The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  I could stay here, Wendelin thought, I don’t need to go back. But the empty space inside him suddenly flooded with desire for his wife’s voice, her arms around him, and her eyes.

  Then he rose and strode back to Little Heavens Alley.

  ‘I must leave now,’ he told his parents. ‘My wife is waiting for me. And my business. My and Johann’s business, which I shall carry on in his name.’

  They nodded, politely. They did not accompany him to the river-dock, but waved from the window of the house. By the time he reached the river, he had thoughts of nothing but Lussièta in his mind.

  When he asked her what he might bring her as a souvenir of the riches of his town, his wife had requested only a portrait of himself as a child. This, extracted from his mother, was now wrapped in sheep’s wool at the top of his trunk, It had been handed over with some difficulty (he could read her thoughts – his wife would have him by her all the time now, it was she, his mother, who needed the mementos). He had glanced briefly at the sketched likeness, hoping to revive his memory of his childhood self, which now seemed so fugitive. But the drawing was badly done, wall-faced and unalive – unless, thought Wendelin, this is how I really was before I went to Venice?

  Chapter Seven

  Sirmione, sweet little eye of all islands

  and peninsulas that Neptune lifts out

  of the liquid waters and vast seas,

  how happy the heart that beholds you!

  At last he came back to me. He slept in my arms one night at the Red Bears and then we set out again, this time, blessedly, southwards. I was light of spirit for he’d shown me in an instant that he forgave my selfishness and my coward’s heart and that he had not guessed my motives for staying behind. The first thing he did was lay his hand on my belly and look at me full of hopeful query. When I shook my head, he took me to his breast straight away, and said, ‘Well, we begin again now.’

  Afterwards he rose from the bed and went to his leather box. He brought me the picture of his young self, which I kissed. I hoped he’d understand from this that I can love his Speyer self as much as his Venetian self, provided, of course, that he keeps the Speyer self by my side in Venice.

  Of our journey home I shall not trouble you with an account for it was filled with the same discomforts, all intensified by the onset of truly cold weather. You must imagine for yourself the waterfalls weeping ice tears through black rocks, the lakes with their tattered fishnets of mist, the bite of the snow on my cheeks, the old ladies in scarves strapped to the tops of carts like corpses …

  Imagine the horrors of all before, doubled, but yet sweetened by the thought that we were on our way back to Venice.

  Coming down mountains was worse than going up, if anything, as the way was more uneasy. It seemed to me that I but held my breath until we came down from the Alps again, to the Lake of Como. I did not start to feel myself until the mountains began to flatten, like the whipped white of an egg left in the sun to subside. It was only when we were within scent of the sea again, with the houses and churches in rabbles of colour, that I felt free from the dragons, ghosts, frostbite and fear of the mountains. And not till I was home in the plains above Venice that I could let my shoulders fall from their stiff hunch.

  And yet there was one good time along our way. When we passed Lake Garda, though I longed and yearned for home, my man persuaded me that we should go to Sirmione, where the Roman poet Catullus lived fifteen centuries ago. Even at that time, you see, my man had conceived his notion of printing the poems of Catullus, those poems that would soon cause our lives to change for ever. A certain manuscript had come to Venice, and all the scholars were talking of it.

  There were the ruins of an ancient Roman villa at Sirmione. Felice Feliciano and his friend, the artist Mantegna, had been there before. One evening at a tavern they’d filled my man’s sweet head with pictures of it. Those two had arrived by boat and picnicked in the shade of the ruins, fancying themselves the new ghosts of the young Catullus come to life inside their drunken bodies, no doubt. It was those two, of course, who were loudest and most persistent in pressing my man to print that dangerous book, even though he’d not yet laid eyes on it himself.

  Even so, I was not curious to see this Sirmione, for every moment I thought I could catch the tang of Venice air blown westward on the wind. Yet my man insisted, saying that the place was lovely and I should see it once in my life.

  In the end, though it cost us two more days, I am grateful that he put me under duress.

