I kept walking away, and the voices rose. “Display all your accomplishments! More, more!” Vitellius, who had been helping on stage, came after me.
“Come back,” he said. “As we arranged.”
“Let me change my clothes,” I said. Quickly I went behind the stage and put on the citharoede costume, then clutched my instrument and returned to the stage. People screamed with delight.
“I will sing the ‘Niobe,’ a song of my own composition.” One that I had feverishly composed in the last few days.
I held the heavy cithara, its strap across my right shoulder, its weight resting on my left wrist. I had to use the fingers of both hands to play the strings—plucking from one side with a plectrum, pressing from the other with my fingertips to temper the sound. And in addition, to sing. Let no one accuse anyone who plays this instrument, even badly, of not being a virtuoso, for even at the lowest level it demands much of the musician.
As tense as one of the strings, I concentrated so hard that sweat dripped down my face and my fingers grew slippery. When I got to the end, I was exhausted, drained—yet aflame.
The audience responded, my trained cadre of Alexandrian clappers leading the different rhythms, until the sound was deafening. I stood, running in sweat, melting. Finally I bowed and left the stage, too sapped even to speak.
* * *
• • •
Poppaea had been in the audience. Five years ago it had been Acte there, nervously watching me as I convinced myself that the oracle who had told me There is no respect for hidden music had meant that I must perform publicly. And after the performance, in a dazed state, I had wandered onto the pleasure boat and hence into Poppaea’s arms. I was still married to Octavia then. Five years ago. Was it only five years ago? Now, once again in a dazed state, I wandered in the aftermath of the performance, half flying, half lost.
After we returned to the palace, Poppaea said, “That was a victory. Over your own doubts and those of others. I applaud you, now that you can hear me. For it would have been lost in the cacophony of the crowd.” She clapped daintily. “And now I add to the prizes, one only I can award. I am with child again.”
It was too much—too much happiness, too much excitement. Beyond happiness, beyond excitement, into the realm of ecstasy. I grabbed her and swung her around, until her feet hit a pedestal stand and knocked off a vase, shattering it.
We sank down on the floor, laughing, holding one another, with the pieces all around us. I did not care. I cared for nothing but the glory of the gifts I had been given that day.
* * *
• • •
The Neronia continued for another two weeks, the entire city thronging to the events and clamoring for more. This time Greek dress was not required, but some people wore it anyway, so that I got a glimpse of what one might see in Athens. People were in a holiday mood. Clearly they wanted to put the past behind them, to walk on the freshly paved streets, no longer complaining about the direct sunlight since shading overhanging stories had been banned as fire hazards, and to sit by the new fountains, dipping their hands in the splashing water. The conspiracy had not touched them; it was confined to a circle that the common people had no involvement with—the aristocracy and the soldiers.
My staff, made up almost exclusively of freedmen, were all loyal and still with me. Oh, how I had been criticized for employing freedmen, criticized by the aristocrats, because it kept them at a remove from power. But the aristocrats did not want to do this work, did not want to demean themselves, as they saw it. And how fortunate they did not, because had I been stupid enough to employ them, I would now be lacking a principal secretary, a secretary for Latin and Greek letters, a minister of accounts and revenues, a minister of correspondence, and so on all down the line.
The expenses of rebuilding were still rolling in. But thanks to the conspiracy (if one can be thankful for it), the estates of the traitors were now going directly into the imperial treasury. There was still a deficit, but not a catastrophic one.
Most of the thousands of Praetorians had remained loyal, and I rewarded them with a donation of two thousand sesterces per man, as well as free grain for life. Naturally this was very expensive, and it was fine justice that the estates of the traitors were paying for it.
The public gardens were crowded with strollers, and the much-maligned—by the people who had been in the Piso plot—grounds of the Golden House were enjoyed by the common people. Zenodorus had not completed the statue yet, but its base was already in place in the outer garden. For now, people sat on the flat platform and picnicked.
But in all this calm, this recovery, I was wary, like a forest animal alert for any misstep. They had not murdered me, but they had murdered my serenity. Would I ever sleep restfully again?
The grand finale of the Neronia was the races in the Circus Maximus. Once again I would compete, and this time it was known well in advance. There were no surprises as there were last time, when all my company in the imperial box had been ignorant of my secret intentions. Now they had perished in the conspiracy, those nonchalant souls who had bantered with me beforehand about wine and which charioteer to bet on. Gone, gone—Piso, Lateranus, Vestinus, Scaevinus, and the two Praetorians guarding us, Subrius and Sulpicius. Now let their ashes disapprove of my race.
I said as much to Poppaea. “You sound pettily vindictive,” she said.
“Petty? What they tried to do to me was hardly petty.”
“If you turn into a bitter, suspicious person, they will have killed the man you used to be after all.”
“He’s gone,” I said. Or, rather, the softer parts of me had had to shrink back and give space to the third Nero, the hard one who gives no quarter. The dark figure I had seen slinking in shadows who looked like me—was I now him in corporeal form?
She smoothed my hair. “No, no, he isn’t.”
