The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  ‘Aha!’ I say, ‘Take that!’ brandishing my stylus, my little arm that will reach into the future.

  As will the little wax doll I have commissioned, of course, my darling devotio, soft and silky to the finger and tender as the nape-parting of a little girl’s hair.

  * * *

  December 62 BC

  Brother of mine,

  All Rome is up in arms about their antics now! Clodia and Clodius.

  You know of the Bona Dea, do you not, Lucius? She’s a Roman goddess. Her temple rites are held in May at her dwelling on the Aventine. But more important and more luscious, they say, are those secret ones that take place in December, performed by all the highborn women of Rome and the Vestal Virgins.

  We men cannot exactly know what happens among them or the style of the ceremonies they perform together. They are rightfully called ‘The Mysteries of the Good Goddess’.

  It is known that at midnight both the Vestals, the more proper matrons and the pregnant women retire. At this point comes an act thought to be obscene in nature, lubricated by a special wine, which, for the sake of the goodness of the Good Goddess is called lac, or milk, and is carried to the house in a honey pot.

  The women return from their night’s exertions radiant and serene, as if after a protracted orgasm.

  It’s these very rites that Clodia and Clodius have violated.

  I bribed a young Vestal to tell me about it. Some of them are surprisingly venal.

  This is what I had from her little puckered mouth as we stood in the shadow of the temple.

  She started pompously, informing me that this year’s ceremonies of the Bona Dea took place in the Via Sacra residence of Julius Caesar, he being Supreme Pontiff, in the presence of his wife, Pompeia, and his mother, Aurelia.

  ‘I know, I know!’ I said impatiently.

  My eyewitness then began to gasp and roll her pretty eyes as a prelude to reliving her important memories.

  Annoyed, I stared her down until she calmed. ‘Just the facts, if you please,’ I told her sternly. ‘No hysterics.’

  She shrugged and lowered her eyelids. Apparently, the mêlée started just before the ceremony reached its height. (I hoped my Vestal might elaborate on that point, but it seems nothing will make the women break their silence about it.) There was a collective intake of breath – my Virgin demonstrated – as the realisation spread among them all that the unimaginable had happened: Clodia Metelli had smuggled her brother Clodius, dressed as a woman, into the sacred rites.

  My witness thought it was Aurelia, mother of Caesar, who first detected the faint scribble of beard on the chin under the turban and veil of a dancing girl. But she’d also heard it said that it was a pungent male smell that suddenly maddened the brains of the women near Clodius. She herself had scented it.

  ‘Oof, disgusting!’ she shuddered, yet I’ll lay money on it Clodius was not the first man she’d sniffed in her life.

  I told the Vestal that it would be just like Clodius to be contemptuous of detail: not to bother with hiding his own rank odour with feminine lotions. Or perhaps he suffered a moment of normal human fear – in the presence or eminence of the Good Goddess he might have begun, unusually, to sweat.

  She nodded sagely and then spat on the ground.

  To myself I kept the thought that Clodius had longed above all to see his sister in her moments of greatest excitement, and that in his jewels, his cosmetics, his slender body exquisitely conscious of the strange garments he wore, he must have felt a rare excitement. I pictured him, his dark curls dripping sweat, his features, so like his sister’s, rendered identical with paint.

  Gossip whispered that Clodius had swallowed the alectoria, a crystalline stone the size of a bean that is to be found in the gizzard of certain magical cock-hens. This stone is said to give its ingestor not just the usual endowments of strength and potency, but also invisibility. It’s hard to say if Clodius, never the most spiritual of men, could believe in such a thing, but in all events, if he used the alectoria, it did not preserve him from the enraged eyes of the female celebrants of the Bona Dea.

  The women went mad, with their special kind of violence. I pressed my witness to describe what she meant by this, and with an extra coin in her hand she found the words to paint the picture.

  Like adolescent girls caught naked, the women felt the shame and helpless rage of violation. The screaming was of a thousand of sibyls. Some women beat him with their hands. Others tried to cover the implements of their sacred rites from his eyes. A handful reached out to gouge those eyes. They shredded his robes with their bare nails and tore the turban from his head.

