A Mist of Prophecies rsr-9 Read online

  And then it all came crashing down. After a skirmish with Milo's entourage on the Appian Way a few miles outside Rome, Clodius was murdered. Milo and Fausta were at the scene, and whether Milo literally bloodied his hands or not, he was blamed for the murder of his enemy. Angry rioters burned down the Senate House and demanded Milo's head. Pompey, called upon to keep order, put Milo on trial and did nothing to help him. The Best People washed their hands of him. Loyal to the end, Cicero took on Milo's defense, but his efforts were to no avail; attempting to give his oration, he was shouted down by the mob. Accompanied by a large band of hardened gladiators, Milo fled from Rome before the guilty verdict was announced and headed for the Greek city-state of Massilia, the destination of so many Roman political exiles.

  He left behind a fortune in property that was confiscated by the state, a bitterly disappointed wife who by all accounts was glad to see the last of him, and a hopelessly divided city. Looking back, it seemed to me that the murder of Clodius and the trial of Milo marked the last gasp of the dying Republic and the beginning of the end of the Roman Constitution. Certainly it had marked the end of Milo; even amid the turmoil of civil war, no one could doubt that Milo's career was over for good. When Caesar conquered Massilia, he had declared amnesty for all the Roman political exiles in the city, with the conspicuous exclusion of only one: Milo.

  Abandoned by Pompey, rebuffed by Caesar, beyond the help of Cicero, Milo had become the forgotten man of Roman politics.

  Now rumors were reaching the city that Milo had managed to escape from Massilia, despite the garrison of Caesar's soldiers, who had instructions to keep him there. Not only had he escaped, but he had managed to do so with the large band of gladiators who had accompanied him into exile.

  Even more bizarre than these rumors was the further assertion that Milo was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Marcus Caelius. Milo's entire career had been based on pandering to the interests of the most rigidly conservative clique among the Roman elite. The idea that he would join forces with Caelius, who had made himself the champion of wholesale revolution, was ludicrous. Or was it? In such times, old friendships and bonds of trust might count for more than differing political philosophies, and men as desperate as Milo and Caelius might take whatever allies they could get. What, after all, did Milo owe to the Best People or to Pompey? In the crisis that followed Clodius's murder, they had cast him aside like a hot coal.

  In my own household, all else was overshadowed by Bethesda's illness. Its prognosis and cure were as elusive as the whereabouts and future plans of Marcus Caelius. To pay for physicians, I borrowed more money from Volumnius. They examined Bethesda's tongue. They studied her stools. They poked and prodded her various parts. They prescribed this treatment and that, all of which cost money. I went further into debt. Nothing seemed to help. Bethesda had good days and bad days, but more and more often she kept to her bed.

  Her symptoms were obscure. There were no sharp pains, no visible rashes, no vomiting or foul excreta. She felt weak and out of sorts-"uncomfortable in my skin," she said. She was sometimes dizzy, sometimes short of breath. She had no faith in the physicians or their treatments. When she bit one of them for pinching her tongue too hard, I told the quack he was lucky to leave my house with all his fingers, and I decided to send for no more physicians.

  A household is not unlike a human body, with a head and a heart and a sense of well-being that depends on the harmony of its various parts. The disposition of my household changed from day to day, depending on Bethesda. Her bad days were bad days for everyone, full of gloom and foreboding. On her good days the household stirred with a cautious sense of hope. As time passed and bad days outnumbered good, hope receded, so that even the best days were tempered by a deep anxiety.

