Rome For Sale, page 28
“He sends Catalina messages. I know. But what’s the use of this talk? I’ll give you seas and mountains, girl, when the massacre begins. I’m going to take one whole jeweller’s shop. You can pick it for me.”
7
Orestilla sat waiting for Catalina. She wanted to tell him what the child had done. The child had lifted up her little terra-cotta doll and offered it to the wet-nurse who was suckling her. Orestilla had the doll in her hands, for she had come from putting the baby to bed after its bath, and she played with the moveable limbs, raising up the folds of the dress. The child did that, and she, Orestilla, had done the same as a child; and she still raised the folds in the cheated hope of finding something beneath that would explain a mystery. What mystery? A physiological one? But any mirror could yield that answer. Yet the impulse to look persisted, though nothing was found but a smooth space of terra-cotta and the jointing that allowed the body to turn.
Orestilla hugged the doll and kissed its scarlet-painted cheeks. She was full of the exciting desire to tell Catalina how the child had wanted the nurse to suckle the doll.
Then she heard Catalina coming. There were always so many people with him. She dropped the doll behind the chair and waited. Surely he would come in and speak with her for a moment. But he had passed into his study with half a dozen men. They were all talking together. Orestilla sat listening to the unintelligible hum. Like a subdued concert of parrots, she thought, and tried to imagine the men as bristling with bright plumage and perched on boughs in the thicket of their conspiracy.
A servant entered. “Master says that you’re not to wait up.”
Orestilla signed imperiously, and the lad went out. Magistrates from some smaller Campanian towns, introduced by a conspirator named Cæparius who knew the south well—these were the men whom Catalina was seeing to-day. The net was being cast wide. He was working like a hundred men, but surely he could have spared the time to hear about his daughter and the doll.
Suddenly she heard the deep-throated laugh that Cethegus affected, mixed with the high snickering laugh of Cassius. The laughter of Cethegus wasn’t quite convincing, it was too deliberately masculine. But it plucked strongly at Orestilla’s pulse. She lay back with her eyes closed. What cowards men were. He could easily find an excuse to slip out and see her. He knew where the bedroom lay. If he encountered a slave, he could pretend that he had lost himself, and ask where the privies were.
She drowsed, the doll in her lap. Footsteps. She quivered. Her thought had reached him and she felt guilty. It was her thought that was bringing him. Keep away, Cethegus.
Cethegus it was. He entered on tiptoe and stood gazing at her. Wide-eyed she stared back, tranced. With a glance round to see that no one else was in the room, he moved across and took her in his arms. “No, no,” she moaned weakly, but did not fight. He kissed her wildly, passing his mouth over her mouth, her eyes, her throat. She pushed at him nervelessly. “Go away.”
She relaxed, curving under his embrace; but then, at the last moment, she realised what she was doing. Fiercely she pushed him away and retreated. He stepped after her, and she swung the doll which she still held. He ducked, and it hit him on the shoulder, cracking. Panting, he stood looking at her with pallid face.
“Someone’s coming,” she muttered. “Go.”
“Not unless you kiss me.”
She hurried to him and kissed him. Again he clasped her and she relaxed; but the sound of padding slippers in the room beyond gave her back her strength. She pushed him through the curtains.
The old woman who tended the baby appeared at the farther doorway and regarded the curtains that still swayed. “I thought I heard voices.”
“No,” said Orestilla, turning as if she had lifted the curtain and then drawn back. “They’re still in there talking. I think I’ll go to bed.”
“Shall I help undress you?”
“No, you have your own work to do. Send Glycera in. No, I don’t want anyone. I want to be alone.”
With a curious glance at the flushed face of her mistress the old woman retired; she was devoted to Catalina and suspected that something was wrong. The world was in a sad way, and no woman was good enough for her master. In her young days she had slept with his father; she had been taken by him on the very night of Catalina’s birth, a virgin; and that made her feel like a mother to Catalina. While the moans and cries of the woman in childbirth had been filling the house, she had lain in the arms of the father of the child, gasping as if the cries were her own. Catalina was her child. Let any wife dare play him false.
