trilogÍa pax machina
BOOK II: THE CHILDREN OF THE MERIT

Eduardo kwiatkowski

© 2026 eduardo kwiatkowski. all the derechos reserved.


COMPRAR EN AMAZON

can an empire survive its own success?
Roma no longer obeys the gods, but the gears. after the death of july césar, thePax machinait has been consolidated as an unrelenting order where the bloodline has been crushed by the weight of technical merit. but the perfect machinery begins to show its first cracks.
Vercorix, the gale that once was enemy and today is consul, faces a challenge that no legion can defeat: the inertia of a system that begins to devour its own children. while the germanic tribes beg to enter the empire attracted by the promise of a "less stupid" life, a clandestine network of corruption, theOf the seal, start selling access to power.
In the distant basements, an inventor rejected without a diploma,Kemethos, leads a "pirate" technical revolution that threatens the monopoly of knowledge of the atheneum. at the same time, in the dismay, a prophetic voice cries out for the soul that roma lost in her career towards progress.
"the children of merit"is the second delivery of the acclaimed trilogyPax machina. a historical technothriller where intelligence is the only currency of exchange, loyalty is a risk calculation and the memory of a destroyed civilization - carthage - is waiting in a wooden box to change the world's destiny.
The architect is gone. the machine is left alone. and the real trial just starts.

Table of contents
PARTE I — LA SUCESIÓN29–27 a.c.
Chapter 1 - the day after
Chapter 2 - candidates
Chapter 3 - gala in the forum
Chapter 4 - examinations
Chapter 5 - the campaign
Chapter 6 - the vote
Capítulo 7 — consul primus
Chapter 8 - the invisible crown

PART II - THE SYSTEM RUNNING27–23 a.c.
Chapter 9 - the first hundred days
Chapter 10 - the provinces connected
Chapter 11 - the first supplier
Chapter 12 - cleopatra medicine
Chapter 13 - the empty temple
Chapter 14 - antonium frame rest
Chapter 15 — octavio el admin
Chapter 16 - the second generation

PARTE III — EL IMÁN23–19 a.c.
Chapter 17 - the ambassadors of the north
Chapter 18 - what the germans saw
Chapter 19 - the annexation debate
Chapter 20 - the vote of expansion
Chapter 21 - the gala that governs germanies
Chapter 22 - the magnet model
Chapter 23 - inconvenient protection

PART IV - THE FIRST SHADOWS19–10 a.c.
Chapter 24 - rejection
Chapter 25 - the confraternity of the seal
Chapter 26 - the true gods emerge
Chapter 27 - the hispanic accident
Chapter 28 - the sine diplomate
Chapter 29 - pirate technology
Chapter 30 - the secret meeting
Chapter 31 - the consul's proposal
Chapter 32 - internal resistance
Chapter 33 — the ultimatum of kemethos
Chapter 34 - consul disease
Chapter 35 - the commitment
Chapter 36 - births observed
Chapter 37 - the death of the galo
Chapter 38 - the system only
GLOSSARY OF THE ATHENEUM



PARTE I — LA SUCESIÓN
29–27 a.c.
Chapter 1 -The day after
On the day he died of cesar, roma dawned without ceremony.
There were no trumpets at dawn. there were no priests going up to the capitol with the theatrical urgency of the days to enter the books. there were no preachers announcing official mourning or slaves hanging black fabrics in public buildings. the sun came out on the roofs with an almost offensive indecency, illuminating the dust of the streets, the wet facades, the early smoke of the ovens, as if the city had decided that the death of a man - even that man - did not justify altering the physics.
The prefects opened their offices at the usual time.
The bronze statue that the steam crane had raised three days earlier on the north end of the forum already had dust on its left shoulder. no one had cleaned it yet.
In the prefecture of the grain, two scribes discussed a late shipment of sicilia with the same professional irritation of the previous day. in the water office, a foreman reported a minor loss in a shale valve and requested replacement of parts before noon. in the back yard of the atheneum, behind the walls where the stone returned the noise like a closed box, the looms continued to turn with their mechanical breathing, dry, continuous, as if they had never heard the word death.
