‘Don’t you know how dangerous it is?’ he demands, angry with her for the risk she’s taken with herself.
Lightning flashes again and on top of it comes a blast of thunder, silencing them. Rain hisses through the leaves, so thick and white that everything is invisible to the two of them except themselves. He holds her tight, as if to fold her into his own body and deceive the storm into thinking she isn’t there.
‘I wanted to see you,’ she says.
He is covering her face with kisses, consuming its wet coldness, the clotting of her eyelashes with rain, the shivers that run up and down her body and into his own.
The paths are dry again, and pale with dust. The inner flesh of the umbrella pine that the lightning split open has turned from creamy white to yellow. Time is already undoing everything that the storm accomplished a week ago.
It’s two days now since he last saw Clodia. He sticks to his routine, even though he has lost faith in it. Up when the morning is empty, to write out the whiteness of a sleepless night. His limbs ache as if he’s going down with marsh fever. His eyes burn and his throat is dry. He reaches for a cup of wine and water mixed, and takes a long draught, but it won’t slake his thirst.
He knows what she’s up to. She’s playing games with him, confident that her hook is embedded deep in his flesh.
He’s a fool, wasting love on someone who thinks she wants it but doesn’t even know what it is. She wants the feeling of being loved, and that’s why one lover is never enough. Clodia doesn’t kill for food, she kills because it’s her nature.
He hates her and he loves her. He doesn’t know what is happening to him or why it’s happening. He came to Baiae because she asked him to, for fuck’s sake, when he’d rather have stayed in Rome, or gone to the country. Rome’s where he belongs, not Baiae, not even Sirmio any more. Rome is his, because it’s where he’s made his life.
Two nights ago she was at a party where he didn’t expect to see her. She’d sent him a message that she was going somewhere else. ‘Some incredibly tedious do that I can’t get out of. Thank your stars that you’re not forced to sit through it.’ He hadn’t been disappointed. He had his Clodia. He preferred to hold her safe in the memory of the storm.
He’d only gone to the party out of boredom, and because Ipsitilla kept going on about it. Ipsitilla adores Baiae, and she’s thrilled that Catullus is here this season. ‘The atmosphere’s wonderful: you’ll see. So different from stuffy old Rome with all the respectables pulling long faces whenever they see anyone having fun.’ Ipsitilla has a new ‘protector’, as she calls the favoured client of the moment, and they’re throwing a party.
‘Do come tonight, sweetheart, we need you. I’d so love you to recite. It lifts the evening on to altogether another plane.’
‘Which plane are your parties on as a rule, Ipsitilla?’
‘Nasty insinuations, darling, don’t cut any ice with me. I bring like-minded people together, that’s all. If they make friends and go off and enjoy themselves, then so much the better. What’s life for, if you can’t help your friends to make friends? Promise you’ll recite, just for me. One of those gorgeous Sappho translations?’
‘Maybe. If I’m in the mood. Or I could write a poem about you, just for the occasion.’
‘Hmm. I’m not sure about that, bearing in mind some of the poems I’ve heard you write about us girls. I’ll have to hear it first.’
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures…
‘Sweetie, I’m not fooled for one second, you most certainly didn’t write that one for me. I’m not quite as badly educated as you seem to think. But it’s gorgeous, isn’t it? So exactly how you feel at that moment, you know, when you’re falling in love and you don’t know anything at all about the person… And after that it all starts to go off.’
I can’t speak,
thin fire runs over me,
my ears pound
with the thunder of my blood…
‘I wonder where it all goes?’ asked Ipsitilla.
‘Where what all goes?’
‘That feeling about someone, as if nothing else matters or ever will. Because it always does go… Sad, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. But then someone else comes along. Especially at one of your parties, Ipsitilla.’