Orestilla, alone again, held out the doll which she had been hugging against her breasts. Poor thing. It was badly broken. An arm was hanging loose, a thigh was fractured, the nose was chipped. What could she do with it? The child would be so upset, but the doll was past mending.
She looked round to find a hiding place. Then she decided to take the doll to bed with her. She could say that it fell out and broke itself. She would buy a better one to-morrow, one carved from ivory. But that wouldn’t mend the broken doll, nothing could mend it.
As she lay in bed, she nursed the doll, muttering incoherently to it.
8
The political tension was now interrupted by the Roman Games. Catalina however continued with his work, and the hilarious days of the games were not unsuited for agitators to mix with the unruly populace. Cicero also did not slacken in his efforts to obtain evidence and to arouse apprehension; but the conservatives were mostly too relieved after their late worries. They looked on him as a bothering panic-monger; he had exaggerated things from the beginning; he wanted to pretend that Catalina was a social peril in order to reap the benefit of crushing a rather harmless lunatic with great pomp and noise. Cato and his group however needed no convincing, and they began to look more kindly on Cicero.
But the people were taken up with their pleasures. They were not interested much in the Banquet of Iuppiter, the core of the festival, where the magistrates, after the sacrifice of a white heifer, sat and ate in the company of the three Capitoline deities, Iuppiter and Iuno and Minerva. Iuppiter lay on a couch, richly decked, his face painted red; and his two womenfolk sat on seats at his side. Food was placed before them, and the sacramental meal of the state was consummated. But for the people there were plays and, more importantly, the games in the Circus. After a solemn procession, during which the spectators talked and betted, there were chariot-races in which a warrior stood at the side of each charioteer and leaped to ground at the end of the chariot-drive, finishing the race on foot. The populace sported the colours of their favourites; they laid wagers among themselves or with the professional bookmakers who ranged through the crowd; touts offered inside information; brawls and exchange of missiles between rival factions kept the streets and the Circus in continual uproar.
Then there were athletic games, dancing, competitions in horsemanship, and, greatest attraction of all, gladiatorial combats. Marcus Antonius was especially keen on the wrestling and bored Curio with all the technical terms, the Greek phrases for the grips, the choke when the man was caught from behind and the elbow forced up under his chin, the bends and twists, the hook or trip from behind, the push, the feints, the pulling up of the man’s legs from under, the twirl when a man was spun round by a sudden spring, the ladder or pounce up his back, the middle-grip, the neck-bend, the upset when a man’s ankle was grasped and his balance spoiled by an arm levering under the thigh.
“Come away,” said Curio. “Why don’t they have women fighting?”
“This is the last pair,” replied Antonius, drawing him back into the seat. “Ho! a good one!” The man had made a quick dart forwards, grabbed his adversary’s left hand, and with a violent crunch broken all the bones of his fingers.
Satisfied, Antonius rose, stretching himself and knocking over the man in front. “Come on now. Let’s get a drink.” They dived out of the Circus, a long oblong space tiered with stone and then wooden seats, and curved at one end where the stables lay. Along the gangway they shoved, until they had climbed down a narrow stairway and come out into one of the passages that led to the seats from the roadway outside. The lower storeys of the Circus, opening on the road, were let out to shopkeepers, dealers, wine-sellers, restaurateurs, or brothel-managers, and the inner rooms were filled with blazing ovens, food-counters, stalls where mages sold prognostications about the races or birthdays, shops stacked with cheap souvenirs and gifts, dens where women could buy jars of white-lead for their faces or contraceptives, dark steaming rooms where drunkards sprawled over benches or women with price-tickets sat painting themselves.
Curio and Antonius passed a door inscribed: Syrian Girls Only Guaranteed. They entered one of the drinking-rooms where women were also to be found though the tavern-keeper threw them out every now and then for enticing away good custom; and they sat near a group of sailors.
