“We’ll call her ‘Lia’ for short,” she said to her mother.
“Oh, no!” cried Rutilia, deeming “Lia” too commonplace and unimposing. “How about ‘Julilla’?”
Aurelia shook her head very firmly. “No, that’s an unlucky diminutive,” she said. “Our girl will be ‘Lia.’ “
But Lia didn’t thrive; she cried and cried and cried for six solid weeks, until Shimon’s wife, Ruth, came marching down to Aurelia’s apartment and sniffed scornfully at Aurelia’s tales of doctors, worried Cottae grandparents, colic, and colds.
“You just got a hungry baby there,” said Ruth in her heavily accented Greek. “You got no milk, silly girl!”
“Oh, where am I going to put a wet nurse?” asked Aurelia, profoundly relieved at what she instantly saw was the truth, but at her wits’ end to persuade the staff they must share the servants’ quarters with yet another body.
“You don’t need no wet nurse, silly girl,” said Ruth. “This building’s full of mothers feeding babies. Don’t you worry, we’ll all give the little one a drink.”
“I can pay you,” Aurelia offered tentatively, sensitive enough to know that she ought not sound patronizing.
“For what, nature? You leave it to me, silly girl. And I make sure they all wash their teats first! The little one’s got some catching up to do; we don’t want her sick,” said Ruth.
So little Lia acquired a whole insula of wet nurses, and the bewildering array of nipples popped into her mouth seemed to worry the baby’s feelings as little as the mixture of Greek milk, Roman milk, Jewish milk, Spanish milk, and Syrian milk worried her digestion. Little Lia began to thrive.
As did her mother, once she was recovered from the birth process and the worry of a perpetually crying baby. For with Caesar gone, Aurelia’s true character began to assert itself. First she made mincemeat of her male relatives, all of whom had been charged by Caesar to keep an eye on her.
“If I do need you, Father,” she said to Cotta firmly, “I will send for you.”
“Uncle Publius, leave me alone!” she said to Rutilius Rufus.
“Sextus Julius, go away to Gaul!” she said to her husband’s older brother.
Then she looked at Cardixa and rubbed her hands together gleefully. “My life is my own at last!” she said. “Oh, there are going to be some changes!”
She started within the walls of her own apartment, where the slaves she and Caesar had bought just after their marriage were running the young couple rather than the other way around. Led by the steward, a Greek named Eutychus, they worked well enough that Aurelia found herself without sufficient grounds to impeach them to Caesar; for she had learned that Caesar did not see things as she saw them, and was absent-minded enough not to see some things at all, especially domestic things. But within the space of a single day Aurelia had the servants hopping to her tune, working her will upon them with a speech first and a schedule after that. Gaius Marius would have approved the speech mightily, for it was short and breathtakingly frank, delivered in the tone and manner of a general.
“Oooooo-er!” said the cook, Murgus, to the steward, Eutychus. “And I thought she was a nice little thing!”
The steward rolled his long-lashed beguiling eyes. “What about me! I thought I might just sneak into her bedroom and console her a bit during Gaius Julius’s absence—what an escape! I’d sooner crawl into bed with a lion.”
“Do you really think she’d have the guts to take such a terrible financial loss by selling us all with bad references?” asked the cook, Murgus, shivering at the very thought.
“She’d have the guts to crucify us,” said the steward.
“Oooooo-er!” wailed the cook.
From this encounter, Aurelia went straight to deal with the tenant of the other ground-floor apartment. That initial conversation with Caesar about the tenants had robbed her of all her original resolve to be rid of the ground-floor tenant immediately; in the end she hadn’t mentioned the man to her husband, realizing that he wouldn’t see the situation the way she did. But now she could act, and act she did.
The other ground-floor apartment was accessible from within the insula; all Aurelia had to do was walk across the courtyard at the bottom of the light-well. However, that would give her visit an informality she definitely didn’t want. So she approached through her tenant’s front door. This meant that she was obliged to go out her own front door onto the Vicus Patricii, turn right, and walk up along the row of shops she rented out, to the apex of the building where the crossroads tavern stood; from there she turned right into the Subura Minor and walked down the other row of shops she rented out, until she finally came to the front door of the second ground-floor apartment.