  If I one day committed some dark crime, and was made to leave our town, there is one other place in the world where I could live, and that is Sirmione.

  Everyone should go there.

  It sleeps on the lake like a dream, in a veil of white light, a little headland nosing long and slender into the centre of the water. This light makes the near shores look transparent, like a sketch in pencil, and it rubs out the far shores, so the place looks like heaven, floating on the clouds, seen above and in reflection on the water.

  We walked through arches that framed the lake like a theatre, and the bird choirs lifted our hearts with their sweet music and refreshed our souls. Sirmione was beautiful not only for its flowers, but also for the shade of its orange and lemon trees. Water streamed from springs, fruit still hung heavy from the boughs of trees like lamps holding the sun in their kernels. We found many traces of antiquity: the marble columns were dimpled with inscriptions.

  Sparrows fluttered everywhere, their brown heads as glossy as chestnuts. I reminded myself, when I saw them, to tell young Bruno Uguccione about them, and also about the northern sparrows that had frightened me with their strange pale heads. These were proper Venetian sparrows – the males with black-blotted breastplates and serious skullcaps, their downy dim mates hovering at tender distances, their brown gowns muted as if left in the attic many years past.

  There was not much left of the great Roman house, but we could see that it was vast. My man wandered around, picking up stones, looking through his fingers and squeezed-up eyes at the crumpled walls. I guessed that in his mind he was building it all up to splendour again, with its waving flags, its mosaics, its fluted columns and the happy young Catullus lounging in a portico writing his love poems and gallivanting with his mistress.

  Sitting on a cool rock in the shade, I watched my man from a distance.

  He was not alone in his sightseeing, it seemed, for I saw a young man flitting in and out of the trees too. He was strangely dressed in a tunic that was nothing to do with Venetian fashions. But I’d seen all kinds of costumes on our travels and nothing surprised me now.

  Even from a distance I could see the young man was not well. He staggered, and his whole slight frame was racked with a most terrible cough, which reminded me sadly of Johann. I hoped my man could not hear him.

  Every few seconds the young man stopped to loose what pressed on his breast and he grew weaker by the moment. Finally, he leaned against a tree and collapsed, sliding down the trunk to the ground where he lay in a mess of thin elbows and knees. I rose to fly to his side and assist him, but then an older man, also strangely dressed, appeared as if from nowhere. He seemed to be calling out. When he saw the young man he fell to his knees and gathered him in his arms. I could see from the way the young man’s head lolled back that he’d fallen in a deep faint. The older man, who must have been his father, held him tight against his breast and I saw his shoulder shaking with tears.

  I was so absorbed in the piteous sight of the young man that I did not notice the roach that crawled up to join me, not until its tiny antlers tickled my hand. My scream echoed around the natural theatre of the site, but the roach stayed on my hand. In a moment my man was with me. Weeping with fear, I held up my hand, on which the roach seemed glued, for even when I shook it, the wretched beast stayed there. My man brushed it gently aside.

  ‘Kill it! Kill it!’ I shrieked at him.

  In an instant he snatched up a heavy rock and dashed it down upon t
he roach. I still sobbed, feeling the imprint of the beetle on my hand. I calmed myself only when he lifted the stone to show me the shattered carapace of my tormentor, cut in two halves by the sharpness of the blow.

  ‘All gone, darling, you’re safe now,’ my man said, rocking me in his arms, his eyes on the horizon over my head, which he kissed and kissed.

  I too looked up and was ready to tell him all about the sad sight to which I’d just been witness, but the older man and the young one had vanished. I thought then that in the heat of the sun I had perhaps become drowsy and dreamt them.

  So I did not tell my man what I’d seen. He’s not fond of ghosts, real ones or dreamed ones: since our parting in Freiburg I’d tried not to mention them too often. Also, I felt sorry for him. I’d interrupted his reverie most brutally, and we had come all this way to help him think about Catullus.

  ‘Go, darling, go and look at the rest of the place,’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly well now. I can see that the thing is dead.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes, go!’

