The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  I never told you that when Caelius left her I went to see him.

  ‘I helped you out over the sparrow,’ I said to him bluntly, ‘now you tell me how you cured yourself of her.’

  He looked at me pityingly. ‘I don’t write about her any more. I don’t think you are ready to make that sacrifice, my friend.’

  He’s right. I’ve been so in love with her it’s hard to feel anything else. It’s like fighting my way out of an egg: my strength is nearly gone in making the first small hole, from which I peer, hopelessly, at freedom, while the breath ebbs out of me.

  I think that perhaps there will always be Clodias, just as there will always be mothers. The poor men will run from the breast of one to the other. They may invent new machines to change our lives, so we can run faster from one to the other, but what good is speed to a man who’s forsaken the gentle breast of his mother to become ensnared by the bitter nipple of a Clodia? Nothing at all.

  Better to write slowly, one word in front of the last. By writing you can use up a whole passage of the moon, and face the new day too frail to feel the pain except as a blurred kind of hatred for yourself.

  I write now because I can do nothing else. I work and rework the old poems tirelessly, changing them into new ones. In the end it’s just one. A poem about a man in love and a woman who’s incapable of it, a picturesque and futile little prayer, endlessly chanted.

  By its recital I have acquired the honour of being the most talked-about poet of my day.

  Not for long, though. Rome lacks the concentration for poetry. I know this even as I write. From the moment I got my immortality, the day my book was presented to the world, I’ve been aware that fame itself is highly perishable.

  Our empire is expanding, but the minds of our populace are contracting. The city’s now in the grip of an obsession with ludi – gross entertainments; at the most innocent, chariot racing and beast-hunts; at worst, we’ve the glamorous obscenity of our gladiators who compete for the goriest kills. Caesar’s up north invading some ungainly island of primitives, pitchforking those shaggy Britons out of their long-haired forests, to bring back more human fodder for our arenas. Assassins, not writers, are the real heroes in this town.

  In my poetry, there’s a breast laid too bare, shown too soft for a populace that lives on a diet of viscera.

  Worse still, there are too many books, too many cheap productions by too many booksellers for a tiny market of readers. The scribes are working long hours to make copies of books better left unwritten. But even the good ones are implicated in the general over-production.

  I know all too well the way these things go. Ignominious destinies meet some of the best books … after languishing over-long in the storerooms of the booksellers they’re sold off by weight to the grocers and bakers to wrap pastries and spices or to line barrels in which cereals are stored, or they’re sent to the butchers where they’re wadded around sanguineous cuts of veal and the lolling heads of tiny songbirds impaled upon sticks.

  There are so many ways for a poet and his poems to lose their immortality – even while he’s still alive! I walk past the butchers and bakers, whistling, but in my heart I dread to see my own work embrace their wares one day. Yesterday I saw one of Caelius’ poems flapping like a tunic round a fine mackerel, and smiled for the first time in weeks.

  Meanwhile I’m still singing my poems. The publication of my book did not silence me; it’s drawn more out of me. Perhaps I’ve over-exposed myself. I have lived too much, as if afraid of running out of material; I’ve used up my life too fast. I have always been too delicate for this world of Lesbias, or should we say Clodias.

  You might ask me why I have written so much, why I’ve been writing, it seems, instead of actually living. I wrote when I could have been out looking for a better woman to love, when I might have been forgetting – getting drunk with men friends who had not (yet) slept with Clodia. There are so many things I could have done which would have served my happiness better than writing.

  I myself have come to think of it less as an art and more as a way of breathing. I take a deep swig on her latest lie, and out come these songs, fluent as blood.

  Just as with the birds, the instinct to sing is alike manifested by heaven-born musicians and the carrion-gnawers of life: the lark and the crow both make their music when they want to make love. The crow plainly thinks his caws and splutters are as eloquent as I believe mine to be. Or used to. Perhaps the crow is more effective. It is said the crow-wife maintains the highest monogamous standards throughout their married life. In the case of Clodia and myself, only one of us attempted monogamy, the one who sings.