Its tenant was a famous actor named Epaphroditus, and according to the books, he had been living there for well over three years.
“Tell Epaphroditus that his landlady wishes to see him,” said Aurelia to the porter.
While she waited in the reception room—as large as the one in her own apartment—she assessed its condition with an eye grown expert in the matter of cracks, chips, peeling paint, and the like, and sighed; it was better than her own reception room, and had recently been frescoed with swathes of fruit and flowers dangled by dimpled Cupids between convincing-looking painted purple curtains.
“I don’t believe it!” cried a beautiful voice, in Greek.
Aurelia swung round to face her tenant. He was much older than voice or reputation upon the stage or the view across the courtyard suggested, a fiftyish man with a golden-yellow wig upon his head and an elaborately made-up face, wearing a floating robe of Tyrian purple embroidered with clusters of golden stars. Though many wearers of purple pretended it was Tyrian, this was the real thing, a color as much black as purple, of a luster which changed its hue as the light changed, suffusing it with sheens of plum and deepest crimson; in tapestry one saw it, but only once in her life had Aurelia seen genuine Tyrian purple raiment, on her visit to the villa of Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi, who had displayed with pride a robe taken from King Perseus of Macedonia by Aemilius Paullus.
“You don’t believe what?” asked Aurelia, also in Greek.
“You, darling! I’d heard our landlady was beautiful and owned a pair of purple eyes, but the reality pales what I had imagined from the distance across the courtyard!” he fluted; his voice was more melodious than ridiculous, despite the effeminate accent. “Sit down, sit down!” he said.
“I prefer to stand.”
He stopped in his tracks and turned back toward her, his thin plucked black brows lifting. “You mean business!”
“I certainly do.”
“How may I assist you, then?” he asked.
“You can move out,” said Aurelia.
He gasped; he staggered; his hands flew to clutch at his chest; an expression of horror fell upon his face. “What?”
“I’m giving you eight days’ notice,” said the landlady.
“But you can’t! My rent’s paid up and it always has been! I look after this place as if I owned it! Give me your grounds, domina,” he said, voice now very hard, and a look about him which made the painted face seem an utterly masculine lie.
“I don’t like the way you live,” said Aurelia.
“The way I live is my business,” said Epaphroditus.
“Not when I have to bring up my family looking across a courtyard into scenes not fit for my eyes, let alone a child’s,” she said. “Not when the harlots of both sexes spill out into the courtyard to continue their activities.”
“Put up curtains,” said Epaphroditus.
“I’ll do no such thing. Nor will it satisfy me if you put up curtains. My household has ears as well as eyes.”
“Well, I’m very sorry you feel this way, but it can make no difference,” he said briskly. “I refuse to leave.”
“In that case, I shall hire bailiffs and evict you.”
Using his considerable arts to grow in stature until he seemed to t
ower over her, Epaphroditus came closer to her, and succeeded in reminding the uncowed Aurelia of Achilles hiding in the harem of King Lycomedes of Skyros.
“Now listen to me, little lady,” he said, “I’ve spent a fortune turning this place into my kind of place, and I have no intention of leaving it. If you try any tricks like sending bailiffs in, I’ll sue you for everything you’ve got. In fact, after I’ve ushered you off my premises, I’m going straight to the tribunal of the urban praetor to lay charges against you.”
The purple of her eyes made a cheap mockery of Tyrian imitations; so did the look on her face. “Do that!” she said sweetly. “His name is Gaius Memmius, and he’s a cousin of mine. However, it’s a busy time for litigation at the moment, so you will have to see his assistant first. He’s a new senator, but I know him well. Ask for him by name, do! Sextus Julius Caesar. He’s my brother-in-law.” She moved away and inspected the newly decorated walls, the expensive mosaic floor no rented apartment ever boasted. “Yes, this is all very nice! I’m glad your taste in interior design is superior to your taste in companions. But you realize, of course, that any improvements made to rented premises belong to the landlord, and that the landlord is not obliged under the law to pay a single penny’s compensation.”