  To please Bethesda, I kept to the house as much as possible. For long hours I did little more than sit beside her in the garden, holding her hand while we reminisced. It was in Alexandria that I had found her. I had been a young man, footloose in the world. She had been a slave, hardly more than a child. At the first sight of her I was hopelessly smitten, as only a young man can be. I was determined to purchase her and make her my own, and I did. When I returned to Rome, I brought Bethesda with me. It was not until she became pregnant with Diana that I made her a free woman and married her so that my child would be born free. Why had I waited so long? Partly because I feared that such a drastic change in Bethesda's status would also throw our relationship out of balance; she already wielded quite enough power over me as my slave! But our marriage and the birth of our daughter had only strengthened the bond between us, and freedom had strengthened Bethesda's character in every way. Where before she had seemed willful, she became strong willed; where before she had seemed petulant, I came to see her as fiercely determined. Did these changes take place in Bethesda or merely in my perceptions of her? I couldn't say, and Bethesda was the last person to ask. Paradox and irony held no fascination for her.

  When we reminisced, it was not to remark about subtle states of mind or the way things changed but stayed the same. Our conversations served to remind one another of a vast, shared catalogue of people, places, and things. The mere summoning up of these memories brought us a shared pleasure.

  "Do you remember the beacon atop the Pharos lighthouse," she would ask, "and how we sat on the deck of the ship the night we sailed from Alexandria and watched it dwindle to nothing?"

  "Of course I remember. It was a warm night. Even so, you shivered, so I held you next to me."

  "I shivered because I was afraid to leave Alexandria. I thought that Rome would swallow me up."

  I laughed. "Do you remember how awful the food was, on that ship? Bread like bricks, salty dried figs-"

  "Nothing like our last meal in Alexandria. Do you remember-"

  "— the little shop on the corner that sold sesame cakes soaked with honey and wine? The memory makes my mouth water even now."

  "And the funny little woman who ran the shop? All those cats! Every cat in Alexandria came to her shop!"

  "Because she encouraged them," I said. "She put out bowls of milk. The day before we left, she showed us some kittens, and you insisted on smuggling one of those kittens on board the ship with you, even though I expressly forbade it."

  "I had to bring something of Alexandria with me. The Romans should have thanked me for bringing them a new deity! Imagine my surprise when we arrived and I saw not a single statue of a proper god anywhere in the whole city, no falcon-headed Horus or dog-headed Anubis-only images of ordinary men and women. I knew then that you had brought me to a very strange place indeed…"

  At some point we would both realize that we had had this exact conversation before, not once but many times over the years; it was like a ritual that once begun had to be pursued to its conclusion; and like most rituals its mere observance brought us a curious comfort. One memory would lead to another and another, like links in a chain that wound around and around us both, cinching us together at the very center of the time and space that encompassed our two lives.

  And then… the shadow of her illness would pass over Bethesda. The corners of her mouth would constrict. Her brow would furrow. Her hand would tighten, then loosen, in mine, and she would say that she was suddenly weary and light-headed and needed to lie down. I would draw a deep breath, and it would seem to me that the very air was thick with worry and repining.

  I began to feel like a prisoner in my own house. Small irritations grew into unbearable torments.

  Androcles and Mopsus drove me to distraction with their constant bickering. One day I yelled at them so sharply that little Androcles began to cry, whereupon Mopsus began to tease him, which drove me into such a fury that I barely restrained myself from striking him. Afterward I felt so ill that I had to lie down, and found myself wondering if I had fallen victim to Bethesda's complaint.

  Hieronymus, whose mordant wit had always amused me, began to strike me as a pretentious buffoon, always prattling on about Roman politics,
a subject about which he knew next to nothing. One night, losing my temper over some particularly sarcastic observation of his, I remarked on the prodigious quantities he was able to consume at every meal, at my expense. He turned pale, put down his bowl, and said that from that point onward he would take all his meals alone, after the family ate, dining upon our scraps. He left the room, and nothing I could say would persuade him to return. This was the man who had taken me into his home in Massilia, sharing everything he had with me.

  Davus, who had saved my life in Massilia, earned my wrath one day by knocking over a tripod lamp. Trying to pick it up, he tripped and stepped on it and damaged it even more. When he was done, all three of the bronze griffin heads were dented and the pole was bent. It was-or rather, had been-one of the most valuable objects remaining in the house, something I had counted on being able to sell if the direst need arose. I told him that his clumsiness had robbed the household of a month's worth of food.

