The Floating Book Read online

  A poet is like the birds of passage …

  They pass singing in the distance, the world

  Knows nothing of them except their voice …

  I was singing, my friends, as a man breathes,

  As a bird mourns, as the wind sighs,

  As murmurs float on flowing water.

  Lamartine, Le Poète Mourant

  Contents

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Four

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Five

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Six

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Seven

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Postscript

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s note

  Also by Michelle Lovric

  Praise

  Part One

  Prologue

  She came to me in the secret night,

  all the spice of Araby on her skin, to give me

  the priceless gift of herself, prised from her husband’s lap.

  No, it’s fine; I’ll be satisfied if

  she notches on her belt the days she spends with me.

  June 63 BC

  Greetings, my brother,

  On what forsaken crag of Asia Minor does this find you, soldier-boy?

  How little we know of one another these days! Reading your letters, nostalgia slings its warm arm around my shoulder and I’m hungering for your laugh, for that reproving look in your fond eye, and I cannot believe our childhood intimacy at all fractured by your absence.

  How do you recall that childhood of ours, Lucius? It seems drowsily happy to me. Perhaps it’s always so to the younger son.

  Perhaps it’s necessarily so to a poet.

  Is it not strange that you can remember my infancy, my first word, when I do not?

  In fact I envy you all your memories; unlike me, you also have an image of our mother’s face, and of her eyes fixed upon you with adoration. I read recently that the mother-ostrich kindles life in her chicks merely by the loving intensity of her gaze upon the eggs. Those eggs that miss her eyes grow addled and never hatch. I hope to evade such a fate, though our mother died pushing me into this world, leaving me to your tender ministrations.

  So – can you guess what has brought on this touching bout of nostalgia? Or where I sit as I write this letter?

  Yes! Our father has at last given in to my intolerable pestering and agreed to send me to Rome. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m eighteen years old this month. It’s time for me to take my place at the centre of the empire.

  The ten-day journey was uneventful. Our father ensured I travelled in every comfort at the mildest time of the year, for the sake of my mythical weak chest. (Yes, that same damned birdcage always cited when disallowing any robust games.)

  Cocooned like a precious jewel in a casket, I arrived in Rome intact. But from the moment I entered the city my sense of self cracked open like a trodden insect.

  At the city gate we were obliged to leave the carriage and I myself had to help carry the ignominious straw baskets of my possessions as we proceeded lowly on foot. Little lord of Sirmione, no one turned to salute me here among the impossible palaces and closed-fist faces that stubbed down my pride like a vicious thumb.

  Husked of all my pretensions, I was rendered a nothing creature, transparent, absorbent, leaky as a good secret. The innocence dripped off my sweat-sponged forehead and my veins distended in new appetites fed by the stinks and uproar of the streets and the marble eyes of women haughty as balconies.

  My new home – rented from Marcus Crassus – turned out to be a fine villa within a shallow sniff of the livid juices of the Tiber. The first thing I did was to despatch back to our father the Veronese servants who had accompanied me on the journey from Sirmione. They were quite possibly his spies, but worse, they had witnessed my sudden degradation to back-street nobody.

  Waving them off, I lifted my head and sniffed the tangled salty air. It was late spring, the cooking fires were burning in rich men’s houses, and already I had a stack of invitations to attend to. Our father’s friends in town were determined to be generous.

  Caesar himself bestowed his company and his patronage. His house was among the first I visited. (I took care not to be visibly awestruck by its luxuries.) He showed me (our pater, rather) the honour of stepping forth to greet me so that all might see how I was esteemed. He held my hand for a moment after he first pressed it, looking into my eyes until I was forced to look away, blushing.

  ‘What are you for?’ he asked me, a strange question, I thought. Now I know him better, I realise that it was entirely characteristic. Caesar always seeks the essence, disregarding anything ephemeral, including youth, good looks or humour. He finds no poetry in the little things, but a great lyrical epic in shaping the future. Look at his ambitions – praetor-elect and his sights set even higher – compare them to my little poems!

  Still, he had the grace not to laugh when I told him that I was a poet, and would be a great one. Instead he put his head to one side and considered me for a long time. The glass of those large grey eyes cooled my spirits, but when I was gently dismissed a few seconds later I put Caesar out of my mind. I went to join the drinkers and the jokers and show them what I was made of, on both counts.

  I’m never homesick, well rarely. I’ve taken to urban life as naturally as rosemary to pork crackling. Yet I still feel myself an outsider. I know we’re all Roman citizens now. No matter that our Verona estate rolls into the horizon, or that there’s old money in the family, and good blood. I still feel myself irretrievably provincial.

  I confess I’ve also made the occasional faux pas, like the sweltering night at Caelius’s house when I dropped a lump of ice in my red wine and six of the other dinner guests went home early. Romans! I’m still prickling at the memory. Mind, I myself was so saturated at the time that I needed to be told about it the next day. Then I clapped my hand on my forehead and fretted, for such idiocies breed nicknames that stick for ever in Rome. I was tormented by the thought that my only immortality might be as ‘Ice-man’ or ‘Cooler’. If anything, I think
the incident set me scribbling more earnestly, to make sure that I would be known for something much better, infinitely better.

