by Jack Lindsay
At last he said, “I’ve never enjoyed anything so much as I enjoyed that recitation of yours the other night.”
“Did you?” she asked, with an air of mild concern.
“No, no,” he cried, bitterly. “I hated it. I mean it was too genuine. It hit me in the navel. It was unfair, somehow ...”
“It was only a recitation,” she said, with the same surprised depreciation. “The technique was a rather worn-out imitation of an old eunuch called Mardis who taught me when I was young. A wonderful actor of women’s parts he was. I was only copying him.”
Gallus knew she wasn’t telling the truth; she had put herself, or at least one poor harrowed part of herself, into the miming. But how could he contradict her? He saw that her defences against him were too strong; she didn’t mean to let him come any closer. He rose in depression.
She saw his misery and felt that she had nothing to fear from him. She liked him more, impersonally, though she despised him a little; and she didn’t want to lose him altogether.
“Why don’t you bring me something you’ve written?”
“Would you really like to see some of my verses?” he asked, with new hope.
She smiled, careful not to give too much away. “Don’t forget it’s my business. I’m a trained reader of verses. Perhaps I could do something to help you — and myself. I might be able to recite a poem. Let me see some of them. They mightn’t be suitable, of course — I mean not suitable for my type of acting. I haven’t much technique.”
She was sorry for her offer. No doubt the poems were worthless and she would have him worrying her ceaselessly now.
“I’ll bring you something along in the next few days,” said Gallus, stiffly, overjoyed and yet somewhat hurt. He bowed and left the room.
She sat still for a long while after he had gone. He left her dissatisfied, made her want to lead a different life; and she would soon be penniless if she let herself be affected by what a third-rate poet thought of her.
*
The riots grew worse. Antonius issued a strongly-worded edict forbidding the wearing of all arms within the walls, but made no attempt to enforce it. He was at his wit’s end how to appear innocent before the Senate without offending the veterans. Again attacks were made on the houses of the conspirators and beaten off with difficulty; and he would have to do something if this continued. But more painful than his efforts to evade the responsibilities of the situation were his efforts to evade Fulvia. During the day he kept his brothers with him and continued organising a police-band of the more reliable veterans, but at night he had to meet her alone. He bedded in a separate room, but she came to him there. She lay beside him, and, fighting him off, demanded that he should act decisively.
“What can I do? I’d stop these riots if I could. They’ll only hasten the reaction. Mob-outbursts have always ended with a victory for the diehards.”
“All the more reason why you should step in first.”
“Show me what can be done, and I’ll do it.”
“They’ve beaten you. You’re a coward.”
What hurt him most was the feeling that she spoke the truth. But he didn’t see what he could do. The failure to save Caesar had broken his nerve; he should have run into the Curia; one steadfast opponent would have scared the conspirators from Caesar, given time for a defence to rally. How could he find a solution in action now when the whole situation was vitiated by that cowardice? Caesar was the man, and Caesar was dead. Anger at Fulvia jerked into anger at the mob that was causing all the trouble. If only he had a strong force, he’d soon scatter and kill them.
“You shan’t kiss me.”
She fought like a cat, kicking and scratching him, nothing but bony edges and sharp nails, until at length she tired out; and then there was no satisfaction in possessing her. He fought and clutched only because he wouldn’t have her think he was frightened of her. Then he felt more frightened than before. If she kept on much longer, he would do something mad — turn the mob on to the Senate, or clean out the Forum with his bodyguard. His will was crumbling, falling into the maelstrom of Fulvia’s tainted blood.
He drank all the while, and the cloud of evil thickened about him.
*
Darkness too was clothing the world of Brutus. He was imprisoned in his house; and through the day and night he heard the jeers and threats of passing bands of insurrectionists. Attackers battered drunkenly at the front walls, but there was little to fear unless the populace set fire to the house. So far they had not dared to do this, since fires were so risky at Rome; the whole block, perhaps the whole district, would be burned. The mob lacked leadership.
