by Jack Lindsay
Clodia spent another half-hour plugging the rat-holes with pieces of cloth torn from the bed-coverlet, and eventually found more holes. Otherwise she liked the room very much, particularly after she discovered a hole through which she could spy on the family next door. Then she put her dress on inside out to hide the embroidery at which the caretaker had stared; and as the cloth still looked too rich, she rubbed some dust on it, sneezed, sat on the bed, and began to cry.
After that she felt hungry, and went out to find some food, unaware that her cheeks bore dusty tear-smears. She bought a sausage and ate it in the street, surrounded by small children who told her that she was a greedy pig. Then she realised that she had no money left, having been cheated out of her change by the sausage-merchant and having left the Syrian coin under the pillow in her room to make the bed more homely. So she knew she’d have to earn some more money. She’d already decided how.
She walked along the street; but all the men she saw were horrid-looking. She had never noticed how many horrid-looking men there were in the world. In fact it was a most disconcerting discovery; for she had always thought that all men were kind and handsome and cheerful, except of course for the very old ones. Now she found they were all either grimy or bristly or fat or bony, and none of them had the kind of face it would be pleasant to wake up with. This was a terrifying discovery. It shattered all her plans and illusions; and it was only because of her fear of the small children that she kept herself from sitting down on the pavement and crying. She knew the children would pull her hair and call her crybaby. Anything was better than that.
At last she saw a young man that she almost liked. It would never do to lose him. She ran towards him, calling out. He stopped and looked around, staring at the windows and balconies of the first floors. Having reached him successfully, she stood breathless and forgot what to say, sorry her embroidery wasn’t showing.
“Anything I can do for you?” He felt stupid, a trifle heated with wine. Not a bad-looking girl.
“Yes.” She found her tongue. “Please do come home with me. There’s nothing but rat’s holes in my room, and I hate it. I loathe it. I detest it. But I won’t be sent to the country. I won’t. O nobody loves me.”
The youth took her hand. The appeal was unusual, but it flattered him. “I’ll soon settle those rats for you.”
She moved off to lead him to her room, and found that she had forgotten where it was. At that she broke down and wept in his arms. “Take me back to my proper home. My name’s Clodia. I live at the House of Pompeius in the Carinae.”
He stared at her. “Not the consul’s house?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, impatiently, still weeping. “Take me home to my mother.”
*
It was all too ridiculous. Cytheris realised with a start that she had refused entry to all her visitors for over a week now — ever since the day when Gallus came staggering in. What had she done with her time? She was astonished and wanted to find out how she had managed to live — she who was usually bored unless she had at least one party every evening to visit. Yet she hadn’t been bored. She had been dreaming, going over the past and yet not being hurt by the memories. The days blurred with a dim sweetness, and she knew that she had been waiting all the while for Gallus to come and take her.
The thought roused her to action. It was too ridiculous. She couldn’t be in love with a young fool who didn’t even dare to touch her. Twice she had been ready to surrender — the night before he left the house, and the day when he kissed her — and he hadn’t known it. Well, he’d get no more chances. There was only one way to banish him properly, and that was to admit her visitors, to find a party somewhere.
She spent that night with a young noble who collected murrhine cups and had a household of slim negresses. He could tell the quality of the cups by smelling them; and as soon as the slaves coarsened, he sold them or put them out to his country estate to breed slim daughters. He had a flawless taste in Greek music and discoursed to her on the spiritual meaning of the various modes and instruments, enlarging on the amorous subtleties of the Phrygian mode, illustrating his theme with selections played by an orchestra hidden behind the hangings, and with apposite caresses.
She came home next morning feeling that she had at last obliterated Gallus; but as she entered the hall of her house, a worried janitor informed her, “He’s in there waiting for you. I couldn’t keep him out, mistress, as you didn’t give me leave to use force.”
She didn’t need to ask whom the janitor meant; and the fact that the man had confidentially referred to Gallus in this way irritated her profoundly. She’d tell Gallus to leave. How dare he force his way into her house. She hastened to the triclinium and stood with her hand on the garlanded doorpost, intending to have no nonsense. Gallus was seated on a couch, a papyrus sheet between his two hands, his face lighted joyously as his lips mutely framed the words. His head nodded slightly.
She knew that she couldn’t tell him to go. Not all at once.
But she managed to say haughtily, “How is it that I find you here?”
He looked up, smiled, and frowned seriously. “I’ve written a poem for you.” He rose, and held out the paper, wanting more than anything to ask where she had spent the night, but not feeling that he might presume so far. He merely said, “You were out early this morning.”
“A friend of mine was in childbirth.”
With child of a kiss, in the throes of deliciousness. Why had she lied? She didn’t care what he thought; but she couldn’t now take back what she’d said. She glanced at the poem. Another dull imitation of Philetas, she supposed. But before she had read the first line, she knew that it wasn’t. There was something real in it; it was good. Her lips parted and she felt a bird of quick pleasure struggling behind her breasts.
Gallus watched her eyes moving over the paper. He could see that she was reading in a way different from that of the other day. He tried to peep and guess which verse she was reading, to hear the echo in her mind, to taste her response simultaneously.
