Last Days With Cleopatra

by Jack Lindsay

  He paused, went to the door, then came back.

  “I thought I heard a cat miaowling.” He settled down again. “ I can’t make out why everything went wrong. We had the best army by far...”

  He dropped his goblet and beat at his head.

  “ Lad, keep your conscience clear. Stick to one woman. Stick to whatever you make your purpose. Don’t pull two ways. O god, god...”

  He ground his teeth together. Victor felt that he would do anything to help him, but there was nothing...How awful to see a man in torment, and to be able to do nothing. Never had pain and death come so near, or uttered so sharply their meaning. Because now there was Daphne to lose. Victor realised with a start of remorse that all his old loyalty to Antonius had faded, that he cared only for Daphne. The sufferings of Antonius didn’t really touch him; they fluttered his brain with a passing enigma, a perplexity of pity; but they didn’t matter. No more than the buzz of a fly caught in a spider-web, the twitch of an ant half trodden on. One might stamp on the ant to finish it off, but that was all. Then one forgot.

  How strange was this love, that made him feel infinitely more acutely the nature of pain and loss, but made him care nothing for others in the throes of pain and loss, made him care only lest Daphne should suffer. Yet he didn’t want to see the others suffer; he wanted everyone happy.

  Antonius was talking again. “...Trying to compromise. Liberty one side, and Egypt on the other. But I can’t blame her. She was right too. It’s my fault for failing in Armenia. Hell, but you can’t guess what a Fury she is, you’d have to know first how sweet she can be. It was her fault that Fulvia died—before your time: my wife in those days. I was feeling defiant, I laughed in her face, and she just fell on the floor and died. And she was a brave woman, with a tongue like a meat-chopper. You might as well say I killed her. But I still can’t understand. The virtue went out of me. God, it’s like a stormy wind pressing in the middle of your shoulder-blades. The men trusting and looking for the coming of righteousness. But I couldn’t feel the wind behind me. Cats-meat for a woman, that’s what they all said. O how ashamed I’ve been...”

  He looked up through his fingers and saw Victor’s scared eyes. At once he reached out and grasped Victor again, his mouth curling back in a snarl.

  “You were grinning. What’s that you said? Tell me the truth. Did I desert my men? The truth, do you hear!”

  The hands tightened. A thin slaver of foam flecked the parted lips. The eyes dilated, squinting with possessed rage. Victor felt that his life depended on the answer he gave.

  But what was the right answer? His flustered wits refused to function. Hadn’t Antonius a while back repudiated the charge of desertion? Obviously then he wanted Victor to soothe him, to say that he hadn’t deserted.

  Antonius shook him. “Tell me the truth. Did I desert them?”

  The grip grew stronger. A film was spreading over the distraught eyes.

  Victor opened his mouth to say “No”; but as his lips framed the word, Antonius seemed to know what he was about to say. His face darkened and writhed distortedly; his fingers pressed like iron into Victor’s flesh. And Victor heard only the cry “Truth!” and saw only the adored imploring face of Daphne. Courage and Truth. Something snapped inside him; a white glow consumed the world and his past.

  Without thought he answered.

  “You deserted them.”

  At once he knew what he had said, and was stricken with terror.

  But Antonius dropped him and lay back sobbing. The tears ran down his face, but he made no effort to hide or wipe them off. His body shook convulsively.

  “Go away,” he said, and his voice was surprisingly meek and calm. “I’m afraid of what I might do. If you’d tried to humour me...” He beat at his head again. “O I know well enough what a beast I’ve been. God, god, I think I’m going mad.” He turned on Victor wildly. “ Go away before I ask you if I’m going mad. Quick. Quick.”

  Victor ran from the room, falling over the loose carpet in the passage and ignoring Eros who lay wrapt on a couch at the corridor’s end. Not till he reached his room in the tower did he realise how badly he’d hurt his elbow when he fell. And his throat and arms were bruised. How sore he was.

