Cleopatra Dismounts, page 7
It was the arrow that kills the one it does not strike.
Clad in the precious garments that Love prescribed, our limbs contracted little by little; they narrowed, became enchained. On the one hand, our presence drew the eyes of the world, the presence of you and me side by side, as if the cleverest artisan in the world had fashioned us, creating the visible statue of Love itself. Who, when he saw us, would not exclaim: “They love each other!” We were fairer than the fairest, because you and I together composed one figure, entire in itself, the purest of forms. The gift of the ancient centaur had been put on. “From hereon he will see women but none will please him like you do. None will please you except him. Thanks to that garment, the two of you will feel your very entrails shiver with delight!”
From that time on, after our return from Antioch, we were possessed by convulsive cramps. Under the sway of the jealous Deianeira, the double Hercules, the queen of Egypt and the triumvir Mark Antony, were like two children out of control.
The arrow infected with the poison of the hydra of Lerna envenomed two lives more. The dusky hydra imprisons us now; its venom circulates through our veins; its stabbing pains burn our flesh and transform it into hot coals. We bubbled, as if boiling, and nobody warned against the fire, though it blazed unremittingly around Mark Antony and Cleopatra, obscuring them from the world. The bonds of love converted into the shirt of Deianeira defeated us. Now your blood, which a dagger let loose from your body, bathes me, Mark Antony. Look, I am relieved because it has set you free of me.
Let Octavius hear this: It was not you, you vile, bloodthirsty, merciless, wretched Ocatavius, who defeated me. Once more I say it. What were you? You had no part in our story. Confess it! Whom can I blame for my condition? Whom would I like to tear to pieces?
Sixty thousand infantry, twelve thousand cavalry, the four hundred ships of Rome, the problems of supplying our troops when Agrippa had seized control of the neighboring islands, the desertion of the kings of Thrace and Paphlygonia, Delius’s going over to the enemy and taking our battle-plan with him, the surrender of our land forces, the defection of the legions stationed in Cyrenaica, the ships I sent overland that were captured and burned by the Arabs of Patras—none of that had power over us, because Love held us in its sway. And now here I am, undone, in shreds, my powers of no avail, but even as I see you dead, Mark Antony, I fall in love with you again. Once again I put on the tunic of Deianeira, though I know of its burning intensity, but I am determined to see you and me become One.
I should have listened to the gods. My mistake was committed before I met you, Mark Antony, before I met Caesar, before I knew the hope of being the love of another, the dream of achieving completeness in the arrogance of a fulfilled couple.
Antony, neither you nor Caesar, nor anybody could have given me that One, for a mortal is nothing without the gods and the earth. The river loses its gleam, its generative powers, if the gods do not infuse it with life. The Nile is the gods because it contains them. Let us imagine the unimaginable: that the Nile became merely running water, that it lost its divine identity. Well, so what? It is impossible to imagine it but let us suppose that the giver of life losts its godly powers. Its dark waters would not even wet us. Its silt would be sterile sand. But the river knows nothing of such foolish arrogance. The river is the breath of the gods and does nothing to hide it. It runs full of life and it bestows it on us, because it is life itself. Hear this, Antony, though you hate me to speak of Caesar: His attachment to me made me haughty after I thought that, with him as my ally, I would receive obeisance from all the kingdoms of the world. Listen now to what I say of you: So great was my joy, so profound the intoxication you filled me with, that I loved you in the firm belief that we would one day encompass everything, that our love would contain the Nile, the air, the sea, the sun. Nothing, nobody, would be lacking. We were to be complete. We needed no tunic of Deianeira to ruin us! The bonds of love could have remained untangled and we would still have known defeat, for we were convinced that you and I together were One in the world’s despite, the One that outrivaled all beings mortal and divine!
