The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  It is this: that we should publish Catullus, and as soon as possible. I was brave and bold like Paola when I told him so. ‘What, now?’ he almost raised his voice, so astonished was he with me. ‘When we are so deep in trouble?’ He lifted quizzing eyes on me.

  ‘Because of that,’ I replied. ‘It cannot get worse.’

  Then he told me something which he’d guarded to himself I do not know how long (it seems we both have secrets!). Despite the rants of the priest on Murano, the nobleman Domenico Zorzi is also pressing him to print Catullus and promises to buy one quarter of the first run. And there’s another noble, Nicolò Malipiero, who has also come to his office, on just that one errand, to ask him to make a printing of that book, says he will subscribe for twenty copies, all on fine Bologna paper. What’s clear though, also, is a threat beneath all their fine words. Without the need to say so, their smiles also mean: if you do not give us what we want then we shall find it elsewhere. Both these men are known whoremongers, said even to associate with foreign women, so I doubt their motives. At least I think they’re little to do with literature and everything to do with lust.

  My man and I do not talk of such things, for with the worries about money a small shadow has fallen between us again, and we are not so free and easy with each other as we once were. We both feel smaller than we did before, diminished in the eyes of the world.

  I long to purify myself with a confession of my crime, but each time the words come to my lips a pair of hands inside my throat pushes them back down into the well of my guilt.

  * * *

  The book burnings ceased. There were no further executions or disappearances.

  After the purge the stricken printing industry limped uncertainly forward, except for Nicolas Jenson who quietly flourished.

  Jenson’s type was so beautiful that Wendelin could imagine him struggling to find a text sublime enough to print with it. After him, after his Roman and his Gothic Rotunda, there was nothing left to do but copy him.

  And publish what Jenson dared not.

  Wendelin took his problem to his sister-in-law. If Paola, clear-eyed and cool, could see wisdom in publishing Catullus then he would almost feel he had Johann’s blessing too.

  He brought her some pages of proofs, the sparrow poems, and the kissing poems. Although he did not bring the worst of the obscenities, he was embarrassed at the intimacy of watching her read the lines. He stood in silence, aware of his knees pressing together, awaiting her verdict.

  She scanned the sheets quickly, and turned to him, ‘It’s not to my taste, but it will sell. Does Lussièta know you’ve come to me?’

  He hung his head.

  ‘I thought not. Best not to tell her. While you’re here, there is something I’d like to discuss with you.’

  But Wendelin was overcome with guilt for every moment spent secretly in her company and excused himself quickly with a grateful press of her hand. He hurried away from her door, hoping that he was not seen. If Lussièta happened to be looking from her window … He hoped she was at Rialto. Sometimes he felt faint qualms at the public nature of his wife’s life. She insisted on going to Rialto each day. It was, she said, to choose the best of everything, and to garner what she called ‘my dollop of news’, but Wendelin was dimly aware that there were other, subtler missions, too.

  That afternoon he wrote to Padre Pio in Speyer:

  My period of deliberation has already been too long. I begin to think that Jenson will steal this idea from me too. If he did that, should I see him in the street, I believe I could not forfend to smite his nose. But do you know, he’s never seen abroad. I have never knowingly crossed his path, even in this town, where I must take threefold the time I should just to cross the town, because of meeting people who must be greeted and consoled (Venetians always have something wrong with them) or congratulated and admired (they have always just bought something beautiful) … Anyway, I see my entire acquaintance twice over at least once a week but never this Jenson. Not once.

  But Padre, I don’t believe you wrote to me asking for more of my futile repinings over Jenson … You want to know what I’m going to do about Catullus. I confess that it is at this moment, when I veer towards publishing those poems, that I most feel the loss of my brother. Johann’s voice would be so welcome in my ears; his caution would be appreciated.

  But to tell you the truth, I think I have decided already. Even if Johann told me not to, I would publish this Catullus now.