‘Go away, you spoil everything. You’re getting so cynical. I know who’s to blame for that. Look at you, you’re supposed to be on holiday and you look as if you haven’t slept for a week. And not nice not-sleeping either. She’s such a mega-bitch, darling – No, don’t look like a thundercloud. Everyone can see it except you.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Ipsi –’
‘Don’t get cross. What I mean is, all those thoughts you’ve got about her, they’ve got nothing to do with what she’s really like. That’s the trouble with you poets. It’s all very well being brilliant, but you end up miserable. You ought to listen to me. I knew you ages before she did and I always made you happy, didn’t I? You always used to leave me with a smile on your face. But you will come tonight, won’t you? Promise?’
So he came, not intending to stay. And there Clodia was, on a couch in a shadowy corner, reclining half in the lap of a boy he didn’t recognize at first. Anger scorched him. Ipsitilla must have known. She must have planned this, wanted it.
But no. Ipsitilla wasn’t like that. Clodia would have come on impulse, and Ipsi would have welcomed her just as she welcomed everyone who ‘knew how to have a good time’. She didn’t turn anyone away, as long as they behaved themselves. Plenty of ‘respectables’ came to her parties, when they wanted to ‘let their hair down’ – as they so grimly expressed it.
If Clodia saw Catullus she gave no sign. Her throat gleamed in the lamplight as he stared at her: her head was flung back as if in ecstasy. But it was false. She was the best of mimics; he already knew that. She even knew how to mimic herself.
He scanned the shifting roomful of bodies, but her husband was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t his kind of party. Either he was at the do Clodia had mentioned, or she’d made the whole thing up and he was at home, dining with himself. There was nothing here for Metellus Celer tonight. No hairy-legged senators, no Baian regulars who loved a spice of impropriety. Only the serious party animals who were the hardcore of Ipsitilla’s little gatherings.
At the Baths earlier in the day he’d heard that Ipsitilla had discovered a Nubian dancer who just simply took your breath away. She’d been booked for that night. But he still hadn’t really made up his mind whether to go or not. He’d been drinking at dinner, but not much, brooding on Clodia. And then she was there, with her unexpectedness and his unpreparedness changing the sight of her into a knife that sliced him to the heart.
He would have left straight away, but she released herself, stood up and came to him. She moved just a bit too carefully and defensively, as if the table might have a mind to get in her way. He knew immediately that she was drunk, although he’d never seen her drunk before. Clodia sipped her wine, she didn’t swill it.
When she smiled at him her teeth were stained with wine. The failure of her smile – and her not knowing about the stains – made her seem fatally close to him. He could have coped with her usual beauty, but not with the way she staggered and caught at his hand to steady herself before quickly dropping it again.
‘I told you about Baiae,’ she said. ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned. People don’t come here to be – to be boring.’
He smelled the alcohol on her breath. Her eyes were glittery and she had that look of a person spoiling for a quarrel and not caring with whom it came. He’d do.
‘You did tell me,’ he said.
‘So now you can – you can write a poem about it,’ she said derisively.
‘You flatter yourself,’ he said. ‘Give him a blow-job right now, in front of me, and then you’ll deserve to be transfixed in my iambics.’
For a moment she gaped at him, t
hen she spat back: ‘Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.’
He made himself shrug.
‘It’s a pretty picture, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘Two people who love each other, meeting unexpectedly like this.’
‘But not quite pretty enough to be worth immortalizing, Clodia. You’d better get back to him. He might get jealous.’
‘Then why did you come? You only came because you knew I’d be here, and now you’ve found me.’
She was telling the truth. He hadn’t really come because of the Nubian, or because of Ipsitilla. He’d heard another flick of gossip at the Baths. ‘Our Clodia was at one of Ipsitilla’s late-nighters a couple of days ago. She’ll probably be there again tonight. She’s got her eye on a little milk-fed lamb she found there, maa-ing for his mother.’
‘It’s true that incest has never been a stumbling-block to the Clodii.’
‘More of a stepping-stone, wouldn’t you say?’
