by Jack Lindsay
Brutus ceased, and the conservatives with a brief hopefulness looked down into the Forum. But not a sound was heard, except a deep breath from the staring multitude. Brutus staggered back, as if struck in the face — suddenly released from the tension of his speech. With a great effort he recovered himself and rejoined the side of Cassius. They exchanged glances, half offering and asking support, half resentfully as if afraid of blame.
There was nothing more to be said or done. The mob preserved an impassive hostility; not one shout of hate or encouragement broke from the serried masses. Only the slow susurrus of the human forest could be heard. Trying to hold their heads high and to step easily, the procession returned to the Capitol.
*
“I must see Antonius,” said Cleopatra.
Sara humped up his left shoulder uneasily. “And how, your Majesty? At home he keeps a wild-cat wife, and he’d make no tryst for fear of daggers. I gather that a public meeting wouldn’t suit your purposes.”
“I must see him. There is no one else.”
She caressed her lips with a fingertip. The world was a tainted place; and time, the gnawing rat, laired in even the most beautiful flesh. Otherwise one would be able to shut out the taint of men in the contemplation of one’s own limbs, the conscious self separated from the world. But in the blood was the contagion; the body was not complete in itself; under the web of fine sensation lay the belly, a poison-spider, demanding its prey. Caesar was dead.
“I must see Antonius,” she repeated, through gritted teeth, drumming with her fingers on the mirror in her lap.
Sara knew better than to contradict her, and wondered how he could retire without attracting her notice. How easily he could strangle her — now, before she could call to her maids in the alcove — strangle and ravish her at the same time. One day she would torment him a little too far.
“Didn’t you hear me?” She lifted the mirror and flung it at him. It struck him edgeways on the shoulder and then clattered on the floor. He grinned. A bruise was nothing. He felt more pleasantly disposed.
“I’m thinking,” he said. “Give me a few moments.”
*
The abortive demonstration in the Forum delighted Antonius. It amounted to a breach of the truce and cleared his way to a counter-repudiation. He would send round a summons for the Senate to meet early the next morning, and it would be easy to terrify the senators into passing any decrees he wished. Decimus Brutus would be ready by that time to accept the loss of Cisalpine Gaul; the Senate would transfer it at once to Antonius.
He drank. He wished to escape the question in his mind. It was sufficient that he needed Gaul for his safety. Bleak moments of fear swept over him; moments when revenge for Caesar seemed futile, the last thing that Caesar would have wanted; moments when the thought of absolute power was a bewildering anxiety. What could a man do if he were handed the tumultuous maddening world to govern at his will? The isolation of such power would be terrific. How had Caesar endured it?
Yet there was a lure in the thought. Power. A sense blended by the towering arrogance of drunkenness, the joy of swinging a sword at helpless flesh, the sweet crunch of an apple under the teeth, the wet warmth of a woman embraced. All the memories of his seething blood, ghosts of the prey gained in the careless past, beckoning with promise of a greater future.
He awoke out of his dream, between shouting orders to the veterans, drinking, cursing at Lucius. He awoke to find himself standing withdrawn for a moment in Fulvia’s dressing-room; and Fulvia was leaning back beneath his clasp. How strong her bended spine, her wide, plump shoulders; how restless her limbs. She moved her mouth across his throat.
“We’re going to win, you and I.”
He felt the heat of her need. She did not question the meaning of power any more than the charioteer rounding the stone pillar of the meta questioned the need to control the horses with the reins in his hands — the reins wound round his wrist and tied to his waist. If the chariot overturned, where would the driver be?
Antonius felt afraid of Fulvia, more afraid of her than he had been of anything else in his whole life. He wanted to ask her, “But am I worthy of power? I dare not, I am not worthy.” But he knew that she wouldn’t understand at all; she would be hurt, enraged; she would mock him coldly. So he held her closely and sought out her mouth, to kiss it, to stop it from moving hotly across his throat.
“You’re wanted.”
Gaius appeared at the door, regarding the couple with malevolent pleasure. Antonius, glad to escape, let Fulvia go, and went out, brushing past Gaius. Gaius continued leering at Fulvia.
