Counting the Stars
Page 21
Lucius will be suffering already because they’re not back. Well, there’s nothing he can do now to ease Lucius’ mind.
‘You had better go,’ says Gorgo suddenly. ‘I will organize for you to go.’ Her Latin suddenly sounds much more foreign. She reaches out her slippered foot and gives Niko’s thigh a light, scornful kick. He doesn’t even notice. ‘Are they men, or beasts?’ she wonders aloud.
The hours in Gorgo’s house seemed endless, while they lasted. If anyone had said to him, ‘How long have you been here?’ he might have said, ‘A hundred years,’ and believed himself. But as soon as he was home, time slipped and those long hours collapsed into an incident, a visit. It was over now and had no further power, he thought. The visit had made its mark, of course, but he didn’t have to consider how deep that mark might be, or where it touched him.
What stayed in his mind was the expression on Antonius’ face. Shame, fear, an exhaustion of hope that went beyond anything Catullus knew about –
– He thought of all that feeling packed inside Antonius, and no way out. And then, because Catullus was Roman, his thoughts swerved.
Eighteen
The sun breaks through, becoming strong. The clouds fly away, leaving a stretch of freshly washed blue. Suddenly it’s no longer late winter. Spring has come.
Birds sing in the olive thickets as Catullus climbs the slope of the Palatine Hill. A pure, warm breeze blows in his face, and carries a distant sound of hammering from the perpetual building site up above him. Men shout warnings, and then there’s a squeal of metal against metal. Another dream villa being built for someone rich enough to afford the costliest land in Rome. This property boom has been going on for as long as he can remember. He listens, and it seems that the birds and the hammer are making music together. Perhaps the birds of the Palatine have learned to imitate the sounds that the workmen make.
(The thought stretches, and begins to fly. Nightingales might learn to bubble curses into summer nights. Poets could bring the noise of change into their poems: the groan and squeal of cranes unloading the grain ships, the rumble of wagon wheels when the city’s streets open to them at dusk –)
He loves this high place, especially the steepest parts of the slopes where the rock crumbles and it’s impossible to dig foundations. Here there’s only the sharp green grass that will be lioncoloured by late May. Wild thyme and lavender cling to the rocks. A little further up a pair of olive trees rustle in the breeze, their leaves shivering with silver light. Viburnum is in flower by the path, its white clusters glowing against dark, leathery leaves. Its scent blows towards him, then vanishes as the breeze turns.
A sparrow flies across his path, settles briefly by a puddle to drink, and then flies off. More sparrows chitter in the bushes.
A butterfly clings to a stone ahead of him, its veined wings open and palpitating. He stops. It would be impossible for the butterfly to spread its wings more widely. It looks as if it’s feeding on the small patch of sunlight where it has settled. Poets write that butterflies feast on nectar, like the gods. It’s rubbish. He and Marcus once saw a dead dog on the rubbish tip at home, its belly split open by the pressure of the gases within. There were six or seven exquisite pale blue butterflies among the cloud of insects fastened to the seam where the dog’s guts spilled out. He and Marcus stared and stared, with the buzz of the flies thick in their ears, then they backed away around the side of the outhouse.
Maybe the gods also feast on death and gloat over every shade of putrescence. Our sufferings are their nectar. They’ll put up with incense and the smoke that rises from a sacrificed bull, but they prefer human pain.
(Again he sees Metellus Celer’s face. It keeps coming back, just as a debt-collector keeps coming back to the house of a man who owes him money.)
It’s not much of a climb, but he’s already out of breath. He wipes sweat from his forehead, and looks back over the Forum, and beyond it to the ochres and terracottas of the seething city.
There’s a cypress trunk growing out of the side of the hill, almost horizontal. Maybe it thinks the sky is in that direction. He smiles, thinking of horizontal skies, and skies underfoot. He feels better now. He’ll sit here for a while.
This is good. Calm and quiet. Only the closest things seem real: the ants tussling with a crumb of soil, the sunlight that filters through the leaves and freckles his cloak. It’s warm in the sun. He’s glad he took this little hidden path, rather than the main road past the Temple. It’s good to rest here, alone for once, without slaves or friends.