  To make matters worse, Clodius was discovered to be wearing a girdle of myrtle, a final insult to the Goddess; the plant was forbidden in her temple for she herself was said to have been cruelly beaten with rods of it by her father, Faunus.

  Clodius carried a lute, with which he tried to shield his private parts from the tearing fingers of the women. Only that, it was said later, saved his manhood.

  ‘What about Clodia?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t they go for her too?’

  But apparently no one touched Clodia. They merely averted their eyes from her. She was beneath their anger or contempt. Pompeia, Caesar’s wife, wisely fainted. Rumours whispered that Clodius had tried to seduce her, and may have succeeded. In this desecration of the Good Goddess in her own home, he’d certainly violated her in a public way.

  ‘So how did it end?’ I asked. ‘How did Clodius survive?’

  Eventually Caesar’s guards came to save him, bleeding, semi-conscious, but still grinning at his success.

  ‘Too bad we didn’t kill him,’ said my witness, viciously, before she slipped back into the shadows of the temple.

  Lucius, you cannot imagine how bad this is.

  Rome is convulsed, shamed in her own eyes. After all, the people are saying, these monsters are bred from the noblest blood of her people. What’s worse: they have got away with it. Clodius has bribed his way out of his punishment. No one can prove Clodia’s complicity, or dares to try.

  When the Vestal had gone, I stood in the garden of the temple, turning bitter thoughts around in my head, then retired to a tavern where I seethed like a cutlet in cheap red wine for hours. I, too, felt a biting wrath against Clodia and her brother. Goading my personal fury was a perverse jealousy that Clodia had excluded me from her plans. Our intimacy is strictly rationed. She would not even take me into her confidence about her outrageous, tacky little plot. We might have giggled over it in bed, extracted all its pleasures and then I might have persuaded her against enacting it, perhaps. But no, I remain peripheral to her high and low moments, called in and out of the arena of her life like an attendant at the lion-pit.

  I prayed that now, alone, disgraced, hated, she would come to me for comfort.

  She did not. The next time I saw her she sneered the compassionate expression off my face. ‘Don’t think you can save me, you patronising little boy,’ she said. But she was stepping out of her robe as she said it and then she lay down in front of me, grinning and breathing faster, as if the memory of her crime aroused her.

  My feelings and my temper were worn to a blade. I pulled her hair back from her face, to whisper harshly, ‘I love you’ into her ear. But she hates me touching her there and slapped my nose stingingly.

  It’s nearly finished now, my little devotio. On my next visit, the craftsman promises it will be ready to take away. He just needs a few more of her hairs to finish it off. I undertook to bring them soon, stroking the little white doll with my fingers. Although she’s tiny – just the size of my hand – and simply done in white wax, the figure has caught the spirit and style of the woman exactly. It’s so very like her that I became suspicious.

  I asked the craftsman, ‘Have you done her before?’

  He smiled discreetly.

  Chapter One

  And shall he now,

  proud and profuse,

  perambulate all men’s marriage beds
,

  like the white dove of Venus, or Adonis?

  For her precious little son, beautiful as God on a cloud, Felice Felicianos mother chose the name that means ‘most fortunate’. It sounded just like ‘Fenice’, or ‘Phoenix’.

  The first morning Felice was able to crawl, he slithered straight to the cupboard where the silver platters were kept. He reached inside with his small plump arms, selected an elegant little platter with a scalloped pattern on its rim. He squatted over it for a moment, delivering a small, neat stool. When his mother walked into the room, he lifted the platter and presented it to her, smiling as graciously as a courtesan might offer convent-made sweetmeats to a noble client. Perhaps, in his kindness, for he was an observant child, he had also detected and wished to reward the very natural delight of his mother in her son’s every bowel movement. But there was no doubt it was the presentation of his own first work, in style, which had chiefly inspired little Felice.