The system was not in mourning.
Octavio received the first report before sitting.
The secretary left it on the table with two hands and without raising his sight too much, as if he feared that any clumsy gesture could break something invisible. the room was the one that cesar had used for small meetings: sober walls, a long table, three main chairs, a map nailed in wood, and that rare silence of the rooms where someone important has just missed. it wasn't a man's absence yet. was the absence of a custom.
Octavio took the tablet, read it, stacked it to the left.
Water.
The second: distribution of bread in trastévere and subura.
The third: confirmation that the eligibility lists were still sealed in central file, intact.
The fourth: consultation of the school of pontiffs on the language suitable for public advertisements.
EACH ONE ASSIGNED A DIFFERENT PLACE ON THE TABLE, FORMING SMALL COLUMNS THAT ONLY HE SEEMED TO UNDERSTAND. HE DIDN'T RUSH. AND THAT WAS WHAT WAS MOST DISTURBING TO THE TWO ATTENDEES WHO WERE STANDING BY THE DOOR: THEY SAW NO URGENCY IN THEIR HANDS, BUT METHOD. OCTAVIO ORDERED AS ONE WHO IS NOT RESPONDING TO A CRISIS BUT PREVENTING ONE.
"sir," said the chief secretary, a chaste man who had learned to speak short near cesar and even shorter near his heir, "there is a formal consultation on mourning.
Octavio didn't raise his head.
- formal from who?
- pontiffs, senate and... some families of rank.
Octavio supported the tablet. his fingers were just a moment on the wax.
(ii) proponen?
- suspension of administrative activity for three days. closure of public schools and workshops until the funeral. duel formula in all advertis. some suggest..
The man doubted.
- say it.
- some suggest we start talking about divine signs.
Octavio looked up. it didn't take any more. the secretary swallowed saliva.
—no —dijo octavio.
The word came out clean, no volume, but it was the kind of no that didn't invite a replica.
- the administrative activity is maintained. classes are maintained. workshops don't stop. the funeral will be sober and public. and no formula is used to turn this into religion.
The secretary looked at the table, not out of disagreement but out of relief in the presence of a decision.
- not even one of official mourning?
Octavio supported both hands in the wood. he looked at them for an instant: clean, quiet, ready for the next tablet. they weren't the hands of a cess, they'd never be, but they were there.
"there is no way to decree the mourning of an idea," he said at last. "one man is buried. the other is verified.
The secretary nodded too fast.
Octavio went back to the tablets.
- i want a copy of that sentence for the media announcement without adorn. and add this: no public office closes without signed authorization. no prefect interprets the tone of the day on his own. if anyone wants to cry, let them cry. but not with the city water.
The second assistant, younger, with a view to having slept little and bad, dared:
- what about the atheneum, sir? the directors ask if..
"if they do not open today," he interrupted octavio, "tomorrow it will appear that he opened another city.
The boy looked down.
Octavio took another tablet. this one came from the file manager. he read it more carefully. the eligibility lists, prepared for the election that he had ordered before he died, followed where they should be: sealed, invented, double copies, two custody signatures.
That gave him a calm he wouldn't have been able to explain without sounding monstrous.
Not because cesar would have died.
Because the lists were still there.
He moved the tablet to the right column, that of things that, for the moment, still obeyed.
He then understood, with an almost unpleasant clarity, the difference between him and the dead.
Cesar built.
He kept it.
He didn't think of it as a critic, he didn't think of it as a modesty. It was a physical description of the world. cesar had been the man able to rip one city off one old axis and turn it over another. that required a violence of imagination that octavio did not have and might not envy. His was different. He did not open the way; he counted the steps so that the way would not be lost. Cesar had created an architecture. He was going to spend years preventing nervous hands from taking a brick to check if the building was real.
He took the next tablet.
