The Floating Book

  Caelius arrived, all oiled and plucked, with a sheen of sweat above those soft lips. Clodia averted her eyes and never once looked at him while five long prosecution speeches sought to paint him black.

  Then, on the second day, Cicero took his place in front of the seventy-five judges and the presiding magistrate. The corona of bystanders drew a deep collective breath, awaiting the stab of his tongue. They were not disappointed.

  But they were surprised.

  Instead of Caelius, it was Clodia who was put in the dock. Cicero seized his chance. With deliciously skilful innuendo, well attuned to the absorbent ears and busy imaginations of the Romans, he vented his spleen against the whole corrupt Clodian clan. What a carve-up! What a fox in the chicken house was Cicero! With his jaws clamped on my lover and her brother!

  How dare Clodia, the expert, accuse someone else of poison? thundered Cicero and all present sniggered behind their hands. I saw Clodia, knowing all eyes upon her, assume a futile smile.

  I felt suddenly faint. I’d laughed at all those rumours that she poisoned her husband. This was the first time I’d heard them taken seriously. The fact that Cicero dared to allude to it so openly, without fear of retribution, gave me grievous cause for thought. Had I been making love to a murderess? I felt as if all the oily heads in the room had suddenly swivelled to look at foolish, gullible me. They had not: it was merely the entrance of another witness that drew their attention.

  Even while these thoughts surged around my brain, Cicero was taking the drama in another direction.

  Clodia was known for writing playlets, said Cicero, clever little after-dinner entertainments, he simpered, as if full of innocent admiration, his tone silkier than a Bithynian handkerchief. All Romans know that when Cicero seems to praise his victim must watch for his – or her – back. In this case the stab was not long in coming.

  Cicero continued, smooth as cooked cream: How could Clodia, a lady-librettist (smile, wink) of some note in the circles where private entertainments rule, come up with a scenario so implausible, unless it was distilled from the pure bile of an older woman rejected by her handsome young lover? Caelius, of course, was to be excused for his lapse of taste in bedding her. Given the times, and his youth, it was an understandable fling – and, after all, what were such women for?

  What were such women for? I thought to myself. Cicero had me under his spell like all the rest, and I was not capable of thinking for myself. I waited for Cicero to tell me.

  Gradually, he did.

  Cicero showed Clodia as a noblewoman with the habits of a prostitute; not just a whore but a whorehouse full of vices, a powerful woman gone to the bad, a one-woman morality play from which society could draw a severe lesson.

  How he enjoyed himself! He harked back to disgraceful incidents in Clodia’s past, using her hated nickname Quadrantaria, acquired after a young man sent her an ironic gift of forty copper coins in a jar, her supposed price. Clodia had sent two henchmen to rape the offender. Nevertheless, another angry young man had dared to despatch to her a perfume jar full of something more personal and more filthy. Cicero, merely by describing these gifts, made it clear that they defined the contents of Clodia’s soul.

  He piled on the innuendo, particularly to do with Sextus Cloelius, whom Clodia’s powerful influence had recently delivered from justice in another criminal trial. Regarding Cloelius, Cicero constantly referred to his polluted mouth and tongue, which was, according to the lawyer, always to be found busily engaged in the business of pleasuring Clodia. Cicero managed to insert into his denunciation every ‘licking’ word in the Latin lexicon … lingere, ligurrire, lambere, each already heavy with lascivious innuendo, and in Cicero’s own deft mouth working overtime to create an impression of a woman who had men at her knees, busy between her thighs, a humiliating position for any blue-blooded Roman.

  ‘Where will you find Cloelius these days?’ asked Cicero, sly as a left hand. ‘You’ll find him over at Clodia’s house, with his head down …’

  The crowd roared and thumped their feet. All I could think of was this: I’d been there myself. Had I tasted Cloelius or Clodia?

  Or even the hateful Clodius, her brother?

  ‘Lady Ox-Eyes’, Cicero called her, referring to the large-orbed Goddess Hera, who was both wife and sister to Zeus – who could miss the reference to her overly intimate relations with her brother? And in case the slur evaded its mark, Cicero continually faux-blundered, ‘The Lady’s husband,’ he simpered, ‘forgive me, I mean her brother. I always make that mistake.’