But what distressed Brutus most was the wound in Porcia’s thigh. It continued to bleed, no matter how careful he was; and Porcia continued to say, “But, darling, what does it matter?” in her wandering, distant voice. He wanted to sleep in another room, but she wouldn’t have it. When he made the suggestion, she broke down and cried. But the moment he agreed not to go, she became once more, in a flash, her untouched self, surrounded with a kind of numbed radiance. He tried to press behind that appearance, to question her, but failed to find anything definite, and, disquieted, he gave over the attempt to probe. There was at least an alluringly shameful peace in succumbing to her, in pretending, as she did, that it did not matter at all when her thigh bled.
What other refuge could he find from the mob shouting and banging outside, the thoughts dissonantly hammering within his head? Her bosom was broad, and only in her arms could he forget the world and the disquieting child-like trust of her eyes.
*
A great poem! It should be the easiest thing in the world to write, with such a stimulus. Gallus sat for hours with stylus in hand, looking at his tablets, and writing nothing. Then he rummaged through his old manuscripts, threw them aside, read them again, picked out half a dozen passable poems, decided they were really rather brilliant, weeded them out one by one till he had discarded them all, and then tried again to write something new, the perfect testament of love.
Leonidas, his slave, watched him with concern. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked, with large-minded assurance.
Gallus shook his head. “I want a woman, my good Leonidas. The only woman on earth. Fetch her if it’s in your power, for I fear it’s beyond me.”
Leonidas pondered this statement for a long while, comprehending only the first portion; but the need being so simple, he couldn’t perceive why Gallus didn’t gratify it. At last he went downstairs and returned prodding on ahead the daughter of the auctioneer’s assistant who lodged in the floor below — a girl ready to supplement her family’s resources in a modest way, as Leonidas had already ascertained.
“She’s not the best on earth,” he confessed, “but she’s not the worst either, though it’s myself that says it.”
“Of course I’m not,” said the girl with a toss of black hair. “Even if my father does work for an auctioneer. That’s not my fault.” She bridled, conscious of the universal hatred of auctioneers, the sellers of bankrupt goods, as only lesser rogues than usurers. “I’ve got an amber-necklace downstairs, too, though I didn’t have time to put it on — this fellow of yours called me out so loudly, I thought someone had had an accident.”
“Give her some coppers and throw her out,” said Gallus, turning away and looking out of the small glassless window at some frail lambkin clouds in the blue.
Leonidas persuaded the girl to leave after she had said what she thought of both master and slave; but Gallus wasn’t interested. He didn’t even want to laugh. He stopped his ears with his thumbs and stared on out of the window, trying to dream himself into a pastoral Eidyllion by pretending that he was shepherd of the fleecy clouds. He was pleased anyhow by the act of shutting out the world and its women. Cytheris lived elsewhere, in an apple garden immeasurably far away, muslined with the sun’s fabrics, dancing tirelessly under the fruit of gold on the gnarled, laden boughs. She was the rhythm that he could never qu
ite forget and never quite express. And Dolabella had lain between her breasts, her apple breasts, Dolabella and scores of other well-mannered louts.
Leonidas, who had returned after pushing the girl down the stairs, sweated to see the agonised pallor of his master’s face. He expected violent abuse for his blunder. But Gallus had already forgotten about the girl. He beat his head with his knuckles, and began once more searching through the manuscripts.
Relieved, Leonidas crept back to his corner and with a sense of duty done gave up his mind to the great daily question: would he buy some black pudding (made out of pig’s guts), pig’s trotters, or swine sausages for dinner. His chief regret in life was that he didn’t have a cooking apparatus big enough to take a sheep’s head; for he considered that the greatest dainty known to man, particularly if served with eyes intact and caper sauce — “sheep-droppings sauce” he called it when explaining why the small tight round buds of the caper tree were intended by nature to accompany the flesh of lamb.
*
Then the pyre burned out at last, and the mob dispersed. Leaderless, it had lived only as part of the flames, and its ardour faded into the embers and ashes of the consumed Caesar. The city slowly returned to normal existence, stretching weary, wakened limbs, uncertain and yet filled with a vague incredulous lightness of spirit. The proletarians lurked once more in their dives and tenements, satiated; and the burghers asked themselves what it was that they had feared. The mob was a mist vanishing with the first rays of civic sunlight.
