No one left Numantia anymore, except one brave man who one day dared to step onto that territory created by Scipio. A double, forbidden space is what it was, for the battle that never took place. On a foggy night, this Retrogenes, the bravest of the Numantines, crossed the prohibited space accompanied by twelve men and a folding ladder. They killed our guards and went off to ask for help from the other Iberian cities. None gave any. They were all afraid of Scipio. The eight hundred hands chopped off in Lutia were still not dust. The stumps of four hundred boys had still not healed. Retrogenes, punctilious in matters of honor, returned to give the news of his failure to Numantia. Of course he did not cross the imaginary perimeter of the city again. He was the only Numantine to die in the space of the invisible battle.
Later, a Numantine ambassador emerged to ask for peace.
“We have done nothing wrong,” he said to Scipio, “We are only fighting for the freedom of our homeland.”
Scipio demanded unconditional surrender: the Numantines would have to give up their city.
“That’s not peace; it’s humiliation,” responded the ambassador. “We will not give you the right to enter our city so you can destroy us and take our women.”
I say to the generaclass="underline" “The granaries must be empty. There is no bread, no flocks, not even food for animals. What will they eat?”
The siege of Numantia lasts eight months.
The first Numantines give up. They emerge from behind the walls like ghosts. For the first time, the only elephant Jugurtha left behind lifts his trunk and bellows horribly. But the dogs also bark, the horses whinny, and the ducks quack. They recognize other animals. Animals with long hair hanging to their waist, with skin eaten up by sickness. Many on all fours. Scipio refuses to fight with animals. He points to the sky: two eagles are locked in combat, turning martial circles. A fetid stench. Long fingernails clotted with excrement. Scipio chooses fifty Numantines to bring to his triumph in Rome. He sells the rest. He reduces the city to rubble.
“Great calamities,” I tell him, “are the foundation for great glory.”
“Shit,” he says.
* * *
WE, the women of Numantia, always knew our men were willing to die for us and our children. But we did not know exactly how willing we were to die for them. The siege lasted eight months. Soon our grain, meat, and wine were all used up. We began licking boiled leather, then eating it. From there, we went on to the bodies of those who’d died a natural death. We vomited: the sick flesh made us nauseous. We are afraid: when will we begin to eat the weakest among us? An old man gives us a lesson. He commits suicide in the main square so we can eat him without having to kill him. But his flesh is tough, stringy, useless. The children need milk. That’s the only thing we don’t lack: our breasts are prodigal. But if we women don’t eat, soon there will be no milk for the children. At night we listen to the creaking of our own bones, which are beginning to crumble from within, as if their burial ground were our own flesh. There are no mirrors in Numantia. But we see our faces in those of the others. They are corroded faces, devoured by cold and scurvy. As if time moved forward by devouring us, consuming bit by bit our gums, our teeth, our eyebrows, and our eyelids. Everything is falling away from us. What do we have left? A strange tree in the center of the plaza. A long time ago, a repentant traveler, Genoese to be precise, passed by here and made a big show of planting some seeds in the center of the main square. He said time was slow and that distances in the world we were living in were great. It was necessary to plant and to wait for the tree to grow and give its fruit in five years. He told us not to worry about the cold. The best thing that could happen to this tree was for it to go through a cold spell from time to time. It was a tree that slept during the winter. The cold doesn’t hurt it. It flowers and bears fruit in spring. Its annual growth ends in autumn and it goes back to sleep during the winter. What is its fruit like? Identical to the sun: the color of the sun, round as the sun … The memory of those words did not console us. This was the last winter before the tree, after five others had died, was to bear fruit. Would we last until spring? We had no way of knowing. Time, we women say, has become visible in Numantia. Its ravages are visible in our mangy skin, our calluses, and the mushrooms of our sexes. We uselessly scratch our anuses to find out if there remains a crust of excrement to eat. Snot, the sand in our eyes. Everything is useful. The earth does not abandon us. We are planted in it. Our eyes tell us our granaries are exhausted. Our noses have stopped smelling bread; they’ve forgotten it. Our hands no longer touch grass, our ears no longer hear the noise of cattle. And the tree planted by the Genoese will only bear its round, golden fruit next summer. But the soles of our feet tell us that the earth has not abandoned us. The world has, but the earth hasn’t. We Numantine women make a distinction between the world and the earth. We are eating the men who kill themselves for our sake, so we can eat them. The men who remain alive howl with grief: for the death of their brothers, for the horror of our hunger. We speak to them. When we do, we remember we have not lost language. Earth and language. They sustain us. The bodies we devour together with our children are earth and language transformed. The men don’t understand that. They are ready to die for us and our children, but they think we are all dying and that nothing will be left alive. We disagree. We see the world disappear but not the earth, not language. We, men and women, weep for the extinction of our city. But we celebrate the enduring life of a clay pot, a metal cup, a funeral mask. The metallic head of a sheep, a stone bulclass="underline" these are the only cattle left to us. Empty urns, barrels of dust: this is the bread and wine we leave behind. We women weep for the extinction of the city. We accept that the world dies. But we also hope that time will triumph over death thanks to wind, light, and the enduring seasons. We will not see the fruit of this tree. But the light, the seasons, and the wind will. The world dies. The earth undergoes transformations. Why? Because we say it does. Because we have not lost language. We bequeath it to the light, the wind, and the seasons. The world revealed us. The earth hid us. We return to the earth. We are disappearing from the world. We are returning to the earth. From there we shall come forth to haunt.
* * *
SHE saw the last men leave Numantia: mute, bearded, filthy. She saw the last horrified women, the last emaciated children. They gave up because they lost language. They forgot how to speak; they gave up. She, with her dead child in her arms, approached the sterile tree buried in the depth of winter. They awaited the promise of the fruit in vain. Damned tree, sterile fruit. She spreads her legs and screams with her child in her arms. She lets the fertile blood of her vagina, the fruit of her womb, the moist and red mass of her menstruation fall onto the sterile scrub.
* * *
YOU ask yourself if everything in the universe has an exact double. It’s possible. But now you know that even if it is true, it’s dangerous. As a young man, you walked through the stoa and the garden, the Academy and the Lyceum. But you always knew that through a crack in all those doors and windows in the Greek paideia our minds escape us when we are most certain we possess them. Your military life was as true and direct as an arrow. Your spiritual life proved to be tortuous and unforeseeable. Is there a god that synchronizes the two? Are the connections between the body and the mind only apparent — an illusion created by the gods to console us? Is reality only the sum total of physical events — I ride a horse, I attack a city, I love a woman? Are mental events only and always consequences of those material acts? Do we fool ourselves by thinking that it’s the other way around only because, occasionally, the mental state precedes the physical event for an instant, when in reality the physical event has already taken place?