So our ship sank all the deeper in the deepest of waters. Because we were happy, because we thought we were complete in the possession of our happiness, because you came back to me and abandoned me yet again! It meant nothing to us that the scant breath of Octavius blew on our sails and snapped the yardarm, and the sky darkened with rage, and the whole universe, including the Elysian Fields and the world of the dead, turned against us. The great battle between East and West, between the Tiber and the Nile, between Octavius and Antony and his Cleopatra—the conflict that poets will sing for centuries to come—none of that ever happened. We fled from Actium before Octavius could smash us down and postponed the final encounter. When he did come to face us, the issue was not fought over you or me, or over the oneness that we thought we were building piece by piece. Antony, neither of us listened to the truths of the gods. Because we were the river that thinks it owes nothing of its power to the divine, because we were a rootless tree, a sky overcast, the couple who believed they were self-sufficient—that was why!
It did not matter, Antony, that you were a successful general but an ineffectual king, that you were not adept in satisfying the wishes of others and were even incapable of perceiving your own, that you never knew what you wanted, that you were often a sundial buried in shadow. You were great when you had my Caesar to advise you, but you were not vanquished because you lost him. You were vanquished because of what I have been telling you, for loving me to excess, because I returned your love, convinced that we two made one, that we formed a perfect unity. We lost. We were our own defeat!
Betrayal
Everything, everything is the handiwork of Death.
—Virgil
Diomedes the Informer
Cleopatra was short in stature but possessed an extraordinary physical beauty and grace in her movements, as agile and elegant as an animal or a nymph. Her manner of speech was quick and confident, and in order to fulfil my obligations as her scribe, I was forced to devise a form of shorthand that my assistants would know how to decipher. She had personally approved of my entering into her service when I was a mere youngster, but would not have done so had she had the foresight to see how much I would end up weighing. I tend toward obesity, the sole trait I share with the Ptolemies, and my body, though formerly obedient to my will, has never enjoyed either speed or agility or grace. Now, thanks to my weight and my advancing years, I am the prisoner of my own legs. I was not so at the time when the events of the story I plan to narrate took place. The hand with which I write now is appropriate to my weight. I am slow. I weigh every word as I go. Between one line and the next, I stumble over my own thoughts. It is incumbent upon me to confess to this characteristic, though it is nothing in my favor, but I will not trouble you with it again.
Cleopatra had this rapid way of speaking and told her stories with a liveliness that I, old and fat, cannot presume to imitate with either my hand or my head that now requires an effort to raise when I wish to see the stars twinkling far above. My weight stoops me the way Nature bends an animal, obliging it to peer down at the surface of the Earth. Only mankind has a face wholly to the front, but some of us, despite our humanity, have become animals in this respect.
The passing years have effaced much of what I remember of Cleopatra, but some things I can still recall without the least distortion, right down to the most trivial details. The one advantage of being torpid and heavy is that one proceeds more slowly; and at that pace, memory holds fast to certain things as if nothing could budge it, as if it were fixed, firmly rooted. But the words of Cleopatra were beaten down every time I tried to recount them. It happened so often that now they hide themselves from me, together with certain incidents to which I had been eyewitness, flying from me like birds that flee before the drums of rowdy men. My interrogators wore themselves out trying to convince me that I had not seen what I really saw. That what I knew to be the truth was actually falsehood. How many times did they come and ask me about her, only immediately to contest every statement I made, every phrase, every account of every act that I tried to affirm. For long years I had submitted myself to the authority of the truth with a dedication I now repeat here, but I started to weaken and make concessions, first with my words, then with my point of view, and finally even in my memory. But I will tell no more lies. I will fill in the gaps where terror caused me to forget. From my stylus will come nothing imagined.
Since I know I am soon to die, I cannot cling to the argument that Theodotus employed to advocate the treacherous beheading of Pompey: “The dead don’t bite.” Maybe they do not bite the living but I’m not certain they do not bite the other dead. I write now because I wish to repair my errors, but already I realize I have failed! The words I have attributed to Cleopatra do not convey the lively way she spoke. I falsify them by calling them hers. That alone should be enough to disqualify them, but there is a defect even more serious: they have been deliberately altered by the powers of Rome.
