What masochistic compulsion had driven me to take a daunting elective like Latin in the first place? I had two reasons: for one, even at thirteen, I was not immune to the hunky cinematic lure of Rome. I had stared at legionaries on movie posters, with their sinewy, thong-wrapped calves, that armor and those unmistakable red-cockaded helmets. Who could deny them? Their unabashed pleated skirts, flapping against powerful, ruthless thighs, hinted of additional, mysterious masculine hardware flapping a mere peek away. The Roman legions looked dangerous, well put together and incredibly sexy.
My second reason for taking Latin was that I knew I could be absolutely certain of not encountering Michael Gould, a boy who had evolved for the single purpose of tormenting me. The moment I walked into homeroom, all five feet eleven inches and one hundred ten pounds of me, he knew that he had found his mission, his expeditionem.
“Olive Oyl!” he would bellow out on spotting me slinking to my desk. His voice, genetically modulated for optimal mockery, resonated from a slightly aquiline nose, the nostrils flaring with sadistic relish. A comma of black hair bobbed above his brown eyes, dancing with wicked glee. The sight of me inspired in him an endless stream of metaphors—I was “a pirate’s dream, a sunken chest.” I was Stan Laurel, Ichabod Crane, the tallest, awkwardest girl who had ever clopped into class in her massive, steel-reinforced white buck shoes (“You need support,” my mother insisted).
The notion that my body could ever be remotely fashionable or desirable lay years—parsecs—away. The genetic cards had been stacked against me. Petite and curvy were, I assumed, stuck as a default preference in boys’ heads. And petite was a French needle that deflated any lingering volume in my flaccid, sagging self-esteem.
Every week, I would stretch my fingers with trepidation up the wall of my room, to calculate whether I had grown. Every week, I could reach a little higher. One mortifying day, my trembling middle finger actually touched the ceiling. If I gave a little hop, I could put my palm flat against it. How much longer until I had to duck to avoid smashing my cranium on it?
And there could be no ungrowing. The requisite cells, driven by berserker hormones, had already been manufactured from the food I could not stop eating. The clasts that lengthened my bones had already been added. The muscles had stretched elastically—drastically—to accommodate this unstoppable length.
I was convinced that my destiny was some medical textbook, illustrating pituitary malfunction. I would be immortalized on the page not as a budding author but as a grinning giantess, my parents gamely squinting up at me from beneath my armpits.
By age eleven, I was unable to wear girls’ figure skates and had been relegated to grown men’s black “speed” skates. I didn’t want to speed; I wanted to pirouette. I wanted to axel. While adorable Tinkerbells twirled in their white skates and dainty spangled skirts in the middle of the rink for optimal attention, I hugged the periphery, clutching the splintery guardrail, hoping that nobody would notice the lurching beanstalk, the bamboo pole, shuffling along in hell-black skates bent over at the ankle.
When I wasn’t fantasizing about the Roman legions, I would construct a more modern scenario: I awoke to find myself magically transformed—and blonde for good measure. My silky head rested just below the broad shoulder of the mesomorphic football captain. I was his pixie, his angel, his minty, milky, silky, pink and golden girly. His letter-sweater nearly dragged on the floor when I wore it to school. I too was one of the anointed—those girls who strolled the hallways with carefully preoccupied expressions—far too busy being popular to even notice that they were wearing a boy’s letter sweater. And they needed those sweaters up there on Mount Olympus, where the weather got so chilly.
My lust for Romans was a secret I couldn’t confide in my crowd, where I was already a hopeless Omega in the pecking order even without this additional weirdness. I couldn’t figure out why all Romans seemed to have clipped British accents, even though they were, theoretically, Italians. Imagine Julius Caesar at the Rubicon slapping his cheek and declaring “Mama Mia! Iacta Alea est!”
My Latin teacher, Miss Williams, was a tiny, fearsome woman in her sixties, perfectly adapted for classroom warfare and armed with a tongue sharp as a sagitta. She would hover above the aisles like a hornet ready to dive bomb the errant, the flagging or the unprepared, stinging over and over without depleting her venom.