  He bolted the door and sat wearily on the bed, unable to summon the energy to undress and lie down. Downstairs was Antonius, sobbing, going mad; and outside was the world of deceit and greed and murder...All such things faded out of his brain, and he sat smiling, remembering how Daphne had hung around his neck, supple and strong and softly warm, as she kissed him behind the door. Daphne.

  *

  Next morning Antonius seemed to have forgotten everything; and Victor felt easier, believing that the night had been washed out of the brains of Antonius by drunkenness. But he feared that Antonius in his ignorance would inquire how Victor’s throat had become bruised. Antonius, however, evaded his eyes and addressed him without looking up, and Victor wondered how much of the night had really been washed out.

  Fear returned, and the shadows of the house gripped his heart with icy fingers; the waving curtains hid an ambush of the enemy; the thud of his pulse was the enemy-tread upon the thick Milesian carpets. He bolted his door carefully each night, placed a stool against it, and yet woke in the darkness with a terrified sense of malign staring presences.

  All his hopes turned towards Daphne for any release from the miseries of his servitude. She grew brighter in his enshrining fancies, mother-breasted Isis with open arms.

  But she was beyond possession. The memory of his one night of unimpeded embrace receded, tantalised with its incredible fact, and slipped through the hands of thought. Instead of the hot-mouthed surrendering Daphne there remained only a Daphne controlled, sure of herself, inscrutable, well behaved, well dressed. The hopelessness of his desire recoiled upon him, breaking the last strands of his newly woven self-confidence, his dawn-consecration. The sense of balanced powers, of inhabiting contentedly the house of his flesh, left him, and with it his growing sense of internal freedom and self-mastery. He was more a slave than ever, weaker than in the days when he read poems in a somewhat overpitched voice to the merchant at Antioch, who gravely corrected any errors in pronunciation or expression, smiling with those indrawn glassy eyes of his, moving his restless flabbily overwashed hands, dribbling a little wine down his loose underlip as he grew drunker, beckoning...Weaker than in the days when he and Eros were intimates, sharing everything, competitors only in their wish to serve Antonius...Weaker, far weaker.

  In the night he tossed and pitched in heated despair, drifting upon nightmares in which Antonius broke down the door and strangled him with serpents; then he awoke to torturing inchoate images of the one moment of possessing Daphne, and tore at his body, agonised by the wish to throw off the flesh of desire like the weighted sheets, bringing the fever to the surface of the skin for brief pulsations of fantasy-escape, then finding himself again coffined in swaddling layers of heat.

  The dawns were clouded with shame. He looked out on the city emerging from the mists of night, smudged under the bile-humours of infected light. A corpse greening with decay, that resisted the magical power compelling it to resurrection.

  Once Lucilius came upon him at dawn in the tower, and gave a new direction to his thoughts, bringing him back to the world and yet tantalising him with a glimpse of escape.

  Aristocrates had gone, complaining that he could no longer keep down his food, blaming the sea-damp; but Antonius, instead of jeering, hardly noticed his going. Nothing, however, could shift Lucilius.

  Though reeling, he had climbed the tower noiselessly and surprised Victor gazing shoreward in the dawn. He spat into the water.

  “You’re a good lad. What are you looking at?”

  “The city...”

  “O yes, the city.” Lucilius stared across the waves, and snorted. “Pretty, isn’t it? Pretty putrid, eh?” He spat again. “When I was young, I thought everyone was noble and beautiful. I thought we only had to turn ov
er in bed to make the world a perfect place. Now I think everyone’s filthy. I was certainly wrong in the past, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be wrong now. So I’m not trying to influence you. You’re a good lad.” He gripped the stone. “There I am again, jumping to conclusions. How do I know you’re a good lad? You’re probably a pismire of a fellow. Are you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Victor dejectedly.