He’s unfit; he should exercise more. In a minute he’ll go on. Up above him are the villas in all their raw, pluming splendour. Imagine if you could look back seven centuries, when the Palatine was a wooded hill where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. And Rome was about to be born… How strange to think that this huge modern city of more than a million souls was once a circle of bare hills around a marsh. If he looks down, like this, through the flicker of leaves, he can almost imagine that Rome has vanished, leaving nothing but a heap of white and tawny stone.
How his chest aches: just there. He’s got a stitch. He climbed that slope too fast. He’ll rest for a bit; he doesn’t want to come to Clodia sweating and out of breath.
How Marcus would laugh to see him puffing like this. When they were boys, he and Marcus would swim and row and run races all day long in summer. Up at dawn, padding barefoot through the silent house, hoping they were up early enough to get out without Lucius catching them. Once they were outside they’d buckle on their sandals, and Marcus would say, ‘Idiot! You’ve gone and forgotten your cloak again. Here, have mine.’ Catullus was ill every winter, feverish and coughing. In summer he was fine, but Marcus fussed just like Lucius.
That curve of shingle was their own beach. You ran down through the olive groves, slipping and sliding, taking care not to trip on their knotted roots. You plunged out into the dazzle of the sun rising over the lake. There was a chill in the air and mist over the water. Even the shingle was cold.
They stripped off their tunics, kicked off their sandals and ran straight into the water. That was the rule, to run without stopping until you were thigh-deep and couldn’t run any more, and then you’d topple forward into the lake. You didn’t feel the cold that way. Marcus would always dive straight down. The water would be bare and bald when he’d gone in, and Catullus would start to count. He’d count slowly at first, treading water, scanning the surface, but then he’d begin to panic and count more and more quickly, because the surface was still smooth and his brother had been gone too long, much too long, so long that in a few more seconds he’d have to call for help –
– And just at that moment, Marcus always surfaced. Never where he’d expected him; Marcus would be close to shore sometimes, coming up as subtly as a frog taking air, or at other times he’d burst out in a surge of water behind his brother, flicking his hair so that more drops spattered around him.
Marcus knew his little brother got scared.
‘I always come up again. I’m not going to drown, idiot. Why don’t you dive, too?’ Marcus said it was better to be part of things than to watch them. A fight always looked much worse than it was when you were standing on the edge. If you were in the fight, Marcus said, you got so angry you didn’t notice the blows. Not until afterwards, anyway.
He was sure Marcus would be a great general when he grew up. He was the leader of their gang, the Lakers, which was at war with the Hillers. The Lakers were him and Marcus and all the boys from the fishing hamlet just down from their villa. The Hillers were mostly shepherd boys, tough and wild with big dogs that they tried to set on you. Marcus knew about tactics and strategy. The Lakers used to hold secret meetings at the fort they’d made in the olives just above the shore. That was where they planned their raids on the Hillers.
The good thing was that the Hillers usually couldn’t come off the hills, because of having to stay close to the sheep and goats. The bad thing was their dogs. Marcus learned th
e Hillers’ dog calls, and secretly gave the fiercest dog, the leader, pieces of meat stolen from the kitchens.
But Marcus hadn’t become a general. Someone had to learn to manage the family estates. Someone had to go out to Bithynia regularly, to oversee the management of the family’s enormously profitable timber-export business there. Their father was getting past the age for long sea voyages.
Catullus’ thoughts shift uneasily. Marcus seems happy enough. He’s not much of a one for poetry, but he recognizes that poets have to live in Rome. Last time Catullus was back in Sirmio, he recited to his brother a piece in dactylic hexameters, a mock epic about those battles with the shepherd boys who lived out on the hills from early spring until the winter came, wrapped in their rough cloaks, sleeping against the flanks of their dogs for warmth. Marcus smiled when it was finished and said, ‘It pretty much makes you see it.’
‘I want to write more about Sirmio but I can’t find the right approach.’
‘Maybe you should come back here.’ The pause lengthened, then Marcus said, ‘I’m not serious. I know you’re settled in Rome.’