And then laughter. Greedy, uneasy laughter. She was too much for them. Too much for Baiae, even. Flaunting it with her Princess of the Palatine hauteur, and then drunk on a couch with a near-stranger’s hand on her breast. And what her husband thinks, fuck only knows. No one dares bring up the subject anywhere near him.
‘So where’s your husband tonight?’ he asked her.
‘Resting, after a course of enemas,’ she pronounced carefully, unable to resist a small smile of triumph when she gets the word ‘enema’ out without stumbling.
‘Clodia –’
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘I must see you tomorrow.’
‘It’s impossible.’
There was the dancer after all: he hadn’t noticed. She had long, polished limbs, and she wore an elaborate twisted red-and-gold headdress that emphasized the carriage of her neck. When she flexed her fingers they seemed to make the music swell and then fade. She cared nothing for him, for Clodia, for Ipsitilla, for Rome even. She seemed to mistrust even the air around her and to breathe it only because she had no choice.
He’d like to go over, take her hand and walk away with her. ‘It’s impossible,’ repeated Clodia, but this time, maybe because she sensed the Nubian in his thoughts, her voice was less final. A little space began to exist, where the impossible might change to the possible – perhaps – if he played the game right.
He couldn’t resist. He hates her but he loves her. There’s no room for anything else.
‘You should go home,’ he said.
‘We only came because of the dancer,’ she replied.
We, you bitch, he thought. Well, go on – have him, and then see how he looks in the morning light.
The dancer stirred. Flute, cymbal and drum rose, clashing out a noise that stirred his blood. A shiver of music ran through the Nubian’s body. She seemed languid at first but then she quickened. Her long red tunic almost covered her feet, and was cut severely high at the throat. The fabric swayed in the lamplight. Her face was stern, with its strong, tilted planes. The whites of her eyes were faintly yellow, and the irises and pupils fused in darkness. She could have been Clodia’s sister, if one looked only at those wide, dark, distant eyes.
Clodia was looking, too. At him and then at the dancer. The dancer noticed and stared back for a few seconds, impervious. For her, Clodia was no witch, no princess, no equal, even. She was just another punter who might, in the way of these Romans, have so much money that she didn’t know what to do with it.
The Nubian moved her hips faster, answering the shrillness of the flute. Both he and Clodia vanished from her attention as the music took it.
‘She’s like you,’ said Clodia.
He laughed incredulously.
‘She is like you,’ Clodia insisted, ‘and that’s why you can’t take your eyes off her.’
‘How?’
‘Look at her.’
Clodia gestured towards the dancer. People were watching Clodia now. She made a disturbance, just by standing there. She was as strung-up as a charioteer at the start of a race, with his reins lashed around his body and his knife ready to cut them free in case of a smash.
But there was nothing to win here. Only the smoky lamplight, and Clodia tense with a passion that was going nowhere. She was everything to him and she had everything that belonged to him, but it meant nothing to her.
He wanted to hate her, but his heart could not do it. He thought of the rage that burned in her. Lesbia… mea Lesbia… Her rage, that became a depression smouldering in her for days, not to be lifted. Days when she would sit blank, her face unmoving except when her sparrow chirruped from between her breasts. But even then her sadness didn’t really shift. Sometimes she stared at the sparrow without seeing it.
Clodia had no race to run. ‘I’m going nowhere,’ she said at those bad times. And then, because he loved her, he wanted some bright object to appear before her – some apple of the imagination for her to run after – et tristis animi levare curas – and lift the weight from her unhappy spirit–
Unhappy wasn’t right. It was something less curable than unhappiness. Clodia seemed lifeless as she sank down into a world that had no welcome for anything or anyone –
‘Come back, you bastard.’
‘What?’
‘You’re thinking of a fucking poem again. This place makes me sick!’ said Clodia loudly, as if the wine had suddenly doubled itself in her veins. ‘She’s safe in dance-world, you’re safe in poemworld, the rest of us can go – to – hell. Don’t lie to me, I know you. Is it too much to ask for you to be present, really here, just for a single hour?’
