Two girls (let them both be that; nobody likes to be old), one in a sweater, one in a jacket, arms linked at the elbow, promenaded back and forth along the terraced way until a school of other shouting girls swept them up. They all ran down to the sea, where the cacti had legs like crossbreeds of spiders and artichokes. There was a shimmering wall of pines between cliff-stairs and the sea. They had never seen death and wanted to go dancing. That night their lovers would come on the ferry. They'd go with them hand in hand between tree-swellings and turquoise water and white cliffs to the tree-haired Arco Naturel, which has several shining sea-holes where some of them would make love; others would descend as far as the Grotta Matrimonia, that gigantic hollow in the earth like a drained boil; and as the boys they'd chosen gripped their breasts, they'd lie looking upward at the chalky ceiling studded with pale stones like jewels of baseness; perhaps for a moment they'd feel uneasy, almost remembering the cisterns of Masada where they'd hid while above them the ones they loved died praying and bleeding; they'd gasp in the boys' arms, then afterwards grow shy and run ahead up the trail into a steep thicket from which the narrow white crags burst up. All the girls met here every morning to dream of boys together amidst the leafy reaches of golden buds and lilies. The boys came running after them, pounding up the old Roman road. A gull rose and fell in the shade of the steep bay. The boys were searching, but they couldn't find them; the girls knew this secret place so well. They watched the boys coming from far down the treepacked cliff where grottos spat out ocean from their crusted lips; and they giggled. It was almost dawn. They almost didn't want the boys to find them. It was their last night together. Tomorrow morning they would leave this thicket of rosemary, emerging from their wall of white boulders bulging with cacti in whose crotches were birds' nests and balls of pine needles; and they would go down to the sea to get married. After that they would never meet again. Some would go with their husbands to live in Rome. Others would set up house in Napoli or Firenze or even far Catania. They'd never again gaze together at those rocks like icebergs in the dark sea, those ocean-stones whirl-kissed by eddies and fan-shaped waves. That is why, succumbing to the promptings of history, I now introduce to these pages the apostate Josephus Flavius, who was not a Zealot, and held out in a cave with many other men when the Romans came. The Jews in that cave had proposed to stab themselves, but Josephus convinced them it would be less of a sin if they killed each other. Better yet, he contrived to be at the end of the line. Ah, Josephus, how I love you, for you loved life! You were good to yourself; you despised that monstrosity called High Principle. When all but he and one other man were dead, he persuaded his companion to surrender at his side. What happened to Josephus's friend I don't know, but Josephus (who wrote our best extant account of the Jewish War, always glorifying himself and the Romans) was dragged before Vespasian in heavy chains. Because he prophesied with a sycophant's urgency that Vespasian would soon be Emperor, he kept his life and in due time even became rich and free. His first two wives had abandoned him. He married a nice girl in Rome and later left her for a Cretan belle… So I wonder: Would the two young women who hid from their fate have played the same game that Josephus did (excluding from their hearts, of course, his own reptilian selfishness)? I can almost hear them laughingly urging their sisters down the hill, gently coaxing and swaying them ahead, until they were the only two left; and then they slipped away to be virgins together forever. — No, I don't think so. — Now the heads of the boys rose above the heads of pine trees, gazing down from the crags. From the shade of a white crag, boys came running, bearing their sweethearts a glorious hellfire of blue flowers. They pulled their true loves away from the other girls, took them swimming in green water with reddish stones underneath, white gulls overhead like whitecaps. The girls whispered: I love you so. . — Why did they weep when they said it? Did they truly long to flee the empty sea-horizon, running back up the tree-frizzed slopes their bare feet knew so well, meeting other girls above the white cliffs? Now it was dawn, the low white wall of windows and arches at the water's edge cliffs not white yet, but purplish-gray, the other ferries white, whitest of all the hydrofoil's wake. The boys took them by the hand. The girls kissed their mothers and fathers goodbye forever. Their husbands had already bought them ferry tickets. And the island quickly became a lump of rocky cloud in the sky, stretching its coast off long and low until it fell off the edge of the world.