She felt a trifle dazed, and couldn’t read very clearly. There was a ringing in her ears. Some lines from the middle of the poem started out and demanded all her attention. They struck her like a blow, like the cry of a child, insupportably, tenderly. She read them again and again.
while I live,
scarred by your absent kiss, I can’t forget.
Forgive me that I loved, as I forgive
that you have failed to love. O love me yet.
Love is so easy a thing: a little sigh,
a body leaning closer in the dark,
an opening warmth where man and woman lie
touching like fluttering wings ...
She walked across to the couch and sat down. She wanted to think things out.
“Do you like it?” he asked, plaintively.
“Yes, I do,” she answered, quickly. “Very much.”
“Then you really might give a reading of my work?”
“Certainly I will.”
He couldn’t understand her constrained manner. He moved across the room and sat beside her, and she knew that she wanted nothing but him. The dilettante young noble of the night before with his pretty talk and his poses was no man. Gallus for all his weakness was real. She loved him.
He put his arm about her and kissed her on the throat, then drew back to look into her eyes. She turned to give him the reassuring smile for which she knew he craved; but she found him straining away wide-eyed. Speechless he pointed at her throat, and she put her hand up to it in alarm.
“What is it?” she asked, hoarsely.
“A lover’s bite,” he replied, in a thin voice of strangulated passion. “On the very spot where I kissed you.” He laughed jarringly. “Don’t say I did it. It took more than a kiss like mine to leave that mark — to redden your beauty with the brand of the rose. You’re his, branded. I suppose you prefer his kind of kisses. Mine wouldn’t have stained you. You want some brute to maul you abou
t, bruise you. And I believed you when you said you went to see a friend.”
He burst into hysterical laughter. She sat motionless. It didn’t matter. It had happened for the best. There could be no happiness between them. Better that their love should be crushed out before it crushed them both.
“He wasn’t a brute.” She leaned back against the cushioned end of the couch. “He was only a man — like all of you. He wanted no more and no less than you want. The kiss he gave me didn’t hurt you any more than the one you gave me now has hurt him. Why don’t you prove yourself the same as he is, and take what he took? I won’t stop you. Why should I?”
Holding his temples between his palms, Gallus stumbled out of the room, leaving his poem still in her hands. She read it through again, dry-eyed. Yes, it was very good.
He would certainly make a name for himself. His poem seemed to her the best since Catullus; she had good taste, and knew it. But what had his poetry to do with the situation? She had wanted him last time when she had seen only a mediocre piece. Anyway, thank the Chances, he was settled now. She would be able to take up the thread of her existence again.
She wanted to rise and go about the house with carefree step; but the blood seemed to have drained out of her. She sat unmoving. He would return. Of course he would return when he recovered. Why didn’t he return?
*
He had already repented his haste. The gesture of renunciation was magnificent, but only as long as one actively renounced. It had been magnificent to walk out of the room in scorn of harlotry; but he wanted to keep on walking out, never reaching the door, never finding himself in the lonely crowded street. Fool that he was. She had been ready to give herself. What did anything else matter but that? What did it matter how many beds she had rolled across on the night before? At least he should have waited till after he’d taken her before he quarrelled. Fool.
But she had praised his poem. That was infinitely sweet. She had kept it in her hand. He was sure she was reading it now, sorry she had lost him.
Hurriedly he set out for his attic. She might send for him. It would never do to miss the messenger.
*
The youth who restored young Clodia to her home was Quintus Cicero, the nephew of the orator. A high-flown lad, disturbed by the late divorce between his good-natured irascible father and energetic nagging mother, he was ready for any form of revolt; and when Antonius gripped his arm and thanked him, he decided to throw in his lot with the Caesarians.
“Would you mind if I called here at times,” he stammered. “I’m sick of that windbag of an uncle of mine — and my other uncle, Atticus, he’s as bad, smiling mean-hearted hypocrite that he is. He wanted me to marry the daughter of a sickly old friend of his; and she’d been divorced too. Not for adultery or anything amusing like that, but she wet the bed or something at the wrong moments. With a pale face as shiny as a peeled onion. I ask you.”
Fulvia had been demented with rage against Bhebeo, who was being stripped for a lashing when Clodia returned; but in the flush of the reunion she clasped Clodia in motherly relief, and a tear trickled on to Clodia’s ear. Clodia, who had longed for such a rush of affection, was so surprised that she failed to take advantage of it. She drew away and repeated: “I won’t go back to the country. I’ll drown myself in the duck-pond if I’m sent there.”
“You needn’t go,” said Fulvia, “if you’ll promise to obey and keep with Bhebeo. And you mustn’t visit your aunt again.” The elder Clodia had been making herself a laughing-stock by running round with a young boy, driving out with him in a racing-gig, both of them dressed in the same short tunics.
“O I’ll be ever so good,” cried Clodia, earnestly. “I swear I will. I had a fearful time. I was almost eaten alive by rats.”
She came nearer, wanting to make a return for the warm greeting; but Fulvia had moved away.