  He was an adorable child; a cherub, a little angel, cooed the women of the family. He was presented to widows and rich town-ladies of Verona like a truffle. By the age of six he was speaking like a miniature Petrarch. He knew how to please, and loved to do so. Plumes of compliments – of a sumptuous texture and colour not found even in the love-songs of the age – unrolled from his pretty lips; he lisped ‘The noble lady’s eyelashes are like the legs of a slender grasshopper or autumn wheat waving in the zephyr.’

  At first, everyone thought he would be a writer. But the gift of invention was not in Felice; merely that of decoration. Words were of importance to him only in the moment of their immaculate execution at his lips, or, more importantly, his quill. A story, for him, was better deconstructed down to the last descender of its most perfect alphabetical letter. The little boy who could have been anything decided to become a scribe. He affected the costume of the ancient guilds, carrying his work materials in a case appended to his girdle.

  In the world of manuscripts, Felice’s opinion soon came to matter. It was known that he endorsed, for example, the long-tailed Q, the curling R, the double serifed M. These things immediately became not just the fashion but the rule.

  People quoted his aphorisms about letters: ‘A good script is a god that dispenses happiness. An ugly one is not merely incompetent but an act of hostility against beauty, like a pustule-on the complexion, like a lovely poem spoken in a brutish accent.’

  What a charmer he was! When he held a quill in his hand it was a magician’s wand. Only errors of taste offended him. In the spirit of friendship he had appointed himself the muse of the painter Andrea Mantegna, to whom he dedicated a collection of Roman epitaphs, and of Andrea’s brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini, whom he counselled in the draperies of angels.

  Felice’s reputation as a lover went before him. His kisses were said to have the finesse of a heron in flight. His very musk was known to be perfumed as if with sandalwood. However, his heart never seemed to be engaged.

  He would look at women long and critically. He was aware of the daily fluctuations in their skin and eyes. He would greet them with a question, ‘How lovely are you today?’ Their fingers would fly to the blemish he had detected.

  Surprisingly, the quality of his female provision was not always of the best. ‘Perfect beauty,’ he claimed, ‘like pure water, is tasteless.’ And so women of unusual lineaments or dimensions were explored for their very particular pleasures.

  People were sometimes suspicious of him, as they might be suspicious of a man who did not love wine or shellfish or music. He was like a beautifully set table: china translucently expensive, golden candlesticks, flowers, but nothing on the plates that could nourish a red-blooded, tender-hearted person.

  However, in the end his charm got them, anyway, the suspicious ones falling hardest of all.

  Felice was utterly clean of the dust that clings to some antiquaries, but he was not untainted in other respects. It was faintly whispered by some and obscenely roared by others, in the taverns, that the fragrant Felice loved a boy. In 1467, lascivious, unnatural poems were found, apparently in his unsurpassable script. The provenance of the poems was thought sufficiently credible to have him banned from the town for a period.

  And so Felice drifted from Verona to Venice, to embrace the printers, rather than to make enemies of them, as did most scribes, short-sighted as they were, in his opinion. He did not think the printers would rob him of work – they would give it to him. And of course Venice might have been created specifically to serve the pleasures of Felice Feliciano. It was just the place for him, an effeminate town whose fused and febrile spirit could not separate her industry from her arts.

  He spent everything he earned in the town, on pottery, silk, jewelled swords. Better than the view from the Campanile for him was the sight of the glass blowers of Murano. Felice stood by with his slate while the men emptied their lungs down a tube into a nugget of molten red glass. Later, he would practise alphabets whose rounds were shaped like the glass blowers’ fragile shells of colour packed with air.

  When Felice came to Venice he stayed at the Sturion at Rialto. It offered every comfort: clean beds, good food, and a vantage point over the liveliest part of town. The famously lovely Caterina di Colonna, who ran the Sturion, was the real reason for its success. She dressed with care merely to supervise the emptying of the slop bowls. All who caught sight of the red-gold halo of her hair would pause and wait for her to come nearer: it was always worth waiting to see what ingenious confection of silk or gold wire or flowers – never too ostentatious but always a gift to the eyes – she had twisted into her curls, to which clung, at all times of the year, the delicate scent of wisteria.