  He left me, finally, with a long kiss on the lips, and many looks behind him. I waved at him each time and blew kisses, until he was quite out of sight.

  It was then that I saw something glint in the cavity left by the rock with which he’d killed the roach. I leant down and put my fingers where the shining was. I touched something soft and cool, like a candle in a larder.

  I knelt down and dug gently around the object, thinking it some little souvenir I could give to my man to remind him of this place that gave him so much pleasure.

  With a little digging, I loosened it and pulled it out of the earth. I turned it around in my hands, blowing the grains of dirt off it and dislodging clumps with my little finger.

  Then I dropped it on the ground with a cry.

  For I had seen what it was: the wax figure of a woman with nails in her back, one each for her kidneys, her liver, her spleen and her heart, with dark hair wrapped around them to form a number 5 or the letter S. A witch figure! A bad love charm! And I had touched her with my own naked fingers. I wiped them backwards and forwards against my dress.

  My man had heard my second cry and was hurrying towards me again. My instinct, sharp as a squirt of civet, warned me that he should not see the figure: it would trouble him and spoil Sirmione for him. I did not know what to do; all my thoughts were scrabbling in my head as his dear outline gained substance running towards me. In the last minute as he approached my side, I leant down and scooped the woman up into my sleeve, just to hide her. I planned to drop her again as soon as he was not looking.

  ‘Is it another roach?’ he asked breathlessly. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Y-y-y-es, but it ran away. It’s gone. I’m sorry I frightened you.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s gone?’ He foraged around the grass nearby with his hand, looking for it. Then he turned to me, ‘I don’t mean to frighten you, darling, but shall I look in your clothes?’

  ‘No!’ I said vehemently, with such force that he took a step backwards. ‘Let’s just leave now. I’m tired from all these beasts.’

  We walked slowly back to where we’d left the horses, hand in hand, stopping sometimes to kiss.

  Truly, I meant to drop her on the ground somewhere when he was not looking. But it was not to be: inside my sleeve one of the nails on the figure had hooked itself to the fabric. She hung there, like a fly in a spider’s web, and no matter how I shook her, surreptitiously, she would not drop out of my dress. The wax had lost its fatty coldness and became warm against my skin. I stopped shaking my sleeve.

  She means to come to Venice, I thought. Or whoever made her wants her to come to Venice with me. I have been chosen to carry her. Who am I to stop him? Whoever made her: his will has become mine now.

  As we left the grounds of the old house, my man put his arm around me, and turned me to face the sunstrewn ruins one last time.

  ‘Is it not lovely?’ he asked. ‘Is it not sad that it has fallen back into the past?’

  I could see then what he was thinking: by printing the poems Catullus wrote, he could make Sirmione come alive again. I did not say anything, because I did not agree.

  It was beautiful enough for me, just as a ruin. I do not see why we need to bring the past back into the present.

  Why not let it stay there, where it was happy?

  Part Three

  Prologue

  For there is no crime more extreme to perpetrate.

  Not even if he were to lower his head and swallow himself.

  October 62 BC

  Greetings, brother!

  What tidings from the East? I hope these last months have not erased my name from the tablet of your memory?

  I hear nothing from you, just stale news via our father. Have you a wound in your writing-hand, soldier? In your profession, silence is frightening for those who love you. Write.

  My news? Nothing of war or gain. I’m writing all the time now; that is, when I’m not scintillating with the drink. I spend my sober hours with the other young poets of the Alexandrine school, in which excess, delicacy and, naturally, the courses of Venus are celebrated. Our coterie likes everything small and perfectly formed (we abhor an epic). My Phalaecean hendecasyllable is a thing of polished beauty and my limping iambics positively gambol! Even Caelius has something tumescing his normally flaccid verse these days.

  We are interested in the concept of synaesthesia put forward by the Greeks: how, in writing, combinations of two or more senses give a disproportionate amount of pleasure. Also, why the sound of certain consonants harnessed to certain vowels can move a man to tears, even when he has no idea of the language.

