The Hole in the Wall

by Porphyry of Tyre, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The woman in Puteoli took two days to be delivered. Eustochius could not leave her. The child lay crosswise, and the midwife, who had brought half the grain factors of the harbour into the world, had sent for him at the second dawn with her hands held away from her body as if they belonged to someone else. He turned the child. He lost a great deal of sleep and some blood that was not his own, and on the third morning he had a living mother and a living son and a letter, four days old, that had been waiting at his lodging the whole time.

The letter was from the steward of the farm near Minturnae. It said what such letters say. The master is weaker. The master asks for you. It was written in a large hand by someone who did not often write, and the word asks had been gone over twice.

He hired a mule at the gate because the horses were all out on the road to Capua, and he went north by the coast road with his case of instruments strapped behind him and a loaf he forgot to eat. The road ran past Cumae and then through pine and marsh and then along the sea again, and the sea that afternoon was the colour of lead with the shine still on it. He reckoned the distance by the milestones. At a posting-house where he changed the mule a man asked him whether it was true that the old philosopher on the Zethus farm had the plague, and Eustochius said no, it was a disease of the throat, and the man said that was what they all said.

He reached the farm after dark on the following day. The track up from the road was soft with rain. He knew it the way one knows a street one has walked to work on: the oak with the split trunk, the shrine at the turn with its little clay Lares, the place where the ruts went deep and a cart had once lost a wheel. Zethus had owned this farm, and Zethus had been a physician, and an Arab by birth, and a friend; and when he died the farm had stayed in a sense his, though it was the old man who lived in it now, provisioned partly from its own fields and partly by carts from Castricius at Minturnae, six miles off. There was a lamp in the porch. Paccius the steward came out with another lamp and held it up into Eustochius's face as though to make sure it was a face.

"He is alive," Paccius said, before he was asked.

"Who is with him?"

Paccius looked at the ground. "We leave the food at the door, Doctor. He told us to."

That was true, and Eustochius knew it was true, and still he said nothing to Paccius while he washed his hands in the basin by the porch and took the case from the mule. It was not the slaves' fault. It was the old man's habit, which he would not give up, of greeting every friend with a kiss on the mouth. When the throat had begun to rot and the voice to go and the sores to open on his hands and feet, the friends who came up from Rome had found reasons to stay in Rome. One by one, with letters full of regret. Eustochius had read some of the letters aloud to him. The old man had listened with his eyes shut and then said, in what remained of his voice, They are right. I would not kiss me either.

The room was at the end of the colonnade, the warm side, where Zethus had kept his own study. It smelled of the sickroom: vinegar, wool fat, the sweet dirty smell of a wound under linen. One lamp. The bed against the far wall. Eustochius set his case down without noise, from long practice, and came to the bed.

The old man's eyes were open. They had been grey once, clear as rainwater; now there was a film across them, and Eustochius did not know how much he could see. The face was thin, the beard thin. The hands lay outside the blanket, bound in the linen Eustochius had shown Paccius how to change, and the linen had not been changed for two days.

"I am late," Eustochius said. "There was a woman in childbirth."

The lips moved. He bent down. The voice was not a voice any more, only breath shaped by a tongue, and he had to put his ear almost to the mouth to take it.

"I have been waiting a long time for you."

He did not know whether it was a reproach. He had learned, in the years he had known him, that it was often impossible to tell, and that the old man did not seem to care whether one could tell. He said, "Let me see the hands," and the old man let him.

---

There is a kind of attention a physician gives to the body of a patient he loves which is no different from the attention he gives to the body of a stranger. Eustochius had been proud of that once. He unwound the linen. He looked at the sores, which had spread, and at the fingers, which were cold, and at the nails. He felt for the pulse at the wrist and then at the neck, where it was easier to find. He counted. He listened to the breath and heard it catch and drag in the throat like a cart in a rut. He knew the shape of what was happening, and how long it would take, and he knew there was nothing in the case that would change either.

He changed the linen anyway, with clean strips from his own bag. The old man watched the ceiling. He had never liked to have his body looked at. He would not sit for a painter. Amelius had once smuggled a painter into the lectures, a man called Carterius, to study the face for days and then paint it from memory, and when the old man learned of it he said nothing, which was worse than if he had been angry. He would not tell anyone the day of his birth, because he did not want it kept. He would not name his parents or his city. He lived, Porphyry said once, as if he were ashamed to be in a body at all. Eustochius had been the one person whose business it was to look at that body without asking leave, and he had been grateful for it, and sometimes, in the night, ashamed of being grateful.

When the hands were bound again he put them back on the blanket. He sat on the stool by the bed and took out the wax tablet he kept for notes and did not write on it.