Hospitals.
Then another.
Rumours of small groups in the mess, no incidents.
He left them in different columns, resolved one, marked the other for follow-up and was allowed, for the first time since dawn, to support the body against the back.
Outside, very far away, the repeated blow of a telar was heard. then again, three together, disagreed as different hearts forced to produce the same noise.
Octavio closed his eyes for a second.
I didn't pray. doing that would have seemed like a form of sentimentalism.
The city was still there.
That didn't comfort him.
He didn't offend him either.
He confirmed the job.
He took the last tablet. he solved it. he put it in the right column. for a moment, before he came in, he looked at the empty chair once again.
I'd thought eventually i'd stop seeing her.
That time had not yet come.
* * *
Antonian frame left without escort because it needed to know if the city still recognized it without metal around.
The decision irritated two centurions and left the third one without arguments. he sent them with a look. he had no ceremonial sword. just the well-girded robe, the layer on top and that big body that kept going into places like they were too small. had slept little, bad and in anger. not against anyone specific. against the kind of night one understands that a war can end without battle.
He went down to the forum with the sun still low.
I expected many things. i expected groups talking too high to be valued. i expected optimal smelling opportunity behind the solemnity. i was hoping to cry. i was hoping for opportunist vendors to put the profile of cesar on cheap tablets. i expected, above all, that tremor before the riot that cities teach before they broke.
He didn't find any of that.
He found bread.
Bread coming out of kilns. bread cutting with working knives. bread passing from hand to hand with that practical urgency of old hunger: not that of disaster, the usual. he found watchers arguing on the basis of his priority. he found a woman haggling fish. he found two masons repairing a minor rupture along with a drainage with the offended concentration of those who consider a more serious matter leak than history.
Antonium kept walking.
Normal, he thought, was much more insolent than crying.
On the edge of the forum, a group of veterans saw him coming and he just straightened out. no formal greeting. i wasn't there. one of them, man, with a twisted scar on his cheek, raised his head.
- commander.
Antonio grunted something that served as an answer.
"is there anything new?" asked the old man.
Antonium looked around. the square was filling with people who still didn't know whether to look to the ground, the capitol or the offices.
"that's what i came to see," he said.
The veteran followed his look.
- doesn't look like it's gonna burn.
—no.
- that's good.
Antonio took a second to answer.
- i don't know.
The man didn't smile. the old soldiers soon learned that the order sometimes has a strange taste.
Continued ahead. he passed by a short row in front of a registration table where two scribes reviewed eligibility stamps. it wasn't voting day yet, but there were already people confirming data, asking procedures, correcting father, tribe, home names. antonium stopped unintentionally. he looked at the movement of the tablets, the ink, the tiled tails.
A boy of no more than twenty years, with his hands stained with lime, asked the scribe:
- if i can't read the whole decree, can i bring my brother and explain it to me?
"you can bring it," said the scribe. but the certification is yours, not your brother's.
- then i'll be back tomorrow.
- i'm back tomorrow.
The boy nodded, as he who received instructions for a work, not for a political act, and left.
Antonium felt something like tiredness, but deeper. cesar had achieved an elegant monstrosity: turning obedience into routine.
He crossed the forum and took a few steps to the public buildings area. a door opened. a prefect came out with two tablets under his arm, saw him, became rigid and almost stumbled on the threshold.
- sir.
"i followed," said anton.
The man went on.
That was new, too. in another roma, the death of cesar would have left men still, hoping to know who to fear before moving. in this one, they were more afraid to delay a procedure.
Antonium went down to the fountain. the water kept running with that unbearable indifference that has things done well. he bowed, wet a hand, passed it through his neck. it was cold.
A salesman recognized him late.
"mr. antonio," he said, not knowing whether to offer respect, apology or merchandise.
Antonium looked at him.
—¿qué se dice?
The man blasted.
- depends where, sir.
- here.
The seller looked at the square, as if he feared that the correct answer would be written in some statue.