They pretend to describe the real Cleopatra; they even believe their own pretence, but they end up reinforcing the version created by Caesar Augustus. (Cleopatra always called him “Octavius.”) They focus on one aspect of her, representing her as a creature who saw life through eyes blurred by her feelings. An insulting straitjacket for a woman of her energy, complexity, and violence. Could the great Cleopatra have been merely a tear-stained creature, weeping for her sentimental misfortunes? She had been educated by sages, constantly surrounded by refined and worldly eunuchs, by prudent and intelligent maidens. From childhood onward, she had witnessed palace intrigues. She had shone as a governor, excelled as a cunning strategist, and managed her affairs with consummate skill. Could she be this weepy weakling? Not anywhere on this planet called Earth. Nowhere where a man is called a man, a woman, a woman; courtiers, courtiers; youths, youths; slaves, slaves; soldiers, soldiers. Nowhere in the world of Cleopatra. She was of another order entirely. And I intend to portray her as such—even as I flee for my life, on horseback for my legs no longer support me—as a woman born to command, with the glance of a queen; a woman of method, order, skilled in languages and in seeing through pretences. Get away from me, all Romanness, Rome and its Romans. Away, I say! Far from where my hand is writing. Away, I tell you.
With this abjuration I need to begin before inscribing the words of Cleopatra, taking care not to alter them, in order to preserve the one thing she asked of me, her memory.
I wish to repeat what she began to dictate to me before the corpse of Mark Antony, covered in his fresh blood. She wore hardly a shred of clothing on her body. She had pulled off her clothes the night before, to cover him. Almost naked, she had spent the night in his arms, murmuring to him. We did not attempt to separate her from him, not even when his corpulent body stiffened and ceased to show signs of life.
Before day broke, before we shrugged off the sullen heaviness that had befallen us in place of the comforting sleep that carries whole and entire to realms where neither sadness nor joy can touch us, before we were fully awake and alert, Cleopatra sprang up, slipping out of the corpse’s embrace, where she had seemed part of its death, painted with blood and frozen into immobility.
She spoke to me, with her hair disheveled and matted. But she addressed me with an intelligent glance in her distraught face. She had abandoned all her attempts to chafe life back into Mark Antony and stood frozen. Her scanty garments had the look of sculpture, heavy, dense, and thick. They still retained a stiff charm in their folds but they no longer seemed to be woven of threads. The bloody fabric possessed an unearthly weight and volume.
Standing there, heavy as lead, with the proud carriage that always obliged us to adore her, as if she had dressed with an eye to elegance, adorned, as it were, for a ceremony of some importance, but with the blood always threatening to stream off her, she looked at me and began to speak, gesturing that she required my full attention. She ordered me to take her dictation and to take it accurately. I began to do so the second she opened her mouth, calmly and coolly jotting down her words, striving to preserve the precision and clarity of her thoughts. As is obvious, I have skipped some truths. My false memory, my slave’s memory, my Roman memory, wanted to imply that a certain madness raged in her words, out of control, as if she were beside herself with the grief induced by her farewell to her husband, to her sons, to Egypt itself, and along with Egypt, her farewell to autocracy, to power and riches, to beauty and all its charms, to life itself as it surrendered to the blind, insensate greed of Rome.
She wanted her story recorded. She was looking back to a world that she alone had known, one that could survive solely in her words. All the rest I have set down here, expressing it through her voice. The absurdities that I have attributed to Mark Antony, the feelings that verged on extremity, the recriminations, the tone, especially the hysterically vindictive tone, stripped of her characteristic self-possession—all that came from my stylus under pressure from Rome’s leader, determined as he was to destroy the memory of a great queen.
What is true is that Cleopatra’s voice retained its firm tone till the very last moment. Till then she remained in control of herself, a peerless creature who at no point succumbed to sudden fears and fits of anger, a woman who knew how to be beautifully persuasive. It was the voice of a queen and the silence of a woman, both of which I disfigured by distorting the way she spoke.