Eight days later Epaphroditus was gone, calling down curses upon the heads of women, and unable to do what he had fully intended to do, namely to deface his frescoes and dig up his mosaic floor; Aurelia had installed a pair of hired gladiators inside the apartment.
“Good!” she said, dusting off her hands. “Now, Cardixa, I can find a decent tenant.”
The process whereby an apartment was let occurred in any of several ways; the landlord hung a notice upon his front door and more notices on the walls of his shops, did the same thing outside the baths and public latrines and any wall owned by friends, then spread the news of a vacancy by word of mouth as well. Because Aurelia’s insula was known as a particularly safe one, there was no shortage of prospective tenants, whom she interviewed herself. Some she liked; some she felt were trustworthy; some she wouldn’t have rented to had they been the only applicants. But none proved to be what she was after, so she kept on looking and interviewing.
It was seven weeks before she found her ideal tenant. A knight and the son of a knight, his name was Gaius Matius; he was the same age as Caesar, and his wife was the same age as Aurelia; both were cultivated and educated; they had married about the same time as Caesar and Aurelia; they had a baby girl the same age as Lia; and they were comfortably off. His wife was called Priscilla, which must have derived from her father’s cognomen rather than his gens, but in all the many years the family Matius was to live there, Aurelia never did find out Priscilla’s proper name. The Matius family business was in brokerage arid the handling of contracts, and Gaius Matius’s father lived with a second wife and younger children in a commodious house on the Quirinal. Aurelia was careful to check all this, and when her inquiries confirmed it, she rented Gaius Matius her ground-floor apartment for the welcome sum of ten thousand denarii a year; Epaphroditus’s expensive murals and mosaic floor helped secure the contract, as did Aurelia’s promise that all her future leasing contracts would be handled by the firm of Gaius Matius and Gaius Matius.
For there were to be no more agents collecting the rents; from now on, Aurelia intended to run her insula herself. All the flats would be let by written lease, with an option to renew every two years. Penalty clauses for damage to the property were inserted, as well as clauses to protect the tenants from extortion by the landlord.
She converted her sitting room into an office stacked high with account books, kept only her loom from all her old hobbies, and set to work to discover the complexities of being a landlady. After she collected the insula’s paperwork from the erstwhile agents, Aurelia discovered there were files for all manner of things—masons, painters, plasterers,vendors of many kinds, water rates, taxes, land titles, bills as well as receipts. A good deal of the incoming, she learned, would have to be almost immediately outgoing. As well as charging for the water and sewer laid on, the State took a small contribution for every window the insula possessed, and every door opening onto the street, and every staircase leading to every floor. And though it was undeniably a stoutly built insula, there were repairs going on all the time. Among the tradesmen listed were several carpenters; conning the dates, Aurelia found one man who seemed to have done the most work and lasted the longest. So she sent for him, and ordered him to remove the wooden screens boxing in the light-well.
This project she had cherished from the time she and Caesar first moved into the insula; Aurelia had discovered in herself a longing to make a garden, and dreamed of transforming the ill-kept central courtyard into an oasis which would be a pleasure to everyone living in the building. But everything had conspired against her, starting with the problem of Epaphroditus, also entitled to use the courtyard. Caesar had never seen for himself the goings-on of Epaphroditus; the actor was cunning enough to make sure his debaucheries occurred only when Caesar was out. And Caesar, she learned, thought all women tended to exaggerate.
Irksomely dense wooden screens were fixed between the columns of the balconies which looked down into the courtyard from every upper floor. Therefore, no one who lived upstairs could gain a glimpse of it. Admittedly these screens did keep the courtyard private—and helped stem the constant torrent of noise which emanated from every flat—but they also converted the light-well into a dreary brown chimney nine storeys high, and the courtyard into its equally dreary hearth, and rendered it impossible for any of the upper floors to obtain much light or much fresh air.
Thus as soon as possible after Caesar left, Aurelia sent for her carpenter and told him to tear down every screen.