- that the funeral will be tomorrow or the past. that octavio doesn't want to close anything. that's a lack of respect, some say. and others say that if the mills close, the lack of respect will be felt by all.
Antonium supported a huge hand on the stone edge of the fountain.
- what do you say?
The seller shrugged his shoulders.
"i say that cesar did this." he pointed out the water, then the line of scribes, then you watch them changing shifts. able to cry is to let him walk.
Antonium didn't answer.
Not because i had nothing to say.
Because the phrase fell to him with the brutal weight of simple things.
He took out a coin and left it on the edge of the fountain. the seller looked at her, doubted for a second, took her. antonium was already gone. he didn't know if it was payment for the sentence or anything else.
He kept walking, slow down.
In one corner he saw two girls carrying girls' tablets, probably into a small school of accounts or copies. at the door of the atheneum, above, students and assistants were already entering with the tense normality of who feels being involved in an experiment too large to name it. a young teacher was arguing with a doorman. antonium reached a single sentence:
- if we close today, tomorrow the rumor teaches more than we do.
Antonium almost laughed.
Whole roma was talking like cesar, or worse: like octavio.
That was scary.
* * *
When antonium entered the room, octavio was already carrying eleven read reports, five answered and three resent.
He didn't look at the door. he said:
- on the small table on the right.
Antonio left two tablets there, although he hated to obey instructions that seemed to be given in advance.
- quiet veterans. people on the forum. no big group. he'll make me murmur but he won't get together.
Octavio settled while reading, as if antonium was another column of data with legs.
"there are also rows in record," he added. "people ask about the election.
That did make octavio look up.
- how many tables were active?
He looked at it with open irritation.
- i didn't come to count banks.
- you should have counted.
The silence that followed was not that of two allies. it was the two men who had been in need of each other's usefulness for 15 years.
Antonium took one step further inside. he saw the empty chair at the bottom and turned his eyes away with a barely contained violence.
"the city is still like nothing," he said.
Octavio immediately corrected it:
- no. it's still like it's real.
Antonium dropped air through his nose.
- you know that sounds almost offensive.
Octavio returned to the tablet he had in his hand.
- the offensive would be that it depended on a body.
Antonium supported both hands on the table. the wood crunched.
—in the habit of corpses.
Octavio looked at him now. cold, tired, precise.
- me neither.
Antonio wanted to argue. he meant that a man was not a procedure, that he had been there when the blood really came out, that no valve or file had held to cess on the nights he tasted until he ran out of air. he meant many useless things.
He ended up saying:
- people aren't scared.
"yes, he is," replied octavio. "only he has another education for fear.".
"antonio frowned.
Octavio took a tablet and spread it to him. he didn't get it. octavio read it out loud.
- "consultation on suspension of workshops out of posthumous respect." - left the tablet. you see, they want a break, and a break, today, is an invitation. in a pause the city looks around and remembers that it used to obey names. i need you to perform functions today.
Antonio looked at the table full of reports, stamps, strokes, priorities. he then looked at octavio.
"the difference between you and him," he said, "is that cesar would have turned this into a speech.".
Octavio took less than a second.
- the difference between him and me is that he could still start things.
The phrase was there.
Antonium straightened his back slowly. in another mouth would have sounded like a calculated modesty. in octavio's, it sounded like a brutal diagnosis.
"what are you doing then?" he asked.
Octavio moved the column of fixed tablets with two fingers.
- i keep them from stopping.
From the inner courtyard came again the noise of the looms of the atheneum. beyond, almost imperceptible, the hammer blow of some early repair. a big city has that heartbeat form: not a single noise, but many jobs colliding with each other without killing themselves.
Antonium turned to the open window.
From there i saw a part of the forum, a corner of the source, the small movement of people who still didn't know they were making history precisely because they didn't seem to know. a car crossed slowly. two guards changed words and followed. a woman loaded water. a scribe ran with a tablet under his arm. there was no heroism in any of that.
There was continuity.
That upset him and relieved him at the same time.
