(excerpt)
Now listen here, my Cypriot lads! Quit your nagging, I’m serious, I’ve just about had it! Leave me be for once. I’d like to spend my evening marveling at the sunset in peace and quiet. I am tired. I was out fishing all morning, then brought fish, clams, crabs, and octopus over to Pydeus’ wife. Her children starve while her dear husband spends all day lazing about in the orange grove. I even had to drain my garum amphorae. I’m spent, I’m done! I’m only waiting for Ambrosius here to set those three-pronged skewers of his over the glowing coals. I want dinner. A spot of lamb and coriander would go down well. And a touch of wine. Perhaps a game or two of tavli. I’ve no mind to run my piehole till the sun comes up.
Not settling down, eh?
Want to keep sucking at my blood, eh?
What’s that? You’ll keep my wine goblet full until I’ve reached the end of my tale?
Such an offer does warrant consideration…
Very well, I won’t turn down a flagon of good wine in exchange for my story.
Which vintage indeed.
Let’s have the Icarian. What else? Only that. And take care, I’ll bloody well notice if you try to poison me with some foreign swill. You’re a scheming lot, you are, but I didn’t spring from the earth just yesterday! Everyone knows it was you all who taught the Greeks how to make wine and perfume. Then the Greeks taught the Romans, the Romans the Gauls, and so on. We’ve a name for those who can’t make a proper wine: barbarians!
But when it comes to the nectar of the gods, you didn’t exactly pull the recipe out your asses yourselves. Dionysus himself shared the secret with Icarius, that Cypriot vigneron. Icarius once went to Athens. He brought with him some wine, here and there offering up draughts of the stuff. Those Athenians didn’t know you had to cut the wine with water, and they stumbled so deeply into their cups that they beat the Cypriot to death. They believed he’d poisoned them, you see.
They did not yet understand wine.
They were barbarians.
But the carousal came to an even uglier end, for Erigone, daughter of Icarius, went after her father, and when she found her dear dead papa, well, she wasted no time in stringing herself up. Dionysus threw quite a fit at this, and he sent a madness onto the virgins of Athens, making them hang themselves en masse. Eventually the Athenians killed their compatriots who had murdered the Cypriot farmer and organized a festival in Erigone’s honor. That settled everyone down.
So bring out the Icarian. That and none other. Why should I drink some adulterated vintage from far off lands when the finest wine in the all world is produced right here?
Life’s too short for dwarves to drink shit wine.
Speaking of, I’m not sure why you’re shitting yourselves over this of all things. If I’ve told the story once, I’ve told it a thousand times. And just last week, if memory serves. Ambrosius, how many times have you heard it already? You’re always here, considering it’s your tavern!
And aren’t you bored of it?
Admit it, you’re sick to death of hearing the tale of my life!
Go on, let Leon blow away on his aulos instead. The songs he knows, it’s as if he’d come straight down from Olympus itself, despite being naught but a simple herdsman.
You don’t want music? What a sorry sodden mob! Do your brutish souls not thirst for culture? No? Very well, you tone deaf tosspots. If you want to hear it so badly, and you finally bring me my wine, perhaps I’ll tell it again.
“We have time, and we have milk. Why not suckle on both!” say the Huns.
A balmy wind stirred the searing sands when I was born. Not that I remember it. I don’t remember a fucking thing. Really, who remembers their own birth? No one. But we’re all wont to tell of it. We always start the same way: “The snow was gently drifting in Hibernia when I was born.” Or: “My mother was sailing down the silt-colored Nile when, unexpectedly and before my time, I was born.” Maybe: “Mom was on her way to Rome, the Eternal City, when on the side of the road, not much past Dorian Ancona, I popped out from between her legs into a good-sized haystack.” And so on…
So.
A balmy wind stirred the searing sands when I was born. I don’t remember it, but so it was. You can bet on that. And a safe bet it would be, considering that balmy fucking wind is always stirring the searing fucking sand where I was born. Believe you me. Stirring and stirring. Constantly. Your eyes and mouth? Filled with sand. Constantly. The sand eats into your very skin.
Your hair.
Your clothes.
Between your toes.
In the parts where I was born, they believe man is made of sand, and to sand we all return. They believe every grain of sand is the soul of a man’s former life. If that’s true, then the souls of my mother and father are also out there somewhere, stirring in the desert sands. A tiny grain of African sand apiece. Blown and stirred about by the balmy wind. Or the searing wind. And there’s nothing they can do about it.
I myself believe differently, but that’s neither here nor there.
As far as who my parents were, for a long time I could only guess.
I thought my mother might have been some whore from the outskirts of the city who’d been paid handsomely by a traveling merchant. But it’s also not impossible that she was some Berber floozy who lay with a shit-faced Roman. What might my mother have been before she took up as a whore? A princess, a servant, a hawker? Maybe she was the daughter of a king, forced into exile, with no choice but to present herself at the first brothel she saw. Such were the imaginings of my childhood, at least. And what of my father? Soldier, emperor, pimp, slave?
Who knows? Does it even matter? I’ve asked myself a hundred times and then some.
What is absolutely certain, however, is that my birth was just like that of any other man. Be he beggar or prince, when he comes out, it is amidst fucking agony. My mother, when she birthed me, screamed like a stuck pig. She writhed from the pain. She tore at her hair. She bit her fists bloody. Then I poked out my bald little head, and I started screaming too.
I opened my eyes.
For the first time in my life, I looked around.
Then, none the wiser, I slipped out from my mother.
I’m not sure that was such a good idea. Perhaps I’d have done better to stay put inside, forever. Inside, in infinite silence and infinite dark. By the by, while we’re on the subject: women really are unbelievable creatures. The feminine soul cannot be comprehended. How can one love another who, from their very first moment, causes horrible, almost unbearable pain, as a child does to its mother?
And my mother loved me too. Of this I am certain. She cradled me and kissed me. She put me to her breast and nursed me. How could it have been otherwise? Everyone is loved by their mother for at least a moment, even a wretched dwarf such as myself. I was born a hunchback, you see. Hideous, repulsive even. But even I was loved by my mother. For a time. About ten minutes.
Then she flung me out the window.
Translated by Austin Wagner