The Liberators stirred miserably behind their barricades. It was impossible that the mob had ceased to be. The imprisoned men allowed a passage to be cleared for messengers or visitors, but refused to believe themselves safe. They kept guards posted and sent scouts to patrol the streets. More and more senators and capitalists departed from Rome for their country-houses. Hirtius had gone. Lepidus was grumbling, badgered by Iunia for having opposed Brutus. Near the end of March Cimber and Decimus Brutus set out for their provinces, marching hastily with strong guards through the streets before dawn.
But there was no move from the populace. They seemed exhausted by their outburst, orgiastically drained of emotion and energy. Antonius waited for the counter-coup of the Conservatives. Surely it would not be long in coming now; and when it came, it would be decisive. There were a few meetings of the curtailed Senate, and he was careful to act as an ultra-constitutionalist. He supported a measure to annul privileges and immunities conferred by Caesar, and himself proposed that the office of Dictator be abolished — erased from the constitution.
Then he went home to bluster and drink, while Fulvia jeered at him before his brothers or lay in sulking contempt at his side through the night-hours. Once when she beat at him and threw a small table at his head, it was almost a relief. He could bear anything but her cranky silence in those hours when he lay sourly sobering and the unintelligibility of the world was a clot of blackness eddying in his brain, an accusing question which he could never answer because it was never formulated.
He was determined on one thing. He would not wreck the State at Fulvia’s whim.
*
The eagerness to finish a poem in order to have an excuse to visit Cytheris again prevented Gallus from any concentration. He spoiled his scribbling-tables by ploughing deep into the boxwood; when he tried to write, the steel-point scraped over the wax and jarred on the furrows. He threw the tablets out of the window and wrote on paper, though that was too expensive for him and he spilt the ink in the bed. But no inspiration came. His mind was cramped; all words seemed thin, with the colour dried out of them; Cytheris with her supple curves had turned all words into the merest of counters. At last, in despair, he took the best of his old work, a narrative of Phaedra’s love for her chaste stepson, and, stopping himself from looking at it and its insufficiencies, he dashed along the streets. He knew that if he glanced at a single line, he would read on and condemn the poem, tear it up, and have no excuse for calling.
Cytheris was out.
He lounged in and out of some wine-bars nearby, feeling the sweat from his palm soak into the paper, and still refusing to look. Then he returned and found to his joy that Cytheris was now at home. He produced the poem, apologised that he hadn’t been able to write anything fresh, and offered her the manuscript.
“It was written before I knew you. I must write something different.”
Cytheris read through the poem, dawdling to delay the moment when she would have to meet his eyes again. She read it all through scrupulously, though the first two lines told her all she needed to know. The poem wasn’t bad; it wasn’t even original enough for that; it was merely flatly ordinary. She was disappointed and yet pleased. Now she would be able to turn him away with an easy conscience; and yet dimly she was aware that she had expected something genuinely fine. But what would it have meant if she had discovered him a real poet? A man’s character didn’t change because he wrote well or badly, though good or bad writing would be part of his character. She ought to be able to tell whether she cared for Gallus without seeing his poetry first.
There was no need for her to delay. He had seen from her manner at once what she was thinking; but he stood there, rooted in contemplation of her quietness, her head slightly moving as the eyes travelled over the roll.
She could put off no longer the moment of looking up. She looked up, with no notion what she could say. But she was saved from having to say anything. His eyes read and answered hers.
She saw the tears pressing out from under his lids, and was deeply sorry. But what could she do? The scene was slightly ridiculous.
He rushed from the room, and she was glad to be no longer compelled to witness his mortification; but no sooner had she closed her eyes, as if to shut out the image of his weak appeal, than he rushed back again, his hair ruffled, his toga slipping from his shoulders.
“Will you give me a kiss? A single kiss? Then I’ll be able to write something.”