  Yes, I still dream of writing a book. Meanwhile, I’ve made my mark in other ways. Our youthful tomfoolery on the banks of Lake Benacus has served me well. Only recently arrived in Rome, I became the star of the Aemilian Draughts and Swimming Club, and performed prodigious feats of swinging from beams and swimming the Tiber with a cat aloft in one hand. The beast scratched my wrists raw and my blood flowed into the river. At last I felt that Rome had taken me in, suckled on me, as it were. So I told everyone who’d listen and they roared at the piquancy of my blasphemy, and then spread it around.

  There’s worse, too.

  A good team of well-bred young men can send any town, even Rome, to hide under its bed. Just yesterday – one of those extraordinary nights when excitement sifts like powder on the skin – when everyone else had scattered, I remember me and Cinna catching a nightsoilman and putting him down a drain. But then everything I do these days is just a bit larger than life; the way I screw up my entire face at a bad smell, the complexity and filthiness of my oaths when I lose at draughts, the delicacy with which I place my drained cup down on the table. I make sure everyone’s looking at me, and that it’s worth their while to do so. (‘No change there then, Gaius,’ I hear you say.)

  And I’ve made other friends, Lucius.

  People are writing roasting letters to our pater to tell him: Young Catullus has fallen in with the worst company in Rome.

  The gossips are right (I told the old boy they lied, of course). I have become intimate – and I use the word advisedly – with Clodia Metelli and her brother Publius Clodius Pulcher.

  Between them those siblings can show the world what’s wild and burning bad at the heart of Rome. This much I knew before I even met them: that the brother’s a ruffian (his armed escort is smellier and more vicious even than Caesar’s); the sister a notorious libertine. She’s connected vertically and horizontally (the pun is intended, dear Lucius) with half of Rome’s nobility. And Clodia’s more than ornamental. She’s powerful.

  At her house on the lordly Palatine Hill, she entertains the elite of Rome in more ways than are respectable even for a highborn Roman matron with a husband conveniently serving in the provinces these twenty years past. There’s a spindly little daughter somewhere, an heiress, but she’s of no account. It’s the mother who draws the crowds and lights them up. Her dinner parties, at which she reclines in transparent muslins and dances with immoderate suppleness, are famous for their lewd late-night entertainments, and what happens after them.

  So yes of course, brother, when I first expressed an interest at the Club, out sauntered all the stale and rancid jokes. ‘A Cold Proposition,’ they called her, ‘But anyone may Go There. Even her …’

  ‘Is she not rather gifted, though?’ I ventured, flame-faced, gauche as a veal-calf. ‘I heard she writes plays.’

  ‘Her wittiest part’s between her legs,’ someone hooted and I laughed along with the rest.

  I finally met her for myself at a dinner in the house of Allius.

  Caelius had laid me a bait to the door – of dancing girls, not to mention plates of gilded flamingo tongue and peacock brains seethed in wine. And the company of poets. Caelius styles himself one such, notwithstanding that his verses droop like the eyelids of a drugged prostitute. Meanwhile, though, he’s winning fame at the bar, flirting with the old men, unpacking his handsome grin at the right parties.

  This was one of those.

  So she was there.

  In the torch-shimmered threshold he introduced us. ‘Gaius Valerius Catullus … Clodia, daughter of Appius, wife of Quintus Metellus.’ I bowed, wondering if she had heard of me yet.

  I remember the sidelong pivot of an eye, of red-brown rich as resin that seemed for a moment to glisten, a flighty black pupil, a heavy thrall of lashes. Clinking emerald earrings, she murmured something inaudible in a low, deep voice, which had the effect of making me lean closer to her.

  My heart shot backwards in my breast like a heavy bolt. In the rafters of my ribcage something warm and fragile batflapped through the darkness. I suddenly smelled lightning in the leaden air (and indeed it sliced the sky within an hour, and all the guests splashed home through the pooled and dog-loping streets).

  But the storm as yet lay secret in my senses and for a moment I shared breaths with Clodia. Already slightly turning on her heel, she looked me slowly up and down, and moved swiftly on, her breasts shifting minnowlike beneath the tunic pinioned by a magnificent sardonyx cameo. I noticed then that the hem was already stained with the juices of the gutter.

  She turned back once to nod at me, and then she was gone, swallowed into a huddle of important men at the kernel of the party. I saw her brother – the likeness was unmistakable – pull her to him and nuzzle a whisper into her ear. I stood simmering, goose-skinned and wisp-tongued in the milk of the moonlight, until the douse of rain chased me into the prattling shadows of the portico, where I listened to my poet friends declaim as if through a cup pressed to a door. I paced her name all the way home through ribbed curtains of water. Above me rose-coloured lightning embroidered the drowning sky with hectic stitches.