“Shall I finish what the brute began?”
“If you touch Pisidice again,” said Fulvia, staring back, and undisconcerted by her disarray, “I’ll whip you.”
“Don’t be jealous,” he jeered. “I only took her because you turned me down.”
A young girl of about fourteen entered at the further doorway, throwing aside the tasselled curtains. She was unlike Fulvia except for the brightly glazed look of the eyes, the brightened colour of the cheekbones; her face was oval, and she wore her hair drawn back so that her lifted eyebrows gave an impression of ceaseless surprise. She stood looking at the two with her lazy air of suspicious enjoyment.
“Did I interrupt an adultery? Don’t mind me.”
“Behave yourself,” said Fulvia, sharply. The girl was Clodia, daughter of her first marriage.
“It’s all right. I overheard everything. I can see, mother, you’re as chaste as — as — I don’t know what. Do you, Gaius?”
“Get out,” said Fulvia to Gaius, and he withdrew, with a sweeping bow. Fulvia turned to her daughter, “You little fool, keep your eyes and your mouth more closed, or I’ll send you back to the country again. We’re playing for more than you can understand.”
“Very well,” said Clodia, with slow, deliberate emphasis, “I’ll keep my eyes and my mouth shut — but what about the rest of me?”
“I see that you’ll have to go back to the country,” replied Fulvia, doing up her hair with quick, skilful fingers. “You’re a silly little noisy girl.”
Clodia reddened. “I’m not.” She came nearer. “Dear mother, I think you’re wonderful. I’d love to be able to crush a man with a few words like you can. I’m sure I’d stutter, and then I’d scratch his eyes out. Don’t send me away again.”
“Then don’t leave your nurse.” Fulvia went to the door and called. “Bhebeo!”
A fat, middle-aged woman with little sunken eyes entered.
“O there she is.” She hastened to Clodia with flapping slippers. “What a girl she’s turning out. Putting sense into her head is like trying to wash a clay-brick clean. She’s worse than a cow with a gadfly under her tail.”
“Look after her better,” said Fulvia, moving away. “If anything happens to her I’ll have you sewn up in a sack full of cockroaches.”
Clodia clapped her hands and looked wide-eyed at Bhebeo, as if watching the hungry cockroaches already at work.
“I’ll do my best,” said Bhebeo, shrilly, “but I’d as soon milk a he-goat. Some girls are that silly they could ruin themselves, if you ask me. I once had an apple without a single hole on its skin, and yet there was a maggot inside. I did hear of a girl who was got in the family-way by the wind like the mares in Lusitania, but I never believed it before.” Clodia took her mother in her arms and kissed her. “Do whip Gaius,” she whispered, and ran giggling from the room, followed by the waddling Bhebeo.
Fulvia shivered, and turned towards the next room where she had heard the cries of her infant son. What weak creatures men were. What would they do if they felt their body weighing and sickening for nine months with a strange life within? Yet on that chance of drawn-out pain, with anguish at the end, the woman gambled with her body, matching the call of lust against the plans and ideals of the wandering man. Compensation was needed somewhere. Let other women find it in jewels and flattery; she wanted something that went deeper, wider, than th
e haunches broadening beneath the womb-burden. She didn’t want anything, but by the God of Women she’d make everyone sweat to gain it for her.
The child whimpered again, and she picked him up, then smiled, burying her face against his soft small body. He ceased his whimpering and cooed, reaching out with fat stubby hands at her face and hair, as she kissed and nuzzled.
*
Like the gurgling of a tide first heard in the rock-crannies and seaweed-covered holes at the foot of a cliff, the anger of the people was murmuring up through the alleys and slum-dens of Rome: coming through the cautiously opened doors of cellars and smoky taverns, the window-holes of rickety attics, the rifts in darkened closets under stairs, the squalid partitioned apartments where two or three families slept together. Fear that the dole would cease, that the colonising schemes would be quashed, that the grants of land would be revoked and the promise of more land nullified. Anger at the deed of blood.
