The Floating Book

by Michelle Lovric

  He felt everything more distinctly in his worn-thin heart, so painfully that at times he wished she had never walked into the stamperia, even though before Sosia he had been but half-alive, fed only on books, shyly eager to know what real love did and was.

  By candlelight he usually saw Sosia, in a dark place. Candlelight rendered her features crude as a primitive carving. She looked hard, not soft in the haze of the flame, like a Goddess of Vengeance, implacable. He could not say any more whether she was beautiful or not. He searched the blackness where her eyes should have been.

  She never stayed long. Sometimes it seemed to him that Sosia used his house like the street, making her way through it, not looking back. Now that they were lovers she only occasionally came to the stamperia. These were precious moments to him; he hungered all day and all night for the sight of her. It seemed to indicate a reciprocal feeling in her, when she came to his workplace, even when there was no possibility of physical gratification. And better still, she still showed an interest in his work sometimes. She understood Latin, and the new manuscripts, in which he lost himself daily, seemed to please her. She herself carried a book of her own around with her everywhere. When he tried to show an interest in its contents – perhaps she was a poet? – she rounded on him, ‘Hardly!’, so he guessed it was some kind of diary.

  When they were alone Bruno touched her everywhere he could – on her bodice, at the waist of her dress, on her workbag, on her stockings. She asked questions, had him scrabbling at the lower shelves for early proofs to show her. Once, at her feet, he noticed one of her shoelaces undone, and humbly retied them. She did not acknowledge it; she had not been looking at him, but glancing impatiently about the room.

  He showed her a poem that moved him, from Catullus, of course. He had written out one of the poems he had memorised, on the back of a discarded proof.

  I hate and I love. Perhaps you’ll ask why?

  I don’t know. But I feel it happening, and it’s crucifying me.

  Sosia met his eyes mockingly over the manuscript.

  ‘This is what you call “love”?’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem much good to me.’

  She took another look and smiled, ‘But the lettering is very nice.’

  Bruno woke at night, sick with guilt. He was cut through with the thought that he might have a choice. But he needed her. He did not need his love of himself. He would let Sosia have him; he would be the creature she wanted. He had given up his place amongst the righteous.

  Bruno conducted so many imaginary conversations with Sosia that at times her name came to his lips involuntarily. If a flicker of dust scraped his eyeball, if he dropped something (which he frequently did; despite the former grace of his movements Bruno was as clumsy as a drunk since he began to love her), then he would gasp ‘Sosia!’ as an imprecation, as an invocation.

  She sent messages. She told him to wait for her. She did not come. He dared not go to the dark house in San Trovaso where she lay by night in bed with her husband and by day mixed the doctor’s potions and washed his linen. His intimate linen, Bruno thought sometimes, and a queasy pain nudged his stomach.

  Bruno daydreamed guiltily of Rabino being done away with, carried off by diseases contracted from his patients, or poisoned like … a husband. Sosia was amused at the idea.

  ‘Ah yes, every corner of the house shall stink of him,’ she laughed.

  For the first time in his life Bruno found himself looking at other men, monitoring their attractiveness, not in an aesthetic sense, but in terms of whether they would appeal to Sosia. Not that he could second-guess her taste. Many times she had shocked him by pausing in the street to bestow a slow stare on a fat gondolier or an ageing merchant. Foreigners, she ignored.

  ‘She does this to taunt me,’ he consoled himself thinly, she does not really want those men.’

  He added, ‘She does not need them. She loves me.’

  He waited for her on the stairs of his studio when he knew that she should come. Outside the door, on the crumbling staircase, he was already ten paces closer to her. He invented a game to control his patience, lacing a finger through each of the spaces between his splayed toes, one at a time. He started full of hope: by the time he had finished the lacing of his toes she would be there, he told himself; or by the time he finished the next lacing. When she came in the door, always tormenting minutes later than she had promised, he used the sound of the slamming to mask his own creeping footsteps back into the studio. So when she strolled in he was bent over his work, as if he were fully occupied and had not noticed at all the lateness of the hour.

  He could not deceive her. She would walk to him and run her finger over the last line of his text to see if she could smudge the wet ink. She held up a dry finger, which she then put into his mouth. When he rose, she slapped the dust of the staircase from his rump, none too gently, while he hung his crimson head.

  His happiness was at her disposal.

  Once she left her diary by the bed when she left. When Bruno found it he struggled with himself, desiring and fearing with equal intensity to read what she had written about their love affair. In the end, he found it in himself not to open the book, hoping to earn a reward for his abstinence. When Sosia came to reclaim it she looked at him sharply, ‘Did you read it?’ When she saw that he maintained his serenity, she herself answered: ‘No, you did not. You are a rare one.’

  Bruno often closed his eyes with Sosia, whether because he could savour their lovemaking more that way or because it spared him from seeing the inappropriate expression on her face.

  He wanted to say to her: ‘I love and trust you. You are indispensable to my happiness, and my sadness. When anything happens to me, I want you to know that moment.’

  She would say: ‘Take your clothes off. Do this. Touch me there.’