"i don't like it," he said.
Octavio no sonrió.
- you don't have to like it.
- he would have liked it.
Octavio first looked at the empty chair like he accepted it was there.
- he would have been interested.
Antonium supported a hand in the window frame.
- that's worse.
—sí.
They kept quiet.
Down, the city was breathing with the lungs borrowed: the ovens, the water, the files, the guard relays, the wheels, the looms, the recent custom of making a line for something other than food. he had died as men die, with a tired body and a room too small for his ambition. but what he had built didn't know how to die the same way.
He then understood why normal had disturbed him more than a mutiny.
The mutiny would have been his. he would have known what to do with it.
Not this.
This belonged to another order.
BEHIND HIS BACK, OCTAVIO BEGAN TO DICTATE NEW INSTRUCTIONS WITH THE USUAL LOW VOICE:
- double surveillance on access to the central file. send a copy of the announcement to all prefectures. and the director of the atheneum..
He stopped for a second.
- tell him not to close a wheel.
The secretary scored.
He kept looking at the square.
There were no applause. there were no hymns. there was no consolation of a crowd crying to the right man at the right time.
There was a city working.
For the first time in generations, roma was breathing without asking for permission at one throat.
AND THAT BREATH - MEEK, IMPERSONAL, OBSTINATE - WAS THE MOST DISTURBING THING THAT ANTONIC FRAME HAD EVER SEEN IN HIS LIFE.

Chapter 2 -The candidates
In the senate, the names were read as read the stocks of an expensive warehouse: without enthusiasm, with professional attention and with the secret hope that nothing really new would appear at the end of the list.
The curia smelled of hot wax, wet wool and old stone. outside, roma continued to breathe with its insulting punctuality; inside, men who for generations had confused custom with nature expected the reading of candidates as if they expected a medical part. not out of curiosity. by control. they wanted to know if the system they had tolerated while carrying the cesar signature was now planning to move forward on their own.
A dry-voice prefect stood with the tablet in his hand.
He did not carry. he did not seek solemnity. that was also new: in the recent roma, until the ceremony he had learned to save gestures.
- by provision of the electoral register and in accordance with the existing certifications - he has read -, they are presented as eligible candidates to the consulate for the next period..
The phrase followed with an impersonal precision that would have pleased octavio and offended almost all the men present. names, filiations, district, certification range, administrative vouchers. there was no invocation of the gods. there was no prior praise. there was not that music of the old republic that involved the mediocrity in illustrious latin and made it pass through to destiny.
The first name was a cornelium.
It didn't matter which one. in the living room, the cornelias were similar to each other in the way in which the inherited furniture was similar: for noble wear and lack of surprise. the candidate in question just bowed his head when he heard it. a measured, learned gesture. the modesty of the raised men to receive what they consider their own.
The second was an emilio.
The third, a claudio.
Three employers of families who had been in power for so long that they had ended up confusing duration with merit. his genealogies were longer than his arguments. between the banks, some senators nodded with the tranquility of those who recognize a known landscape. there was a roma, still. there were the names that could be pronounced without the tongue having to get used to anything.
The prefect moved on to the next line.
He didn't look up on the tablet.
- vercorix, of the galia, graduated with distinction of the atheneum caesaris; certified edil, second cycle.
No hubo murmullo inmediato.
First there was a pause.
An exact, whole, almost clean second, during which the room seemed to forget how to produce sound. it wasn't respect. no, no, no, no. it was calculation. each man present was quietly making the same uncomfortable account: if that name could be read there, then many other things that until yesterday seemed limit could have ceased to be so without asking for permission.
Then the air came.
A sigh here, a laugh suffocated there, the rote of a toga moved too fast, two heads bowing each other, an old hand tightening the edge of the bank more forcefully than necessary. the senators did not know yet whether to laugh or prepare, and that ignorance was, in itself, a defeat.