  Even with Diana, I became short-tempered. I found myself arguing with her about her mother's illness and what to do about it. Our disagreements were over small things-whether Bethesda should drink hot beverages or cold ones, whether or not she should be kept awake during the day (so that she might sleep more soundly at night, I argued), whether to heed the advice of a physician who had told us that the blood of a sparrow would be beneficial to her-but the words we exchanged were sharp and bitter. I accused Diana of having inherited her mother's worst traits of stubbornness and wrong-headedness. In a cruel moment she accused me of caring less about her mother than she did. I was cut to the quick, and for several days would hardly speak to her.

  I looked to my son Eco for relief. Like Meto, he was my child by adoption. Unlike Meto, we had never had a falling-out of any sort, yet over the years we had grown apart. This was only natural; Eco had his own household. He also had his own livelihood, following in my footsteps, and although we had occasionally consulted one another professionally over the years, Eco had grown increasingly independent and kept his business and financial affairs to himself. Increasingly, he also kept his family to himself. Eco had married up, into an old but faded family desperate for fresh blood, the Menenii. His wife and Bethesda had never really gotten along.

  The afternoon I invited Eco and his brood to my house turned into a disaster. Menenia said something to offend Bethesda-some nonsense about the women of her family "staring down" illness rather then submitting to it-and Bethesda promptly retired to her bed. Eco's golden-haired, eleven-year-old twins, who took after their mother, took shameless advantage of Mopsus and Androcles, ordering them to fetch this and that. When Androcles muttered a remark about "losing their heads someday"-a bit of inflammatory rhetoric he had picked up in the Forum, no doubt-Eco was appalled and insisted that I punish the boy like the slave he was; and when I refused, he took his family home. Goaded by his brother, Androcles gloated about his escape, whereupon I finally did deliver a few sound thwacks to his back side. Everyone in the household went to bed miserable that night.

  In the past, there had always been someone to whom I could turn in troubled times, even though he was seldom present. Confused, unhappy, seeking solace, I would have locked myself away in my study, taken up my stylus, unlatched the cover of a spare wax tablet and rubbed it blank, and set about writing a letter to Meto. Knowing he might not read my words for many days-secretly fearing he might never read them, for he was a soldier and often in danger-I would nonetheless have set down my thoughts and feelings to share with my beloved son; and having done so, I would have felt a great relief and a lightening of my spirit. But now, by my own decree, that avenue was closed to me. In those dismal days, how bitterly I missed that source of solace!

  Oppressed by the uncertain state of the world, anxious about my debts, worried by Bethesda's illness and the discord in my household, aching from the loss of the son I had disowned-such was the state of my mind when I decided to escape the safe confines of my house and go off wandering one day.

  I had done much the same thing almost a month before, on the day I found myself at Cassandra's apartment and later witnessed Caelius's disappearing act in the Forum. But whereas on the previous occasion my feet had taken me straight to Cassandra's door, unwittingly or not, on this day I found myself taking a much longer walk as I trod a meandering course through the city. Having lived so long in Rome, knowing it so intimately, it was probably impossible for me literally to lose myself in the city. Nonetheless, I fell into a certain musing state of mind, forgetful of my bearings and direction and alert only to my immediate surroundings and the sensations they produced.

  It was a fine day for such a walk, typical of late Maius, sunny but not too hot. The charm of Rome was everywhere. At a quaint neighborhood fountain, water poured from the mouth of a gorgon into a deep trough from which women scooped brimming buckets. (Water, if nothing else, was still plentiful and free in Rome.) Just around the corner, a huge bronze phallus projecting from the lintel of a doorway proclaimed the presence of a neighborhood brothel. The sun happened to catch the phallus at such an angle that it cast a shadow onto the street so absurdly enormous that I laughed out loud. On the doorstep an uncommonly plump prostitute sat sunning herself like a cat. As I walked by, she opened her eyes to slits, and I believe I heard her literally purring. A little farther on, I came to a long alley fronted by continuous walls on either side; both walls were overgrown with blooming jasmine, and the smell was so heady that once I reached the end of the alley, I turned around and retraced my steps, just to see if the scent was as sweet going in the opposite direction.

