Counting the Stars

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Crassus introduced us to the mosaicist. He’s done a remarkable Leda at Crassus’ summer retreat – you know his little place near Formiae?’

  ‘You’ll have to narrow it down. Little places in Formiae are his speciality – the last time I heard, he had a dozen.’

  ‘He has a good eye for property,’ says Metellus Celer with a tinge of reproof in his voice.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, thinks Catullus. So we can’t say that good old Crassus is a greedy bastard who won’t be satisfied until he’s bought up half of Italy. No, let’s keep up the pretence that wealth drops into his lap – and ours – and that we’re all too high-minded to notice what’s going on. We can just about be bothered to pick up the booty.

  ‘You’ve been unwell, I hear,’ says Metellus Celer.

  ‘It was just a cough.’

  ‘You must take more care of yourself. Where would we be without your poems?’

  Where indeed? In your case, to be without my poems would be a positive advantage, since so many of them are addressed to your wife –

  But it’s unlikely that Metellus Celer has seen those. Why should he have done? Unless someone’s been malicious enough to pluck a lyric out of private circulation… In Rome, of course, malice has to be factored into every equation of human behaviour. The pseudonym he gives to Clodia in his poems wouldn’t hide her from anyone who knew her.

  He’s sweating. It’s this damned fever again. Standing up for so long makes him feel dizzy. He’s weak as a cat, and there’s Metellus Celer looking exactly like what he is: a strong, upright, hairy-thighed pillar of the Republic – or indeed of any other system that would put him where he deserves to be, at the top.

  ‘You look as if you should be at home in bed,’ says Metellus Celer. ‘It’s very good of you to pay this visit of condolence to my wife, in the circumstances.’

  Pillars don’t know about irony, surely? The man’s face is impassive. My wife. Well, why shouldn’t he say so? It’s true. Clodia is his wife and the mother of his child, and they both belong here, in this palace on the Palatine. She is part of him, just as the rare, naked Diana is part of the floor. Men like Metellus Celer don’t moon over what they want, they act decisively and they get it.

  An immense weariness and discouragement washes over him. He is dissolving, like Actaeon, into something he is afraid to be.

  – Oh, yes, his verses are marvellous, apparently, although I can’t say I see it myself. Verging on the scatological, and so short. As soon as you start to grasp what it’s about, it’s over. Give me something I can get my teeth into – Have you read Volusius’ Annals? Immensely worthwhile, in my humble opinion. But Catullus… chaotic lifestyle of course, that goes with the territory. Clodia Metelli had quite a thing going with him for a while, you know. Yes, of course you knew. Not one to bother with discretion, our Clodia. What her husband makes of it, as usual, no one has the first idea. Yes, he’s very dignified, isn’t he? Hidden depths. Such a marvellous family tradition of service – I must say I do so admire him. He makes all those artists and whatnot look very flimsy.

  Flimsy is what he feels now, all right. And tawdry, too. He’s in Clodia’s house, and her husband is judging him. His visit of condolence. Yes, that’s about my mark, isn’t it? Traipsing in here, bringing my nasty cough along with me, to pay my respects on the occasion of the death of a sparrow.

  ‘My wife’s maid will be along shortly. I can’t stay, I’m afraid. Pressing business at the Senate. Duty calls.’

  Excellent. Keep on talking like that, and you’ll soon wipe my conscience clean. I’ll be free to dislike you, my dear Senator. The only pressing business we all want to know about is which pair of downy buttocks is currently the recipient of our noble Caesar’s prick –

  But all the same, Metellus Celer owns this mosaic.

  ‘It’s the detail that makes it so remarkable,’ says Catullus abruptly. ‘See that dog there? He’s lost interest in the hunt, just for a moment. He’s scratching for fleas.’

  Metellus Celer bends, and looks closely. ‘I had never noticed that before,’ he says, and his face folds into a slow, unwilling smile.

  Metellus Celer has gone. The hounds encircle Actaeon, but they will never leap. No, it’s worse than that. They will all remain frozen in that slice of time which can’t release them. Actaeon’s terror will never end in death.

