No, Berenice is not a vampire that you risk to cross on a dark, drunken night after involuntarily leaving your favorite pub, because it's four o'clock in the morning and it' s closed. That would be more like an eighties Stephen King's story. My characters are people who lived in the early Late Antiquity, just a few centuries before the beginning of the Middle Ages. They lived a thousand and seven hundred years ago.
But how do you bring such ancient people to life?
When one speaks of the Roman Empire, probably the picture that comes to many of us is that of old senators, dressed in white togas, secretly confabulating in the halls of Curia Iulia against Julius Caesar or another Emperor of the time. Outside the building, a mass of miserable people protesting clear and loud, until the Emperor throws pieces of bread and announces that there will be a spectacle at the Amphitheatrum Flavium (aka Coliseum), causing the crowd to calm down like in a magic trick.
Perhaps we can even imagine them speaking English or, if there is an effort of accuracy, all "speakum withum wordus quid terminum withum 'um'".
The thing about this imagery is that it allows us to switch the scenery several times. Curia Iulia becomes Henry VIII's St. James Palace, or Louis XVI's Versailles Palace, but also the contemporary White House or the Palacio do Planalto. Everything is very much the same, and our identification ends up being diluted in the message that "history repeats itself".
Throughout the writing process of Berenice of Cappadocia, I really wanted to bring the characters to life, eliminating any caricature with which we are used to thinking "the people of the past".
One important lesson I had during the Faculty of History is that a man of the Middle Ages did not identify himself in this sense. Nobody in that long period thought "Oh, I live in the Dark Ages, how harsh it is!" And I'm not even deal with the “Middle Ages equal obscurantism” question. This is not a blog about History. That may sound obvious when we put things in these terms, but in general culture, we tend to look at people of the past like a spectrum, an opaque image of lives long gone. And there is nothing more wrong than that!
Those interested in the Humanities — History, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. — are used to considering the human being as a whole. A species that was built in time, that continues this process today and for as long as it exists. Thus, as a unique species, even if there are space-time distinctions between individuals (the "when and where" each one exists and has existed), our modus operandi continues to be the same. This means that since its origin, the Homo Sapiens loves, hates, rejoices or is saddened basically for the same reason: the challenges arising from its social, gregarious nature.
I often say that, under the cultural varnish, we all become anxious in the same way when our loved ones get sick, or full of hope when we know we are loved by the one we love. What changes is the way we express those feelings.
So, when I thought about all the events that happen in Berenice's life, and the way she reacted to them, I described it from the point of view of a contemporary young woman.
Berenice is unaware that the world she knows is collapsing. Neither does she imagine that we are following her story a thousand and seven hundred years after she lived, through the screen of our electronic devices. Not even through one of the things she loves most, which is the written history! For her, the world in which she lives is contemporary and certainly, being a teenager, she gets excited about the novelties surrounding her, wrinkling her nose to the primitive way of life of her ancestors.
This perspective strengthens the bonds between me and the shepherdess of Cappadocia. I wanted to tell her story not because I find Late Antiquity romantic — when I hear someone saying they would have liked to live in this or that time, I always ask "are you sure? — but because for me it represents the portrait of humanity, a proof of our unity, our similarity as members of the same group.
Basically, my hope is that through the narrative of Berenice from Cappadocia: the no hero's journey I might, in a modest but sincere way, contribute to the understanding that among us, humans, there is nothing that separates us, because we are all made of the same essence.
Who knows?..