Last Days With Cleopatra

by Jack Lindsay

  “I saved your life once,” said Antonius with a spiteful laugh. “Fancy that. I said, ‘ Don’t be in such a hurry to die.’ And because of that you pester me like an unpaid debt. You’re the worst of the lot of them, you hyena. You’re only waiting for me to die so that you can feel free again. You pismire. You undernourished maggot.”

  Lucilius did not stir, then, after slowly putting down his wine-cup on the floor, he rose and went out. Antonius sent jeering laughter to follow him.

  “It’s your turn,” he said, stopping suddenly and turning to Aristocrates, who had sat up on the edge of his couch.

  “You asked me what a god is,” said Aristocrates, in quick precise tones as if giving a lecture, to hide his agitation. Antonius nodded sagely.

  “It is all a problem of words, of a break somewhere in our capacities,” went on Aristocrates, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “The divine is the natural. But because we cannot grasp that simple truth in its entirety, we have to isolate certain aspects and think of them as more divine than the others. Hence the errors and distortions. Yet there is no other way, we being as we are.”

  “We are as we are,” assented Antonius, nodding heavily. “As we are.” He yawned, and Aristocrates spoke on more quickly still, but without raising his voice.

  “There is only one blasphemy, to think of God as separate from the world—”

  Antonius interrupted. “But what of me? What I want to know is the effects on God of being God, do you see?” He beat his chest. “She called me Ra-Amen—to explain away her bastards. The god came in the darkness....” He sniggered, and then fell silent again.

  Victor had been leaning against a pillar in the gloom, trying to make out what was said; but the words perturbed him without revelation. He thought of the huge statues of Cleopatra and Antonius in the temple in the Eleusis district westward of the city, and was filled with contempt for his master sprawling on the couch. The dark chamber seemed to grow darker and around Antonius to thicken a miasma of evil, beating wings of vile night-presences. But perhaps there was more to understand.

  “...Man may be a god to others, but never such to himself. The priest in the Mysteries may hold up a Cross, and it becomes man and woman mating and the whole universe; but if it were lost and later found by someone who didn’t know what it was, it would be only a cross, for use perhaps as a vine-support. The cross wouldn’t be divine in itself, but divine when looked at in a certain way. So a man might become a god, but he’d remain a man to himself, since he couldn’t look at himself as the others were looking. He’d be a god in the acclaiming voices, but a man in the silence which was his inner self. Yet, since all things are divine, his inner silence too would image a god, but never the God that the world saw...”

  Antonius was listening intently. Aristocrates, blinking away to himself, went on.

  “The inner-god is reality. But never a god. Life changes, and the changes are divine. You can understand me. There is no god in an image or a word as the people believe. The god is in the blood. Blood is everywhere.”

  Antonius leaned forward ardently, and touched Aristocrates on the arm. “That’s what I dream.” His voice was hushed, cautious. “I see it flowing endlessly.”

  Aristocrates did not look at him. He was staring into his wine-cup, speaking in strained tones like a man compelled to speak.

  “It’s all in the blood. All the forms. Yet the change of forms is the god. But the god is in us, since we are in the stream of blood. The god is only the change, and yet the change never ceases. The god is the pattern.”

  “I can understand that,” said Antonius, in a louder voice. “It’s all a battle, and the god’s the general. I know that. I’ve led an army. After the death of Caesar. I was part of it, and the men were all part of me. It must have been then that I became a god. But I’d rather die. I can’t die...”

  Eros, who had been lying still all this while, stirred and clasped the feet of Antonius, looking up at him imploringly. Antonius took no notice, grinding his teeth. Aristocrates had fallen back on his couch, exhausted.

  Lucilius re-entered and lay down on his couch without a word or a glance round.

  “Drink up, man,” said Antonius jovially, roused from his stupor.

  Lucilius lifted up slowly and stared at Antonius with sad eyes.

  “Master, how is it all to end?”

  Antonius stared back at him, and gradually his face lost its tensions, his eyelids drooped. He shuddered and passed his hand over his brow.