  Cicero condemned Clodia and her whole class … degenerates with not a thought for the good of the world, lost in their luxury and lechery, simply addicted to ludi e quae sequuntur… ‘dinner games and all that comes after them’.

  He described Clodia’s villa at Baiae as a palatial floating brothel. Her park on the banks of the Tiber was just a discreet place for picking up young men.

  Whatever the result of the trial, Clodia has already lost. Caelius has won more than just his freedom.

  Does she care?

  Probably not. Her contempt embraces the whole of Rome. She can afford to scorn everyone. No one is more aristocratic than Clodia Metelli, even if no one is more debauched.

  And who’s going to stop her?

  Certainly not I. Clodia’s not going to listen to the whinings of an old lover, already gone stale. Although she still calls me to her bed, presumably when she craves a bout of poetic lovemaking, I know that she sends other servants to other men, to satisfy other needs.

  I turn my little wax devotio around in my hand, making plans for her. I don’t know why I keep her. It was my intention to burn her in the fire, to melt Clodia’s pebble heart. Somehow I found I could not do that, so I keep her wrapped in a sheaf of linen in my bedchamber, and I sleep with her in between my fingers. I could not hold her in my naked hand or my warmth would distort her shape.

  I’m pained to discover that I myself have become slightly ridiculous, somewhat tainted, in association with Clodia now. It does not make me love or hate her less. It’s just a new edge to the pain of those things. Cicero has also made my poems ridiculous, those of a cuckold. I hate him! If I were stronger I would set upon him. But Cicero has too many enemies; he’s well guarded.

  And I am not well, these days, not even strong enough to thrash an old man. I’m troubled with a cough. I’m not yet thirty years old; I should be in the prime of my manhood. Instead my chest is hollow as an adolescent’s and the bones of my face are pushing to the surface, stretching the skin. The flesh hangs loose on my upper arms, like ox skins on the rack at a tannery. All the asafoetida in Cyrene will not still the bubbling in my lungs. I even incubated a night in the temple of Serapis, hoping the God would send me healthful dreams. None came, just vivid nightmares of Clodia’s unmistakable silhouette engaged in frantic acts with random men in back alleys.

  My father sent a physician all the way from Verona to listen to my chest. For his sake I downed a bitter infusion of hellebore, a swift purge for insanity.

  ‘And rest,’ the doctor urged me, ‘fewer late nights, more swimming. More fruit.’

  So I have doubled my intake of squashed grapes, slightly fermented. Ha!

  Chapter One

  Listen to me now!

  I scream my wrongs to the sterile sands.

  I am scorched, ash-blind, brainless with pain.

  My misery is clear: I scrape the dregs

  inside me to show it to you,

  So don’t walk past me. Take it with you.

  Sosia and Felice were in his room at the Locanda Sturion. She had taken to coming there without an invitation, as if that proved her claim to him. She faced down the beautiful landlady, who turned away without blushing from Sosia’s impudent stare.

  ‘Why does everyone say she’s so peerless?’ asked Sosia, flinging open Felice’s door without a knock. ‘Her nose is big, her mouth is crooked. She’s thin. If Bellini painted her, and told the truth about her, the portrai
t would not be beautiful.’

  Felice, at the window, did not turn to greet her, answered over his shoulder, ‘It’s true; she’s not a conventional Venus. But her looks are yet more pleasing as a result. People enjoy thinking that in her they’ve discovered a rare beauty for themselves and that everyone else lacked the discrimination to distinguish it. They’re always disappointed to hear someone else raving of her charms.’

  ‘Do you find her beautiful?’ Sosia edged closer, hoping for a welcoming embrace.

  ‘I find her attractive. She attracts me.’ Felice, finally turning, nodded a cool greeting.

  ‘Does she know that?’

  ‘I have given her certain incontrovertible proofs of it,’ Felice said, casually.

  Sosia shut her eyes, muttering through clenched teeth, ‘I thought she was supposed to be above that kind of thing.’