For the poor, flung together in suffering, could intuit a bond of brotherhood now lost to the nobles who had forgotten in a capitalised world the race-bond. The old compact was gone, and a new compact was being formed; and it was the slave and the starving workman who sensed the sanctions of the future age. The upper classes clung to forms that had once been pure and inspiriting, and sought to turn life back to the departed age of farmer-warriors; or clung, avaricious and spendthrift, to their possessions and privileges, deaf to the voice of doom.
“Why have they killed Caesar? Only because they feared what he’d do to them and their like.”
“Caesar was giving everyone fair play. He was killed by a gang of crooks.”
“Caesar died for us.”
Bring your love, sufferers, to the man who died for his fellows. The mighty has fallen. Must his work therefore fall? Is the mighty one dead because his body is defiled by the enemy? Will he not reappear, in the same or another shape, breaking through the tomb, returning with rescue?
How can Caesar die, since he died for man?
Look up, you boozing veteran with your warty nose in a tankard. Tears are rolling down your cheeks. Lick them sideways with your tongue, and their salt will make you thirstier yet. Remember the solemn Mysteries and what they have told you in their chapels: the lessons learned from the voice of the priest and the images of the god suffering, dying, and reborn. The god became man to save the earth. The lamb and the bull became man to save you. The god had a face like the face of Caesar. Who is a god? The blind sky, the ruthless forces of nature that ignore you, the universal mind that the philosophers talk about, unity in manifoldness, the comprehensible laws of energy that can never be comprehended? You care nothing for such things. God is a man. God is the man that means the most to you.
Look back into the confusing screen of the past, into the wavering riddle of birth, when the womb opened with griping pangs and dropped you into a great opened hand, into the storm of cold and heat; and the hand upheld you, and the waters of birth receded, and you lay frightened amid flame and ice, the jagged edge of light, hungering and wailing with a voice that you did not know as your own.
Food came and filled you with warmth, and tore you again. The storms of colic broke the world of your body; for you lived only in the flesh, and the prickles of heat were the stars of over-arching darkness, and the sun was the navel through which you had once drunk your mother’s blood, and the moon was the breast of your severed mother, coming and then going again; and the hand upheld. You were upheld by the cradling hand, and the storms slackened, and you dared to sleep and find peace at moments and to smile; and the hand was the hand of the Father.
O yes, let the philosophers talk. God is a man.
“Hercules, I’d like to get my fingers on their throats.”
“Caesar died for us.”
*
When urinating away from home, Amos had a sense of sin. He had a sense of sin now as he stood against the house-wall on the Tiber Road: a sense accentuated by the appearance of a curly-haired young girl from the near doorway. But she threw a kiss and moved on down the road. The main reason, however, for the sense was the fact that urine was of prime importance in the fulling industry, and everyone in the household was expected to contribute his or her daily product. Old Ezra had pronounced ideas on the chemistry of the subject. The women’s, he said, served only for washing coarse garments and removing mud-stains; the men’s was best for the finishing touches. Amos had always accepted this thesis before; but today he felt that if ever Karni was a member of the household he would protest strongly.
He was waiting for Karni. He hadn’t the courage to venture again into the grounds of the villa lent by Caesar to Cleopatra — particularly now Caesar was dead. But he was loitering about in the road outside, hoping that Karni would be sent on some shopping expedition; for that was her usual task. Though very worked-up over his experiences of yesterday, he hadn’t liked to mention them at home; and he felt that he must communicate them to Karni. He was closer to her now; there seemed a more solid link. She was employed in the kitchen of a Queen; he had stood alone in a huge room looking at a murdered Dictator. The connection, though hard to put into words, was emotionally obvious to Amos. Also, he was wearing a yellow cloak.
At last, after encountering many false alarms and almost falling into the Tiber through leaning on a rotten post, he did see Karni appear. Sauntering towards her, he tried to pretend that he was walking that way casually; but she refused to accept the pretence.
“Have you been waiting long?” she asked, with the tiniest of dimples in her cheeks. “Why didn’t you send a message in? You know things are easy with me. I’m not like a common slave,” she explained, loftily. “And as long as I do my duties my time’s my own.”