I had been a good English student, but Latin caught me flat-footed. I’d had no idea how demanding and subtle the language would be; how much brute force memorization would be required to prepare for each class. And so, from the start, I ran afoul of Miss Williams, who judged me a hopeless fatuus and withheld none of her scorn.
Burning with embarrassment and fear, I doubled and tripled my study time and finally began to handle the dizzying declensions and conjugations; the capricious, unforgiving prepositions. I could conjugate the verb “to be” in my sleep (and still can): Sumesestsumusestissunterameraserateramuseratuseranteroeriseriterimiseritiserunt and on and on.
After months of studying agricolae plowing their agricolara and munching their vegitata, I was at last ready for what Rome was really all about, bellum et victorum—war and conquest, filled with thrilling, bloody deeds.
So at last, our class was to be invited along on the immortal incursus—to march with Caesar against the Gauls. I imagined barbarians as hordes of extravagantly hairy near-animals who could only benefit by being brought to heel, groomed and civilized by Rome. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that Gauls might be people like myself—minding their business, looking for love, primping, praying, dodging plagues, worrying about puberty.
Awareness of the human imperative to resist alien incursions also lay years in my future. For now, I identified only with the Roman oppressor; I wanted to see gladii glinting in the sun as the legions marched inexorably, irresistibly on.
Measuring us with a steely glare, Miss Williams passed out our copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, faded and taped; veterans battered by decades of earnest student sieges. At my desk, she paused to lob grudging encouragement, something that sounded like “there may still be hope.” But it would have been more fitting to have quoted Dante at the gates of the Inferno: Missa spe qui huc instrasti. (“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”).
Eagerly, I opened my book to confront its immortal introduction: Gallia est omnes divisa in partes tres: All of Gaul is divided into three parts—a deceptively simple statement. But Caesar then proceeded to hurl at me a barrage of incomprehensible constructions. I had expected shields (scuta) clattering and pounding hoofbeats (tardaverunt pedes), the thrill of legions on the march. Instead I found myself bogged down in the appendix of my textbook toiling like a servus in a futile campaign to untangle even a single sentence.
Yet, my soul remained pure; I had had no plans whatsoever on that fateful day to commit the one unforgivable, cardinal offense that Miss Williams had warned us not to even consider, namely peeking into the interlinear translation.
My best friend and I had entered the downtown bookstore to breach a taboo of a different nature. We wanted to buy Lady Chatterley’s Lover, recently released from its ban, which contained paragraphs, if not whole chapters of delightful sexual contraband. So while my intent was not exactly innocent, it didn’t threaten my academic integrity.
But suddenly, my eyes were snagged by a slender volume on a display shelf, posed alluringly half open. It was red, of course, the hue of lust, blood, and betrayal: Caesar’s Gallic Wars, in its forbidden Interlinear Translation. Beneath each Latin sentence was the English key. I knew there could be only one reason to acquire the book in that specific incarnation: to cheat.
Aw, come on, the book coaxed, take a look. I will instantly untie the grammatical knot that kept you awake half of last night, solve all that frustrating toil in a single glance. And not only that, lured the wily book, I will instantly transport you back thousands of years to meet the barbarians themselves in all their woad-wearing splendor. Open me, cooed the book. Flip my cover. Go ahead.
Approach. Avoid. Approach. Avoid. I knew that the minute I opened the book and drank its sweet, illegal liquor, I would be ruined. Hooked. Whole new avenues of mendacity would open up like Roman aquaeductus so I could gush lies and dishonesty. Those who peeked even once Never Returned. They were lost forever (perdita in aeternum).
I took out my wallet with its babysitting money, to be spent now not on pornography, but on crime and deceit. The little red book secreted in my purse, I raced home and entered the bathroom and locked the door. This was where I read forbidden things, like my mother’s copy of Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, which was even dirtier than Lady Chatterley’s Lover, all proof of incipient sexual perversion, another of my chronic worries, along with rabies. (While snooping in my mother’s forbidden chest of drawers, I had come upon a small box that I thought might contain a bracelet, and there instead sat her diaphragm. I knew what it was from reading The Group. Terrified I gazed at it, knowing the penalty for what I had just done was worse than death. With trembling fingers I replaced the lid, ran to the bathroom and vomited.)
