Ecce Homo
Through a small opening in the antique curtains, a cleft with scalloped edges among the embroidered frills, she spied a scampering act of frolicsome murder.
She was a young woman, although most things about her were like the curtains, unrepentantly outmoded and obsolete. At the moment she became aware of the killing, for instance, she was sitting at the big dining room table, translating the Roman historian Dio Cassius after supper (“as one does,” she would have said with an attractive, self-effacing laugh, had there been anyone there to hear her). But her live-in girlfriend, Jodi, was upstairs in the bath, and besides, had heard all her attractive, self-effacing jokes many times. So it was just she and her fountain pen, the thick burgundy one, and one of her old-fashioned notebooks, the kind with black-and-white, marbled covers, and her Latin-English dictionary (which she almost never needed any more), and the Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius, books 71-80. It wasn’t only Dio Cassius that engaged her, of course. She had actually given over the better part of her 20s to gaining full command, in both Greek and Latin, of the classical, humanist tradition. And the event here related occurred quite recently, just last Tuesday, in fact, at a time when everyone goes around knowing (some celebrating) that humanity’s reign over the earth draws to a close. So you can see why much about her might indeed have been considered unrepentantly outmoded and obsolete.
She was nearing the end of book 72 in Dio Cassius, his chronicle of Ancient Rome, waiting on the line for which his book principally enjoys fame (“our history now descends from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust”), when she heard a disturbance in the yard. Her dog, a good, sweet, yellow girl called Sisi, was barking excitedly, and with an undertone of menace she had never heard from her before (Sisi was named for her favorite ruler, empress of a vast, absurd, polyglot realm in the heart of modernizing Europe, a quaint relic that had survived for decades past its rightful death, and some say poisoned the continent). In the weak light of the yard, she could see Sisi tautly circling the same small spot, batting at it with her paw, then instantly withdrawing it as though she had touched a hot burner, before rapidly striking out at the spot again. Alarmed at the uncustomary display, she pushed back her chair and hurried into the yard.
And it was then she discovered the murder. Sisi had somehow brought to ground, there in the middle of the grass, one of the rabbits that typically kept to the protective garland of bushes enclosing the yard. Although it wasn’t much of a rabbit, which was probably how Sisi — utterly unskilled — had managed to capture it. The rabbit, just a newborn, amounted to little more in the darkness than a few splayed scraps of blinking ligament … Sisi had probably charged its mother, who had dropped the baby in a panic-stricken flight to the hedge, and now Sisi ranged around it, with a trembling, instinctive excitement, batting at the quivering marvel on the grass … But it was a paltry thing; it looked like nothing so much as a blackened bit of banana peel; it didn’t know what it itself was (its parents had not initiated it into even the rudimentary self-knowledge of bunnies), nor did it know what the thing was that came to hurt it from the dark. It did know how to screech, however, and the young woman, still clutching Dio Cassius with one hand, tried desperately to restrain her dog with the other while cringing at the cries of the black banana peel.
Behind them was the house from which she had come running, the source of the faint light that illuminated the scene. It was crammed full of all the signs that she was good and wise. Before hitting the yard, the light passed over an old “Harris for President, 2024!” placard (“not as leftwing as I’d like, but what can you do?”), piles of carefully sorted plastic and glass (“I mean, I assume they actually recycle it, right?”), and a framed photo of her great-grandfather, in a worker’s militia during the Spanish Civil War (this one anointed with no phrase, just a proper, reverent silence). Even the light’s weakness attested to her goodness, since the house was stocked exclusively with low watt eco bulbs… And the books! So many books. Aside from Dio Cassius, there was Catullus (“that scamp!” she would say, and playfully wink), Xenophon’s Anabasis (“almost makes me want to travel … though I’m such a homebody”), and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (this one, also, anointed with no phrase, just proper, reverent silence).
And it was in the light of that house you could just make them all out. One creature, that thinks it knows what it is, trying vainly to restrain another, which may have a vague notion of itself, from murdering a third, which it does not know, and which does not know it, and which does not know itself at all, in a small square of attenuated light, made of good books and good intentions.