“It was an island somewhere out west of Gades,” one of the men was saying. “We’d been blown out of our course for the Tin Islands, and we were short of water. So we were glad to see land. But when we neared the beach what did we see but a herd of goat-legged satyrs scampering out of the woods. Then we guessed the reason. The wind was blowing off the sea and we had three women aboard. The satyrs had scented them. As you know, satyrs don’t usually attack unless you attack them first; but this herd was quite mad. There was nothing for it. We didn’t have time to cast lots, so we took up the fattest of the three women and hove her overboard to them. That gave us the chance to get out into deep water again, and we escaped.”
“Don’t believe it,” said a man who was so drunk that he could only open one eye.
“Why don’t you believe it, you owl-eyed liar?” asked the narrator in disgust.
“Because the other two women would have jumped after the first one,” said the drunken man, and, falling back, he snored.
A lizard-faced girl sidled up and sat on the knee of Antonius. “Away, my darling, or I’ll throw you to the satyrs,” said Antonius. He took hold of her under the knees and neck, and lifted her up over his head. “Here, who wants a wench.” He made the motions of tossing her among the drinkers. The rafters were low and the girl thrust her face in a mess of cobwebs.
“Let me down,” she screamed, knocking her elbow on the ceiling in her hurry to brush the cobwebs off.
“Throw her out,” said the proprietor, hobbling up. “She hasn’t any right in here. She belongs opposite.”
Antonius laid her down carefully on the table. “I won’t. After all, she’s only thirsty like the rest of us. Give me some drink.” He picked up a flagon and poured it over the girl.
“Have your fun,” grumbled the proprietor, “as long as you pay for it.”
The drunken man awoke and looked at the streaming girl. “Waste,” he said. “Horrid rotten stinking waste. Why doesn’t someone empty her into a bucket?”
Antonius licked her. “Not bad wine. Give me another flagon.”
9
Next day there were gladiators. The spectators, proletarians and capitalists and nobles, howled their delight to see the men hacking at one another. The men with nets fled, circled round the heavily armed Samnite, cast their nets. If the net-man missed, then was the armoured man’s chance. He rushed in and tried to catch the other before he could haul in his net again. The sand was soon spotted with blood. It was left bloody to look impressive, though slaves stood by with brooms to smooth it over when the fighting was finished.
The net-men sang to the warriors whose grilled helmets were surmounted with the image of a fish:
Not you I chase but the fish that I see.
Hey, why do you run away from me?
The flute-players shrilled; the horns blared; and the men with cymbals waited to add their rattle and clang to the blows of the fighters.
Occasionally the waving of kerchiefs or the lifting-up of thumbs granted mercy to the fallen man. More often the people hooted and leaned forwards to see the death-blow. Men dressed grotesquely as death-spirits rushed across the sand to drag the body out through the gate of death, chanting and hopping. The victor stood by, fanning himself with the palm-branch, admired by all the women.
To-morrow there would be hunting-games. Ten leopards, thirty boars, fifty deer, eight bears and three lions would be driven frantic and slaughtered.
10
Though Cicero was busy at his detective work, he found time to complete the arrangements for Tullia’s marriage. Since the day when Piso had called, he had felt increasingly anxious to have the matter finished. The religious rite of marriage with its sanctified bread-breaking by wife and husband was now only used by a few very conservative families; even the legal methods based on a method of sale or on the prescription of a year’s continuous use were not much employed; for the revolt of women had made them unwilling to pass legally into the hands of their husbands. The wife was in law the husband’s daughter; she merely changed one paternal authority for another, and could not hold property. Therefore various fictions were devised, and most wives were strictly living a life of concubinage, though for all social purposes they were married and could only break the relationship through divorce. Either party could divorce by stating that the marriage was at an end; but this apparent ease of procedure was very much limited in fact by money-questions of repayment or loss of dowries.
Tullia was spending her time in play with her baby-brother. Terentia was superstitious and had just ordered the full carcass of a boar. “Be sure to get me one with the head entire,” she said to the slave who was going to the meat-market. She wanted to use the teeth for toothing-charms, tying them to the cradle.