  Art is a monster, he thinks suddenly. Poetry is the same. It stops the work of time. All the love and suffering in the world is trapped in it.

  Aemilia nudges him. ‘My lady’s waiting for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me say? It’s this way, through to the blue reception room.’

  She bundles along at his side. Slaves glance as they go past, then duck their heads or sidle off through doorways. One unlucky girl drops a pile of linen and scrabbles to pick it up. She glances at Catullus fearfully, as if he might be qualified to punish her.

  ‘Report yourself,’ says Aemilia. ‘That lot will need to go straight back to the laundry.’

  ‘Swear you, mistress, z’not a mark on it, s’as good as new,’ gabbles the slave in an accent so thick that at first he doesn’t recognize that she’s speaking Latin.

  Aemilia’s face darkens. She kicks the linen out of the girl’s hand and wipes it across the floor with her foot. ‘You want me to put the dirt of the earth next to my lady’s skin, do you? Wait till I tell her.’

  ‘Oh no, mistress, mistress, I beg you, mistress –’

  ‘Report yourself, girl!’

  The girl backs away with her soiled bundle, sobbing. Aemilia’s face is calm, and curiously content. She’s passed on the blows Clodia gave her, he thinks. The girl will be flogged and Aemilia will be satisfied. Aemilia seems older and more powerful in the Metelli house.

  ‘So a slave calls you “mistress” in this house,’ he says to Aemilia.

  She glances sharply at him. ‘She knows nothing, that one.’

  The blue reception room is empty. After a moment a child comes in, a little Moor who wears a scarlet loincloth and a fine gold necklace. Catullus has seen the boy before. He’s a favourite of Clodia’s, and he runs messages around the house. He also feeds Clodia’s pet monkey, and picks up its shit. Clodia has no interest in the monkey, which was a gift from her husband, along with the little Moor. No one has bothered to house-train the animal.

  ‘Where’s my lady?’ demands Aemilia.

  ‘My lady’s still crying,’ answers the child.

  ‘You’ll have to come to her chamber,’ says Aemilia to Catullus. The boy gives a high bubble of laughter, looking from one to the other of the adults, and then he leans back, back, back until his hands touch the floor behind his head and his silky belly is stretched to a tight hoop.

  Aemilia’s face glistens. Swiftly she bends and tickles him just above the navel. The child collapses, giggling, then springs to his feet again and says, ‘I’ll never learn my routine if you keep doing that.’ His Latin is strongly accented, but perfect. Children are sponges, Catullus thinks, they soak up everything.

  ‘You’ll never learn your routine anyway. You’re lazy,’ says Aemilia. ‘If you ever learn to tumble fit for the guests to watch at dinner, I’ll give you a denarius.’

  ‘You haven’t got a denarius,’ he answers, and dances away from her.

  Aemilia’s face falls, heavy again.

  ‘It’s this way,’ she says to Catullus, leading him.

  He doesn’t want to go with her. It will all start up again, and he’s not strong enough for it at the moment. His breath catches, and he has to lean against the doorpost. If he could just cough freely he’d be able to breathe better, but it hurts to cough.

  He can’t stand here, propping up the house. He must see Clodia, and then get out.

  ‘She’ll be in her room. Go on, go on.’

  The bedrooms open off a colonnaded garden, full of splashing water and shade that will be rich in summer time but feels dank now in the Roman autumn.


  ‘Here, this is the door.’

  She almost pushes him through the doorway. He has walked too fast. Dr Philoctetes was right: his heart is hammering and there’s sweat all over his body. He shouldn’t be out in the world.

  The room is dark. The shutters are all closed and only pallid lines of light squeeze through. There’s a faint smell of vomit.

  In the centre of the marble floor, she’s sitting cross-legged and bowed forward. She lifts her face as he enters. It looks shocked, slapped.

  ‘So you’re here,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Did Aemilia tell you my sparrow is dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sees that she has the bird in her hands. It is lying on its back, showing its claws and its pale fluffy belly. He kneels beside her. She pushes the bird a little way towards him, showing him. He touches the claws with a finger, gently. They are stiff, and they catch on the skin of his forefinger.