He stared at her as if she had gone mad.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, bewildered.
“Domina, you’ll be knee-deep in shit and piss inside three days,” he said, “not to mention anything else they want to toss out, from the dead dog to the dead granny to the girl-babies.”
She felt a tide of red suffuse her face until even her ears were on fire. It wasn’t the unvarnished truth of the carpenter’s statement mortified her, but her own naivete. Fool, fool, fool! Why hadn’t she thought of that? Because, she answered herself, a lifetime of passing the doorways and staircases of apartment buildings could not give one who had always lived in a large private dwelling the remotest idea of what went on inside. Her Uncle Cotta would not have divined the purpose of that wooden screen any quicker than she had.
She pressed her hands to her glowing cheeks and gave the carpenter such an adorable look of confused amusement that he dreamed of her for almost a year, called round regularly to see how things were, and improved the standard of his work by at least 100 percent.
“Thank you!” she said to him fervently.
The departure of the revolting Epaphroditus did give her the opportunity to start making a garden in the courtyard, however, and then the new tenant, Gaius Matius, revealed that he too had a passion for gardening.
“Let me help!” he pleaded.
It was difficult to say no when she had spent so long searching for these ideal tenants. “Of course you can help.’’
Which led to yet another lesson. Through Gaius Matius, Aurelia learned that it was one thing to dream of making a wonderful garden, but quite another to actually do it. For she herself didn’t have the eye or the art, whereas Gaius Matius did. In fact, he had a genius for gardening. Once the Caesar bathwater had gurgled down into the sewers, but now it was ducted to a small cistern in the courtyard, and fed the plants Gaius Matius produced with bewildering rapidity—purloined, he informed Aurelia, from his father’s Quirinal mansion in the main, but also from anyone else who owned a likely bush or vine or tree or ground cover. He knew how to graft a weakly plant onto strong rootstock of the same kind; he knew which plants liked a little lime, which Rome’s naturally acidic soil; he knew the correct times of the ye
ar for sowing seed, bedding out, pruning. Within twelve months the courtyard—all thirty feet by thirty feet of it—was a bower, and creepers were wending their way steadily up lattices on the columns toward the patch of sky high above.
Then one day Shimon the Jewish scribe came to see her, looking very strange to her Roman eyes in his long beard and with his long ringlets of hair curling around his little skullcap.
“Domina Aurelia, the fourth floor has a very special favor to ask of you,” he said.
“If I can grant it, Shimon, be sure I will,” she said gravely.
“We will understand if you decline, for what we ask is an invasion of your privacy,” said Shimon, picking his phrases with a delicacy he usually reserved for his work. “But—if we pledge you our word that we will never abuse the privilege by tossing refuse or ordure—might we remove the wooden screens from around our light-well balcony? We could breathe better air, and look down on your beautiful garden.”
Aurelia beamed. “I’m very happy to grant you this favor,” she said. “However, I can’t condone the use of the windows onto the street for disposing of refuse and ordure, either. You must promise me that all your wastes will be carried across the road to the public latrine, and tipped into the sewer.”
Delighted, Shimon promised.
Down came the screens around the light-well balcony on the fourth floor, though Gaius Matius begged that they be retained where they covered the columns, so that his creepers could continue to grow upward. The Jewish floor started a fashion; the inventor and the spice merchant on the first floor just above asked next if they could take away their screens, and then the third floor asked, and the sixth, and the second, and the fifth, until finally only the freedman warrens of the two top floors were screened in.
In the spring before the battle of Aquae Sextiae, Caesar made a hurried trip across the Alps bearing dispatches for Rome, and his brief visit resulted in a second pregnancy for Aurelia, who bore a second girl the following February, again in her own home, again attended by no one save the local midwife and Cardixa. This time she was alerted to her lack of milk, and the second little Julia—who was to suffer all her life under the babyish sobriquet of “Ju-Ju”—was put immediately onto the breasts of a dozen lactating mothers scattered through the various floors of the insula.
The First Man in Rome Page 89