  “There, I knew you were a good lad.” He looked again at the city. “It oughtn’t to be there. Or I oughtn’t to be here. It’s easier for me to move. I’ve got a wish for a cabbage-garden. I believe that cabbages can save the world. Anyhow, when I look at that paradise-on-earth yonder, I want at once to go to hell.” He rubbed his stubbled chin, and looked questioningly at Victor.

  “I’d like to get away too,” agreed Victor, and then added, doubtful of how far he could trust Lucilius. “If everything was all right and I could go.”

  Lucilius laughed, a mirthless but not unpleasant laugh. “You heard what he said to me—insults—I’d have killed anyone else...”

  “He was drunk…!”

  He frowned and tried to clarify his thoughts. “What’s happening. As if it’s all fixed, already happened, fated. I’ve never felt that before. Like being utterly becalmed in mid-sea, while the sky’s getting coppery. You see what’s coming, and feel helpless, like midges. But I’d never leave him till the end.”

  He looked at Victor with a smile wrinkling the corners of his eyes.

  “You wonder why I’m saying this, don’t you. Well, I like the look of you, and I wanted to talk. I always speak my mind. If I was younger, I’d dare you to dive with me over the parapet into those waves below there.”

  “I can’t swim.” Victor shivered.

  “Neither can I.” Lucilius whistled some notes of a marching-song. “I used to think it fine to take a risk, and I couldn’t live unless I thought life was a woman with her big eyes on me. But now—” He frowned and spat again over the tower-wall. Then he swung his arm round towards Alexandria. “ It would be fine to see a wave come out of the sea and wash it all away. There’s none of us but makes at least one stench daily.”

  He slapped Victor on the shoulder, and went downstairs, reeling but sure-footed. Victor turned back to look anxiously at Alexandria and the racing wave-crests, fearful that the wish of Lucilius would come true and a wave sweep across the shining city of stone, drowning a million people who didn’t matter and one who was Daphne.

  He met her. For quick unsatisfactory moments, rich with hope, crossed with misunderstandings. Always they talked, talked till they were weary of their own voices, but never wearied in the need to talk. Words came quickly enough now. Yet there were also intervals of silence, smiling armistices, when they looked into each other’s eyes with sweet acceptance of the moment for what it was, absorbed in nearness to one another. She kept on accusing him of being dissatisfied, and he argued endlessly that he wasn’t dissatisfied, he wanted only to be with her—terrified always that she would end their meetings. For neither dared speak of marriage; such an impossibility They did not even think of it, entirely taken up by the immediate issues, the doubts (as to whether one wanted the other), the fears of exposure. So they hurt each other with words, with suspicions and incriminations.

  “I don’t start these discussions,” he protested.

  “But I can see what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything of what you say.”

  “Then you truly don’t want me—like that?”

  “Of course I do. But I’d rather this than nothing.”

  “What a miserable creature you must be.”

  “I’m not. I’ve never been happier in my life.”

  “Why don’t you weep to prove it?”

  Then, goaded, he would attack her back:

  “But why don’t you want the same as I do?”

  “It isn’t the same for a girl.”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  “If things are the same for both of us, you’d want to be friends.”

  “But I do.”

  “Why can’t you be happy as things are?”

  He wanted to say that she had wanted the same as himself on the evening in the niche of flowers, that she only put him off now because she looked on him as a slave. But under the stress of her cross-examination he grew tired and himself believed for that spasm of tiredness that he really didn’t want anything but friendly conversations.

  “I don’t want things changed. I’m perfectly happy.”

  “You’re not. Don’t lie to me or I’ll never see you again. You know you want me.”

  She made him admit it and then told him she hated him, and he expected her to say that she wouldn’t meet him again. But she only made that threat when he refused to admit that he wanted her; and yet when he admitted it, she wept or was angry. But he didn’t mind tears or rage so much. He didn’t mind anything but the threat that she wouldn’t meet him again.