“I saw Caesar lying dead on the floor,” said Amos, equally important. “He had his neck twisted and blood all over him, and one of his shoes was coming off.”
“Where did you get the cloak,” answered Karni. “You do look fine.”
He was divided between annoyance at having his story spoilt and pleasure at the compliment. “O it’s only an old cloak. My father got it for a bad debt. It belonged to a man with a squint.”
“Your father must be a good man,” said Karni, musingly, “and a loving father too.”
“O yes,” agreed Amos. “But where are you going today?”
Karni was going to order some fish and condiments in the Macellum; and Amos went with her, excelling himself in officiousness and narrowly escaping assault from the combined guild of fishmongers. He could never have haggled as well, not even if his father had been standing by, and he felt that Karni must look on him as a well-dressed man-of-the-world who thought nothing of buying fish in large quantities. He was emboldened to stop her after they crossed the bridge again, and to suggest that she needn’t go home yet.
“Let’s have a drink somewhere.”
But Karni didn’t want to go into a crowded tavern or cookshop. “Don’t you know somewhere quiet?” she repeated. After arguing awhile, he saw what she meant.
“I’ll find a place. You wait here.”
Off he dashed, invading the nearest respectable-looking shops, taking the master aside, and whispering, “Could you rent me a room for an hour or two? I’ve got a girlfriend that doesn’t like going down under the bridge. She was brought up too well.”
He was thrown out of a draper’s and a spicer’s, spent five minutes trying to explain more guardedly to a deaf man who turned out to be a customer waiting for the apothecary to return from the rear, then became more careful, and at length found an ironmonger who was ready to accommodate him for an agreed sum. Amos paid him and then discovered that the slaves who had been lounging at the side of the shop were about to resume hammering operations. It was hardly a quiet shop. “But she’s a bashful girl,” he reasoned to himself, “she meant lonely, not quiet. She won’t mind a bit of banging and clattering, as long as there aren’t any bugs.” He had a good nose for bugs, and was sure that the shop was free from them; probabl
y bugs didn’t like noise.
He hurried back to the corner where he had left Karni, and to his despair found that she had gone. But a small boy, who was playing in the mud, looked up, cocked an eye at him, and remarked, “Was it you she told me to watch out for?”
“Karni said she’d wait for me here,” said Amos, struggling with a desire to confide everything to the small boy.
“She borrowed my chalk and wrote on the wall,” said the boy. “That’s all I know about her. I thought she’d give me a copper. She used up nearly all my chalk.” He looked up hopefully at Amos. “She said you’d give me something.”
But Amos was searching for the message on the wall. Then he found it. “Amos same time tomorrow I can’t wait for ever Karni wear your cloak wont you.”
“She said she’d poke her finger in your eye if you didn’t give me a copper,” shouted the small boy.
Amos considered him severely. “Learn to speak the truth, young boy. Do you know what is written in the Sacred Scriptures? Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, and the forward tongue shall be cut off.”
He wagged his finger and walked away, leaving the small boy to put out his tongue and weigh a handful of mud.
The mark was too good to miss. A lump of mud landed on the back of the yellow cloak, and a small boy scudded for safety, knocking over an old man who was leading a goat on a halter. Amos was agonised. How would he wash the cloak in time for the morrow without arousing his father’s suspicion? For he hadn’t shown the cloak at home. O why hadn’t he bought security for a copper?
*
Unable to bear the waiting, Servilia decided to call on Porcia. Besides, she wanted to see how Porcia was taking things; she hoped somehow to find her broken down. But Porcia was still radiant; her low smooth brow, her calm white face, her burning blue eyes, had never revealed greater happiness. After her breakdown on the morning of the murder she had reawakened with her nimbus of contentment intact. She clasped the hands of Servilia, honoured to touch the woman whose flesh had borne Brutus; and Servilia was disturbed, as she had been for weeks now, by something witless in the radiance of her daughter-in-law, also her niece. A thought struck her.