  There it is, my decision. And you are the first to know it, even before my wife.

  Chapter Nine

  As soon as it dawns

  I will run to the booksellers’ stalls

  The Venetians liked songs; they liked them a little malicious if possible or at least pungent as a black canal on a midsummer afternoon. They liked little dialogues between mothers and precocious daughters destined for the nunnery, or else illicit mistresses pitting their wits against impudent servants or their own dear but dim-witted lord. The Venetians sang so much that the state was obliged to bring laws to forbid singing at certain hours. But even when they desisted from their melodious caterwauling, the townspeople warmed their throats, humming like cats.

  Felice told Wendelin: ‘Venetians are not miserable enough to produce a great poet of their own. If they feel a poetical emotion, they ask Bellini to paint it for them so they can look at it. Catullus does with words what Bellini does in paint. Ecco – they will love him.’

  Wendelin nodded. This was also his experience of Venetians. Abstract erudition was not for them – they wanted stories, short and piquant as possible, the ghostlier the better, like the ones his wife brought home from the market. He imagined them distended languidly upon their divans, dozing over their books; undertaking imagined voyages and vicarious romances without exertion beyond turning a page.

  ‘You have not risked so much,’ insisted Felice. ‘Catullus is just what they want right now. In fact, he’s overdue. It would be a relief to give him birth.’

  * * *

  Once he had finally decided to publish Catullus – many weeks after he had begun to invest in the manuscript, assigning its introduction to Squarzafico and the editing to Bruno – only then did Wendelin start to feel true fear. For the first time, when he saw his own staff at work on printing the book, did it seem real to him and even then, when he looked at the first pages, the act of doing so had the surpassingly real quality of a dream. He saw himself from the outside, leaning down to examine the folios. Look at me, he wanted to say, the man who will publish Catullus.

  At the last minute he decided to temper the shock of the new work and to make his investment safer, both at one stroke. He resolved to include in the book the poems of two better-known Romans: Propertius and Tibullus. These two were so famous, so much quoted, so exposed, that they were almost respectable, even if their verses were not always so. Why, Giovanni Bellini himself had made neat use of a line from Propertius in the cartello under one of his Pietàs.

  Wendelin quoted aloud to himself: ‘When these swelling eyes evoke groans this very work by Giovanni Bellini could shed tears …’

  In the company of Propertius and Tibullus, Catullus would be safe, Wendelin decided. Just to be sure, he inserted another work too, the innocuous pastorals of Statius.

  On the last day of September what Wendelin hoped would be the first three hundred copies of Propertius-Tibullus-Statius-Catullus were printed and piled high in their quires. At midnight, Wendelin and his men ceased their labours and went, as one, down to the waterside, to rest their eyes and compose their thoughts before going home to their wives.

  They stood by the Grand Canal, watching the reflections of lamps on the water and listening to the soft breathing of the city. Dark ghosts of gondolas haunted the windows by the water, floating in and out of probability, like dreams. Golden chips of moonlight beckoned from the canal, glittering like the tiny tessere of an infinite golden mosaic.

  What have we done? the men wondered. Had they made
their fortunes or lost their livelihood? Everyone knew that this book, or at least the last and greatest part of it, was different, that it had broken a tradition, that it had startled a foetal idea out of its egg, perhaps before its time.

  Wendelin said aloud to Bruno, standing quietly beside him/It’s just a book, after all.’

  But his voice quavered so that his editor gently took his elbow and led him back indoors, where he handed Wendelin his cloak and bid him an affectionate goodnight.

  A book may not be imprinted, thought Wendelin, walking home through the dark streets.

  * * *

  So at last the poems came out.

  My man came home late, late one night, with the first book in his sleeve.

  I had gone to bed but not to sleep, for I knew what great thing he was about. I stretched out there thinking of him at his work, and how he must be feeling.

