Of late, things have been busy. Of course, on the Mount time gets distorted and it does not match up with everyone else's perception, but there's still been enough time to miss the few extra minutes here or there. And when I have had those moments, the computer is the last thing I seek.
The child has been occupying much of my time. Astrid is there occasionally, but she still goes out and judges if people are worthy to exist or not, and there have been more calls for that these past few months than I can recall at any point in the beginning.
I have started him on a writing regiment, the way I was taught. Yes, he speaks well, and in varied languages, but his writing remains like chicken scratch and even then, he much prefers to drop his writing implements and ask me why he needs to write when he could just tell me. The first time he did it, I did not have an answer I was willing to give him. I told him instead that sometimes there would be people he needed to tell something to that would have to be told at a later date when he was not around. Fortunately, he is not yet so adult that he said he would call the person on the cellular phone and leave a message, or pop down from Mt. O to make a house-call, so he accepted it and continued his exercises.
I just do not want him to be like me. Already he has proven that he is so much more than I ever was. He is the best thing in my life, my single accomplishment, and having him is the only thing I am proud of having done. I was never great a man with triumphs to my name, or feasts held in my honour. Indeed, I would argue that I was never a man at all. I served, and often more as a place to lay a crop or whip than something to be functional.
I was kept in a state of miserable ignorance, knowing that somewhere out in the world, there was more, so much more, but it was not for me. Those goddamn bastards didn't want us to be educated intelligent people, to contribute to... to anything. Not on insight to the human condition, not to the betterment of the society, not even to the golden fucking glory of Rome. I may as well have been an unshaped piece of wood for all they wanted of me. And they made fucking sure that we didn't know anything.
Perhaps they wanted to make damned sure that we didn't start thinking, perhaps form our own ideas, be able to carry out our thoughts. We had our own functional knowledge, yes, and it varied from household to household, slave to slave. There were slaves to work in the kitchen and they were phenomenally intelligent about their domains. They knew how to tell one herb from another, how old things were, where to get the best bread in the vicinty and it amazed me. Or the slaves who cleaned the villa, they knew every item in the household, its history, its value, where it was kept, how it was placed, how it needed to be cleaned. And the artisans, and the doctors, all slaves, and yet, what they knew!
And when I would have a cause to be outside of the walls of the villa, the slaves of some households looked like nobility themselves. They were kept fine and elegant. They dressed well, spoke well, their manners were exquisite and they held themselves with such confidence that even freemen and nobility could not help but be pleasant and polite. And the Dacians, with their fair hair and blue eyes, their perfect skin, made me hate myself even more. They were foreign, captives of battle and of defeated provinces, and they were beautiful. And unfailingly, these slaves looked down their long elegant noses at me, too.
Once, one of them spoke to me, while I was still young, and though scarred, not yet mangled. His introduction was nothing short of a command to get out of his way. I scrambled to remove myself from his path, both terrified and in awe. He was not particularly handsome, but his short white tunic had recently come from the fulleries (you could always tell when they were newly bleached) and he wore sandals. His hair was cut and clean, and there was no dirt under his fingernails. After seeing that, I don't think I ever had the desire to be free, since there were some slaves who were so well kept and respected and far better off than the freemen. I just wanted to be away, anywhere, so long as I no longer was forced to endure the abuse by people I wanted to love and who should have, if not loved me, at least have been decent to me.
I always thought it was my innate stupidity that made me as I was. At twenty-six, what do you really know when no one's ever given you a shred of their time save to determine that you're wearing the wrong expression or perhaps, for an eighth of a second, made unwarranted eyecontact?
My sole knowledge was that of an animal. I knew that if I was noticed, I was in trouble, and if I bared my teeth, I'd be in much deeper trouble. I knew when to cower, and I knew when I was hungry. I knew how to be afraid every second of my life, and the only thought I had, when I was too cold or not so worn out to sleep, was how to repay them all.
I thought of horrible ways how to kill them, how to prolong the agony, how to keep them alive so that they could beg me to let them die. Them, begging me for mercy. Anger was the only thing I had. That and despair. But I was too much of a coward at the time to do anything. I often thought about killing myself, but I always feared if I lived, they would torture me worse than ever.
And looking at my boy, I wonder how I could have ever fathered this beautiful wonderful child who stuns me with his intelligence and his insight. Would I have been like him had someone cared about me? Certainly, I would have been less ignorant if I had been taught, and more open to the world had anyone but taught me of trust, yet, even with the best treatment and the most support possible, I cannot imagine being anything as great as my child.
We all want something better for our children, pray that they turn out better than we did, succeed more, achieve more, be happy, healthy and proud of themselves. And I pray I've been a good father, have done the right things, loved him enough. In the end it is all just a craps-shoot, but I hope I've given him the ability to rise far above those that still hold a lingering disgust for me.
All this because I was illiterate.... imagine if I actually had something to say.
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