  Sosia’s lies and her rare, cruel truths were so compelling as to have their own moral world. There were certain truths etched in stone for her, between her and Bruno, like the tablet of the Ten Commandments:

  I do not have to tell you that I love you.

  You may not ask me where I have been.

  If you displease me, even for a second, I will leave you in that second.

  If your expression changes to something that I dislike then this is also a fair reason for leaving you.

  Bruno had his own litanies. He told himself: Truly it’s better to love someone like her. It’s too easy to love the soft slack women that Morto lays himself on. It’s too easy to love someone beautiful and affectionate. I have chosen a love that asks more of me.

  But the love never came true with her.

  Sosia shrugged off any questions. He knew nothing of her past. She would not tell him how she had acquired the S carved into her back. He knew nothing of her earlier loves. There must have been some, for there was nothing she did not know about the satisfaction of physical desires and how to arouse them. Sometimes Bruno felt she was working him grimly through some erotic manual of positions and contortions less loving than improbable. He worried less and less about Rabino Simeon – he sometimes even felt sorry for his original rival – than about the legions of unknown, mysterious lovers who had been with Sosia and taught her all these compelling things she knew.

  What Sosia had lavished on others, he could not bear to ask, did not know if the reason that there was so little tenderness for him was that it had been spent irretrievably elsewhere – or had she still saved it inside her and was he not sufficiently desired by her to release it? He felt he had failed to be attractive enough to inspire her passion.

  She was not curious about his past; she had shown no interest in his family, had cut him off when he tried to tell her of his own innocent early loves, a friend of his mother’s with lagoon-silver eyes and blonde hair, of an older woman who had caught his imagination for an entire winter merely by opening the shutters in her chemise one memorable dawn as the schoolboys tramped through the street beneath her house. Only Bruno had looked up at that moment, seen the
shadow of a nipple through the crumpled linen, seen the other breast bunched up under her elbow and suddenly swinging loose.

  He was wiser now, years older in the weeks since Sosia had first come to his room. Spring was creeping into early summer. He had meanwhile lived whole seasons of passion and disappointment.

  He could say to Sosia: ‘Before I knew you, I thought love was a delicious mystery. Now it’s not a mystery. I know so many things about love, but I find there are many of them which I did not wish to know.’

  ‘Shall I go then?’ asked Sosia, rising, with seeming indifference.

  At this, panic rose inside him, sharp as garlic.

  ‘No, no, no, my sweetheart,’ he gasped, pulling at the hem of her dress. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Sosia, looking out of the window.

  Below her in the street, the men strolled.

  Part Two

  Prologue

  Sparrow, darling of my darling,

  with whom she plays, keeps at her breast,

  to whom she always hands when he begs, her fingertip

  arousing him to tiny little pecks.

  When it is my darlings desire to play this way,

  I wonder if it is for the solace of her own pain,

  I believe so: that the hurt that burns her might be soothed.

  Let me now play with you myself and find, as she does,

  a way to ease this soul-ache.

  December 63 BC

  Lucius, Lucius,

  So many questions! (And how much brotherly censure packed into each one.) I see you’re not finding it easy to be sorry for me.

  Nor are my friends quite racked with sympathy. Once they stopped whistling and rapping their chests like monkeys, they all teased me, a chorus of nauseating monotony, like the ear-scuff of a single dog barking, ‘So you’ve got Clodia Metelli to your bed? A mundane Transpadane like you? You want her to stay there, too? You’re dreaming.’

  They told me. ‘This is the best bit, for her.’

  They mean that it’s part of her legend that for Clodia the ending of a relationship is its summit. All Rome knows that the art of dismissal is her special talent. So she cuts all her men to measure. I should know too: she’s discarded me and called me back to her so many times now, each parting barbed with a piquant new twist of cruelty.

  At least I’ve had four months, so far, of dismissals and recalls. I’m lucky, you might even say. She’s rinded me diligently as a scribe working over a papyrus; she’s unrolled my whole history between those nipping fingers. With other men, I’ve heard, she’s been in such a hurry that the amatory episode was but perfunctorily consummated and the lover never once recalled to her bed, or even remembered, except for the way in which he served her, a sharp physical memory entirely detached from the man’s face.

  It seems that I have misconceived my muse, Lucius.

  I know now that Clodia, unlike the pleasure-stained Sappho, hates love, hates everything lovely with a flint-eating, savage coldness. She hates so much that beneath the rose oil and civet she stinks of hate, foreign and metallic. She has the shades of Orcus inside her, which eat up anything beautiful.

  The purest distillation of happiness is what I long to taste when I make love to her, but it’s as if I merely suck on the cool stopped-up bottle in which the sacred juice is sealed. The bruising repertoire she puts me through, while gratifying my every inch, is painfully inappropriate to the delicacy and sweetness of my feelings.

  I know. I know. The fashionable thing would be to let it pass, to enjoy what I can and then let her go. But I’m incapable of playing a cool hand with her. Because she’s the way she is, not in spite of it.

  At the beginning, I loved her blindly. Now I have opened my eyes to her nature, I still love her blindly.