Now I opened the red book with the same apprehensive impulse: if the world had to end, then let it all end now. The book drew me in not violently but softly, the prose oddly mellifluous for an epic of war and death. The forbidden English narrative flowed in a seductive stream beneath the turbid Latin—a story simple, brutal, and utterly fascinating. What a tale it told. Unable even to pause, I read on and on, compounding my sin by the minute.
I knew how Caesar had put the conquered Gaul leader Vercingetorix in a cage for the Roman mobs to gawk at. I also knew that if I were discovered, I would come to occupy its Minneapolis equivalent, without even a comforting memory of battles won or rebellions fomented to console me. I would be branded a cheater. Forever.
Now that I was tainted with The Truth, there was no way back to ignorant innocence. Just as I could not ungrow my nearly six feet, I could not unlearn what I had jumped ahead to discover about the invasion of Gaul. I knew the whole story now, unfortunately.
There was always the option of a full confession. But Miss Williams would punish you just as harshly for telling the truth as for lying. I decided to do nothing. I sat at home with the day’s homework assignment before me, trying to peek into the forbidden book (illicitus liber) as seldom as possible, meaning about every third word. Then I tried for intentional errors—such as botching the fourth declension, which I understood about as well as I did the fourth dimension. But I learned that it is more difficult to make mistakes purposely than it is to make them accidentally.
The following day, I entered Latin class with the trepidation of Marie Antoinette in her tumbril. I turned in my tainted homework; all I had left, like another doomed queen, Mary of Scots, was to die well. Miss Williams would instantly recognize my clumsy efforts to conceal my crime, a skill she must have honed over decades.
Hyperventilating, I pretended to study my vocabulary while she graded our homework at her desk. Words jumped out at me: liar (mendax), cheater (fraudator). The insight struck me that English and Latin were deeply interlaced, as were lies and truth. Up at her desk, Miss Williams corrected our papers, her expression one of infinite wry amusement. Occcasionally she would emit a snort of derision. After an eternity, she rose, scooped up the papers with a shudder of distaste and began her fateful trek down the rows. Even from my desk I could see the slashes of red on the pages, wounds inflicted as if by a Roman gladio. Suddenly, Miss Williams paused, not at my desk, but at the desk of another girl.
“Let’s have it, Rita,” she said, extending her claw and snapping her fingers at an enviably petite and curvy girl who fumbled in her purse and drew out the clone of my own red contraband. The class emitted a sound somewhere between a gasp and a titter.
“This,” said Miss Williams, “is what an F looks like.” She held the book at head level and rotated slowly so that we could all get a good look at it. To her credit, Rita looked mildly discomfited but not exactly devastated. She must have drawn strength from the boy’s letter sweater she was wearing,
“Don’t think I can’t tell if you’re using this,” she said. She glared into Rita’s face. “I will keep this and give you one more chance.” She looked out over the class, searching our eyes and souls. “And that goes for all of you.”
Then she continued her trek. When she reached me, she held my homework at a slight distance, like a soiled diaper. Then she let it go and it wafted onto my desk as she strode past. Written across the top in crimson were the words, “You’re better than this.”
Flushed with gratitude and disbelief at my unexpected stay of execution, I never again peeked into the translation. It stood on my shelf, calling out to me when I hit a difficult construction with a pleading little chirp, which I ignored. Because I understood now that second chances were not to be wasted. I only wish I could have carried that insight forward into my life, because I have managed to waste bales of them. Propelled equally by terror, gratitude and some prurient interest, I eventually earned an A in Latin.
Linda Boroff lives and works in Silicon Valley. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in a wide range of places including McSweeney’s, Gawker, and Thoughtful Dog.