  She ministered to her guests like an apothecary, distributing rooms with canal breath or morning reflections as if administering just the right potion for whatever ailed them. What mostly ailed them was a fierce desire for her own person. Felice knew that when married couples came to the inn the fine dust of the house was disturbed every afternoon by a rhythmic thumping during which the husbands pretended that they were showing Caterina di Colonna the skill born of their ardour for her, and the wives pretended to be the landlady herself With their eyes shut each spouse achieved loud and wonderful climaxes and fell asleep immediately without opening an eyelid, in order to preserve the perfection of the fantasy

  In the presence of such beauty as Caterina’s – indeed, Felice always declared, as a natural response to it – happiness kept breaking out everywhere in Venice, in the form of impromptu festas and routs. Felice loved the parties and often ornamented them with his presence, always making certain to leave so that his absence was noted.

  It was at such a party he had met the Jewess Sosia Simeon, whose intriguing features somehow soaked through her mask so he could read her vivid face in a far corner of the room.

  It had not been difficult to extract her from the fat nobleman she accompanied. She had walked with him in a pleasing silence to his inn where she had per-formed, also in silence, and without instruction, a number of acts he had previously commissioned only from boys.

  She had looked startled when he asked her to leave.

  ‘You don’t want me to sleep the night with you?’ she asked. ‘For later?’

  ‘No, thank you, my angel,’ he replied pleasantly, handing her the chemise she’d discarded two hours before, ‘Let’s not spoil it, shall we?’

  He had lifted a book from the small stack near his bed and commenced to read before she even left the room. In his hand he held the stone letter T he had chipped from an ancient grave near Verona. As he read, he fondled it continually, pushing his fingers into each angle and niche.

  Sosia stood silently for a moment with her hand on the door handle. She had not come across such a man before. She was surprised to feel not merely insulted but also a tearful prickling at her eyes and a sad constriction at her breast. She scribbled her name, which he had not once asked, and directions to her house on a piece of parchment she found on a table near the door. He
did not look up, kept caressing his stone letter with an expression of satisfaction she had not seen on his face even at the most hectic moments of their intimacy.

  It was suddenly clear and devastating to Sosia Simeon that the fascinating Felice Feliciano loved the crevices of the alphabet the way other men loved the crevices of women.

  Chapter Two

  I snatched, while you played, sweet-as-honey,

  a kiss sweeter than sweet ambrosia;

  But I paid the thief’s price for it;

  For I remember that I hung an hour on the cross

  stammering, snivelling my apologies …

  If this is the way you punish a kiss,

  I shall never steal one again.

  After you fall in love, Bruno had noticed, you must adjust your sight to all the old things. You may think you have absorbed the love entirely, swallowed it up inside you as the sky inhales the dew, but then you visit again a familiar place where you have not set foot since your heart made that fatal somersault. Eccoqua – the old place must be re-addressed. You must sit there quietly and allow your soul to transact a negotiation to admit you as the new creature you are – in love or beloved – or, if you are very fortunate, both.

  Bruno smiled bitterly, thinking, It’s possible that the place may not believe you. It may slyly undermine you, start to persuade you, with its own implacable permanence, that nothing’s changed at all, that the love you thought in your grasp is mere delusion. In the face of this proof, so tangible and familiar, the love becomes ghostly, scarcely credible even to you.

  That morning he had faced Sosia inside the courtyard of the Ca d’Oro, where he had brought some folios for the nobleman who owned it. In the absence of Wendelin, the editors had taken it on themselves to keep the reputation of the stamperia alive with constant diplomatic missions to Golden Book houses where they presented samples of their work and flattered the noble clients as much as they dared. He had surprised Sosia, who was leaving the palazzo as he entered it. Now the wind was blowing her lies through the columns out to the water, stippled like beaten pewter in the fitful autumn breeze.