  There’s a map in Genoa that shows how Irish geese grow upon trees. The goslings ripen in fruit that resemble apples. Decaying within, the fruit produces a worm, which as it grows, becomes both hairy and feathered. Eventually the creature breaks the skin of the fruit and flies away. That was how I thought of the book: breaking out of the skin of its fruit.

  It was the early hours of the morning when I heard his step in our calle. His footsteps were light for he did not wish to wake our son, but they were also leavened by the bubbles in his blood at the thought of what he’d just printed.

  He came up to our bed where I lay in wait for him. I could see in his face that he’d given that book all he had, as if it were his wife or child. Time was the least of it, but I felt suddenly exhausted at the thought of all those hours that had been used upon it, so much more in deciding to print than in committing the act.

  So I felt a piece of meanness for that book in that I knew he loved it in some ways as he loved me. That love I wanted all for myself from him. And he knew that I knew it, so that night he took steps to make me see that the book could be a part of our love, not just something of his own.

  When he came into our room, he made a small cough to clear his throat so he might tell me a thing of great worth in a clean voice. He still wore his cloak, and he stood at the foot of the bed, a little theatrical and very conscious of himself.

  ‘This book’, he said, ‘I have made and the cause of it is you, and my love of you. If I had not known you, I would not know that these poems are true. I would not believe in love like this, think that the poets lie. They seem, the sweet ones, to be all of you or for you, by me, from me. The dark ones are of someone else. I think with fear sometimes that they could be my other fate – the wife who would have been mine, if I did not have you. Your corrupt double.’

  ‘My sosia,’ I whispered.

  We both shook like bells then, and he cried a drop, at so dread a thought. So I held wide my arms and took the book to my bed and my heart. I held it tenderly, that first book, as if it were a babe – and yes, in fact, it was just two hours old when I first met with it.

  I rocked it in my arms. It was a big thing, at least seven inches by ten. It gave me its rich smell and then the creamy silk of its pages. It had no binding yet; it was too young, vulnerable as a naked baby sparrow before it grows its feathers.

  ‘Three hundred and seventy-eight pages,’ my man said proudly. ‘One hundred and eighty-nine folios.’

  I raised a page to see which watermarks he’d used – the bull’s head with the crown, the scales, the scissors, the castle, the lily, the dragon … but my man stayed my hand and said, ‘No, just look at the words, this time.’

  I saw he needed my comfort for the brave thing he’d done, and I gave what I could. I did not praise the type or the set of the margins. That was not the kind of praise he needed.

  So I gave him words of love about his book. I read aloud some lines. I traced my fingers over them. I showed him I was lost in it. I told him it was as wise as the owls of Athens, as sweet as the pears of Calabria, as piquant as the fried frogs of Cremona and as delicate as the broiled quails of Delos.

  Then I rose from the bed, and said, ‘Let us take the boat now.’

  My man looked fully mystified, and I whispered, ‘Trust me.’

  At this he followed me without one more word to our son’s room, where I gently scooped the sleeping babe, and then downstairs to the jetty. All the while I kept the book tucked under my arm.

  ‘Where, my love?’ he asked, when the boat was untied and all three of us inside.

  ‘To the lagoon,’ I said, ‘where the Sposalizio is done.’

  And so we poled to that same spot where each year the Doge drops a gold ring in the water, to marry Venice to the sea.

  Then I rose from my bench and held the book of Catullus above the water and looked back to my man to see if he was in accord with what I proposed to do.

  He smiled at me, struck silent with awe.

  And so I did as the Doge does. I called on Poseidon, King of the Waves, the Tritons, the Sirens, the Nereids and all the creatures of the briny kingdoms.

  ‘Show the world,’ I entreated them, as the Doge does, ‘that the ancient times may be married to the present ones.’

  Then I set the book softly on the skin of the waves.

  I don’t know why it did not sink. Perhaps it was buoyed up by our hopes, perhaps being made of beaten wood the book imagined it could float, like a raft.

