An Imaginary Life

Ovid wonders if he made some grave mistake in bringing the Child to Tomis. The Child lies in a hut all day, passively, doing nothing. He whimpers but never cries, which Ovid thinks would at least make him seem like the little boy he is. The Child seems to have no sense of self-awareness or shame. Even when Ovid has to wash him after he soils himself, the Child accepts everything with a “passivity” that Ovid finds disturbing, as if they have already killed his spirit.

The Child has toughened feet and a thin line of hair down his spine. Although Ovid does not find this unusual, the village women take it as a sign that the Child has a bestial spirit, and they refuse to come near him. Ryzak’s grandson, Lullo, spreads the rumor that the Child is covered in hair and has hooves. Ovid hoped that Lullo would take an interest in the Child, since they are nearly the same age, but Lullo seems to loathe him. Lullo fears, as the village women and shaman do, that the Child is a “sleepwalker,” a person whose spirit can leave his or her sleeping body to possess the body of another person.

Ovid spends hours sitting with the Child in the darkness of the hut, watching him. He seems to have none of the spirit he possessed in the wilderness, when Ovid felt they communicated without words. He is ugly, rather than beautiful as Ovid imagined the Child would be. Even so, Ovid feels a tender sympathy for for the boy and a need to “free him into some clearer body” and restore his human spirit. Ovid is not sure how to proceed. The first step ought to be showing the Child kindness, though the villagers have already ruined that approach. Ovid realizes that this task will fall only to him, since the women will not touch the Child and Lullo should be kept away from him.

Weeks pass. Ovid lives in the same room with the Child, and the Child grows accustomed to his presence. The boy eats less timidly. Ovid begins to feel some sense of connection between them again. Normally, when Ovid bathes the Child, the boy does not seem to recognize that it is his body being touched. One day, however, he places his fingertip on the back of Ovid’s hand, feeling its texture. He withdraws it quickly. Ovid finds the encounter almost unnerving, and wonders if the Child has any real awareness of the shape and form of his own body.

Within two weeks, Ovid senses an awakening intelligence in the Child. He starts to grow restless and watches curiously while Ovid writes on parchment. Ovid realizes that the Child experiments with his ink and parchment whenever he leaves the room, even trying to drink it. One day, Ovid steps out of the hut but watches from the doorway as the Child dips the stylus in the ink and scratches a line on the parchment, sticking his tongue out in concentration. The sight of such human striving brings tears to Ovid’s eyes—the “wild boy” is entering human tradition and society. Ovid leaves the Child untied from then on, sensing that he is now bound to the village and his fellow humans. Ovid leaves a colored ball for the Child to discover and possess as his own.

As Ovid reflects on how to help the Child, he finds himself reliving memories of his own childhood. As a “cynical metropolitan poet,” Ovid eliminated his childhood and his family’s rural farm from memory since they felt discordant with his adult identity. Now those images and sensations flood back, more vivid than ever. Ovid remembers playing with his brother and the slaves’ children, while the servants tend and bathe them. His mother is ill, so the nurses raise Ovid and his brother, caring for them and telling them stories about woodland spirits and demons. The memories bring new clarity and tenderness, and Ovid realizes that he wasted such a childhood by becoming a man of the city, while his brother “went another way, to death.”

Ovid thinks about the days before his brother died. When his brother is 18, he falls seriously ill. Ovid sits by his side for hours at a time, nursing him. His brother is pious and dutiful, and Ovid secretly respects and envies him for it. However, Ovid accepts his “role as the frivolous one” and teases his brother, rather than emulating him. One evening, since his brother is ill, Ovid must perform a religious ceremony in his brother’s place. In his heart, Ovid feels that if he even momentarily feels sincere about the ritual, then it will be a sign to the gods (that he claims not to believe in) that he is replacing his brother, and his brother will die.

Ovid goes out to the boundary stones of the farm, which for his brother mark the edges of the world, but for Ovid mark the beginning of it. He finds his father, who already completed his part of the ritual and gives Ovid a handful of ash and beanstalks to carry while leaping over heaps of straw. Ovid runs down the length of the field and, for only a moment, feels the joy of the ritual, of participating in the life of the farm. He realizes too late that he let belief take root in his mind—he killed his brother. Ovid feels guilty as he walks away from the field, back toward the house. He hears the mourning cries. Stooping to the ground, he covers himself in dirt, subconsciously “atoning for [the] moment of belief.”

Ovid reflects that one tries to hide from such moments for the rest of one’s life. He “killed something in [him]self on that night and tried to cover it with earth.” Ovid longs to speak to his father one last time, to tell him that he finally accepts where he came from. Ovid is “home.” Ovid wonders whether the Child will ever know who he should be since he doesn’t know where he came from. Or perhaps “not knowing make[s] him free.”

Each morning, Ovid takes the Child out to the marshy land near the river, where they will not run into anyone else from the village. The boy carries the colored ball, his single possession, with him everywhere. Ovid tries to teach the Child how to speak, and in return the Child teaches him how to call out animal sounds. The Child can produce them so accurately that Ovid thinks he sees him transformed though the language, as if the Child briefly becomes “the creature itself.” Ovid sees that the Child produces the noises by contorting his face to imitate the shape of the animal, which helps him to understand how they make their call.

