Prevod

He was waiting for her at the landing as night fell, and when he caught sight in the distance of the boat, driven forward by the rowers’ strong arms, cutting a greenish wake of light through the phosphorescent sea, the blood surged into Fausto’s heart and his eyes grew dim.

She was coming—or rather, they were bringing her, handing her over to him; she would be in his power, the woman for whom he had so often lain awake all night, feverish, tasting bitterness, despairing and biting his fists with rage, or hoping against all reason.

Against all reason? Criminally would be nearer the truth. For the woman reclining in the bow, wrapped in white veils, lost in thought, Fausto had stooped to informing and spying like a freedman, casting a black stain upon the honour of his consular lineage. For her he had whispered into the Apostate Emperor’s ear the counsel that had proved fatal to the former prefect Flaviano; and on more than one evening, in the wavering light of the three-wicked bedchamber lamp, the shadows of the curtains had traced before Fausto’s terrified eyes the pale figure of an illustrious man, his forehead marked by the iron used to brand malefactors... But at that moment the musical splash of the oars banished remorse and anguish, and from the depths of the waters the voices of the sirens of happiness rose like a hymn...

Fausto hurried down to the quay and, taking the cedarwood stool from the slaves, set it beneath Dafrosa’s foot; but she leapt nimbly onto the pointed stones without resting her weight upon it. To the greeting, the “Ave!” that Fausto uttered in a trembling voice, she replied with a sad smile. They set off towards the villa, Fausto not daring to offer his arm for Dafrosa to lean upon. Yet the matron’s slight breathlessness suggested that such help would not have been amiss.

On the villa’s terrace, lit by torches fixed to the wall, a welcoming repast had been laid out: milk, fruit, fine white bread, boiled fish—the simple fare a Christian woman favoured. Fausto pointed this out to Dafrosa, who broke one of the loaves and raised a piece to her lips, first making the sign of the cross. Fausto and the woman he had so long desired were left alone. The stars twinkled in the deep-blue firmament, and the air wafted gusts of fragrance from crimson roses—roses the Emperor Juliano himself had brought from Alexandria to festoon the altar of Aphrodite, for their scent was believed to possess the power of a love potion to enthral the heart.

It was Dafrosa who broke the dangerous silence. “Fausto,” she said with quiet melancholy, “who would have told us that we should meet again like this? When I tearfully confessed that I could not forget you, could I have imagined that the Sacred Emperor would banish me to live with you?”

Fausto hesitated, uncertain whether to fall at the matron’s feet and clasp her knees or to make some reply—he knew not what. Then Dafrosa threw back the white veil surrounding the oval of her face, and by the torchlight Fausto saw, in astonishment, a face wasted by grief, dulled eyes, hollow cheeks; her hair, modestly bound with violet woollen ribbons, was no longer that golden mass, that halo of gold. Dafrosa’s hair had turned entirely grey: the grey of clouds, the grey of dry ashes heaped upon the hearth!

“You may look at me without fear, Fausto,” she added. “I am another woman. The Dafrosa you knew is no longer in this world. Once you have looked at me, you will return to your palace in Rome and leave me alone on this island, where I shall do penance. I have been justly punished for loving you, an involuntary love I could not tear out of myself, however hard I tried. They took my husband away to kill him by slow degrees, and me they scorned. I deserved it. Now those wicked men are handing me over to you, perhaps because they believe you are a danger. For Dafrosa there are no dangers left. Look at me as I am; take your time, look closely; examine me. Divine mercy has stripped me of all my beauty.”

Fausto stood motionless, filled with a strange feeling, unlike any that had ever stirred his complex soul, the soul of a Roman of the decadence, a friend of that refined philosopher, the Caesar Juliano. Not long before, in the imperial palace, before the restored altars of Hellenic Kaleos, the two friends had solemnized a pact, a kind of mysterious initiation into a secret cult, unlike the vulgar paganism that sated itself with sacrifices of oxen and calves, with impure ceremonies. This other religion, which Juliano preferred, replaced theogony and superstition with the worship of supreme beauty, of Form in its divine harmony, its sacred proportion, whose concord the intellect perceives beyond the senses. A statue of a woman, supremely perfect, flawless in its lines, the work of Phidias, rose above the altar in the middle of the little chapel, or cella, where the emperor performed the rite, pouring clear libations and burning Sabaean incense in a golden censer of exquisite Eastern workmanship. And the Apostate, taking his friend by the hand, made him prostrate himself there, murmuring: “This is the Goddess, this—and not the sorrowful Galilean, who has brought ugliness into the world.” And now, in Dafrosa’s presence—the woman he had so coveted when she belonged to Flaviano and lived secluded beside her household gods lest her eyes betray her thoughts—Fausto felt within himself an upheaval, an incomprehensible change. The longings, the delirium, the hunger to possess, the fever of passion so long endured, nourished by Beauty, which binds souls and does not release them until the grave, had vanished. The adored Form no longer existed, nor did anything that sprang from it. In the tranquil sea the singing sirens had fallen silent; in the deep-blue sky the stars no longer twinkled with love. The roses gave off not an atom of fragrance: the night dew was perhaps freezing their cups, pouring a chill serenity into them. The stubborn bonds of the flesh were breaking within Fausto; his blood, once fire, flowed through his veins transformed into light. And approaching Dafrosa, he took her hands and raised them to his forehead, murmuring with a sigh:

“Because you have lost your beauty, I love you more. You will think it cannot be true, and yesterday I would have thought so too; but believe me, I am not deceiving you.”

Dafrosa did not withdraw her hands. This simple contact inspired less horror in the Christians of those centuries than in those of our own, perhaps because in those days they were more chaste at heart. Dafrosa’s palms caressed Fausto’s bowed head, and, bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered:

“I believe you. What you tell me is natural. You too, Fausto, my brother, are a Christian.” The chronicle relates that Saint Fausto suffered martyrdom and that Saint Dafrosa recovered his body by night so that the dogs would not devour it, paying for this act of charity with her life.