"Paccius will bring broth," he said. "You will take a little."

The old man moved his head on the pillow. It might have been no. It might have been only a movement.

Outside, the rain had started again. Eustochius could hear it on the colonnade roof and in the gutter, and somewhere beyond that, a long way off, the sea, or the wind in the pines, which in that country sound the same.

---

He had first come to Plotinus in Rome with a question, as they all did. Not a philosopher's question. He had been treating a patient, a senator's freedman with a wasting sickness who believed that his soul was being drawn out of him by a neighbour's curse, and who was dying faster for believing it. Eustochius had wanted to know whether there was any argument he could give the man that would make him stop. He had gone to the lectures because someone told him the teacher from Alexandria who lived in the house of Gemina spoke about the soul as though he had seen it.

He did not get an argument. He sat at the back for a month and understood perhaps a fifth of what was said. Then one afternoon, when the others had gone, he asked his question directly, and the old man looked at him a long while and said: Your patient does not need an argument. Is his bowel open? Does he sleep? Feed him, and keep the neighbour away from the door. And then, almost as an afterthought: You are a physician. Why are you asking a philosopher what a physician knows?

Eustochius had been offended for a week. Then the freedman lived.

He had heard the other story from Porphyry himself, the week before Porphyry sailed. Porphyry had come to Rome from Athens five years before, with Longinus's polish still on him. How the young Syrian, sharp, quarrelsome, the one who would not let a lecture end until his objections had been answered, had shut himself in his rooms one winter with the intention of dying, and told no one, and how the old man had come to the door unannounced and stood there and said: This is not reason. This is a black bile. Go away from Rome. Go somewhere with sun. And Porphyry had gone. To Sicily, to Lilybaeum, where there was a scholar called Probus he could talk to. It had been two years now. He wrote often. He was well.

Eustochius had thought at the time that it was a physician's diagnosis made by a man who was not a physician, and he had been jealous of it in a way he could not account for. He had seen Porphyry that winter. He had noticed nothing.

---

Paccius brought the broth and set it inside the door and went away again. Eustochius warmed it over the lamp in a little bronze cup and held a spoonful to the old man's mouth, and the old man took it, and some of it ran down into the beard, and Eustochius wiped it away with the corner of the linen. They did this four times. On the fifth the mouth stayed shut.

It was past the middle of the night. The lamp was low. Eustochius trimmed it and filled it from the jar, and when he turned back to the bed the old man's eyes were on him, and the lips were moving.

He bent down. He put his ear to the mouth.

What he heard was this, or nearly this: Try to bring back the god in— and then a word he could not take, a breath with a vowel in it, —to the divine in the All.

He stayed bent over. He waited for it to come again. He said, "In whom? Master. In whom?" and he heard how loud his own voice was in the room.

The breath went out, and came in, and went out.

It was then that the snake came. He saw it first as a movement on the floor at the edge of the lamplight, a dark length pouring itself out of the shadow by the door, and his body went cold before his mind had named it. It was a big one, as long as a man is tall, brown going to olive along the back, with a pale belly and a narrow head held just clear of the floor. It moved without hurry. It came along the wall, under the stool where he had been sitting, past his foot, so close he could have touched it, and went under the bed. He did not move. He heard it, a dry soft sound like a hand drawn across linen. Then it came out at the head of the bed, against the wall, and there was a place in the wall there, low down, where the plaster had fallen and the mortar behind it was gone, a hole the size of a fist. The snake put its head into the hole. It went in. The body followed, not quickly, the whole length of it drawing after the head into the wall until there was only the tail, and then not the tail.

When Eustochius looked back at the bed the old man was not breathing.

He felt for the pulse at the neck. He held the bronze cup, which was polished, to the mouth and looked for mist on it. He waited. He did these things in order. Then he closed the eyes, and laid the bound hands together on the blanket, and sat down on the stool, and did not do anything for a long time.

---

In the morning Paccius came, and stood in the doorway, and understood. He covered his head. Then he came in, which he had not done in a month, and looked at the body, and looked at the wall.

"There was a snake," Eustochius said. He did not know why he said it.

Paccius did not seem surprised. "The big brown one. He lives in the wall. He has been there since before Zethus. He takes the mice." He knelt, with some difficulty, because he was not young, and looked at the hole. "You saw him go in at the moment?"

"At the moment."

The steward stayed on his knees. He said, carefully, as though offering something he was not sure would be accepted: "My grandmother used to say that a man's genius goes out of him like that. In the shape of the house snake. That it goes back into the wall, into the house, and stays."