  Love is only worth what you pay for it, I told myself at the start. I, just like the rest, chose not to sit in the counting house, doling out my feelings only for just returns. When she sent a messenger two days after that dinner at Allius’s, I raced up the still-steaming hill to her house in the exclusive Clivus Victoriae on the western side of the Palatine, panting for my climb, panting for her attention, just like all the others, running as if each step pressed pins into my feet, nosing blindly into the white-hot light, my head spiced with holiday oils and all the hairs on my wrists stiffly at attention.

  On the way I passed the temple of the Cybele, vibrating with the usual high-pitched howls and febrile drumbeats. No, Lucius, I did not hear a warning in that din! You must be steeped in Her myth, living as you do in the Magna Mater’s native Asia Minor. But here in sophisticated Rome the cult of Cybele is something of a joke. We find it rather distasteful that there are still men ready to emulate Her disciple Attis and cut off their pricks with stone knives. Anyway, I assure you that self-mutilation was the last thing on my mind as I trotted past the noisy temple towards Clodia’s house.

  I forced myself to slow my pace when I arrived at her rain-rotted garden and walked slowly past the smoking flowers. When I reached her threshold another manservant greeted me with lowered eyes and led me silently to the room where his mistress awaited me. At first, stupefied by the view, I did not see her reclining on a divan. All Rome’s power teemed in miniature beneath me. Clodia’s house overlooks the forum, where her brother Clodius was no doubt busy conducting his intrigues even as I stood there. High above the courts and temples, none of their clamour reached her terrace. I heard nothing but insect-song and the quiet scurrying of servants. From that lofty viewpoint Rome seemed like a model displayed for Clodia’s regal manipulations.

  ‘Ah, the poet is arrived.’ Her voice, cool and amused, turned me around. I started: she was sparingly dressed. My eye fell on a terracotta oil lamp on a table beside her. It was intricately carved in the shape of a winged phallus.

  ‘Against bad luck?’ I asked boldly.

  ‘That’s the conventional meaning,’ she murmured evasively. She did not rise to greet me, but fingered a cushion beside her, and smiled. As I walked towards her I saw hyenas carved on the headrests of her divan.

  There were a few preliminaries and then, surprisingly, she gave herself to me without ceremony, as if the act meant nothing to her.

  Yet I shall never forget that divan in the porch of her house and the thrum of the cicadas as I kissed her for the first time and fumbled with the cord of her robe, and the puffs of air which came from her pet sparrow’s beating wings. The bird circled around us the whole time, trying to alight if we were still for a second. I remember the lisp of wings in my ears, l
ittle claws scraping on my back. The scratches I found there that night must have been the result.

  It seems that it all happened slowly, for I play it back in my mind slowly, the first afternoon I spent naked and alone with Clodia. It was like a long meal, with perhaps nine or ten courses; some were deeply satisfying; others seemed merely to whet my appetite for what would come next. After a while I stopped worrying if we might be interrupted. I realised from her deliberate style of lovemaking that she had arranged things so as to enjoy me for as long as she wanted, to test my stamina, to audition me. There were moments when the divan felt like a trough in which she was trying to drown me; others when it seemed to float over the ground. She kept me until a wan and wasted moon swung above us. The blind night watched me shamble home.

  Her embrace was vigorous; she is of course nearly as tall as I am, and expensively well fed. Her breath was sweet and mingled with the scent of perfumed oil in her hair and eyebrows. I choked on that scent while her hands went everywhere, weighing and pulling rather than caressing. Her breasts were heavier and less responsive than I had hoped, but the joy of fingering what I had passed forty-eight hours feverishly imagining was enough reward for me. I was conscious that she was older than me, perhaps fifteen years older, but instead of disgusting me, that merely made me feel more grown-up myself, as if this were my true arrival not just in adult life, but also in the adult life of Rome and therefore the world. Suddenly all my adolescent desires and flirtations were transformed into earthy male lust.

  Her coolness was … alluring. From the start I was drunk as a wineshop fly on the challenge of it. It was on this premise that I fell in love with every part of her, just as all the others had done. And just like all the others before me, and after, I’m embarrassed to think of how garrulous I was with it. I could barely wait to tell the world that I had bedded her, and, more eloquently still, how I had already begun to suffer for it. I wrote the first poem that very evening.

  But was I ever happy, even then? Even for a second? Perhaps when I first burst inside her? I think not. You will notice that I’ve talked only of her body, not of her words. There were no intimate exchanges, despite the brawling of our lips. It was quite impersonal. Even the frenzy of our lovemaking was numbed by her rigorous silence. Not a groan did she utter; the only sign that I had perforated the shield of her froideur was a single droplet of sweat on the left side of her upper lip. Even that could have been mine, sprayed from my tearful face; each time I wept in the last moments, you see. Prescient tears, though I was too busy and too exhausted to understand what I was crying about.