The Floating Book
Page 36
When he opened the newly repaired door, he looked wearily at the boy outside. Rabino was suddenly brought low by the thought that no one ever came to his home with good tidings. It was merely a question of how grave the illness each knock betokened.
‘Damascus Plague, the maid had it off a sailor,’ the boy panted. ‘She said a bug bit her, but we all know she spends her nights at Arsenale. The mistress got it off the maid.’
Rabino raised an eyebrow.
‘The maid coughed in the breakfast and took it straight upstairs.’
Rabino poured the gulping boy a glass of water. ‘What happened to the maid?’ he asked.
‘All hell. Like she was got in the teeth of a great succubus. Retching and screaming and great boils bursting open and a stink you could smell downwind a mile …’
‘But did she live?’
‘Of course not, it was Damascus plague. But my master says to come in any case, at all costs, he said. He thinks the stars shine out of her. Indeed, she’s as soft as butter and I shall be sad to see her go out of the house in a box.’
The boy pulled a purse from his sleeve and settled it in the fine dust on Rabino’s mixing table. Beside it he placed an exquisitely printed sheet of paper.
‘Wendelin von Speyer,’ Rabino read aloud, ‘La prima stamperia di Venezia.’
A German, he thought. Only a German would pay a doctor in advance. He saw that the man lived away from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, so he must be married to a Venetian. Campo San Pantalon: just fifteen minutes’ walk.
Damascus Plague was a picturesque rumour; at most a refinement of the old, deadly enemy. Rabino was exhausted at the prospect of witnessing yet another soul perish in agony that day. He knew no sure remedy for the disease, could offer just a few stones and herbs to lessen the suffering of those clawing their way towards survival or death. But he knew that the mere thought of his arrival would now be giving the wretched husband something to hope on … a husband who loved his wife like that … Then, Rabino knew that the moment he came into the room, the poor man would be distracted from his pains by the sight of him.
In all likelihood this German printer had never spoken to a Jew, believed that they ate their own sons’ foreskins. He would barely know if Rabino’s bodily design were the same as his own. He would be repulsed but at the same time unable to contain his curiosity. Politely, for the Germans were always correct, this von Speyer would regard him narrowly from the corner of his eyes and in them Rabino would be able to read plentiful misgivings at the thought of a Jew touching his beloved wife. Still, even such thoughts would give a few moments of relief to the husband while Rabino examined the woman. If she were in the final stages there would be nothing he could do. She would be beyond even pain. He would break the news; he would not be believed – ‘Lying Jew!’ - or he would be abused. He would retreat backwards, dodging thrown objects and insults to his forefathers.
But when Rabino came into Wendelin’s bedroom, the printer – a tall fair man – barely raised his eyes from his wife’s unconscious face. Nevertheless, he reached out and clasped Rabino’s hand warmly, saying, ‘Thank you, sir, thank you for coming; thank God for your skills and for your compassion. I leave you to your work, that you may do it better.’ He stood up and went to the table, where he began to write feverishly.
Rabino suppressed his astonishment and turned his attention to the wife. He was filled with a sudden fervour to help this gentle man. Rabino touched the woman’s forehead and her eyes fell open like a doll’s. Her pupils swivelled towards her husband, who continued to write, his back turned to her, and in that moment a sigh of tinted air seemed to issue from her mouth and rush around the room, binding all three of them in a soft loop, palpable as muslin.
This is not the plague; this is love, thought Rabino. He could not help but pursue the thoughts this phenomenon raised in him. Perhaps Sosia feels this for someone. All my life I longed for it myself
He opened up his bag and took out his stones.
He lifted the wife’s coverlet and it seemed as if that pulverous current had found its way under the sheets, for her sores were visibly drying at an astounding rate. He saw a blister curl up like a dead leaf before his eyes. He felt the heat coming from her body.
She is trying to save herself thought Rabino, because she cannot bear the pain of her husband. She loves this man more than she loves her own beauty. For him, she has the will to live, disfigured, perhaps, and certainly weak, for years to come.