‘It wasn’t for my presence that you came here. What about him – what’s-his-face? – no, don’t tell me, it’ll come to me. Decimus, isn’t it? Did he come trotting down from Rome because you crooked your finger? How many more have you got lined up, waiting?’
‘At least he’s here. At least he’s not thinking about resolution of the fifth foot into spondees.’
‘I don’t think of such things. I discover afterwards that I’ve accomplished them.’
That boy was watching her with hot, aggrieved longing. There was something babyish about him, too, as if he wasn’t quite sure what the grown-ups were up to. But he stayed on his couch. He wasn’t going to come over and make a scene. Catullus turned back to the dancer.
‘Look at her eyes,’ Clodia repeated, more quietly now. ‘She doesn’t even see us.’
She was right. The dancer was lost inside the music. Her right hand, holding a pair of wooden clappers, came up slowly. The sleeves of her tunic fell back to show her oiled bare arms. The fall of her sleeve, the slight, perfect movement of her fingers, and the ripple of clapper beats joined into something so beautiful that he had to catch his breath. The sound of the flute rose again from the trio of musicians behind her, harsh and compelling.
Clodia was a dancer, famed for it in her circle. But she was nothing compared to this, and she knew it.
She would sit for days now, her spirit clouded. She’d go out at night and take one of her boys with her, the type who can only stammer with pleasure because he’s sitting next to her. And each morning he, Catullus, will be gnawed to rags by the thought of what she’s been doing. Picture her looping her long legs around another man’s back, or spreading honey on her nipple and letting him suck. All her little tricks.
He’ll try to stick to routine. He’ll go and sit on the shaded terrace of his rented villa, and struggle with a first draft. The words that might have made poems will shuffle about in his head like criminals. He’ll be sick with jealousy. Shaking with it, close to retching into the bushes, and then furious with himself.
Why does she do it? Why does she make them both live in the grey, shivering, when the sun could be glowing down on them? They have given each other everything. They’ve gone beyond pleasure into an ecstasy so still that moments pass like hours, ripe and perfect. He’s sure, dead sure, that she, like him, has never known happiness like this with anyone.
But she’ll go b
ack to the boy. As if driven by devils that always get the better of her, she’ll do it. Her chariot will clip the post, she’ll overturn in a splintering of wood and a thrash of hooves. Her eyes will stare at him out of the wreckage, still furious.
But the real Clodia, his Clodia, is somewhere inside those eyes. Words stir in him.
Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus
vivere = to live
vivamus = let us live!
mea Lesbia = Lesbia mine, my Lesbia (my girl, my darling, my only one)
mea: let it roll, slow and voluptuous but at the same time sweet and simple. Mine.
Lesbia = my name for you, my name that shields your identity (even though everyone knows it’s my name for you that gives a name to the fiction I have of you)
and Lesbia because sometimes I borrow the voice of Sappho who loved so much that she saw nothing, heard only the drumming of her blood in her ears, and felt fine fire under her skin –
atque = and with that – yes, and also
amemus = but first let’s listen: am em us – No, you can’t say that word without putting your lips together and kissing it. Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love. Let’s love. Let’s kiss and kiss until the word is almost rubbed away between our lips.
Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus
Got it. Listen to this, Clodia!
And at that precise moment she turned. She stalked away from him, with the dignity of someone who was holding her drink well. Her body melted on to the couch and she was beside that baby again: Decimus. Her eyes were as wide as Hera’s, her voice cooing while the scent of all Venus’ spices breathed from her skin. He was meant to see it, hear it, smell and taste it all. To feel as if the hand that she was dragging slowly down the side of the boy’s cheek was dragging his own guts out of him.
Her eyes turned on him, as hard as stones. ‘You’ve got your poems. This is what I must have: this boy who doesn’t remind me of anything except how potent I am, and who stares at me like an ox about to be slaughtered, because he can’t believe how lucky he is. Now leave me alone with him.’