While she was attending to other business, using my secretaries and scribes, I was carefully checking the words she had dictated. I had noted them in own handwriting on the scrolls—less cramped than usual—the way I had done with her other narratives, decades before, along with her successful negotiations with neighboring sovereigns as she maneuvered to make stealthy additions to her realm, her plans for outright conquest, and her sensitive dealings to preserve and strengthen her domestic power. It fell to others to write down her financial dealings. That was never my job. Nor to record entitlements, the revoking of entitlements, and the other official decrees of this queen of kings. Still, all the royal scrolls were kept together, regardless of their content, and treasured as the principal legacy of Cleopatra to the world. To me, she dictated her thoughts about the art of government; her personal version, far from reliable, of the expedition against the Parthians, and a concise history in verse of the Lagids, which she stamped with a false signature. She had her maids compile a volume of tips on how to look beautiful, with hints on hairstyles, skin lotions, the starching of clothes, shaving kits and ointments, intended to be a present for any friendly king in whose territory the women were dismal frumps, so that they might acquire a touch of style. The scroll was scrupulously edited, but of course, it did not give away all her precious secrets. It was signed with Cleopatra’s name to add value to it, though it was common knowledge it had not been actually written by her. I must point out, once and for all, and before I forget, the total falsehood of a rumor circulating here and there, that Cleopatra wrote kitchen recipes, with ideas about how to decorate a room for a party, detailing the layout of the table, the reception area, the dresses and perfumes, with an addendum on mixing drinks and seasoning dishes and suggestions for the best songs and dances to accompany the occasion. That is a libel made against her out of malice, to reinforce the image of her that the Romans want to convey, of Cleopatra as a flirt, a mistress, a trivial housewife given to fits of pique. She has also been credited with a “Treatise on Weights and Measures,” another on agriculture, and yet another entitled “Secrets of Alchemy Revealed,” which contains a legend that she knew how to create gold. In one way that legend is a complete lie, but metaphorically it contains an element of truth, since her astuteness and versatility in business matters meant she had the knack of striking highly profitable deals.
Speaking of alchemy, she increased the riches of Egypt to an immense degree, multiplying them many times over, while hanging on to what she already possessed and preventing the Roman vandals from stealing any of it. She knew where to invest gold so that it brought in a one hundred percent profit. She bought groves of Jericho balsam, paying Antony a mere trifle for them, and then rented them out at 200 talents per year. In Nabatea, she cornered the market in pitch. When she could not exploit a thing for quick and easy profit, she put her ingenuity to work and eventually brought in gold in abundance. Gold poured into Egypt from all points of the compass. She even debased the coinage, minting coins that did not contain the legal amounts of precious metals, and inscribed on them whatever value suited her. Initially this caused an uproar, but then she flooded the market by minting even more of the same, plus others worth even less but all with the same face value. Confusion confounded confusion. She left her mark on the Roman world by this debasement of the currency. And in other ways, too. On her trip to Rome with Caesar, she took with her Sosigenes, the official astronomer of Egypt and, working together, they adjusted the calendar to make it coincide with the agricultural cycle. She worked tirelessly beside Caesar, organizing the census and showing him how to operate a customs and excise service. She applied herself to improving the appearance and the comforts of Rome, giving instructions to drain the Pontine marshes and Lake Pucinus. All without neglecting the affairs of Egypt, on which she kept the closest eye, despite her distance from home.
Cleopatra did dictate to me, at one point, a funeral eulogy over Caesar. We keep it in a separate place, apart from the other royal documents. She did not consider it quite proper for the monarch of Egypt to lament the death of Caesar publicly, either as the father of her son or the ally who consolidated her position on the throne, in case people might read into it a submission to Rome. So she forbade copies of “The Funeral Eulogy over Caesar” to be circulated and stopped her signature being stamped on the sole existing copy. We made copies of all her other works for the library of Alexandria, for the library at Pergamum (which Antony kindly presented to her), and for that of the Seleucids, as well as extra copies to be given as special presents to visitors and envoys and to be sent out via her embassies.
