Reason prompted me to make my escape while there was still time. I remembered the awful words Catullus had spoken. I remembered how he had told me that she would sleep with a squinting Spaniard who polished his cheeks with his own urine, how he himself had waited in her antechamber while she pleasured herself with ignoble wretches she had picked up in filthy taverns or sleazy streets.
I recalled his lines:
Give her my goodbye, her and all her lovers,
Whom she hugs so close to her in their hundreds,
Loving not one, yet with her constant lusting,
Leaving their loins limp…
I remembered the poem written on the myth of Cybele and Attis. (Do you know the myth, Artixes? Let me tell it you.) Attis loved the goddess Cybele, with passionate terror, such as the old gods demand. Either in obedience to her will, or to keep himself pure for her service (there are different versions of the story), he castrated himself with a stone knife, and lived as her worshipper, far from cities, in the forest, with a group of other youths who had submitted in like fashion to the goddess. Well, my friend Catullus took this story, and translated it to the present day. The voice in his poem is that of a Greek youth who has joined her cult, abiding in the wild region where alone she reigns now, and has mutilated himself to do her pleasure and honour. But then, in the poem, he recovers from his madness, and looks back with bitter pain and sorrow on all that he has lost. Learning of his remorse, the goddess lets lions loose on him, so that he flees, in terror and renewed madness, to the heart of the forest darkness.
And when Catullus read these verses to me, he laid his hand on my shoulder and said, 'I pray, Mouse, that you never know the like.'
'Have you come in mockery or in pity?'
She was standing before me, and, immersed in these memories, I had not seen her approach. Her hair hung loose, and she wore a white gown, like a virgin. It was very simple and fell in folds to the ground. How did I know at once that it was all she wore? Her huge dark eyes were even darker, being in shadow from the candle which she held in a golden holder in her right hand, raised aloft.
'I wish neither, Decimus Brutus.'
'I was in court today.'
'With all Rome.'
Her left hand was laid on my cheek, cool, dry and with a tender touch.
'And you thought… what?' I could not speak.
Perhaps my silence maddened her, for she tore her nails the length of my cheek, and the blood ran.
'How many men were there, ranged against one woman? And you were among them and you have the impertinence to come here. Was it to see if I feel shame?'
I sat still, like a dog that has been whipped, and fears to move, lest he invite more trouble.
Then she gave way to rage. She threw the candlestick across the room. (Fortunately, it fell in such a way as to extinguish the flame.) She delivered a tirade that would have inflamed the mob. She cursed Cicero in words that a lady is not supposed to know, let alone utter. She reviled the male sex, hypocrites, brutes, and deceivers. She denounced Caelius as an invert incapable of pleasing a woman; she had found better lovers among slaves and freedmen. She returned to Cicero. Did I know she had years before had him in thrall? He had adored her, sworn he would leave his wife and marry her, and she had laughed at him. That was why he hated her so. It was not his sense of morality that had been outraged — 'Cicero's sense of morality, the man who defended the murderer of my brother — what claim has that sack of dung to morality?' — No, today he had taken the revenge which his own wounded vanity had demanded and long nursed the desire to achieve. She paused.
'Your cheek's bleeding.'
She rang a bell, sent the slave for water mixed with myrrh and hyssop, and bathed my wound.
'You will have had worse wounds in battle.' 'None sharper.'
'It was a shame to make a pretty boy like you a surrogate for that old impotent lecher. He couldn't do it, you know. Not like Caesar. Or you, I'm sure.'
She let her robe fall away, and drew me down on top of her on a gold rug made from lionskins. Her tongue licked the last blood that still seeped from my cheek. That was how it began.
It could not finish. It has never been able to finish. It was like nothing else I have known. Like everyone I have had many lovers — the first indeed was her brother Publius Clodius Pulcher, whom Cicero derided as 'the pretty boy'. He was even more beautiful than his sister, and it was no wonder, I have often thought, that they should have had an incestuous relationship, as everyone asserts, for in both the sexes were strangely mixed. The Roman people adored Clodius as if he had been a lovely girl, and many feared Clodia as a virile destroyer. In bed with her, I discovered more of myself than I had ever imagined, and yet remained confused. She felt no tenderness, except for the memory of her brother, and yet no one, at certain moments and in certain moods, so filled one with tenderness. She terrified me, and I adored her.
She was ill that evening when I left my mother's house and made my way to hers on the Palatine. The house was dark. For a moment I thought it deserted, and knew both relief and heartache. I never approached her chamber without trepidation, dreading to learn who or what I might discover there. But this night again she was alone, as that first time. She had been suffering from fever. Her beauty, so well preserved by art, was disturbed by nature. She looked her age.
When we had made love, performed our sexual acts, achieved a short-lived escape from the desert into which we were abruptly returned, she told me she was dying.
I wept, I remember that; yet even as I did so, felt my heart lift at the prospect of escape. It was an illusion; I have never escaped, any more than poor Catullus did. The only persons who were unaffected by her — the only ones who enjoyed her and maintained equanimity — were her brother, who as a child of Eros knew delight without the sense of waste, and Caesar.
She was fascinated by Caesar for that reason. He had escaped her, and yet she felt no anger against him. This puzzled her.
'When he first told me — in this very bed — that he was a god, I laughed at him. I thought he was inviting me to share a joke. But he meant it. He is descended as everyone knows from Venus, but he believes he is also inhabited by the goddess. They tell me he fucks the Queen of Egypt now. Is she as beautiful as they say?'
'She does not compare with you, Clodia.'
'But…'
'She is a child, an adolescent. What fascinates Caesar is that she is no more capable of love than he is.'
'Then they are well-matched. Does Caesar know you fucked her?'
'He would not care. Clodia, I have served Caesar for years. He is the most wonderful and remarkable man I am ever likely to know. Naturally, we laugh at his little vanities, and we often find him exasperating, but our mockery is exercised in self-defence. It is an attempt to pretend that Caesar is a man like ourselves.'
'He is not so different,' Clodia said.
'But he is.'
'He is only different in having no heart, and let me tell you, Decimus Brutus, that there are many men like that.' 'And women, Clodia?'
'You mean me, of course. Well, I am not angry to hear you say so, as I would once have been. I told you I am dying. I shall not linger here to waste away. I shall simply remove myself. So there is no need to tell lies any more. I know what people say about me. That brute Cicero slandered me to the world, and the world believed him.'
She laid her hand on my sleeve, and the bones stood out clear.
'I said I would not lie, but I still say they were slanders. You don't understand, Decimus Brutus, what it is to be a woman, how a woman is thwarted, perpetually thwarted, how her rage rises to see what is permitted to men and denied her. Well, very early, when I was still a child, my brother and I made a vow. We mingled our blood to seal it.'
She paused, and took up the candle and examined her face in the glass, as if seeking the child she had been. And as she did so, I could envisage them, the boy-girl and the girl-boy, each of a beauty such as no sculptor could hope to seize, pressing against each other, lips yoked, their very blood commingling as they strove to unite two souls in a single body and achieve that perfect unity which the philosophers insist we once possessed and must now forever seek in vain.