  Sometimes I fear I’ve grown stale; that, like the crow, my vocabulary is stunted. I know too much about love now to write about it properly. I would like a pristine voice, with wonder still alive in it, instead of this plaintive one, dirtied by too much experience on the darker shores of love.

  I sit here during these slippery hours when the sun stops beating and no one else can mark what no one else can see. I wonder what Clodia is doing now. It’s winter again. She’s here in Rome, filling the nights with groans of one kind or another; milking the milk-herds, bearing down on the orange-squeezer, kneading the exhausted dough of the baker, screwing the pimp for money.

  I know better than anyone how easy it is, by night, to insert half-hours of secret pleasure. The night bulges a little, pats its black paunch and belches stars. That is how it is with me, when I have my turn with her, as I still do, when the thought of me takes her fancy and she sends out her servant to summon me.

  Meanwhile I walk round the town, watching my own feet fall in front of me. It’s cold and I cough a lot, despite my furs. Our father’s money cannot keep out the ills of the soul that tax my health. He asks me to come back to Sirmione, to the beautiful house on the lake where it’s never too cold and where even the winter air is scented with health-giving herbs.

  But I cannot leave; she might change her mind again. She’s done it before. Eighteen times, to be precise. That is how often I’ve possessed her since she first rejected me. The nineteenth time might be tonight. That’s what keeps me here.

  In my walks I see all the other rich people piled up in furs – we seem like a shambling breed of badly clipped beasts. I laugh at the thought: the more fur we show on our backs, the more superior – the more above the beasts and slaves – we think we are!

  Except perhaps Clodia. She’s different. She’s above us all. She has the power of the kingdom. She knows how not to love.

  In the mists of the gull-squalling river, I think I see her eyes under every hood. I nurse a memory of her yawning with her arms hooked up over her head like the handles of an amphora. Her nipples are laughing at me, and she rubs her belly in satisfaction at all the seed I’ve planted in there. Gods! How I desire her! There’s no cure for the lust she inspires in me.

  I take my friends’ advice – I try to think of that smile in her grave a hundred years from now – a twist of teeth and black bone. For a moment I can envision it. Then the moment passes, like a glimpse at infinity. I am back in her thrall again.

  Even if she called me to her tonight, I could not be sure of satisfying her. The periods of calm between the violent fits of coughing have become shorter. My lungs are hungry as a pair of cupped hands, but the charity of a little air is not forthcoming.

  I keep walking, contesting each breath. The ovens of the town are alight. Women are cooking for the men they love. I choke on the ghosts of ashes, my stomach tightening with envy at the thought of husbands and wives sharing simple pleasures, with no fear of poison in the pot.

  The night is coming. Leaning on the rail to catch my breath, from the Pons Aemilius I see a pale lavender sky pricked by tree skeletons. The darting tongues of evening light, swift and sweet as ideas, have vanished and soon this town will be dark as the grave. Who says that dawn must come? A gland of satisfaction swells somewhere inside me at this thought. If I must die, why not the city too?
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  And all those who live in her.

  It grows yet darker. The moon rises. I am hunched around my own chest trying to protect it from the cold fumes of the river. Furtive figures move about the edges of the streets, dumping the waste of the day. Someone rolls the corpse of an overworked ass into the street and runs off. Other men come to empty the public urinals, and carry the contents off to the tanners. Out of noxious liquid, supple leather. Out of pain, poetry. It’s that bad time, that vulnerable stretch of time, the time when it is essential for lovers to be together. Those who cannot be with their lovers call for drink, violence or fornication, or all three. The needy cluster round the portico of Pompey, where even a hunchback may pick up a girl for nothing.

  Now it’s time for me to go to my room and write, if only this cough will let go of me for an hour. Wine will soon perfume my ink and rock my brain till it clicks to attention, and I will start to write. I shall bend like a shroud-maker over my work, sewing the corpses of my feelings into neat little poems …

  Who knows, her servant might be waiting for me at my door.

  Since I returned from our lake house at Sirmione this last time, I have been waiting.