  And so it did, into a path laid down by the moon. We two watched until we could see it no more.

  I did not know it would be our fate, that book, that all things would change with it. I thought it just a tender thing, a young thing, made of my man’s courage and his love of good words. I thought its printing marked the end of the shadow between us, the one cast by poverty and fear, my way of making up to him for not coming to Speyer, and for starting the rumour which had hurt and killed printers in this town. I thought Catullus would do all that.

  How wrong I was, in all things.

  Part Five

  Prologue

  So accept this little book, such as it is,

  O protecting Virgin.

  May it last for eternity and a day.

  August 58 BC

  Lucius, sweet brother-of-mine,

  Your accusations fail to wound, being precisely beside the point.

  No, I always hoped these poems would raise riot, and that it would last. You know I could never stand to be forgotten, rinsed out of the weave of history, like ink in milk.

  And my bid to stay indelible can hardly fail: because of me, everyone may know what it’s like to make love to Clodia Metelli, not just the hundreds who actually have.

  I knew what I was doing. Don’t say I was hotheaded. On the contrary, I made a ritual of it.

  Those poems were drafted a hundred times on waxed tablets of ivory. I erased as much as I wrote: the flat edge of my stylus was as busy as the pointed one. I melted down successive imperfections without mercy. It was many months before I was satisfied.

  Then came the dress rehearsal: for weeks I toiled with almost ungentlemanly carefulness upon second-hand papyrus whose old words had been rubbed out. Finally, when the words had begun to write themselves straight out of my fingers on to the palimpsest, I myself penned the presentation copy for the patron I’ve chosen, the historian Cornelius Nepos, smoothing down the papyrus with pumice stone till it was silky before anointing it with ink. You never saw anything so elegant. Cornelius would be beside himself – or so I told myself.

  I suddenly realised that four years have wheeled around since I started writing these poems: I began them in the late spring and yet again I’m waking in humid sheets and the streets of Rome are stinking of sun-warmed urine in the afternoons. You tell me the sun burns you in Asia Minor, Lucius, but I assure you the stones of Rome are hotter than the ovens of Mesopotamia. My body distils rivulets of sweat, as if each organ separately wept its own tears for snow.

  Meanwhile, speaking of sweat, at the bookseller’s, anonymous scribes have been grinding out quick, cheap copie
s of my book, one after another. More than the usual number, for a first-time poet. The bookseller, a low type, but clever in his way, very clever, has great hopes of my work. He knew real pain when he saw it.

  ‘Pain sells,’ he told me, spitting on his fingers and running them down the manuscript, which made me feel queasy. But I suppressed my qualms when he added: And sells and sells.’

  You say nothing of the handsome copy I sent you. Is it not fine? I hope you’ve done as I asked and made no mention of this book in your letters home. Father must not see it. You know why. Please reassure me on this point, Lucius.

  I’m not entirely displeased to draw your attention to the fact that it takes three whole rolls of joined papyrus sheets to contain my book of poems. Even in the cheap copies, the ornamental boss is marked with my initials and each roll is tied closed with those thongs of beautifully stained leather.

  (‘Very expensive,’ the bookseller leered at me. ‘They’ll buy it for the looks of it on their tables anyway.’ Forgive me: I know it shows rather vilely in me to be occupied with such low stuff.)

  The noblest copy of all was destined for Cornelius Nepos, my patron. I myself supervised the winding of the papyrus and made sure that the leather thongs were polished to the shine of fresh ox-blood. I inspected it one last time in the morning of the day the book was to be delivered. I’d already decided that this would be the moment I cast my destiny upon the waters, in my mind, the hour I was born as a real poet.

  I had a slave take it round for me, though old Cornelius is as genial as he’s cultured, and I know he would have made me welcome in his tall thin house, built just like him, where he writes his own long, thin books. Like everyone else in Rome, Cornelius has a soft spot for our pater, and I know Father respects him.