Tenth fury, sitting near the center, let the word "galo" continue hanging in the environment without touching it. he was a patient man, who understood the political courage of letting the contempt of others do their work first. two banks away, a meteor murmured something his neighbor received with a short, dirty smile. back, one of the old claudios just closed his eyes, as if the system had just pronounced an obscenity aloud.
Not all reacted the same.
Some of the younger ones did not seem horrified. they seemed disconcerted. they had already grown up in a roma where the examinations existed, where the prefects had more weight than certain surnames, where the atheneum had used the city to see foreigners solve problems that the romans of blood did not even know how to formulate. for them, vercorix was not impossible. it was uncomfortable. and the uncomfortable, in politics, usually lasts longer than the unthinkable.
In the last row, a man yelled without opening his mouth too much.
It was called the fifth lycine and had worked for twelve years in the certification apparatus. it had started as a minor copra, ascended to a stamp verifier, then to an eligibility examiner and, finally, to that grey range where a man does not decide the laws but does touch the mechanisms that allow a law to become reality or stagnate on a table.
No one looked at him.
That was part of his job.
Men as the fifth lycine prospered in the lower area of attention, where true power passes in disguise as a routine. i didn't dress like a rich man or talk like a poor man. he had sober hands, dry eyes and a way of sitting that he didn't call a memory of. if they took him out of line and put him against a wall, half the senate wouldn't have known if he'd seen him before.
He heard the name of vercorix with the same indifference with which he had heard the other three.
OR SEEMED TO HEAR IT LIKE THAT.
On the inside, it wasn't indifferent. it was measurement.
Cornelio: estable, caro, previsible.
Emilio: ambitious, clumsy, family willing to pay badly and demand well.
Claudio: enough last name, little head, environment used to solving reality.
Vercorix: impossible to buy on the usual side, dangerous by conviction, useful if it fell, more useful even if it won and exposed certain nerves of the city.
I didn't think of men. i thought of variables. not because he was a philosopher. because the system had deformed it in the most vulgar way: it had taught him how much each thing cost.
I knew all the folds and all the prices.
I knew which family had obtained an honorable certification for a nephew who would never have approved sober. i knew what scribe accepted wine, which preferred coins, which was best sold with a career recommendation. he knew which examination could be unfolded, which seal imitated with sufficient expertise, which absence of an official was more appropriate than his presence. i didn't hate the system. it would be like hating a house where one has learned to steal without making any noise. he respected him, even. that's why he knew where he was. he looked at the senators' profile and thought, not without a professional irony: they are now afraid.
Until yesterday, merit was an elegant ornament while still favoring the right children. a new way to describe an old privilege. but a galo on the list made visible the part of the mechanism they had preferred not to look at: that the system, if it was allowed to work too much, ended up believing its own propaganda.
The prefect continued to read formalities.
Fifth let the air escape slowly and put a finger on the knee, marking a rhythm that only he understood. i wasn't worried. foreign fear is often profitable. the outrage of the great surnames, too. a pure system is uncomfortable; an impure, on the other hand, feeds intermediate careers.
The only thing that bothered him with vercorix was not his origin.
It was his kind of legitimacy.
A man like that made the mediocrity bought rude. a brilliant alien was a light too white: he forced to see the dust in the furniture.
Near the stand, a senator asked for the word without full formality, as he needs to recover the initiative even with a small question.
"does the details of origin also appear in all public records?" he said, pointing to the tablet as if his doubt were administrative.
The prefect looked up now, yes, barely.
- the provincial origin, as in all non-roma candidates.
"i understand," said the senator.
I wanted the whole room to remember that the name had come with a border.
Another intervention:
- and the mention of academic distinction is necessary in reading?
"it is regulatory," the prefect replied.
That was all the humiliation.
There was no inflamed speech. there was no great defense of the system. only one official clarifying that the rule remained the norm even when it made the right men uncomfortable. sometimes the most lasting revolutions take the form of a boring response.
Fifth floor saw how the irritation went through the room and thought the business of the next few months was going to improve.
More applications.
More reviews.