Love like this, thought Rabino, must be allowed to live on. If only it were in my power to make sure of that.
* * *
You see, I thought I was dead. In my death I was white with red spots. I could see my own face for I seemed to float in a high space from which I could look down and see my man with what looked like real tears bent over to stare at me. It was strange that I could still see for I had watched him reach out and close my eyes after the doctor left.
In my ears was a noise of birds, a great pitying of pigeons and sparrows outside the window.
For a long time my man sat close by my head, just holding my hand. It seemed to me he wished me to live still in spite of what he had done. But a part of me said, ‘No, he just feigns this grief for the sake of the new maid and the Jewish doctor. He wants them to see those tears.’
I could hear nothing of what went on inside the room but I saw the door shake. There was a pink thing in the hole of the lock: I could see all things from up high. So I knew it was my little son who thumped and thumped the door to come in. Sometimes he put his eye to the lock, sometimes it was his thumb, and sometimes he threw his whole self at the door.
But my man just sat there by my side, with his mouth in a big ‘O’ as though he howled for pain. I felt myself rise higher. From that moment on I could not hear a thing, just a blur like the roar of a fire in my ears, so I knew not if he made a noise.
Then at last he closed his mouth and let go of my hand. He went to the door and let in our son, who, it was clear, did not think to be allowed, and so fell into the room in a rush like a huge sigh.
My man looked down on him where he lay on the floor. The boy did not weep. He just looked up at his pa. Then they both turned to look at me and each of their mouths framed at the same time that same ‘O’.
Then my man took our son in his arms and held him up to his own face. He carried him to the bed and sat close by me once more with our son on his lap turned to face him.
With his hand he touched my lips and then the lips of our son. It is true; we have the same lips, my son and I. Then my man touched my nose, and then our son’s nose, and the swell of my cheek, and then his, and the curve of my ear, and then his, and so on till he’d laid his hand on my whole face and then my son’s.
If I did not know what he does each dawn, I would say that his was an act of love. I would say that he made a map of my face on the face of our son. That he tried to make a print of his love for me and press it on our son’s face, so that his love for me would not die, but live and grow in the eyes, nose and cheeks of our son – that my man might not once lose my face and that he might love our son all the more.
While I was watching these things I felt a call of light on my eyes and soon a white wind pulled me from the room. I saw my man and son no more and the next thing I heard was the wheel of a cart nosing through mud. I knew it should be cold out of doors at night, and yet I felt no chill on my skin. I felt I was flung on the cart and that I landed on top of a man who was green and frail with death. I heard a bone in his hip smash with my sudden weight. Face down now, I was blind and I could just hear the cart make its way through the town. Sometimes a new dead man or child was thrown on top of us. No one moved or talked so I felt I was the only one who was not dead. I learned to hear where the cart went for I know the count of steps from one bridge to the next in all parts of this town. It seemed to me that we did make a big curve, and then a turn, and that in a short time we would be back at the place where I lived with my man.
I had no strength but as we passed our house I wished, I wished with all my might to be back in that bed where it seemed perhaps, after all, that I had died. The fire in my ears was most, most loud then, as if it fought, flame by flame, to eat me. But I did not give up on my wish. I wished to lie there with them; I wished my son and my man to touch me, though I could feel it not.
Then it was all quiet in my head, and dark and I knew not a thing. It was as if I fell to sleep.
Part Six
Prologue
You have forgotten.
But the Gods remember
and so does the Truth.
It’s the Truth that will make you sorry
one day
for everything you did, and everything you do.
57 BC
Lucius, my Lucius,
You are dead, my brother, of some nameless eastern fever.
The fact of your death is indigestible. Such an impossibility cannot wean me of my habit of writing to you. I defy your extinction with living words!
I was about to go to Baiae again when our father called me back to Verona with the unspeakable news.