  So, for example, I’ve coined a new word for ‘kiss’. Old ‘osculum’ sounds to me like what snails do. It has all the sensual panache of sucking a pip from an orange. I’ve borrowed from our Celtic dialect in Verona and come up with ‘basium’ on which the mouth can linger at least. And instead of mere kisses, I write ‘kissifications’ – the kind that leaves you wishing for another mouth, so pillaged is the one you own.

  It’s a rare day when a poem stays trapped inside me.

  I have plenty of hours – sometimes days – when Clodia doesn’t require my services. I don’t wait around moping. I burn up the time between our encounters. I do everything. I go everywhere that’s fashionable. I wave away the hand that pours water to dilute the wine. I know the hazy pleasures of wandering drunkenly through midnight Rome, my arms linked in those of two poet-brothers. I bypass all those earnest transactions in doorways of exclusive clubs, for I, Catullus, am always waved in indulgently. I drink and gamble with my slaves and on the Kalends my animal mask was more grotesque than anyone’s. This year I was a small deer with enormous horns and a nose of ember-red. Clodia was a hyena.

  Her brother Publius Clodius wore women’s clothes, of course. There are rumours it’s not only at the Kalends that he does this. I avoid his company, for he puts the glad eye on me when he sees me. He’ll reach out a hand too, if I pass too close, and it’s horrible to feel, soft as a baby’s sneeze. He makes me uncomfortable in ways I cannot name. It’s not just the excess of fondling he lavishes on his sister, even or perhaps especially in my presence, or the wall-eyed thugs who lurk in knots on the stairs when he’s with her. It’s a sense of something limitless in his corruption. There’s nothing Clodius would not do. He would bring down the edifice of this city if he could, temple by temple, brothel by brothel.

  I’ll admit it, I myself love to shock.

  Not like Clodius. With me, it’s just a bit of fun, a savoury jest at someone else’s expense. Mostly.

  The stink of Aemilius’ mouth, I quipped, is worse than the stench of his arse, because the latter at least lacks his long, rotten teeth – which are like the slats that stop manure from falling out of a cart. I’ve dedicated another poem to Rufus, who smells like hell. I put about, in sonnet form, the story that a rutting goat is lodged under his armpit, frightening away the women.
Of Furius, so mean he can’t bear to excrete, I wrote that his infrequent stools are dry as beans and smell of rose petals.

  Other writers are my best game. I insult the very tissue of their work. Cacata carta, I say of the wretched paper smeared with the Annals of Volusius, beshitten paper; cursed even are the flames to which the tedious words are inevitably consigned.

  And when I cannot insult someone I know, I’m ready with some anonymous witticisms, dirty as you like. The prick, as I write it, is a sausage that makes its own gravy.

  Our father sends pleading letters from Verona, for my health continues to deteriorate. Sometimes I make the journey home, but Rome is the place to be if your heart’s being slowly dismembered in front of you. Not achingly lovely Sirmione or the gentle fields by the lake.

  Rome gives me plenty of material for metaphor. The mutilations Clodia performs on my feelings are enacted every day in the public places of Rome with less subtle instruments of torture; scourges, barrels of boiling pitch, the rack, whips with spurs, flaming torches held directly against the skin. Every day I pass men stretched out or doubled up on the little horse of the lyre rack. I pass an open door and see a slave being flogged in an atrium (they always make such a punishment as public as possible to discourage insubordination). I see the carnifices on their way to torture the criminals in the forum. I’ve seen the impaled corpses up at the Esquiline Gate. Even radish and mullets, supposedly harmless foodstuffs, are used as painful suppositories for the adulterous, administered in public places where the mobs may see the pain and humiliation of their peers for themselves.

  My best weapon remains the verses.

  ‘Good morning, wax tablet,’ I say, like a gladiator saluting his lion. Indeed I sport on my tablet like a hardened killer, murdering reputations, cutting down rivals, branding them with the vocabulary of the brothel, scribbling ugly marks on their immortality. My words, my hired beast-boys, go out ball-breaking, just like Clodia herself.