“He is here only for you. Like a person who is fey, you are the only person now who can see him.”
“He will come back,” she said. “When the burn heals.”
* * *
• • •
I did well in the two races I was in. I had altered the rein length for the two horses on traces, and it made for a more sensitive handling of them. The chariot axle had been broadened, making it more stable in turns. I came in third in one race and second in the other. If I never won a first it would not matter; what mattered was the skill in driving and the bond between me and my horses. And the supreme feeling of moving supernaturally fast.
The Neronia concluded successfully, and I was content. The anger and bitterness coated the surface of my mind but did not penetrate deeper, where my happiness with Poppaea, my pride in the rebuilt Rome and in my Domus Aurea, resided, untouched and untouchable. Often at night we would sit quietly in the lamplight, she resting with her feet covered with a light wool blanket, me reading and writing poetry. Sometimes when she was not looking, I would steal a glance at her, a wellspring of joy flooding me, too much to be contained. Too much to be borne. Too much to last.
XLIII
After the games ended, I suggested that we leave Rome for a while. The last few months had been all-consuming and soul-devouring.
“We could go back to Pompeii,” Poppaea said. “I have not been back since we married.”
“Back to your old home, where you seduced me?” I said it lightly, but in truth I wondered if I could bear to return to the Bay of Naples and gaze across the peninsula at Baiae. Baiae, where Mother . . .
“Or the other way around,” she said. “Oh, let’s go back. I want to see it all again, to see how well they’ve repaired the earthquake damage. And besides, I need to inspect the vineyards.”
“Where the vines grow that produce that abominable wine you foisted on us at the Circus?” The Circus, and the people in the box drinking it, all dead now, all traitors . . . Would everything I see, everything I hear, remin
d me forever? If only there were an instrument to remove it from the head, cut it out as neatly as we pit a peach.
She smiled. “The same. I tell you, in years to come it will prove its worth. You’ll see.”
“I’ll be an old man. I can hardly wait to taste this wine then. Age will have dulled my sense of taste!”
We left less than a week later. We passed by Naples, with the bay sparkling before us. Hundreds of boats were bobbing on the water, dipping up and down between white-capped waves. The wind was strong off the waters, bringing the tang of salt with it. Naples was my favorite city for its Greek ways. Besides, as the site of my first public performance, it held a special place in my heart—even though the theater had collapsed in an earthquake just afterward.
In the distance Vesuvius spread its purple shadow. We headed toward it; Poppaea’s villa was not actually in Pompeii but closer to Vesuvius and the water. We passed under the umbrella of the mountain’s shade and then down the long road to the villa itself. As we approached the heart of its extensive grounds, the landscape came back to me as a friend. The wide paved path to the colonnaded entrance . . . the grove of plane trees and olive orchards, stretching into the distance . . . it had the familiarity of home, but not quite home, because this was Poppaea’s own estate, and I had come there as a hesitant visitor three years ago. I had arrived at night, greeted only by flaming torches and guards at the door, and passed into rooms that seemed mysterious and magical, where she waited for me.
“We are here!” she cried. “Oh, it is so good to be home!” Like a child, she rushed toward the doors. I followed at a more leisurely pace.
Inside was the hushed and odd suspension of time in a place where one has been absent. Slaves and attendants had overseen it and, upon notice that the mistress was returning, had opened rooms long closed. But the lack of a presence here meant that it had slumbered.
She turned around several times in the wide atrium, seeing the dancing motes in the shafts of sunlight that poured through the roof opening into the impluvium—empty now.
“They didn’t fill it,” she said, disappointed.
“Wait for the rain,” I said. We strolled through the rooms, all immaculately clean but with the odor of disuse. We came at last to the western room that overlooked the bay, being on a cliff high above it. She flung open the doors to the portico and let the wind in, singing from the sea. The curtains danced and twirled. We went outside and stood looking down at the water, its piercing blue almost hurting our eyes.
Back inside, as we passed back through the room, the fresco of Apollo at Delphi, and the oracle’s tripod, caught my eye. Suddenly, as if the oracle had actually spoken, the words whispered in my mind. Delphi. Home of Apollo. You must go there.
I stood, rooted to the spot, while she walked on.
Delphi. Delphi.
She turned, frowning. “Why have you stopped?”
“I was . . . I was remembering this fresco and what you said about it. That you were fond of Apollo.”
“And I said you were my Apollo.”
“Sheer flattery, but I loved it.”
“I knew you would.” She smiled slyly, holding out her hand for me to join her.
In the late afternoon we went to the small enclosed garden, its frescoes of flowers and shrubs blending with the real ones growing around its border. It was here we had exchanged our marriage vows. Whenever and wherever you are Gaius, then I am Gaia. Silent, she took my hand, and we stood for long minutes there.
Then we entered the adjoining triclinium for our dinner, a simple one for this first night. Her longtime attendant had prepared her favorite dishes—sweet melon with mint, cumin-flavored chickpeas, and grilled mullet—and tactfully offered other wine than the estate wine. She thanked him for remembering her favorites and asked him if there were any problems at the villa that he wished to report.