Now I have executed all the expected acts. I took part in your funeral rites like a ghost, as if it were I myself who had died. In that mourning household, awash with grief for your loss, I went nearly mad. In every corner where I sought peace I stumbled on a slave weeping incontinently or an impromptu shrine set up in your memory.
I left indecently last, kissing my father’s closed, reproachful face without meeting his eyes.
‘Why do you hurry away, son?’ he asked me. ‘Stay a while, and recover your health, and give me the pleasure of seeing you grow fat again. Rome has not been good for you.’
‘It’s been good for my poems,’ I told him.
‘Why may I not read them, then?’
I hung my head. It hurt to withhold them, but I did not want him to see why I was really going back.
I thought my grief for my darling brother would bring forth her tenderness, but Clodia had seemed absent-minded at my leave-taking. I smelled Clodius’ musky hair-oil and wondered dully if he was hidden behind a curtain. There were two cameo glass chalices beside her divan and I leaned forward to see the wine-dregs in both of them.
I carried the scent of that stale wine in my nostrils all the way back to Verona. My heart was opened by your death; it made me more sensitive to everything. I was painfully aware that something was not right with Clodia, less right even than usual.
To confirm my fears, her ‘welcome home’ was less than enthusiastic. I’d been back in Rome two burning days before she summoned me. I devoured the road up to her house, but when I arrived, a certain dishevelment in the bedroom and a sharpness to her scent showed me, as all Rome had seen before me, that she was cheaper than I valued her.
While we made love, I calculated the comparisons that she must have been making. This had a deleterious effect on my performance.
‘Got used to the goats again, country boy?’ she asked, fanning herself, for our ineffectual exertions had been long and laborious.
Since then I’ve made it my business to know every foul detail of her infidelity, collecting incriminating statements from anyone who’ll talk to me. Whenever I see the hairy pulp of a nobleman’s armpit in the Baths, or the spit glistening on his lip at a banquet, I wonder when Clodia was there. Not if. That’s a certainty.
When I find a new instance of betrayal, I scourge us both with it in a new kind of poem, each a species of versified suicide note, uttered in a quiet, bitter voice.
Give up, I tell myself, and yet still the frail fire scuttles up in sparks and bonfires under my skin.
Sparrow-like consonants no longer fly around the page. Just memories of them. I remember when I loved her as if her veins ran with family blood, when my altruism was as deep as my passion. I remember when I was almost happy to exist in a unilateral state of love, a state of qualified grace from which I’m now exiled. Now I celebrate a sick, sad love, which knows the horror of its condition.
Against Clodia’s indolent indifference I launch verbs, packing eight of them into a two-line poem. Who needs adjectives to blur and simper round the edge of the action? Not I, who loves, hates, knows not why, and is crucified for it, all at the same time.
I fled Rome.
I went to Bithynia with the pompous governor, Gaius Memmius. Caesar and his hangers-on were feeding in a frenzy on Gallic loot. This provincial sojourn was supposed to be my chance to fatten my purse. Instead I spent my time hunting for your bones to take back to Sirmione. I could not bear that you should rest in exile.
No one among those iron-eyed bureaucrats could tell me your exact resting spot in Troad, though I searched for information without cease. Other men made themselves millionaires, scrabbling under the shadow of our chief Memmius for the few coins that were too small for his grasp. I just looked for you.
In the end I found an unmarked grave and appointed it yours, so that I might address you with the tears I’d saved for that moment.
My thoughts were these: Who closed your eyes at the last? It was my right – I who gave you so many mock-deaths as a child, pushing you in the lake and down haystacks and whispering ghost tales in your sleeping ears at midnight so you woke white and nibbled by the Shades.
Who covered their eyes, rack-throated, at the sight of your bundled corpse? It should have been me.
Who strewed your grave with wine, milk, honey and flowers? That was my right too, who stole so many apples with you and shared the warm juice of the cow from your cupped hands.
Who wept at the graveside? Those tears belonged to me. Who returned the day after to lie on the warm earth and embrace you, pressing his humid face to the place where yours lay just below?