  ‘Ah, she lets me have her, but she’s somehow not really contaminated by it. She simply rises above it.’

  ‘Why does she let you, then?’

  ‘I think she’s biding her time, waiting for something better.’

  ‘Better than you?’

  Sosia turned away sharply, knocking a small quire of paper to the floor. She bent to pick it up but Felice pushed her aside briskly.

  ‘Don’t touch it. It’s a proof copy.’

  ‘Proof the editor’s a drunkard. This is Squarzafico’s work, isn’t it? I heard he’d gone over to Jenson. You too, Felice? Poor Wendelin and Bruno, what hope do they have with friends like you? How could you, and with Wendelin’s wife …?’

  She pointed to two mistakes on the first page and a little smudge in the bottom left-hand corner. Her learning constantly amazed Felice. It despoiled his theory that she was pure instinct, which permitted their couplings, intellectually, as a kind of experiment, in the uncluttered realm of the flesh.

  ‘And what do you know of Squarzafico, Sosia? No, don’t answer that. I shall forever interpret the stale dregs of wine in that interesting smell of yours. Still, I don’t know how you could – or if he could, even given your provocation. It must be many years since he made love to anything but a bottle.’

  ‘You think I’m so lacking in discrimination?’

  ‘You’re intelligent, Sosia, no, that’s not it. You are pantegana-shrewd. You’re a rat who runs round Venice, spreading filth.’

  Sosia, hearing an unaccustomed acerbity in his smooth voice, looked up quickly and retreated to the back of the desk. She had achieved that rare thing: she’d made Felice angry. Instantly she guessed the cause. He was diseased, because of her, he who had always been so fastidious. He’d long since ceased to give her the rigorous examination he performed the first time they lay together. She knew he always checked his whores and casual lovers, so it could only be she herself who had infected him. Indeed, the discomfort in her genitals pricked her sharply just then, and she rubbed herself against the edge of the desk. She regretted not using the herbs Rabino had left her. He had not offered them again since she wrecked the apothecary studio. She had not felt inclined to ask, or to ask why some of her clients had fallen to the disease, while others, like Bruno, remained unaffected.

  Felice said, ‘Yes, scratch away, don’t mind me! Who was it, Sosia? Which one of the six men? In fact, is six enough for you? I merely allow two each from the current columns in your ledger. If you can sleep with six, why not nine? Sosia, let me make some introductions – Sosia’s left leg, meet Sosia’s right leg. I know that you used to be acquainted but you’ve been apart so much now that it’s as if you never met.’

  He walked around the desk, took the corner of her sleeve between two fingers, and pulled her to the mirror.

  ‘Sosia, look at your face. It has been plastered on the loins and lips of so many men that it’s like a mask which has been passed around and around at Carnevale.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said as she spat at the image in the mirror. ‘You never swallow your own saliva if you can swallow someone else’s. You only look pure because semen washes off. You must be rich as Croesus from all your paying customers. Do you even know who left you this little tribute you’ve kindly shared with me? By the way, you must remember to leave me an account when you leave. It seems I have neglected to settle my debts. What’s the going rate? I’d reckon 40 zecchini, enough to fill a small chamber jar.’

  Sosia said quietly: ‘I only charge Venetians.’

  ‘Why?’

  Sosia looked at the floor. ‘Why should I tell you that?’

  ‘And so it’s only because I’m from Verona that I get my service gratis? Bruno gets his for free because he’s an orphan I suppose? Wait, of course, I remember, he’s only half Venetian. So he gets half-service for nothing.’

  ‘Bruno was something I picked out for myself. I thought it would be nice. I did not know he would become such a weight on me.’

  ‘Poor Sosia! How you suffer about it! Bruno’s pains are nothing to yours, I suppose?’

  Sosia picked up a jug of milk from a tray in the windowsill. She walked slowly back to the desk, and poured the milk in a thick stream into an open drawer where a finished manuscript lay drying. The pink and yellow inks instantly marbled the milk in its little rectangular pool.

  At first Felice spoke only to himself: ‘The woman doesn’t have the run of herself any more,’ he said wonderingly. He had been angry before; instead of becoming more so he was now calm and detached. He picked up a book.