More families suddenly discovering that abstract merit was a wonderful idea until competition began to look like a concrete threat.
Was asked, not without professional curiosity, if vercorix knew the exact number of enemies who had just assigned him with a single line of lectur. probably yes. i had come too far to be naive.
In that, at least, fifth gave him something similar to respect.
* * *
At the front door, vercorix first heard the rumor and then the silence.
He lived in a house of modest, clean stone, with two useful rooms, a heavy table, a table shelf, a narrow window towards the street and nothing to suggest the career of a man destined - according to some - to rewrite the limit of roma. there were no family statues. there were no death masks of illustrious ancestors. there were no slaves in sufficient quantity to form decorated. there was order, work and the kind of sobriety that was born not of virtue but of the habit of not being able to waste anything.
He was standing by the table when he heard the voices pass.
Not full words. the city never offers its main news in whole sentences to the first attempt. first let them run out of thin, like broken fabric: loose names, a laugh, an insult, a too high said confirmation, a sudden silence later. then, when it's too late not to know, the news takes shape.
Vercorix no salió enseguida.
That was also a custom learned. the visible man too soon seems anxious; the man who takes a little while seems guilty or prudent, according to who looks at him. and everyone would look at him with a desire to choose the worst version.
Supported both hands on the table.
His were not roman hands in the elegant sense of the term. were great, with hard knuckles, clear veins and an old white line near the left thumb that had left him of youth, before the atheneum, before the perfect latin, before learning to think with the discipline of a city that always requires you to forget the first language to fully trust you. they had held tablets, tools, sacks, compasses, books. they didn't embarrass him. nor did idealization. it was just what i had.
From the outside someone said, almost screaming:
they read it, they read it!
Then a laugh.
Then another voice, lower, more poisonous:
- yeah. see how long it lasts.
Vercorix closed his eyes for a second.
Not ambition.
Of fear.
I knew exactly what his name cost on that list. not in money - although there would also be money in motion, gifts, favors, purchase of certifications, small old corruptions defending privileges with new clothes - but in human temperature. he knew how many men are able to forgive a defeat, but not a lie. and he, by the simple fact that he existed there, was dislying too many at once.
Something was said that he had learned years ago, when he still couldn't completely hide the accent and the romans smiled before correcting it as he corrected a smart dog:
The murmur is just air until you breathe it.
It didn't work out.
He heard the street again. a car. steps. a woman calling a boy. beyond, a salesman announcing fruit. the city didn't stop for him. that was the reassuring part, too.
On the table had a tablet with loose field notes: river routes, provincial training quotas, channel maintenance costs, rotation of atheneum teachers in medium cities. nothing heroic. nothing to fall in love with. he looked at everything with a bitter light.
The patricians were to be presented with surnames.
He was gonna have to come up with solutions.
That seemed an advantage until one remembered the tiredness that it produces, throughout a lifetime, to have to justify with excellence what others justify with blood.
They called the door.
Not with violence, with that brief certainty of who brings news and knows that it will be admitted.
Vercorix took just a second to open.
He was a boy from the register, one of the assistants who sometimes carried communications between the atheneum offices and certified candidates. he would be seventeen, eighteen at most, and tried to look official without yet learning to disguise the enthusiasm.
"sir," he said, almost smiling. "it's official.".
Vercorix asintió.
- i heard.
The boy gave him a sealed tablet.
- a copy of the reading for the candidates.
Vercorix took the tablet. too little for the amount of lives i was about to make uncomfortable.
- thank you.
The duo boy was then allowed:
- my father says this is good.
Vercorix levantó la vista.
- what's the matter with you?
- works in public baths.
Vercorix asintió otra vez.
- so your father can distinguish between a wall and a facade.
The boy smiled, though he probably didn't understand the whole thing. he greeted and left.
Vercorix closed the door gently.
He didn't open the tablet. he knew the contents. the law always repeats in more words what the street already said in the most brutal way.
He came to the window.