Not I, alas.
And now what can I do? What can I give you? A poem? A little rustling stack of unfeelable caresses, untasteable tears. I come all these mazy ways simply to tell you that I love you, and I cannot bear to be deprived of your love.
I’ve come home empty-handed, poorer than I left, and without your remains. I travelled via the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, Thrace and the Cyclades, sailing on my own beloved yacht. Finally we sailed up the Adriatic, then down the Po and the Mincio. Finally, all the way to Sirmione, gratefully abandoning the slavering beaches of the ocean, with its waves that smote my aching prow like rocks.
Instead of your remains I’ve brought back the carcass of my love for Clodia. It’s still more powerful than the bodies of living, lovely women. In Bithynia I took an interest in Cybele, for in her native land her cult is practised more violently than in Rome. More and more I saw the parallels between Cybele and Attis, and Clodia and myself. Standing on a cliff above the ocean, I sketched the outline of my poem, in which Attis comes to his senses, after castrating himself in the frenzy of his devotion, and walks to the sea, where he (now, poignantly, ‘she’ in the pronoun) laments his/her losses. Cybele, of course, will not spare any of her eunuchs, and soon sends her lion to drive poor Attis back into the thickets of Mount Ida.
And so my love for Clodia has driven me back to Rome. She has a lien on my mentula; like Attis, my condition is irreversible.
Still she calls me to her side, when she’s bored with the others, or sometimes, I think, to monitor my pain. I still believe that it enriches her. What a vampire bat she is! How rapacious her appetite for the vital fluids and sentient parts of men! I pass other fellows in the street and wonder, Is it your turn next? Or yours? Or have you already been there?
The only thing that comforts me is a new rumour – that Caelius has given her the cold shoulder, the first time such a thing has happened. He has turned on her like a serpent, and bitten hard. We’ve all known for some time that Caelius was involved in some murderous Egy
ptian business; we knew he far surpassed us in his ambitions. But I never thought he would be able to do what I could never do: pay Clodia in her own coin.
* * *
When Caelius abandoned her, Clodia went insane. This is the only way I can explain the terrible error of judgement that followed.
I saw with wonder that Clodia could not bear to be rejected. Whether she loved or not, it was her role to cast off lovers, not to be cast aside. All Rome now knew that Caelius had coolly sidestepped her. The personal humiliation was also a political one: it turned out he’d been working secretly with Pompey against the interests of her too-much-beloved brother.
Caelius flitted from the apartments at Clodius’ house, leaving his rent contemptuously in arrears. He was out of Clodia’s reach: she could not go after him in person. Even in her fury, she would not humiliate herself by hunting him around the town. Instead she went after his blood, accusing him of plotting to poison her, or defrauding her, conspiring to murder a diplomat and to provoke a riot at Naples. She launched a shoal of spears, sure that at least one of them would stick in him, and fatally.
But Clodia’s case against Caelius has gone gravely wrong for her. Unluckily for Clodia, the accused poisoner went to Cicero for his defence. No one would have thought that the great man would take on the case, as Caelius, a former protege of Cicero’s, had already double-crossed him once in allying himself with the Clodian clan. But Cicero did, and probably just because of his bitter hatred of Clodius, who had him exiled from Rome last year and saw to it that his house was thoroughly pillaged in his absence.
The day she heard that Cicero had been appointed counsel, how Clodia must, for the first time in her life, have trembled.
I returned from Bithynia in the middle of the furore.
It did not escape my notice that the trial took place in the first days of the games devoted to the Magna Mater, Cybele.
Hidden at the back of the crowd, I watched the whole trial. I know it was less than dignified of me to show my face, but I could not resist. I stood twenty yards from Clodia and her counsel, seated in the front row of the circles that fanned out from the central area. It was a long time since I’d observed my mistress from such a distance, and I had never seen her with that defiant, fearful expression upon her face. She gave me no sign of recognition.