Antonius liked Quintus, and asked him to call again; and Quintus, peeping round the curtains in the hope of seeing Clodia once more, went out to drink and tell everyone how he had rescued the step-daughter of Antonius from a gang of ravishers. Antonius was the right sort of man, he thought; a man with a man’s grip in his fingers and a good hearty laugh — different from the bleating crowd around his uncle Cicero.
Quintus pulsated with the wish for action, for something to destroy the world of talkers and compromisers.
*
A negress sat in an easy-chair, her milk-swollen breasts exposed with their slack tawny nipples. An embarrassed girl was milking her into the silver bowl held by an interested page-boy, keeping up the flow by sucking at the nipples and then dropping the milk from her mouth. A trail of escaped milk streaked the black creases of the belly of the negress. The negress grinned, pleased with herself. Cleopatra lay with her face on her wrists, watching. The milk was intended for a cosmetic, and she was having it produced under her supervision, so that no goat’s milk should be substituted.
After the negress had gone, flashing the teeth of her smile and catching up her loose white cotton-dress, Cleopatra turned over and let the girls massage her face and breasts with the milk. It was an experiment she was trying out; she had noticed the negress yesterday and had the idea as she lay thinking before sleep.
The sensation was soothing, and she drowsed.
Images passed across her mind, quick as birds, merging like foam-crests. Her odious young brother whom she had married seven years ago; his intolerable efforts to show off, to be manly. He was only ten; and she had taken charge of things, successfully, till he felt himself fully grown-up, three years later. He’d tried to assert himself, and the final break had come. Miserable days. Court intrigues; plotting eunuchs, waddling slightly and always wanting to touch one as they talked; brawls in the streets of Alexandria; corpses washed up on the water-front of her garden with fishes nibbling at them; her flight from Egypt; the days when she was all alone gathering an army of Arabs to win back her throne; and then Caesar. They had said little, and yet his embraces had brought her mind to maturity, as if his thoughts invaded her with his touch; and she had discovered her needs. She saw the whole world; with a unifying glance she saw its war-riven coasts, the huge tides of barbarian forces forever surging in, forever menacing the few centres of civilisation. She saw Caesar as the binding-element, the new dispensation of power become law, widening the boundaries of empire, bringing in more and more barbarous tribes under the rule of order. Rome she respected; but she was Greek, and her world was the world created by Alexander, in which fear of the eastern races and their culture had been lost. East and West must mingle; she saw that; she felt that the role of her family, the Ptolemaioi, the sole remaining dynasty born from Alexander’s conquests, was to complete what Alexander had spectacularly begun and what Caesar had made constructively possible.
Then the plannings for power faded into the warmth of her body again, and she was content to be a woman rubbed with milk. Her skin would whiten; her strength would shine through it as sunlight shining through a lily-petal.
A golden haze enfolded her dream, and she saw the moon-woman. Isis seated on a throne, with the face of Cleopatra, her breasts streaming with milk of sustenance for the world, for the divine baby in her arms. Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, the guardian light. And all this dream of universal empire must be held in the palm of her plump little hand, which one man’s kiss could fill.
She moved restlessly on the cushions spread under her back and legs. Where was the man? No man had kissed her for months. Caesar was the last. How could she wipe away his kiss with the kiss of a lesser man? Was she then to remain chaste all her years, sterilely cherishing that votive kiss ?
She moved restlessly, as if her body was a dress of tight-fitting cloth out of which she sought to wriggle. No, that image was ingratitude, and she did not want to escape her body. She wanted to possess it; and how could one possess one’s body except in the embrace of another — as one could only see one’s face in a mirror?
Never had she been chaste for so ma
ny months before, except during the months when Caesar was at his wars. For four years now she had been very chaste. The thought frightened her. She counted the months over and over.
A slave announced that Ammonios was at the door. Send him in. She lay restlessly stirring, counting over the months. Then she opened her eyes. Ammonios was regarding her gravely a few feet away. She waved her girls to stand back and lay panting slightly.
Ammonios spoke. “Money is impossible to get in Rome.”
“Nothing is impossible.”
“As your Majesty says, nothing is impossible. With the aid of the High Priest of Isis I financed a loan among the merchants of Puteoli and Neapolis, but things are growing worse at Rome. I fear for your Majesty’s safety.”
Cleopatra laughed. Pointing to the silver bowl, she bade one of the girls hand it to Ammonios. “Drink it,” she said, “to sustain you after your efforts.”
Ammonios stared at the white liquid with starting eyes. Was there a poison in it? Surely she would not dare to poison him here at Rome, especially at a moment when he was so useful. Curious her whims were. Perhaps it was a joke. Hadn’t she put some diarrhoetic mixture in the wine of a girl in her train whom Caesar had once noticed admiringly, till the girl almost perished and was sold cheap in the slave-market? Gingerly Ammonios balanced the bowl on his fingertips.
“Drink it,” repeated Cleopatra, sternly.
Muttering an exorcism, he drank. The fluid tasted like milk, goat’s milk with a touch of garlic. He stood waiting to feel the venom strike in his veins, his heart leaping, a sweat on his forehead. He wiped his lips feebly with his forefinger, puckering his brows.