  ‘Talk to me,’ screamed Sosia.

  ‘And what would the madwoman like to talk to me about?’

  ‘About what I’ve just done, of course, Bog te jebo, God fuck you.’

  ‘Well, there are a number of things I could say,’ Felice murmured, smoothly. ‘For example: you have stolen a year of my life by doing that, Sosia.’

  ‘It’s a worthless life. Letters of the alphabet. Not a life. Not a man’s life.’

  Felice failed to lose his temper. Instead, while she turned the empty jug round and round in her hands, he turned two pages of his book and started to read. She clutched the handle. Despite her worst play, she had not managed to pierce his feelings beyond irritation.

  ‘Felice, are you not furious with me?’

  He did not look up until she struck the jug against the wall for emphasis.

  ‘It’s hard to be angry with you because I find my feelings are not engaged in the matter. I can be bothered to explain this far: books are life, for those of us who love them. It’s not a kind of love you would understand. It’s a subtle, fragile kind of love, the kind parents have for children. The book is never perfect, never as perfect as the idea of it. Once it was crystalline and miraculous in the mind of the writer. In utterance, it came out imperfectly, only carrying a scent of the original thought …’

  Sosia screamed, ‘At a moment like this you talk about books! You are obscene in your love for books. A woman for you is like having a lover on the side. Something to be ashamed of!’

  She threw the jug across the room. It exploded against the far wall. White tears, the dregs of the jug, were surprised out of the bottom of it, and ran down the red paint and slapped on the broken shards of the pottery. Felice looked away in distaste, remarking, ‘You did not think so when you first came to my bed.’

  ‘My coming to your bed should have proved to you that yours is a worthless life.’

  ‘Sosia, I’ve no taste for this idea of you as a victim which gives you the right to hurt everyone in your path, as if it were self-defence.’

  ‘Then why do the curs follow me?’ She was panting, and tears hung from her eyelashes.

  Felice sniffed fastidiously: ‘Because you have the aroma of the fields, or is it the fish market, my dear? It’s revoltingly attractive.’

  It was true. Lately, dogs followed her everywhere, burying their snouts in her groin. Ugly dogs; dogs with skin conditions of unspeakable putridness; dogs who held their fourth leg up under their bellies and loped unevenly down the street after her; dogs with eyes like saints and dogs with eyes
like devils …

  She yelled at them in Serbian, ‘Krvavu ti majku jebem, Fuck your blood-splattered mother’, or ‘Otac ti je govno pojeo, Your father ate shit. ‘They followed her anyway. She would scream at them, ‘Let the owls carry you away and eat you.’ Only then would they leave, for some reason, whimpering, as if she had somehow identified all their worst fears.

  ‘Felice,’ Sosia said suddenly and hoarsely. ‘You know what I feel – for you—?’

  Her voice trailed away. Felice laughed. Sosia, holding his unwilling hand, bore it as long as she could. Then she unbuttoned her dress and looked at him hopefully.

  * * *

  I awoke from my illness naked as a worm under soft clean linen, as if I’d been born quite clean and new again.

  But I was not glad to find myself alive. A mange of sadness dines on all my days and I wish them over. I am tired of wrestling this melancholy that still ambushes me like an importuning blanket in the dead of a hot night.

  I get more well, they tell me. The bite on my wrist has healed to a little pucker of pink. I can lift a hand or a leg, languid as seaweed. I can take a full spoon of broth in my mouth and let it wash down my throat. It takes nought from me. I do not care.

  Nothing is right. The blooms are too dark a red in the pots on my sill. I think their sap is vile now. Sourness infects my nature, worse than the illness, makes my breath carrion, turns my pillow to gristle so it marks my face in the morning in long red lines. Who looks at my face anyway? I am shorn of all my seductions now.

  My ma and pa come to look on me with eyes rimmed round with query. Their question is, what’s the matter with me? I’ve grown far apart from them. I wish they would think of me as a daughter whom they lost long ago, that the owls carried me away, unravelling my insides over the rooftops, that …