  “How is it all to end?” he echoed gravely. He paused, and then screamed, “With my own dagger in my heart!”

  He snatched at the dagger that lay sheathed beside him, tore the dagger out, and raised it on high to plunge into his heart. Eros cried and clasped the feet of Antonius in stricken fear; but Lucilius had been watching closely. He sprang across and knocked the dagger away. It clattered on the floor.

  Antonius rolled over with a groan. “I can’t die.”

  “O it breaks my heart,” said Lucilius in dull tones. He knelt beside Antonius. Antonius put an arm round his neck and sobbed.

  “I know you love me, but I can’t help it. You should have let me die. But now I can’t do it again.” He began mumbling. “The world deserves no better. Murderers and gold-grubbers all. Traitors...”

  He lay back at last with closed eyes, and called for more wine. Victor hastened forwards and found that in the painful absorption of the scene he’d neglected to keep a watch on the authepsa, the self-boiler, that provided the warm water for the wine; the charcoal-fuel had long burned away. But Antonius was in no state to tell whether the wine was cold or warm. He drank a cupful and then motioned that the others should go—all except Eros, on whose shoulder he laid his hand.

  Victor noticed that Aristocrates staggered, and helped him to his room. The sweat was still damp on the man’s brow, and he could not speak coherently.

  “What did I say ?” he asked Victor once, but did not seem to expect an answer. He shivered. “ I feared...in his eyes...unless I spoke the truth...not what I said...”

  Victor saw him to bed and fetched him some more wine. Aristocrates drank, and seemed to feel better. He stroked Victor’s hand and arm, and seemed to want to say something. But be turned away with his face to the wall, and asked for the lamp to be left alight.

  Victor returned to the corridor at the end of which lay the triclinium where Antonius had remained. There he loitered, waiting for Eros. Once he heard him cry piercingly. That was all. At last he could bear it no longer, drawn by a disquiet, a feeling of danger, a dim apprehensive jealousy; and he tiptoed down the corridor, glad of the carpets which had been strewn indiscriminately throughout the villa.

  Reaching the door, he peeped through, and to his terror gazed straight into the eyes of Antonius.

  Antonius was standing opposite the door, in a recess where had been painted an adicula or small shrine, the artist endeavouring to continue the lines of perspective and create an illusion of recess-within-recess. Antonius was stripped, and leaned back stiffly against the wall, his arms flat along his sides. Before him knelt Eros, also stripped, with head resting on the feet of Antonius. Antonius did not stir. His eyes, which stared at Victor, were glassily fixed, recording nothing. They hypnotised with their emptiness. There was a strange contorted smile on his face. On his head he wore a gilt wreath of bay, one of the banquet-wreaths that had been stacked in the sideboard. The leaves radiated with spikes of light in the flickering rays of the lamps.

  With a violent wrench Victor succeeded in stepping back, away from the door, expecting to hear a shout of rage from Antonius for the intrusion. But Antonius had seen nothing.

  Trembling, Victor stole back to his room in the tower and tossed awake through the night, a fugitive of faceless dreams.

  3 TELL ME THE TRUTH

  Long before dawn he had struggled out of the blanketing oppression of half-dream and climbed to the top of the tower, waiting for the sea-gulls and the mist of light
over the great city—the city that at this hour became only a pictorial extension of his mood, an image that he had painted on the backcloth of dwindled space. Below him moaned and lapped the waters at their old uneasy work, as if the hunger of the world spoke in their fretting tongues, the suck and cluck at the wearing breasts of earth. Warning and token of the end, this insistence on the hunger of the present. Too long had humankind hungered through dark forest-years, too deep had the fear burrowed beneath all foundations of the sunlit cities of the mind. In the beginning were the waters, and if one paused to listen there was yet nothing else.

  But beyond these, in the gloom, lay the marvellous city, a thing of pride and grace, housing the creatures of terror and lust. In the dawnlight it could be entirely wonder, uncontaminated by the unworthy hordes who built it.

