“Let me go,” he said.
“I’ll see you home. Here, Thasos, take his arm. Thasos, were you mad?”
“We should have stoned him.”
“Why?”
“He quarreled with Alcaeus—spat on him.”
P
Alcaeus leaned on me and I sensed his weariness as if it were mine: he was breathing hard and had to rest, stopping again and again. Behind us, his madman wandered, his Pamphilus.
“I’m too old for this kind of horseplay, it seems.”
Thasos and I were saddened by his tragic features; we frowned; minute wrinkles had enlarged and deepened; his hands trembled; his mouth was open. He seemed in the past, with his men, galled, waiting: What is memory for, I asked myself, to crucify? Shut off from the day, is this the best memory can do?
When I sat with him at home, I said: