leaping up to swing at lamps hung from upper-story windows along the street. 'Damned bitch! The Medea of the Palatine!'
'Medea was a witch, as I recall, and rather wicked.'
'Only because she was 'sick at heart, wounded by cruel love,' as the playwright says. A witch, yes, and wounded-only it's me she's bewitched, and Caelius who wounded her. Medea of the Palatine! Clytemnestra-for-a- quadrans!'
'A quadrans? As cheap as that?'
'Why not? The price of admission to the Senian baths.' 'But Clytemnestra murdered her husband.'
'Agamemnon deserved it!' He whirled like a frenzied gallus. 'Medea of the Palatine! Clytemnestra-for-a- quadrans!' he chanted. 'Who calls her such things?'
'I do!' said Catullus. He abruptly stopped his whirling and staggered ahead of me, gasping for breath. 'I just made them up, out of my head. What do you think? I'll need some fresh invectives if I'm to get her attention again.'
'You're a strange suitor, Catullus.'
'I love a strange woman. Do you want to know a secret about her? Something that no else in all the world knows, not even Lesbius? I wouldn't know myself, if I hadn't spied on her one night. Do you know that giant monstrosity of a Venus in her garden?'
'I happened to notice it, yes.'
'The pedestal appears to be solid, but it's not. There's a block that slides out, opening a secret compartment. It's where she keeps her trophies.'
'Trophies?'
'Mementos. Keepsakes. One night in bed with her, happily dozing after hours of making love, I felt a tickling at my groin. I opened one eye to see her clipping away a bit of my pubic hair! She stole out of the room with it. I followed her to the garden. From the shadows I watched her open the pedestal and put what she had taken from me inside. Later I went back and figured out how to open the compartment, and I saw what she kept there. Poems I had sent her. Letters from her other lovers. Bits of jewelry, clippings of hair, childish gifts her brother must have given her when they were little. Her love trophies!'
He suddenly staggered against a wall and clutched his face. 'I wanted to destroy it all,' he whispered hoarsely. 'I wanted to scoop up all her treasures and throw them on the brazier and watch them burst into flame. But I couldn't. I felt the eyes of the goddess on me. I stepped back from the pedestal and looked up at her face. I left her mementos alone. If I destroyed them, I knew she would never forgive me.'
'Who would never forgive you-Venus or Lesbia?'
He looked at me with tragic eyes. 'Is there any difference?'
Chapter Eighteen
The wrath ofAchilles would pale beside the wrath ofBethesda.
Her anger runs cold, not hot. It freezes rather than scalds. It is invisible, secretive, insidious. It makes itself felt not by blustering action, but by cold, calculated inaction, by words unspoken, glances unreturned, pleas for mercy unheeded. I think Bethesda shows her anger in this passive way because she was born a slave, and remained a slave for much of her life, until I manumitted and married her to bear our daughter in freedom. Her way is the way of slaves (and the hero of Homer's Iliad): she sulks, and broods, and bides her time.
It was bad enough that I had sent Belbo home alone from Clodia's house, leaving myself without a bodyguard to cross the Palatine by night. Bad enough, too, that I eventually came home smelling of cheap wine and the rancid smoke of tavern lamps. But to have spent the night with that woman!
This was ridiculous, of course, and I said so, especially as I hadn't even seen Clodia all night.
How then did I explain the lingering smell of perfume on me?
A smarter man (or even myself, less worn out and sleepy) would have thought twice before explaining that the perfume came from a blanket that the lady in question must have put over him when he unwittingly dozed off in her garden-
That was that. I spent what little remained of the night trying to find a comfortable position on a cramped dining couch in my study. I'm used to sleeping with a warm body next to me.
I'm also used to sleeping until at least daybreak, especially after having stayed up half the night. This was not to be. It wasn't that Bethesda woke me; she simply made it impossible for me to go on sleeping. Was it really necessary to send the scrub maid to clean my study before dawn?
Once I was awake, Bethesda didn't refuse to feed me. But the millet porridge was lumpy and cold, and there was no conversation to warm it up.
After breakfast, I shooed the scrub maid from my study and shut the door. It was a good morning, I decided, to write a letter.
To my beloved son Meto, serving under the command ofGaius Julius Caesar in Gaul, from his loving father in Rome, may Fortune be with you.
I write this letter only three days after my last; Martius is gone and the Kalends of Aprilis is upon us. Much has happened in the meantime, all revolving about the murder of Dio.
Our neighbor Marcus Caelius (now our former neighbor; Clodius evicted him) has been accused of the murder of Dio, and related crimes having to do with the harassment of the Egyptian envoys, as well as a previous attempt (by poison) on Dio's life. I have been hired by friends of the prosecution to help find evidence against Caelius. My only interest is to determine who killed Dio, so that I can put this nagging affair to rest, for my own peace of mind if not for justice's sake.
I will attempt to explain the details later. (Perhaps after the trial, which begins the day after tomorrow.) What is foremost in my mind now, what I would long to discuss if you were here with me, is something else.
What is this madness which poets call love?
What power compels a man to thrust himself against the lacerating indifference of a woman who no longer loves him? What drives a woman to seek the absolute destruction of a man who rejects her? What cruel appetite makes a man of rational intellect crave the debasement of his helpless partners in sex? How does a eunuch, supposedly impervious to love, become enamored of a beautiful woman? Is it natural for a brother and sister to share a bed, as we are told the gods and goddesses of Egypt sometimes do? Why do the worshipers of the Great Mother emasculate themselves in religious ecstasy? Why would a woman steal a lock of her lover's pubic hair to cherish as a keepsake?
You must wonder if I'm mad to pose such questions. But in fact they may have as much to do with the murder of Dio and the upcoming trial of Caelius as do the intrigues of Egyptian politics, and I find myself baffled. I fear I have become too old for this kind of work, which requires a mind in empathy with the world around it. I like to think I am wiser than I used to be, but what use is wisdom in making sense of a world that follows the dictates of mad passion? I feel like a sober man on a ship of drunkards.
We say it is the hand of Venus that compels these strange behaviors, as if that put the matter to rest, when in fact we say 'the hand of Venus' precisely because we do not understand these passions and cannot explain them, only suffer them when we must and watch, perplexed, the suffering of others…
There was a rapping at the door. I steeled myself for a chill wind and called, 'Come in.' But it was not Bethesda who entered. It was Diana.
She closed the door behind her and sat in the chair across from my writing table. There was a shadow on her face. Something was troubling her.
'Mother is angry at you,' she said. 'Is she? I hadn't noticed.' 'What are you doing?' 'Writing a letter to Meto.'
'Didn't you write to him just a few days ago?' 'Yes.'
'What does the letter say?'
'This and that.'
'Is it about your work?'
'In a way. Yes, it's about my work.'