  I’m calmer now. Burying the wax doll in the earth there seems to have laid to rest at least a part of my pain. When all seems unbearable, I remember what I did and what I said then, and it has the power of a prayer to calm me.

  Beloved Sirmione! Delicately bubble-floating on the lake, so unlike Rome, who has bolted herself into the land with great stone latchets. Perhaps I did wrong to desecrate the sweet ground of my birthplace with my wax doll and my curse?

  On the last day before I left for Rome, I went down to the lake with the doll and unrolled her from her linen sheath. I drove five little nails into her shapely back, one each for the two kidneys, the liver, the spleen and the heart. Around these I wound the last strands I have stolen of Clodia’s hair. (I noticed that this formed a shape like the letter ‘S’.)

  Then I dug a small hole with my hands, and bent down to smell the sweet earth. With my mouth to the hole, I whispered to the Gods of the Underworld: ‘I am here, can you hear me?’

  I listened, and heard the quiet breathing of the soil. The shades are said to be kindly folk, and I was not afraid of them, even though my mission was dark.

  ‘I consign to this earth this devotio,’ I whispered, in a quavering childlike voice, ‘this image of the lady Clodia Metelli. It is made in her likeness, and so I invoke homoeopathic magic to bind her soul to it. It is made using her hair, and I so invoke contagious magic, conferred by this substance that intimately belonged to her. I invoke these things to carry my curse.’

  At this point I heard a noise like the crunch of a light footstep on a twig, and I jerked up my head in alarm, for such curses are outside the law. But it was just a brave and curious sparrow, hopping close to see if I would feed him. Sirmione is so kind a place that even the beasts are optimistic in their spirits. I thought about Clodia’s dead sparrow then, and considered this little bird a good omen: perhaps it was the soul of her bird, come to help me bind my curse.

  So I lowered my head to the mouth of my hole again, and continued.

  ‘My curse is this. Clodia shall not die. At least, her body may die; that is, the body she wears now. But I curse her spirit to wander the earth unsleeping, borrowing other bodies if needs be, both male and female. She will wander the earth like that, until she learns to love someone as I have loved her. Until then she will burn in all the seats of love, in her kidneys, her liver, her spleen, her heart, and she will roam the world, unrequited. And her pain will be inscribed on her back, as it is on this devotio’s.’

  Then I put her in the ground, and covered her with soil, as if I planted the seed of a malignant flower. While I did so, I hissed: ‘May this curse fracture and splinter and go off in all different directions like the scintilla of sparks when a hot ember explodes. My hate’s as deep as that.

  ‘I swear by the feather of Clodia’s sparrow, by the slant of her neck, by the planes of her cheekbones, by the groove of her sex, that this curse shall go beyond my life and beyond hers and into the future where everything shall repeat itself endlessly until my pain is expiated.’

  My hands hovered over the earth as I delivered my last words. ‘Anyone who knows how to love will help carry my curse from this world to the next, and the one after that.’

  Back in Rome, now, I miss my little devotio sometimes. I used to sleep with her like a doll in my hand.

  I don’t even know if I believe in the curse. I suspect the power of any curse rests in the catharsis it offers the one who utters it. Certainly, I can say now: ‘Yes, I have settled my accounts.’

  What happens next? When you have settled your accounts?

  Better to work on the poems and not ponder on the wax figure any more.

  I’ve heard they say in Egypt that this world is an egg and the image of it cracking insists on entering my poetry somewhere, I know not where to insert it. Clodia’s sparrow never laid an egg. Like all her loves, it was barren. Perhaps the little figure, laid into the ground, is a kind of egg, which must gestate until her time is come. Perhaps she is my last poem.

  I feel a pressing of time on my shoulders, as if it were a more precious commodity than even a look of love on Clodia’s face. The river mutters filth at me, and mv own lips are restless as a moth, tasting phrases for …

  Chapter One

  My lover’s sparrow is dead.

  My darling’s darling sparrow is dead,

  whom she loved more than her own eyes.

  He was honey in her hands, as intimate

  with her as a girl with her own mother.

  That sparrow seldom left her lap,

  but pranced on the air around her, here and there,

  forever making music for his mistress alone.