  ‘I thought he was sleeping. He had his cloth over his cage. I didn’t want to disturb him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I went to wake him up and I found him like this.’

  Aemilia stands over them. ‘It’s too dark to see, my lady. Will I open the shutters a bit?’

  Clodia stares up at her. Her face is wide and blank. ‘Do you think we ought to, Aemilia?’

  ‘We can’t see to him without we have some light, my lady.’

  Aemilia unfastens the catch, and swings a shutter open. Clodia doesn’t stir. She strokes the sparrow’s belly with one finger, while light bathes her exposed face. Her eyes and nose are swollen. Her hair hangs down roughly, as if she’s been tearing at it. Her cheeks are scratched.

  ‘She’s cried herself half blind,’ observes Aemilia, as if talking of a child.

  But Clodia stares up at her slave, frowning. ‘What have you done to your face, Aemilia?’

  ‘You know what it was.’

  ‘Did I do that?’ asks Clodia in a tone of pure wonderment.

  ‘You know what you did, my lady.’

  Clodia’s stare switches to him. ‘I hurt her. I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘You were out of yourself,’ says Aemilia, as if commenting on a flaw in Clodia’s skin.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you, Aemilia. I promise.’

  Aemilia looks down, with a dark, indescribable expression. He almost thinks she’s going to smile, but she doesn’t. ‘Let me take the little thing,’ she says, ‘you can’t sit there holding him all day. And I need to clean you up, my lady. Look at that stain on your dress, where you were sick. It’s not very nice, is it?’

  ‘I saw him in the bottom of his cage,’ says Clodia, ‘just like this. Just as he’s lying now. But how could he have died like that? Birds never lie on their backs. Do you think he was trying to roll himself over?’ Her face contorts with anguish. She brings the sparrow close to her lips, as if to kiss it, then lets her hands drop to her lap again. The sparrow’s body bounces a little. ‘What if he was trying to roll himself over all night, and he couldn’t?’

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘birds lie on their backs when they’re dead. I’ve often seen it.’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with him last night. He was perfect. He hopped all the way up my arm and then he came and talked in my ear. He was chirping just as usual, wasn’t he, Aemilia? You heard him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, my lady.’

  ‘How could he die so quickly?’ Her eyes fill with tears again. ‘How could he be all right in the evening, and dead in the morning?’

  ‘Let me take him now,’ he says. ‘We need to bury him, Clodia.’

  ‘Do you think we should?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘I don’t want my husband to know he’s dead until we’ve buried him,’ says Clodia quickly.

  But he knows, thinks Catullus. One of the slaves must have told him.

  ‘She don’t want the master seeing her little bird like this,’ explains Aemilia.

  ‘Doesn’t, Aemilia. You’re not a farm girl any more.’

  ‘Doesn’t,’ repeats Aemilia, but Clodia has already slumped back into grief.

  His head is spinning. The floor feels icy through the fabric of his tunic. He wants to be back in his own bed, under the spell of Dr Philoctetes, not here. Clodia looks desperate, awful. His heart clenches with pity, but he still wants to be anywhere but here. What a coward he is.

  ‘Have you got a piece of silk we could wrap him in?’ he asks.

  Clodia doesn’t reply.

  ‘Silk,’ he says. ‘Something beautiful for him to take into the other world.’

  It catches her attention.

  ‘Do you really believe he is in the other world?’

  ‘Of course. That’s why we have to make him beautiful, so that he can show all the peacocks and popinjays that a sparrow is finer than them all.’

  She smiles faintly. ‘More beautiful than all the peacocks,’ she mutters. ‘Aemilia, cut a square from my blue silk evening cloak. Cut it big enough to wrap him. And then empty my amber jewel box, and line it with the same silk.’

  ‘You mean your embroidered cloak?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The one with the pearls sewn into it?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘Well, if you say so,’ says Aemilia, and goes out of the room.

  ‘Poor little sparrow,’ Clodia says, ‘poor little pippety. But do you think we should bury him? Maybe it’s wrong to shut him up in a box.’

  He was in a box when he was alive, he wants to say. His cage was a box, and besides, you never let him hop more than three feet away from you. But Clodia’s poor swollen face suffuses him with tenderness. ‘You can visit his grave,’ he says.

