now to descend the mountain. We ate bread and lentils he’d brought in a pack, and stretched out on a homespun blanket to gaze at the lights in the city below. When the wind picked up, the boy slipped into his robe and lay close to me for warmth. He tantalized me more than any creature ever had, but I kept my hands to myself. Few, very few men could raise a sense of honor in me, but he—a Palestinian subject of the Empire, a Jew boy—managed somehow.
Over the next year, I became obsessed with him. We sailed on the Sea of Galilee, near his hometown, and hiked the rugged mountain terrain of Judaea. We feasted on roasted lamb, chugged his homemade wine until our vision blurred. Hot and drunk on the Mount of Olives, east of the city, we talked freely. He lampooned religious sects like the Pharisees and spun theories about the Elysian Fields, what he called the kingdom of Heaven.
In time he owned up to his heat for me—like I couldn’t see it in his eyes. It frightened him. But it wasn’t fear that kept him from grabbing my balls. He had religious qualms. He was destined to be some kind of eunuch for his god, a damned vestal of Palestine.
His power over me never relented. Not when I inspected with contempt the modest stone house of his family in a neighborhood of Nazarene artisans, not when I watched him join dirty swarms of Jews outside the temple, not when I nearly exploded in unrequited lust.
If he’d toyed with me, if he’d held me at bay to stir up my desire, I’d have taken him in an instant. But he didn’t tease. Nor did he fear me. He wanted me but wouldn’t succumb. And I wanted nothing less than his will.
Our last night together, I was horny as a satyr and thought, To hell with it, I’ve been a Stoic long enough—and when he feels my cock inside him he’ll forget his scruples. When he refused me, and cut me off, my rage knew no bounds.