  Now he takes the path of shadows,

  whence neither bird nor man returns.

  Why do I see rope in all parts where I go? Why not chains? They last longer and are stronger. Rope grows slippery, frays and rots. Is that why I see it – for it’s like the love of a man for his wife?

  Then there’s this new thing in the house. When I serve the wine there’s such a shake in the glasswares that I fear each one will shatter. I do not know if it’s the trembling of my own hands (for they do this now each time he’s in the house) that has caused this. I try to think so, but I cannot.

  There is one more thought which comes and comes to me, no mind how I try to fight it off.

  It is this: the glass of this town is known to shiver when a poison is poured inside it. If there’s a bad illness corked up inside a bottle, it will burst forth. I do not wish to say out loud the thing with which a man may rid himself of his wife if he no more loves her.

  I think you can guess what thing it is.

  I see it in the letters now. He writes to me of the pleasure he takes when I sup at my glass. ‘I love to see your lips wet,’ he has written, ‘with some sweet thing I’ve fed you.’

  * * *

  Late in the frostbound night the Signori di Notte came to Wendelin von Speyer, still lingering at the stamperia, with an urgent commission. Quick, secret and on a grand scale. This was unusual. The Signori had no need to deal with printers on a normal basis. Wendelin sent a servant to rouse the apprentices and set them to work. He told them to wake him with a proof copy. He was only half awake and he would wait to look at the scrawled text when it was rendered in his own lustrous type. He set off on his nocturnal wanderings, returning home in the early hours.

  Soon after came a knock at his door. Stumbling downstairs, Wendelin opened the door and took the proof copy Morto handed him. The cold breath of the lagoon swept into the hall.

  ‘It’s her,’ Morto croaked in a broken voice, ‘the one Bruno loves.’

  Half a dozen grim realisations fell on Wendelin at once.

  ‘She came to the stamperia? She’s Bruno’s innamorata? It’s for this woman – this Sosia Simeon –
the doctor’s wife? – that he walks around like a ghost?’

  ‘Him and a couple of hundred others it seems, sir.’

  ‘What’s she like, this woman? You’ve met her?’

  ‘Bruno was robbed, sir, in my opinion.’

  ‘Shall you go and tell him, Morto?’

  ‘I cannot bear it. I think it should come from you, sir.’

  Wendelin started at a slight noise upstairs. Had Morto’s knock woken his wife? He awaited her footsteps, her call. None came. She must have fallen back to sleep. He burned with anxiety for her. She would be painfully sorry for the Jewish doctor, who had been so humiliated by this dreadful woman. Privately he feared for himself and the stamperia in the aftermath of her crimes: he had seen, with a pang of dread, that a copy of his own Catullus book, found with her, was named in the denunciation.

  Two hours later, Bruno arrived at work, his face twisted and translucent with suffering. Wendelin gratefully assumed someone else had told him on his way to work. He put his arm around the young man, and pressed the document into his hands, that were mottled with cold.

  ‘So we’ve been asked to print it. I wanted you to see it first. Bruno, if the horrors in here should spread to envelop you then I shall support you before the Avogadori, should my opinion count for anything in this town.’

  Bruno stared, ucomprehending.

  ‘Take it home and read it. You need not work today, my son.’

  * * *

  In his little apartments at Dorsoduro, Bruno lit a candle and balanced it, barely, on his pallet. He lay there with the pages of the proofs spread over his body. He did not care if the flame took the sheets of his bed. His thoughts, metallic and cold, ran in vicious circles between his sister and his lover.

  Until that morning he had been preoccupied with Gentilia.

  A messenger had arrived the previous evening with a letter from the Mother Superior at Sant’ Angelo di Contorta. His sister Gentilia, he read, had been found to be suffering from a riotous imbalance of the brain, and they’d been obliged to confine her in a hospital administered by the priests on Murano. She had been taken there that very night, for her own safety. He might not visit her until her mind had settled somewhat. He was not to worry unduly about her, and on no account to try to make contact with her as in her present condition any communication would exacerbate her suffering.