  Hard to make out, but clear enough in the wavering impulses of the blood, despair and hope, self-reliance and prayer. The curling edges of the sea became more distinct, frolicking rather than dying in forlorn submission against the bulwarks of beleaguered earth. The sky was thinning, the city more than a crouching shape of darkness. But the wind was still cold on the cheeks of the gazer, sliding cold fingers against his legs and arms. The causeway ran straight into the dispersing gloom, straight as his thoughts towards Daphne.

  There was no colour in the dawn. It burst in white incandescence, came suddenly and tipped the dome of the Sarapeion with white flame and burned within on the lips and eyes of the god. The first ray of dawn touched the head of the god, who faced eastwards in his shrine, and the priests were kneeling before him with morning-praise; but the gazer from the sea saw only the dazzle on the dome, and that was enough. It was a flame of pure sacrifice sent from the earth, the troubled and stained earth, that yet desired purification.

  And the sea-wind gave the cleansing, and the light of the dawn. Any stream on the mountainside gave it, or the salt holiness of the sea-waters. Yet men were unpurified.

  With full light picking out the details of the landscape there returned awareness of actual problems. The awe of unknown space, the elemental hunger, died away; and the caverns from which they arose were closed in the blood. Instead was the world, and the need of breakfast, and pestering thoughts, false trails of memories, and the effort to forget last night.

  The feeling of lovely strength which had come to Victor in his tower of the morning was no longer his. His rash promise to meet Daphne after dark appalled him, yet he would have to carry it out. But what if something made it quite impossible for him to get away, what if Daphne decided not to keep the tryst after all, what if he missed her and never saw her again (for he had once more forgotten in the stress of the moment to ask her where she lived), what if she forgot the place he had suggested? and what if he did the wrong thing if they did meet (O Sarapis, keep off the evil eye), if he drove her away by some crudity like last time, or if he felt himself drained and sinewless as he had felt on the lake-pier with his arm half round her?

  He wanted to pray, but knew no god well enough. Even Sarapis was only a dome flaring with whiteness, a bit of the sun. Besides, words that Aristocrates had used bewildered him. God is many, God is a man, God is a change in the blood, God is one. How to reconcile such statements, and what had they to do with Sarapis? Probably the instruction and sacraments of the Mysteries would tell. It would be best to become initiated into Isis as soon as possible; Antonius would pay for any necessary clothes or sacrifices.

  But not Antonius in his present condition. Victor waited to hear some tumult from the house below, some terrible awakening. But nothing happened. He heard the slaves going about their duties, and from the boy who brought him breakfast he learned that Antonius was sleeping peacefully.

  The day passed for him in a daze of sick perturbation, with all his thoughts turned to the problem of leaving the villa. But as the hours went and Antonius did not summon him, he began to feel easier. He begged some meal-porridge from the cook, and the stale heaviness caused by the sleepless night left his stomach. There was only one door to the villa, the door leading on to the causeway, and any exit could not be concealed. At last he decided to tell the doorkeeper that he was sent by Antonius on a message; the man wouldn’t doubt his word; and Antonius, who, Victor heard, was drinking again, would be taking no interest in the household.

  Victor ate some fried fish with the other slaves and then retired to his room on the excuse of illness. Dusk was already busy dematerialising the mainland, shutting the market of the day, and insisting that men and women stand for a moment before the mirrors of earthly silence—to which men and women, unless tired out successfully, retorted with the hide-and-seek of pleasure, the castanets of the dance, the draughts of wine that masqued the drinkers as god-beasts, the coming and the going of Venus through the streets and cul-de-sacs of flesh.

  The canopy of Alexandrian night was spread, sagging with the star-spangles.

  Victor crept downstairs to the door, whispered to the doorkeeper, who grumbled and let him out. He sped along the narrow causeway, pursued by the rumbling waves that mimicked the doorkeeper, calling “Come back.” In his haste he slipped and almost fell into the harbour. Then he recovered himself and made sure that the doorkeeper wasn’t calling out after him, that he was alone on the causeway, between the rock-refuge of despair and the murmuring city of pleasure-after-toil.