Marcus knew about Clodia, too. Didn’t want to talk about her, though: he wanted his little brother to marry, as he’d married. There were no children yet.
Marcus isn’t stuck in Sirmio all the time. He travels to Bithynia regularly, and he’s there at the moment; in fact he’s been out there since the previous summer. He’s established tax-collection rights alongside the timber business. He’s visited the Troad, and the sanctuaries of Cybele, where he actually saw one of the goddess’s devotees castrate himself at the height of a ritual dance. He observed the ceremonies minutely, he wrote. How Catullus wanted to read those ‘minute observations’ – but Marcus gave little further description, beyond saying that the man appeared to feel no pain. Marcus’ letters can be frustrating.
He writes in his latest letter that he’s in good health, although the winter seems long. Julia wasn’t able to accompany him. After her third miscarriage she’d been advised to rest, make offerings to Bona Dea, and avoid pregnancy for a year.
‘You must come out, my dear brother. It’s a tedious journey, but once weather conditions improve, the voyage should take less than a month. I don’t have to preach to you about the benefits of sea air. Come in May, and we shall be able to travel in the Troad together before the summer heat sets in. That should give you some material. I don’t speak of the happiness which your visit will bring to me.
‘There is heavy snow on the mountains as I write, and the sky is as dark as a cooking pot. It has been a long winter, my dear brother, and I am troubled with a cough. A family weakness, as you know… But I had a letter from Julia last week, and she is well.’
Marcus wrote rather formal, correct Latin which didn’t reflect his speaking voice. I don’t speak of the happiness which your visit will bring to me. But no, that wasn’t entirely true. A sky as dark as a cooking pot; I’d have been pleased with that myself, thinks Catullus.
He has gone back to the past, because now that he is close to Clodia he is afraid of what he will see in her. He would rather stretch out the moment. How long has he been sitting here? He must go on.
He walks slowly up the last few yards of the path, and comes out on to the level. The marble facings of the Palatine villas glisten in sunlight. They are raised up, magnificent, seeming to float above the city. But the air is full of building dust. A gang of slaves, shackled together, are laying the foundations for a new piece of road.
Niko has been flogged: Lucius wasn’t slow to smell the alcohol on his breath, or to get the story out of him. Or part of it, at least. The two boys were lucky to escape with a flogging. Lucius had been all for sending them back to Sirmio, to a lifetime of field work.
Catullus didn’t intervene. A steward must be left to manage the household.
He turns, and looks down on the city. So many people wanting so many things. So many knots of connection down there below him. The Forum this morning full of people he knows, crisscrossing, greeting each other, in a rush, on their way to client visits, analysing cases in the law courts, pausing to congratulate an orator on his latest speech, discussing their investments with the hard discretion of the rich.
He’d seen Clodia’s brother, as usual surrounded by a knot of admirers. Pretty Boy, a handsome parody of his sister. Everything that was enchanting in her became repulsive in him. His wide eyes that stared so arrogantly and unseeingly; his carefully curled fringe; his oiled, golden, pummelled flesh; his ruthlessness.
He greeted Catullus civilly, smiling. The smile seemed to say: Oh yes, my sister. We both know about her.
And there was Cicero. He’d stuck his neck out too far when he made that speech against Pretty Boy in his trial for profaning the rites of Bona Dea. Pretty Boy is watching him, biding his time. Old Chickpea seems surprisingly unconcerned. He makes cracks about Pretty Boy’s thugs, as if their staves aren’t capable of spilling his brains, or their knives of cutting out his tongue. A man can be so clever, thinks Catullus, that he stops being clever at all. He loses the ordinary alertness of the ordinary man.
Or maybe I’m the one who’s too clever. I can roast and skewer the bastards with an epigram, recite it to Fabullus or Calvus, and then watch it do the rounds of Rome, from mouth to mouth until everyone who considers himself a wit has trotted it out. And nothing happens. I’m safe enough. Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? Powerful men with gangs of armed, paid thugs aren’t going to change their behaviour because I write a poem about them. They shrug their shoulders. Maybe they’re even a little flattered.