He shook his head. “All is in order, Augusta. The earthquake damage has been repaired, and there have been no tremors since. It was a onetime event.”
“Thanks be to all the gods,” she said.
After dinner we lingered in the library, taking out various scrolls, unrolling them, only to put them back. We were too tired to want to read by lamplight.
She took my hand again, as she had three years ago, leading me through her domain. “Now we go there,” she said.
I knew where she was heading. Soon we stood before the door of the black room, the place where we had thrown prudence aside, had embraced our transgression, joyfully and defiantly. Now I did not want to look at it; a place once sacred can become ordinary if revisited. But before I could stay her hand, she flung open the door, and the darkness yawned before us, a beckoning cavern of desire.
A slave hastily scurried in and lit the lamps, then hurried out. We entered the room. It was still sacred after all.
“I built you a replica in Rome,” I said. “But there can be only one room where everything truly started.”
A wide bed was made up with linens and blankets, fresh and smelling of open fields; clearly she had sent orders ahead. She fell on it, holding out her arms to me.
“Is it different here now, being married?” she murmured.
“Yes,” I said. “Nothing is ever the same twice.” I kissed her. “Nor should it be.”
“No,” she said. “We would not want it to be.”
She was my wife now, the companion of my soul, soon to be the mother of my child, no longer the wild stranger who beckoned me down forbidden paths. I would have it no other way.
Since that first night in the black room, we had made love many times, so many times I would not have thought there was any novelty left to us. But returning to the origin of our passion anointed us with a special gift from Aphrodite, a singular experience worthy of the gods themselves. For that little space and that little time, we ourselves were allowed to be gods.
* * *
• • •
Strangely shy the next morning, we ate a silent breakfast of eggs and cheese in the inner garden and then went outside to walk the grounds, which were extensive. It felt good to walk, to feel the brisk morning air on my face. When we reached the formal gardens, the wallflowers and larkspurs were blooming lustily, but the roses were not in season.
“You have not seen my rose garden,” she said. “I told you I have three varieties, all in different shades of red. We must come again at the time they bloom.”
“Roses are sacred to Aphrodite, are they not?” I asked. “I think they were in bloom last night. That’s why they are withered here.”
She smiled. “Yes, that explains it.”
Not until we stood on the wide stone terrace overlooking the sea did the words come to me, all at once. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the crash of the waves below. “The Neronia—they aren’t enough. I want to go to Greece itself, compete there.”
She turned to me, puzzled. “What do you mean? Greece?”
“I have tried to bring the ways of Greece to Rome, and the Neronia have been a success as far as it goes. But the true competition is in Greece. At Delphi. And at Olympia. And Nemea and Isthmia. To go there—that is my deepest desire.”
Just then a gust of wind blew her palla off, and her hair tangled in the breeze. She grabbed it, smoothing it down, and her gold earrings swung back and forth. “But . . . how long would this require? Surely you cannot be away from Rome that long. After all, the games don’t all take place in the same year. The whole cycle of them takes four years.”
“I know that. But, as you and others never tire of reminding me, I am the emperor. Greece is a Roman province, no matter its art and music—they were no match for Roman armies. I can ask them to rearrange the order of the competitions.”
“Order them, you mean.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“What about your duties in Rome? Tiberius lost con
trol when he retired to Capri.”
“He was gone eleven years. I will be gone only a year.”
She turned and hugged me to her. Her voice trembled with tears. “They attacked you for your art. Boudicca insulted you as a lyre player, and so did the Praetorians in the conspiracy, and rivalry in artistry turned Lucan and Petronius into enemies.”
“They are dead, gone. I do not think others will want to follow in their footsteps.”
“It is over. Do not tempt anyone again. Do not become a full-fledged artist, desert your calling in Rome, giving weapons to enemies. And don’t say ‘what enemies?’ There are always new ones; the supply is inexhaustible.”
She didn’t understand. “I must do this,” I said. “Apollo himself—when I saw him again in the room here, I knew what he was calling me to do.”
“The gods often lure us to destruction. They enjoy doing it. Don’t listen to him!”
I wanted to say, He is more than just a god; he is Sol, and Sol is me. We are one and the same. He would not want to harm me. He is me. But I could never explain it, could not convey the transcendent experience I had had in his chariot. So I just said, “It would not be for another year at least. I need time to train, to compose verse and song worthy of the fiercest competition. For that is where the best people compete—Greece.”
Still she clung to me and said in a trembling voice, “You need to be here when the baby comes. Do not desert me, not even for Apollo.”
“Do you think I would ever be anywhere else? I am as joyful and hopeful for this child as you are.” I held her close. “I will be with you.”
XLIV
We stayed in the Pompeii area until the nights grew too chilly to sit outside after sunset. Pleasure boats still plied the waters, but there were fewer of them; soon they would be taken in for the winter. Poppaea visited some of her relatives in Pompeii proper, and they welcomed her with all the pomp due an Augusta, a rank far beyond what anyone else in the family had dreamed of.
The Splendor Before the Dark Page 33
