It was only then that I set up the siege machinery, the catapults, the ranks of archers and slingers, the mountains of darts, and javelins on the parapets.
Then the nephew of King Masinissa, Jugurtha, joined us, bringing that obsessive African contribution: ten elephants. I thanked him for the gesture, but I was afraid of a repetition of the disaster that befell Hasdrubal in his battle against my grandfather, the first Scipio. I invented other places, also hypothetical ones, to which he could take his pachyderms to put some fear into the Spanish people, who were potentially rebellious. For Jugurtha and his elephants, I invented thickets, slag heaps, fields enclosed by wire, all in the land of Arecans, Carpethians, and Pelendons. I think he’s still looking for them. They say elephants never forget, but first they have to remember something. Lost in Spain, Jugurtha’s nine elephants must still be wandering around, gigantic nomads in search of invisible fortresses and fields of mirage. So that I wouldn’t seem discourteous, I kept one elephant for myself, to hold in reserve opposite Numantia.
(Perhaps it was because of that fantastic joke that Jugurtha went back to Africa in a fury and rebelled against Rome, trying to liberate his native Numidia from “Roman political corruption.” But that’s another story.)
For the moment, from the top of the parapet, surrounded by archers and slingers, with the elephants at my back and the Roman army deployed around the seven towers that surrounded Numantia, I felt satisfied. With me were Polybius the historian, the chroniclers, Lucilius the poet, the engineers and sappers, five hundred friends. I myself was dressed not as a Roman warrior and patrician but as an ordinary Iberian commander, with a woolen cloak — the sagum, a simple black cape — over my shoulders to express my grief about Rome’s previous disasters at Numantia. I also ordered the troops to wear black mantles. May our ignominy end here. We shall purge the mourning of our defeats.
Quickly, in the final moment of the preparations, all these signs came together in me, offering me a double vision of the world. What had I done here? Only in the minute before the start of the siege, in the meridian of my mind, did I realize what it was. Before my eyes sprawled Numantia, the unconquered city. Around Numantia, I had constructed a purely spatial double of Numantia, the reproduction of its perimeter, a new space that corresponded precisely to that of its model. Now I was seeing, in the duplicated area, the empty phantom of the city devoid of time. In this divided Numantia, which was the city’s soul, which its body?
My old anguish took control of me. Was the empty space the invisible spirit of Numantia? Was the verifiable city its material body? Or was it just the other way around? The real city a mirage, and only real, corporeal, the space invented to make room for another, identical city?
At that climactic moment, overwhelmed by my own thoughts, I tried to tear off my black tunic and offer my own naked body in sacrifice to Rome and Numantia, to the lost battles of the past and to the virtual battles, lost or won, of the future …
I closed my eyes to stop the duplication of Numantia, my creation, from becoming a permanent, insufferable, mortal division between the body and the soul of Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, the abandoned son and the adopted son, the man of action and the aesthete, apathetic during his youth and energetic in maturity: Scipio, I, the materialist who loved concrete things, and Scipio, also myself, who was the patron of the most spiritual intellectual circle in the republic … The lover of war. The husband of the word.
Why wasn’t I one single thing, happy or unhappy, but indivisible: cherished son, epicurean, and warrior; or stepson, stoic, and aesthete?
The knives hung in the river were cutting me cruelly, finely, while I realized that I’d come here not to besiege Numantia but to besiege myself; not to conquer Numantia but to duplicate it. I reproduced my own self; I lay siege to myself.
I cleared away the suffocation in my lungs, the blindness in my eyes, the choking in my throat, and the whir of prophetic birds smashing against my eardrums, as the eagles smashed against the mountains during the winter campaign of my grandfather Scipio. I also smelled the stench of all the corpses from all the wars. I imagined in that moment the destiny of Numantia and asked why I was being forced, at the end of this chapter in our history, to do all these things. I knew all the tricks of the Iberians; they knew all the tactics of the Romans. Neither side could surprise the other. Political gambits had been used up. I was left with no other arms than discipline — first — and death — second.
I already knew all that. I merely wanted to disguise destiny with beauty. Beauty would be the final surprise of an exhausted politics and an exhausted war. I arranged everything (now I realized it) so that above the blood and stone, above the soul and the body, would ultimately float an aura of beauty, despite death. The wood bristling with knives. The army dressed in mourning. Red flags by day. White fires by night. The dark feathers of dead eagles studding the snow. And Numantia duplicated. Numantia represented. Numantia become an epic poem, acting itself out thanks to the spaces and things that I one day put at the disposal of history.
How to transform representation into history and history into representation?
I see my own answer. Numantia empty represents Numantia inhabited. And vice versa. My two halves, body and soul, don’t know if they should separate forever or unite in a warm embrace of reconciliation. In anguish I seek a symbol which would allow me to join my two halves. The gust of time carries the exact moment far from me. I’ve had to fight against the fatal, exhausted history that preceded me. I’ve tried to turn my experience into destiny. The gods will not forgive me that. I’ve wanted to usurp their functions just as I usurp Numantia’s duplicated image.
I give the order to attack. I, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, also duplicated, representing myself thanks to the spaces and things I’ve placed at the disposal of history: I give the order to attack — that, at least, is implacable, undivided. Thus I disguise my own divided self.
* * *
THEY thought that if they left Numantia, if they came out to fight, they would never return. The women would be raped by the Romans, the children enslaved, and the houses destroyed by foreign hands. Hadn’t this same general burned great Carthage to the ground? Better to resist. Better to die. Let the siege triumph. They themselves will give the triumph to Scipio. Without them, without their resistance, the siege would be a stage: a charade against nothing. Thanks to them, Scipio Aemilianus will find his own destiny. He will be the conqueror of Numantia. They are the allies of Fortune: they direct it with their tears, their hunger, their death. They, the men of Numantia.
* * *
YOU know how this story ended, and I, Polybius, who was there, am telling it now, because I never wrote it down, out of respect for the suffering of my friend General Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus. I wrote the history of the Punic Wars and of Roman expansion in the Mediterranean. But I abstained from narrating what I saw in Numantia in the company of my disciple and friend, the young Scipio. I led posterity to believe I’d lost my papers. I am only giving an account of the young Scipio to exalt his virtues and our friendship: he was generous, honest, disciplined, and worthy of his ancestors.
I told nothing about Numantia because the truth is that once the city had been besieged and as the Numantines became more and more isolated because of the severity of the siege imposed by Scipio, we would only find out what happened within the walls when it was all over. However, I did take it upon myself to attempt to imagine what was happening in order to tell it, as fiction, to my friend, but also my disciple, General Scipio. If I hadn’t, I think he would have gone insane.