He remembers how he used to stare around when he first came to Rome from Verona (trying not to, trying to look cool and unimpressed, but he could never keep it up). The Forum was a treasure-house then. All those great speeches, by men whose names rang round the world! All those swift, busy figures moving in an intricate choreography that he longed to learn. He loved Rome at first sight and his one aim was to belong. Not to be part of it, perhaps – he was a poet, and that came first – but to move as easily and surely within it as others did, to know the bookstalls, the bathhouses, and above all to know what lay behind the rattle of names, as Rome’s gossip flew.
He belongs now. He’s learned how to breathe in Rome’s soup of hatred, mistrust, temporary allegiances and considered betrayals. He doesn’t expect politicians to be anywhere else than halfway up each other’s bums: literally so, in certain cases.
He used to think that satire was a weapon. He knows better now. They want to be noticed, these men. Even insults are taken as compliments.
– Better to be written about than not.
– All publicity is good publicity, as they say.
– Have you heard Catullus’ latest?
– Who’s he written about this time?
– Oh, I must say that’s really awfully good.
And then sometimes, quite arbitrarily, they’ll decide that a poem has ‘gone too far’ and demand apologies. He’s had that, too. If the man who demands the apology has enough swords and staves at his disposal, of course you give it. It means nothing. Soup, all of it.
Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere,
nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo.
Not wishing to know what you are
or how to please you, I blank you, Caesar.
But it’s not quite true. Caesar itches in his mind, forcing him to write. ‘A great man,’ his father says admiringly. How can his father be so naive? But perhaps in the end it’s Caesar who is the most naive of all. These great orators and generals and politicians, even the most cynical of them, they have faith. They really believe that if they work, plot, bribe, conspire and manipulate enough then they will eventually get what they want. Throw in courage and vision (which he has to admit that Caesar possesses), and they’ll be invincible. Why don’t they realize that every other man of ambition in Rome thinks exactly the same? And, therefore, they are bound to end up cutting one another’s throats.
– For heaven’s sake, enough empathy! You don’t want to end up feeling sorry for Caesar, or a viper like Pretty Boy. Besides, are you really so pure and uninvolved?
It’s true. He’s part of it all. The Forum’s flow of people knew him, greeted him, gave way for him and took him in. Pretty Boy all but winked at him. Gorgo was right. He certainly was one of you Romans. The city’s transactions were all for his benefit. Even the dirtiest tricks of politics had him in mind. For him the ships docked at Puteoli, for him the slave-markets opened long hours, for him the brokers discussed the speed of ships and the weight of their cargoes. Caesar dined at Catullus’ father’s house, and so he could write what he liked.
Fate had touched him lightly at birth. The world was his, and his language blossomed everywhere. He was so lucky, wasn’t he, that he had to work hard to make himself unlucky…
When he walked through the Forum he was deep in its soup. He was a poet. He thought his head was free of Rome. He rubbed a line out in his mind, changed step, changed rhythm, but it was no good. He couldn’t hear his lines through the roar of money-changers, shopkeepers and cheap-jack orators.
It was the noise of Rome working for him. The Catullan wealth had grown like its own small empire. It was already so far flung that it took weeks to sail to the end of it. His brother, in faraway Bithynia, hadn’t come to the end of it. In remote valleys where even the gods had never heard of Rome, men were chopping down cedars for the sake of the Catulli.
He passed behind the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, tried a line-ending, dropped it. In there, too, they were doing the business on his behalf, keeping the flame, keeping Rome alive. Even old Chickpea, fresh from the rostrum, acknowledging his own success with such carefully calculated modesty that it made you want to laugh out loud – even old Chickpea had more guts than Catullus had. For Cicero, getting the Consulship had been like dying and going to Heaven. He never doubted the worth of his own contribution, or stopped reminding the world of it. Chickpea’s probably worked on that air of exhausting himself in a higher cause just as hard as he works the honey-sweet plunges of his voice. He can whisper a thousand listeners into his confidence, make them feel part of the inner, brilliant mechanism of his mind.