Eustochius did not answer. He knew the snake. Every physician knew it; there was one on the staff of the god of medicine in every temple of Asclepius from Epidaurus to the island in the Tiber, and the priests kept them in the precinct and let them crawl over the sick. It was the commonest snake in Campania. It came into houses in the autumn because houses were warm, and it went into walls because walls had holes, and it ate mice. He had seen one in a granary in Puteoli longer than the granary door was high. There was nothing in what he had seen that a sensible man could not account for.

And he remembered that the old man had a daimon. Everyone in the school knew the story: how an Egyptian priest had offered once, in the temple of Isis in Rome, to call up the old man's attendant spirit so that he might see it, and how what came, when it was called, was not a daimon at all but a god, and the priest had cried out that Plotinus was blessed, and then the birds the priest's friend was holding to guard against harm had died in his hands, from jealousy or fear, and no one could question the god. Eustochius had heard that story told a dozen times and had believed it about as far as he believed most stories told after dinner.

"Shall I stop up the hole, Doctor?" Paccius said.

"No," said Eustochius. "Leave it."

---

There was a great deal to do, and he did it. He washed the body, which he had always had leave to do and which no one now could refuse him. He sent a boy to Minturnae, to Castricius's agent, and a letter by the next ship from Puteoli to Castricius in Rome, and he wrote to Amelius in Apamea, though it would be months before Amelius had it. He arranged with Paccius for the burning, and paid for the wood out of his own purse, and argued with the agent from Minturnae, when he came, about the cost of the oil. It was the end of the second year of the emperor Claudius. The old man had been sixty-six years old. Eustochius knew that because Plotinus had told him once, in a fever, when he was not guarding himself: not the day, but the year.

On the fourth night, when the ashes were gathered and the agent had gone back to Minturnae and the house was quiet, he sat down in Zethus's study at Zethus's table to write to Porphyry.

Porphyry had asked him, in his last letter, to set down everything. Everything, underlined. Porphyry wanted to write the life one day, and to order the treatises, which were in a chaos of rolls and notebooks in Rome, into some kind of sense; he had said so for years. You will be with him at the end and I will not. Write it down while it is fresh. Do not improve it. I will know if you have improved it.

Eustochius smoothed the wax of a large tablet with the flat end of the stylus and began. He was a careful writer, slow, a physician's hand, used to case notes. He wrote down the woman in Puteoli and the mule and the road. He wrote down the state of the hands. He wrote that the friends had stayed away and why, and then he scraped out the why, because Porphyry knew why, and it was not a thing to put in a book about a man. He wrote down the broth. He wrote down the first words: I have been waiting a long time for you. He read that line twice and left it as it was.

Then the last words. He wrote: Try to bring back the god in us to the divine in the All.

He stopped. He had not heard us. He had heard a breath with a vowel in it. It might have been us. It might have been you, said to him, a last instruction to a pupil who had come too late for the lesson. It might have been me, the old man speaking to himself, about his own work, which was nearly done. He sat with the stylus in his hand and found that he wanted very much for it to be you. He found that he could make himself remember it as you. He could feel the memory begin to move in that direction, quite gently, like a patient turning in his sleep.

He turned the stylus round and smoothed out us.

He wrote instead, below, to Porphyry and not to the book: The voice was gone. I could not hear the word. It may have been "in us", it may have been "in you". I will not supply it. You were always the one who could leave a question standing. Leave this one, or answer it, as you think right; but you must know that I did not hear.

Then the snake. He wrote: As he was dying a snake crept under the bed on which he lay and slipped away into a hole in the wall, and he breathed his last. He added: Paccius the steward says it is the house snake and lives in the wall. He says his grandmother held that a man's genius leaves him in that shape. It was a large snake of the brown kind that the priests keep at the temples of Asclepius. He read that over. It was all true. It was also, he saw, an argument; he had set the steward's grandmother in one pan of the scale and the god of physicians in the other and left them to weigh each other down, and any reader would feel his thumb on the beam.

He smoothed it out, all of it, back to the first sentence. A snake crept under the bed on which he lay and slipped away into a hole in the wall, and he breathed his last. That was what he had seen. He left it there, with nothing after it.

He sealed the tablet in its case, and tied it, and pressed his ring into the wax of the knot. The ship for Sicily would leave Puteoli in three days. He would take it down himself.

Before he lay down he took the lamp and went along the colonnade to the room at the end, which was empty now and smelled of vinegar and of the rain coming in. The bed had been stripped. He crouched by the head of it, where the wall met the floor, and held the lamp low. The hole was there, a dark ragged opening in the plaster, a fist wide, going back further than the light would go. Something in it might have been moving, or it might have been the flame. He stayed there until his knees ached, and then he got up and left the lamp burning on the floor beside it, and went to bed.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Porphyriō Tyriō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Porphyry of Tyre, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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