As she entered the nursery she found that Tullia had removed a doll-like bundle from the window-niche. “How dare you?” she cried and gave her a clout on the head. Tullia crouched down beside the cradle, tears in her eyes; but she refused to sob. She was almost a married woman, and when she had a baby of her own she would order Terentia out of the room for talking so loud. Terentia would be sure to talk too loud and provide the chance for the snub.
Terentia replaced the bundle carefully on the ledge. It consisted of garlic wrapped up in a swaddling-cloth with pieces of hawthorn, and served to keep out all wandering witches, all spirits that might be looking for a baby to steal.
“It’s lucky the sweet little crow is still here,” said Terentia. She picked up the baby, who at once changed his coos into screams. “I expected to find only a lump of straw or some black-faced changeling.”
Tullia rose and walked out of the room in dignified silence. What a pity a witch wouldn’t fly in and turn Terentia’s face black. She peeped into Cicero’s study and found him staring at the ceiling. He at once shuffled some papers, then, recognising her, called her in.
“I want to be married soon,” she said, compressing her lips. “I can’t stand that woman who’s your wife.”
“But she’s your mother,” said Cicero, mystified.
“I don’t care. I didn’t choose her. I’m satisfied with you as father. When will I be married?”
“Next week.” He was glad to find her so amenable. “I’m just finishing all arrangements now.”
“It’s a pity one can’t get married without a husband,” mused Tullia. “But I suppose I’ll get used to him.” She pointed at the papers. “What are you doing all the time?”
“I’m making your father someone that you’ll be proud of. I’m going to be the greatest man that Rome ever produced. Others have led armies, but I shall be the first man who made the civic sphere a martial one and the martial sphere a civic one. The reign of peace is to begin. A new era …”
Tullia listened with seriously wrinkled brow. It was all very interesting.
11
Some decision was necessary. Cæsar felt that he could not go on for ever with a divided will. He received another message from Catalina: “Are you for us or against us?” on a slip of paper; and he knew from the emotion which the question evoked that he could not turn back. Catalina had stated the issues inescapably. There could be no neutrality. Did he declare for the future, or did he pit his trivial weight against the landslide? Let the decision be made. He had never taken an outright dangerous choice since the day he had defied Sulla; there had always been a fair margin of safety, however insolent some of his actions might have appeared. He knew that he could retreat. He had dared everything for Cornelia; now he would dare everything for Catalina. The love of a woman had been his world once; now he was submerged by a love of the world, a sense of the world’s suffering as imaged in Catalina’s bid for mastery. If he failed, he would at least have made the generous choice.
He wrote to Catalina, “I will meet you at Sempronia’s at dusk to-night. I am wholly with you.” Wings of exaltation threshed about him; he had made the right choice. He gave the note, sealed, to a slave whom he could trust, and waited till the dusk settled down over Rome. At last the insistent wails of space peopled with the spectral misery of a world were lulled. He was rocked peaceably in the cradle of mighty gathering forces. He saw the race perish and arise reborn before his eyes. The body of the race lay down in the grave, in the earth-womb, and came forth in the morning glorified with new life. The drama of the dying and resurrected Year was about to be made once more supremely concrete in the fate of Rome. What must arrive was no mere redistribution of power but a completely new concentration and responsibility. Whence but from the revolutionary movement made coherent by Catalina could the new impulse come? The surface-whirls of confusion and bloodlust did not matter. What mattered was the passionate need of growth uttering itself through the movement, through the dedication of Catalina.
At dusk Cæsar set out for Sempronia’s house, exalted and confident. He was submitting, not to Catalina, but to Rome.
He knew Sempronia slightly, but was aware that Catalina used her house as a rendezvous on account of its nearness to the Forum. She welcomed him with subdued courtesy, and he wondered at the stories that circulated about her. He sought to stare down her modest gaze, but retired baffled. She in turn was searching his face. She had not believed that he would join, and she feared that he was setting a trap; he was a cold-hearted amiable person who thought only of his own ends. Rather like herself, she considered.