  Every time I turned a corner, I was confronted by memories, sweet and bitter. I had lived so long in Rome that sometimes it seemed to me the city was a map of my own mind, its streets and buildings manifestations of my deepest memories.

  In this austere little house, now painted yellow but bright blue when I last entered the door, I had once comforted a grieving widow who summoned me to solve the murder of her husband-and it turned out that she herself was the murderer…

  Down that street a band of thieves, intent on cutting our throats, had once chased me and my slave Belbo-how I missed that faithful bodyguard! The two of us had escaped by ducking into a fountain and holding our breaths…

  I crested a hill and saw in the distance the terraces and wings of Pompey's vast mansion atop the Pincian Hill outside the city walls; an intervening haze of heat and dust imbued the place with a slightly unreal, floating quality, like a palace seen afar in a dream. When Pompey slept at night, so far from home, was this how he saw the house he had left behind? The last time I had seen Pompey-making his escape by ship from Italy-he had tried to strangle me with his bare hands. The memory made my throat constrict. At that very moment, was the so-called Great One alive or dead? Was he standing over the slain body of Caesar, listening to his soldiers declare him Master of the World-or was he just another mortal turned to ashes like so many before him, whose ferocious ambitions counted for nothing when the jaws of Hades opened to claim them?

  At the craggy base of the Capitoline Hill, I passed the gate of the private family cemetery where years ago I had met in secret with Clodia on the eve of Marcus Caelius's trial for murder. How I had been smitten by that mysterious, aloof, treacherous beauty! In all my life, Clodia had been the only woman who had ever tempted me to stray from Bethesda. Until now…

  No matter how circuitous the route, no matter how distracting or amusing or arousing or appalling the memories summoned up by each turning of a corner, my feet knew where they were leading me.

  When I arrived at the doorstep of her tenement, guarded by the dog who did not bark at my approach, was I surprised? A little. The part of me that desired her-totally, without question, beyond reason-had outfoxed the part of me that knew such a thing was impossible, improper, absurd. Absurdity, more than anything else, might have stayed me. A much older man hankering after a beautiful young woman inevitably presents a preposterous scene. I thought of every lecherous old fool I ha
d ever seen on the stage and cringed at the idea of making a comic spectacle of myself. Even assuming that my advances were welcomed and mutually desired, there were complications-not least the fact that the object of my desire might be as mad as everyone said, in which case, was I not equally mad to be pursuing her?

  As to the greatest complication of all-my companion and wife of many years, ailing and alone in her bed at home-I could not even bear to think of that. In the end, I was hardly thinking at all as I found myself propelled forward by some mechanism of the body far removed from conscious thought.

  If she had not been in her room, or if Rupa had been there, perhaps things might have turned out very differently. But she was there, and she was alone. I pulled back the curtain, unannounced and without warning, expecting to give her a start. Instead, she slowly turned her face in my direction, sat up on the pallet, and rose to her feet. As she slowly walked toward me, her eyes never left mine. She parted her lips and opened her arms. I let the curtain drop behind me. I think I let out a little cry, like a child overwhelmed by an unfamiliar emotion, as her lips met mine and covered them.

  XII

  The morning after my visits to Antonia and Cytheris, I again rose early. Bethesda stirred and spoke a little, but remained in bed. She had almost entirely stopped eating, and this, even more than her lethargy, was beginning to worry me. Her face had become gaunt, her eyes vacant. The powerful will that had ruled my household for so many years seemed to be seeping out of her little by little, leaving only a shell behind.