His movement, intended to be heroic, merely looked pathetic. A tuba shrilled with a red sound. The lion leapt. He leapt right over the gladiator, onto the man in make-up. He seized him–the mask’s foolish expression never changing – and dragged him screaming across the sand. A couple of tigers had attacked the gladiator. He resisted strongly, with the courage of desperation; laying about himself, first according to some plan he had, and then wildly. One of the animals moved to outflank him, it stepped back on noiseless paws, and then they were both on him. The shock went through the entire circus. ‘Rragh,’ went the crowd, groaning as one. The spectators had jumped out of their seats. They gazed enraptured, their eyes darting everywhere so as not to miss a single detail, and wherever they looked there was blood, desperation, groaning and roaring – people suffering, living flesh convulsed and writhing to death in the sand – while they were high up, in safety. It was marvellous! The whole circus was awash with cruelty and delirium. Only the lowest rows sat quietly and a little haughtily, apparently unmoved. They were the senators and their wives, vestal virgins, the court, high-ranking officers and rich patricians . . . sedately they offered one another sweetmeats in little pots, one of them straightened his toga. Shouts incited the animals, and whipped them up to still greater rage; shouts rained down on the cowardly fighter who had been incapable of defending himself . . . Shouting and sweating, the crowd was an animal rolling in an orgasm of pleasure. It gave birth to cruelty. What was happening here was one gigantic and shameless procreative act of destruction. It was a lust for negation – the sweet slide into death, for the contestants. And it was for this that they spent day after day weaving sandals, inscribing parchment, fetching mortar, paying calls on the nobility and waiting out long mornings in the atrium; weaving cloth and washing linen, painting terracotta and selling stinking fish . . . in order at last, at long last, to enjoy this great public holiday in the amphitheatre. Everything, absolutely everything that their daily routine had ground into these citizens and proles in the way of humiliation and oppression, of stifled fantasies and unsatisfied lusts, could spend itself here. It was like sexual gratification, only more violent, hotter and more explosive. The pleasure of four thousand people soared up like a dart of fire – they were one body, driving itself to exhaustion, they were both the predators and the humans being ripped apart down there. Atrocity opened their eyes – something for which every century has found a different name. They were panting, the wildest spurt was over, now what was left spilled out in noisy raucous conversation. They shouted and gestured over each other’s heads, their thumbs-down, a thousand voices were heard, shouting and speaking, and only here and there the faint sound of a cry, a signal-whistle of pain. What flowed away here was the pent-up criminal longings of these people. They would commit fewer murders now; the animals had done it for them. Afterwards, they went into the temples to pray. No, to entreat. Below, the first guards went out onto the sand and set about the bodies with hot irons – were they properly dead? Had they not cheated the crowds of some tiny ounce of pain? In one corner someone was twitching away his final seconds of agony, while the animals, replete but still excited, disappeared through the small grille doors. The sand was swept, and above, in the gods, the last swell of delight at this suffering boiled away.