  ‘Where? I can’t bury him here. My husband will find out and he’ll dig him up again.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘You don’t know him. You don’t know how much he hated my sparrow.’ Her eyes dilate. She goes on in a low voice, ‘Maybe he did it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe he killed my sparrow.’

  ‘Why would he do such a thing?’

  ‘Because I loved him. That would be enough reason. You don’t know my husband. No one does.’

  He moves back from her a little. The stink of vomit and the musty smell of the sparrow are making his stomach churn. He wipes his forehead.

  ‘You’re sweating,’ she says, really looking at him for the first time. ‘Are you all right? Are you ill?’

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘Because of me?’

  You flatter yourself, he wants to say, but instead he tells the truth. ‘Maybe.’

  She smiles fleetingly. ‘You should have stayed with me at Baiae.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  Her spell is so strong. It’s working on him, in spite of everything. She’s calmer now. Her face is more beautiful to him like this, without make-up, without a thought for beauty. The rims of her eyes are red. She stares at him for a long time.

  ‘You do love me,’ she says at last, like a good doctor making a diagnosis.

  ‘You know I do.’

  Carefully, so as not to touch the sparrow, he moves to her side and puts his arm around her. Her shoulders feel thin.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Listen. If you’re really worried about your husband, I’ll bury the sparrow. I’ll find somewhere beautiful, a place where he won’t be disturbed.’

  ‘Will you come back and tell me about it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t mark the grave. Just tell me, and then no one else will be able to disturb it.’

  It’s the sparrow’s burial that really does for his chest. He should have stayed in the chair and supervised the burial from its shelter, but he would have been ashamed not to dig the hole himself. Aemilia had given him a little trowel.

  He ordered the men to carry him to the Caelian Hill. He knew the perfect spot, near to an ancient oak that w
as dying from the inside, dissolving back into the earth it had known since long before Rome was founded. Wild violets flowered there in spring. He’d be able to tell her about the thick, twisted oak roots, and the smell of the orange fungi that clung to them.

  The ground was harder than he thought. He broke out in sweat as soon as he started digging. One of the men offered to help but he shook his head. He was afraid that they might be tempted by the jewel box, and so he told them that he was burying one of Venus’ sparrows as an offering to her, in propitiation after a curse she had put on him in a dream. They stood back, and made the sign of the horns. At least they hadn’t seen the silk burial cloth, thickly seeded with pearls. Curse or no curse, he’s not sure they’d have held back from those pearls.

  The soil was full of sharp pieces of rock. He dug deeper, smelling sharp, sour earth, hollowing out space until the hole was big enough. The effort made him cough and he had to sit back on his heels until the spasm passed. The men watched him expressionlessly. That harsh tearing sound was back in his chest again. Dr Philoctetes was right: he ought to have stayed out of the wind. It was starting to rain, too: the thick, slanting rain of early winter. But never mind. She had let him bury her sparrow. She trusted him that much.

  He scattered the dried rose petals she’d given him. Their faint smell of dead summers blew into the air, and vanished. He laid the box carefully in the grave, settled it, and scattered more petals over it. Suddenly he saw the bird in his mind, as clearly as if it really had been one of Venus’ sparrows. It was hopping and chirping over the sunlit floor, making its way to Clodia, who watched it smiling. Now he wasn’t pretending for the sake of the men: he was making an invocation. As he rattled soil on to the lid of the box he seemed to hear wings.

  Nine

  The journey home from the Caelian Hill is a blank. He must have climbed into the litter, and given orders to the men, but he can’t find any memory of it. Maybe they had to lift him in. They could have robbed him, bludgeoned him, left him out in the rain to die, but they brought him home. Fever has left holes all over his memory. He feels as if he’s been drunk for weeks.

  Dr Philoctetes comes only once a day now. Catullus is officially ‘making progress’. For a long time the doctor’s clever, ugly face seemed to be at the bedside every time he opened his eyes, day or night. Dr Philoctetes’ cool fingers were touching, probing. It hurt to be touched, and he tried to roll away, but he was too weak.