From there i saw a city cut enough to remember why all that mattered: bare ceilings, fine smoke, a rope with tendered clothes, a section of street where two neighbors discussed anything irrelevant with a republic passion. roma wasn't the senate. i've never been at all. but the senate still had an almost magical ability to turn a novelty into punishment.
He thought of cesar, dead too little so that the custom would have finished absorbing it. he thought later on octavio, that he would probably already be counting tables, stamps, risks. he thought, finally, in himself, and he did not like the version of man that the city was about to demand.
They didn't want him just to be competent.
They wanted me to represent a theory.
That was much more dangerous.
Because theories, when they disappoint, do not receive critics. they receive revenge.
Abrió al fin la tablilla.
He read his entire name, the origin, the mention of the distinction of the atheneum. all right. all cold. all exactly as impersonal as it should be to make the system look fair.
He just shook a muscle in his jaw.
He pulled his teeth.
Not pride.
De anticipación.
I knew what would come now: the jokes said low enough to not be denunciable; the courteous invitations of men who would actually want to measure it; the questions about their "true intentions"; the casual reminders that he had been generous with it; the articles or discourses on integration that would be in the background warnings; the most fierce examination, not the written but the social, where every mistake of his would be worth ten because no one judges a symbol as he judges a man.
Supported the tablet on the table and left it parallel to the edge, correcting without thinking of a minimum deviation.
Then he laughed once, without joy.
Even in that he was looking too much like a roma.
* * *
In the curia, the reading was over, but the name was still floating.
The men left the banks slowly, delaying where it was appropriate, forming small groups of gravity finely casual. in politics, the real conversation always begins when the regulatory part ends.
Fifth floor remained seated for one more moment.
Not because of drama, because he knew the value of getting out of a place where everyone thinks they were observed. from the final row he saw how the first reactions were woven: a cornelium surrounded already by two customers of helpful smile; fury talking to an old senator and a young secretary; a meteor shaking his head as if they had just proposed to turn the puppet into wine. fear, contempt, opportunity. the three raw materials of the trade.
He stood up in no hurry.
A man like that never runs. the rush leaves memory; the calm, no.
As he was moving towards the exit, he was able to hear the tenth fury, behind a column, say with a low and perfectly clear voice:
- it's not the bad thing. the serious thing is, he went through all the doors.
Fifth on the dribble hacia el.
I didn't miss. the phrase was exact.
That was the problem, not that the system had committed an extravagance. but extravagance would have come by procedure.
Fifth he lowered the steps of the curia and mixed with the flow of auxiliaries, customers, scribes and secondary men that support the real weight of the cities while the great names are attributed the design. the mid-morning sun was gluing on the stone with ungrateful clarity. in the forum, the news was already becoming versions.
A salesman said, "a galo.".
Another one corrected: no, a graduate.
A third was laughing: it's the same.
I didn't do the same.
AND THAT'S WHY THERE'D BE MONEY.
Fifth he walked in a hurry to the side street where he was expected by his routine: a narrow office, a legume pending, two private consultations, an informal visit by a free man representing a family too proud to appear for itself. everything would go on. that was the secret of intermediate power: it never seems like history as it happens.
For the first time all morning, however, he felt a slight discomfort.
No por vercorix.
By the system itself.
Corrupt mechanisms work best when the ideal still retains some prestige. if merit ceased to be a useful decoration and began to produce real men able to compete seriously, then the arrangements would have to become finer, more expensive, more dangerous. they would have to look like exceptions rather than usual. and the exceptions, when they stack too much, draw attention.
He settled the edge of the robe with two fingers.
The business wasn't at risk.
I was just changing my difficulty.
That, deep down, was almost stimulating.
Kept walking.
Behind him, in the curia, some men still discussed whether they should laugh or prepare.
On the other side of the city, in a sober house of the aventurine, vercorix already knew the answer.
We had to get ready.
Outside, the city was still there. the prefects signed. the roma was breathing with her lungs borrowed. and he had just become something that that breathing still didn't know how to process.