  He moved on more slowly, and reached the land with a thrill of gratitude. Everything would come out all right.

  After many fears, one found that there was nothing to fear. He was free, and Daphne was waiting somewhere ahead, across the quayside faced with broad paving-stones, beyond the terrace and the heaps of rubble. Straight in front loomed the rear-wall of the unfinished temple, outlined with dim starlight. (The temple of deified Antonius, never to be finished now, surely; upheld by scaffolding.) Alexandrians were moving about, mostly in couples; for they went late to bed, despite their industrial employments.

  With a sob of relief he saw a girl’s form show up through the shadows.

  “Daphne...”

  “Yes, it’s me.” She sounded angry. “Why have you been so long? I almost went home. There was a man...” He hurried to her side.

  “Tell me where you live.” He had determined to say this first. “I can’t bear losing you again.”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. But where are we going to go? We can’t stay here.”

  He hadn’t thought of that, and hesitated. Somehow, now that they had met, he was disappointed. She wasn’t as nice as he imagined her, as he knew her to be; and he painfully felt that he himself was peevish, unlike his thought of himself. Now that they had met, he couldn’t understand why they had met, what was drawing them together in spite of all social prohibitions and all probabilities. He felt aloof from himself, critical, merely out of place; wanted to pick a quarrel over some minute point, such as the way a ribbon was tied, like a bored husband of years’ standing; felt that if the parting could only be done without any discussion whatever, with a complete assent on both sides, nothing would please him better than to go straight hack to his bedroom and fall quietly to sleep.

  “You know Alexandria better than I do.”

  She stamped her foot. “Not at this time of the night. What do you think of me?”

  “Let’s walk along the sea-front then,” he answered, his brains turgidly active. If they went into the city, there would be nothing to do except go into some heated wine-bar. The palace-gardens would he shut, but the sea-front would be open as far as the Royal Docks, with only a few beacon-lights and sentries.

  They set off walking, side by side; and he did not like to take her arm. Neither spoke. A stiff constraint settled down upon them, and they could think of nothing at all to say. Nothing. They were without interests, detached from past and future, two strangers who chanced inappropriately to be walking together, and who would never find anything to say to one another—not if they walked on and on till they met the Sunrise.

  Other couples had also thought of t
he sea-front. They passed, closely linked, laughing secretly, secure in their little worlds of intimacy. Fathers and mothers, and the landlord-world with its miser-laws, were all excluded; the smell of the sea, the clusters of trellised stars, the open space for walking, made up a moment of bodily freedom: the sweetness of clear contact between desiring and desired, between the senses and the earth of their possession, which all freedoms of the mind so pathetically seek to mimic. Each passing couple was a world of unfathomable delight.

  As each couple passed, Daphne and Victor felt driven ever further apart, as if the sea-breeze streaming between them was a blast of chilly dissension, their wasted lives flowing away. Victor tried to find something to say, but his brain was pressed down by hot unseen hands, the tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. There was nothing to say, except the thing he had wanted to say and could not say. I love you. It would be a mockery to speak such words, since he felt nothing save the meaninglessness of the situation. It’s a nice view, I love you, what’s the price of cabbages...Nothing had any emphasis, any meaning. His blood was wine gone flat, but not even tart enough for useful vinegar. Brackish water. Drink from the well of my tears. I saw a mosquito just then.

  It was bad enough to see the happy lovers passing. It was worse at times to see them lying in spaces where the wall retreated, or on the landing-stages lower down. Victor knew that the stages would be wet and covered with patches of slimy seaweed, but he envied those who lay there, luxuriously lullabied by the waves and tissued in starlight, whatever they unbared. The longer he was silent, the more impossible it was for him to speak. Daphne said nothing. He had been sure that she would at least upbraid him, make a reference to his behaviour in the dark flower-niche; and he had spent all his ingenuity in thinking out pleas. Why didn’t she attack him? That would at worst rouse them, make them real to one another. The silence was her fault, because it was her place after her maidenly flight to abuse him. Her silence was worse than any anger or complaint. It was inexplicable. Why was she walking out with him?