  They met for brief moments of the morning, standing behind pillars or in the nooks between shops, under the wall of the Gardens or in the portico of a shrine, till they forgot and raised their voices and attracted everyone’s attention. Then they moved on, blaming one another, for a similar spot in which to linger. Once Simon almost saw them, but they hid from him by darting into a shop, where it took them some time to get away without buying a heap of cheap jewelry. Another time Daphne’s father passed nearby, and she only escaped by crushing up between Victor and a fluted column: so that he blessed the chance.

  On the whole, despite his sufferings, he was glad that he couldn’t meet her at nights. He didn’t altogether lie when he despairingly said that he was satisfied to leave things as they were. For thus the responsibility was taken from his hands, and their relationship was not unduly tested. During the short meetings in the crowded streets there was nothing they could do but talk; and he was glad enough to talk about anything, even to quarrel and excite himself wretchedly.

  Still, he couldn’t understand why she met him.

  Neither could she. Again and again she had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t meet him again, but had turned up at the appointed place. Discontent and a wish for unpermitted wanderings had led her into revolt before she encountered Victor; but discontent alone wasn’t the force that drew her to him. Yet she wasn’t infatuated, she didn’t feel all the approved symptoms...except perhaps sometimes in bed...It must be love, however. For she couldn’t stop meeting him. Love. But the admission made her criticise him more, teased her into forcing him to show all his weaknesses. Surely love would act differently, love that came swooningly, a lightning in the stormy eyes, the noise of many waters in the ears. Sappho said so, and Sappho must have known.

  Yet...

  Dear Victor, she held his ghost in her arms in the darkness of her bed, lying on her back with raised knees. A ghost that was a doll, laid on her breasts, ordered to be good, patted and smacked, turned over and upside-down, whispered to confidentially, told all the funny little things that no one was ever told. Such an obedient doll of a ghost, and sometimes sweetly naughty. He didn’t mind what she did to him, and his eyes were nice.

  But the Victor she met in the daylight wasn’t quite the same as his accommodating ghost. At times she liked him more, and at times she detested him. It was only when she thought of losing him that she felt how closely he had grown into the texture of her days and nights. He was a slave, and even if he were freed her father would never accept him as a son-in-law. But somehow those facts simply had nothing to do with the situation.

  4 THIS IS MY BODY

  Nicias sighed and wiped his eyes. They were beginning to water a lot nowadays. He ought to do less reading. Having admitted this fact, he returned to the book-roll before him, unwinding two more pages. It was the manuscript of Agamemnon in the original handwriting of Aischulos. Nicias was making a commentary; for years he had been labouring on it; he meant it to cover all the seventy-odd. plays. A big task, which never see
med any nearer completion. Lectures took up so much time, and arguments in the common-rooms, and walking to and from the Museion (but habits can’t be changed easily), and exchanging polite remarks to visitors or friends. Indeed everything took up so much time, pushing a life’s purpose into so constricted a corner. But Aischulos must have his commentary.

  Nicias sighed again and fingered the short scrubby beard that covered his rather heavy jowls. He recalled the day when he’d first got the conviction that he and he alone was the man to do Aischulos justice. The blood had rushed in gay exaltation to his head, a dedicating fervour wilder and lighter in its effervescence than any drunkenness; and he had hastened into the next room to tell his wife Callirhoe (now dead), who had been sewing. She was frightened that he might make her lose the needle, run it into her arm or his own, and she tenderly evaded his embrace, scolding him; and then the needle was lost, and she’d been frightened for days to sit on any of the chairs; she said she’d known a girl who ran a needle right into herself and the needle worked through her till it punctured her heart. Old wives’ tales. Dear Callirhoe, fussy and always burning something on the stove and yet so insulted if she wasn’t praised for housewifery. She had been young on that day, seventeen years ago, a neat slip of a thing not at all like her daughter, except for the serious eyes; and in despite of all needles and food on the stove she’d had to listen to the plan of Nicias, to take his bubbling-over caresses. That was the day, surely, when Daphne had been conceived. The conception had seemed a blessing, and deepened his pride and sureness in his destiny; and now the commentary was almost as far from being finished as it had been ten years ago.