To teach the Child human sounds, Ovid puts the Child’s fingers against his own throat to feel the vibrations that human words make. Soon, the Child can imitate the vibrations himself. Ovid feels that when the Child makes a bird’s call, he is not simply mimicking but “being the bird.” Thus, by teaching the Child human sounds, Ovid hopes that he will become a man. “Speech is the essential,” Ovid believes. As the Child learns to make the vibrations that form words, he discovers his throat. As he learns to use his nostrils to make intonations, he discovers his nose. The boy discovers the features of his own face and then compares them to Ovid’s face, confirming for himself that they share their human likeness.

Ovid teaches the Child to throw and catch the colored ball. The Child learns to smile on his own. As they walk, the Child uses hand signals to teach Ovid about all the different footprints and plants and insects in the forest. Ovid sees that this is the Child’s world, his “library” of knowledge stored over years in the same way that Ovid stores poems, philosophy, and laws. The Child leads Ovid into his natural world and his mind, but Ovid does not know how he will lead the Child into his own theoretical world.

Ovid decides he will teach the Child the language of Tomis, rather than Latin. In doing so, he knows he is deciding never to return to Rome. He will continue to write letters of petition to his attorney, asking for his exile to be absolved, but only because this is what society expects of him as an exile. Even if the Empire pardons him, he will not return. Ovid feels as if this life, in the wilderness beyond Roman society, is his true life, the one for which his childhood destined him. This is the life he tried to hide from with all his constructed identities and accomplishments. He belongs here.

Ovid does not precisely know when his personal transformation began. The more he works with the Child, the more his own childhood appears to him, clearer than a memory, as if he is reliving it. Ovid realizes that the Child teaches him as much as he teaches the Child. They are moving in opposite directions along the same course. The Child envisions himself as the landscape and animals around him, struggling to maintain an idea of his individual self. Ovid is only an individual, and struggles to abandon his sense of self like the Child does. When it rains, Ovid tries to imitate the Child and think, “I am raining,” but his fear of losing his sense of self makes him panic. Ovid keeps trying, considering it his “final metamorphosis.” He wants to “let the universe in.”

As Ovid teaches the Child to form human words, the Child teaches Ovid to make bird sounds. Ovid thinks the Child is the better teacher. Sometimes the boy catches a bird and gives it to Ovid to hold in his hands, to feel, to imagine that he is the bird itself and share its being. Ovid closes his eyes, imagines growing a beak and wings, and makes small “piping” sounds. He thinks back to the days when he wished to know the language of the spiders and believes he is now getting close to it. The “true language” is that silence with which Ovid communicated with the Child in the forest, and during his own childhood. He no longer feels exiled from Rome, but from the universe itself and its universal language. Latin divides and distinguishes, but the Child’s language reconciles and unifies all things together.

The air grows colder as the seasons change. The Child still prefers to be naked in the marsh, but seems to slow, as if he will soon hibernate like all the other animals in the woods. The villagers fortify Tomis for the winter, since soon the barbarians will ride across the frozen river and attack once again. Children bring the animals into the stockades. Soon, everyone will be huddled together in their winter huts. Ovid worries about the effect this will have on the Child, since they will have to share a room with the rest of Ryzak’s family. All year, Ovid and the Child have kept to themselves as much as possible, living in a ground-floor room.

Ovid shares his concern with Ryzak, but Ryzak assures him that the women will leave the Child alone. Ovid fears he is wrong, and suspects Ryzak wields less real authority than he pretends to. As a man, Ryzak embodies the law, but his mother embodies the dark spirits of the forest and the moonlight. There is a sense of power about her and the other older women that even Ryzak seems to fear.

Ryzak’s mother, “the old woman,” remains antagonistic toward Ovid and the Child, though she will not practice witchcraft directly against them. Lullo, too, resents not only the Child, but Ovid, since Lullo is no longer the center of Ovid’s attention. Lullo’s mother—who is a foreigner, and whose husband, Ryzak’s son, is dead—fears the old woman as well, and so loosely allies herself with Ovid. In the close confines of winter, tensions within the household run high.

The air feels still. The Child is restless all day, unable to focus, as if his something just beyond perception requires his attention. Ovid recognizes that the boy is often sensitive to changes in the weather. It will snow today, after three weeks of expectant waiting.

Ovid wakes in the night and realizes that the Child is not in the hut with them. He finds the Child outside, standing under the falling snow, naked, letting it fall on his skin and rubbing it against his body, almost trance-like. When the Child notices Ovid, he whoops and shouts and frolics in the snow, bringing some to show Ovid. Ovid realizes that even naked in the cold, the Child’s body radiates heat. Ovid tries to bring the Child inside, but the boy begins howling like he did on the day the hunters captured him in the birchwoods.

When Ovid insists that the Child come inside, the boy lashes out and runs to the village walls, screaming and scratching at the wood as if he wants to climb it. He scratches at his own face. Ovid and Ryzak look on, saddened, while Lullo shakes with fear. Ovid feels heavy with guilt and a sense of the separation between him and the Child, since he cannot understand what it is that the Child is grieving. Eventually, the Child exhausts himself and lays on the ground, sobbing. Ovid carries him inside and sits next to him until the Child cries himself to sleep. In the morning, the Child never completely awakens and doesn’t seem to remember the night’s events.