  Clodia has many … gifts, shall we say, which are the stock-in-trade of a prostitute. She’s the most fascinating package of purity bundled in lechery, the pure inner frigidity of a courtesan gift-wrapped in the fake outer frigidity of an aristocrat. She scintillates with allure and danger like the sun on the water. I cannot keep my eyes off her.

  And as you know, Lucius, I would never have wanted a leftover woman, whom no one else wanted. So I was always destined to be with someone like her.

  My very jealousy enriches her worth in my eyes. She even seems taller, the more she hurts me. I dread to lose her, even when I hate her. And such hatred, such dependence has somehow become aphrodisiacal. No matter what Clodia does, it still excites me, shakes that bottle of undiluted love so it effervesces. As she well knows, her servant will always find me waiting at the door. I bathe four times a day so that I’m always ready to follow him straight to her house to face whatever humiliation awaits me. I lie lightly in my unmarried bed all night, hoping for the familiar discreet tap.

  She would say, and did this very morning, drawling on the words with a mocking smile, ‘It’s your problem, the way you love me.’

  You can imagine, Lucius, that the truth of this remark does not make it any more palatable, and nor does its frequent repetition on her biteable lips.

  Indeed the first time she said it was the moment I began to think about making a wax model of her, and now I find its image floats comfortingly into my mind each time she hurts me. Without it to soothe me, I assure you, I should grow as mad and wild as the Spring Equinox.

  * * *

  Early on she said to me, ‘You’re greedy for pain.’

  I shook my head mutely.

  ‘Without it, you couldn’t write a couplet,’ she laughed. ‘You feed off me. So don’t whine that I’m eating your heart alive.’

  ‘What about my happy poems? The Thousand Kisses? The Counting Poem?’ I countered as a distraction, though I knew she was right.

  ‘It’s clear they’re written in retrospect.’

  I panicked at this, for she was as yet in my arms, and, as far as I knew – idiot that I was – exclusively so at that time. ‘Are you warning me about something?’

  She raised herself on her elbow and looked down on me, amused. I noticed the fold of a wrinkle in her neck and stared at it as if fascinated. She was not embarrassed; she nudged her flank under mine and brought my hand around to grasp her downy haunch.

  ‘My whole life should have been a warning to you,’ she said, starting to move, slowly and deliberately. ‘Were you too stupid to see this when it started?’

  I continued to gaze maliciously at her wrinkle, a fold in that skin which, Lucius, I must tell you, remains as finger-friendly as a Saetaban napkin from Spain.

  Finally she stilled her motions and asked, ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’

  I replied: ‘I’m taking the measurement of your features for a wax doll.’

  She laughed, uneasily this time.

  I said, ‘So give me a curl! I need something from your body, a toenail clipping will do.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ she said, baring her teeth. So I waited till she’d left the room to bathe and then sidled round to her dressing table where I raked a swatch of loose hairs from her comb. I noticed that the roots were tipped with white, which made me feel vaguely triumphant. I raised her perfume bottle, shaped like the glass ghost of a bird, to my lips and gulped some bitter drops from its beak.

  I’ve written a poem to commemorate the bothersome little beast, her self-important sparrow, damn its black-splotched breast. She seems to love the bird, insofar as she can love anything. What Clodia loved, I would love too, with all the talent I possessed: out came my charming tribute, fluttering with delicate syllables. I thought she would reward me for it, but she threw down the tablet after the merest glance.

  ‘Do you like it?’ I asked, eyes downcast.

  ‘Don’t expect me to love you more poetically because you fancy yourself a poet,’ she drawled. ‘And don’t think I don’t understand the double-entendre, either.’

  (You see how quick she is, brother. She saw immediately that my poem referred also to the little bird that flutters
between my own legs at the thought of her.)

  ‘Are you not a little pleased that I write about you?’ I pleaded. She shrugged, as if to say she’s no virgin to the role of muse.

  * * *

  Clodia! You ask what it is about her that could make up for her coldness. Many men have tried to work it out. Now it’s my turn. I would say that Clodia’s incomparable lustre is merely the reflected gloss shined up by the lust of many men. Each sees her as a woman wanted, at one time or another, by anyone who was anyone. She refracts desire, rather than welcoming it into herself, like, and not just in this way, a dusty lantern, which seems to shed light but in fact just spreads ghastly confusion in the darkness.

  I know all women have fantasies; that they can conjure a new lover in their minds any minute, sometimes when the old one is still on top of them. Fantasies are one thing, memories are another. Clodia does not need to imagine what it’s like to be mated by any of the highborn and many of the lowborn men in Rome. She has only to consult the archives of her skin to remember their endowments and their finesse or stamina. When I lay down with Clodia I was in no way alone with her. A blind bat in a cave colony might suppose himself alone in just the way I was.

  This thought makes me shudder, as it must make anyone shudder, but me more than anyone because I fear that the other men have made their way from our lovemaking into my poetry. These men have grown one in my mind, a colossus called ‘not Catullus’. At moments when I should be forgetting everything I’m pricked and snagged by reminders of them: my nails and hair and teeth catch on jewels she was awarded by those other lovers. She never takes them off. Even naked, she’s hatefully scabrous with ridges and crusts of gold and ruby.