This was even more ridiculous, and yet not without its childish charm. She smiled with a slight nod, and lifted up her face, feeling herself the child as she involuntarily parted her lips in a half-pout. He bent over, kissing her passive mouth. Suddenly her pity warmed. If he had taken her in his arms, she would have given herself; but he was thinking only of the poem he was going to write in order to gain the embrace she was offering without the poem.
Without another word he rushed again from the room; and she knew somehow that she loved him, but that no happiness would come out of their love. Otherwise he would have taken her when she wanted him.
*
Terrible were the sins that afflicted Amos as he walked to his trysting-place. He had been unable to look his father in the eyes; food choked in his throat dustily; and when Rachel trod on his sore toe he had not kicked her, for he took the pain as a judgment. In his worry he had dropped one of the sabbath-chests wrapped in straw to keep food hot for the day when no cooking or other toil must be entered upon; and he had broken the chest. Things were almost as bad as if he had eaten of pig-flesh or the flesh of vultures. Surely he had made himself abominable with a creeping thing. For he had taken Karni in his arms while she was still in the forbidden days of her separation.
He was beginning to think that she had a daemon in her. How could she be so shameless otherwise? His father was broad-minded but would never have countenanced a breach of that part of the law. Surely not. It wasn’t a part of the law that Amos liked to question him about. Anyway, Rachel wasn’t allowed to stir the soup or fetch running water on certain days; his mother, that quiet, thin-breasted person, was past her climacteric, and anyhow no one ever noticed her. Amos felt himself the greatest criminal in Rome. Yet he was revisiting Karni; he couldn’t keep away; and when she laughed at him, he became as reckless as she was, and didn’t care if a thunderbolt did split him in half like a gutted fish. But surely if there was to be any splitting it should be Karni who was split; for a fish was the symbol of Venus, as sailors had explained to Amos
, and it was Karni who tempted him first. Therefore, if there was any justice (which there indubitably was), Karni would be split and he would be left to witness to the unerring aim of the Lord in searching out the wrongdoer.
“The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord,” he quoted to himself, “and it searches all the inmost parts of the belly.”
That was an unpleasant thought. It would haunt him all the while he embraced Karni. He would feel the candle lighting him up within, searching out his wickedness, lashing at him with its tongue of flame, stabbing him in the rear. What a pity Karni was wicked or that it was wicked to be Karni. He had lost all interest even in his yellow cloak or the scandal about the Egyptian household that Karni would tell him. She saw everything; she seemed to sleep with her eye to a door-crack.
But the worst part of it all was that he felt an overpowering wish to confess. Sooner or later he would stop someone in the street and blab the whole story; and what would happen if he picked on a man who knew Ezra or the elders of the Synagogue?
*
Young Clodia was in disgrace, and Bhebeo was packing for the retirement to the country. The girl, finding that tears had no effect except to make her eyes sore, considered the bending nurse, resisted the impulse to push her over into the pile of clothes, and decided instead to rebel against her mother’s orders. There was only one way to make rebellion effective, and that was to run away. She went to the cupboard where she kept a number of odds and ends, took out Cicero’s gift-box, peeped inside to make sure that all her wealth (ten denars and a Syrian coin with a hole in it) was still secreted there, and then with a grimace at her back-turned nurse walked out of the house by the side-gate.
She walked about for half an hour, going round more or less in a circle, and then concluded that she had walked at least ten or twenty miles. That was sufficient. The next thing was to find lodgings. She made inquiries at a baker’s shop and was suspiciously directed to a block opposite; and there the caretaker, unable to place her well-fed airs and finely woven dress, grudgingly rented her a small back room on the second floor. In the next room was a woman with five children, and the partition was only boarding as thick as Clodia’s sandal-soles. Her own room possessed, besides cobwebs and dust, a rickety bed, a shelf, a box, and a cracked bedside utensil. It smelt of decaying fried fish, garlic, and cheese; and had no window. She could get all the light she wanted, the caretaker pointed out, by burning candles or by leaving the door open.