The Venus Throw (31 page)

Behind me I heard a stranger cry out, “By Venus! I wager everything and put my trust in the goddess of love!” Then a clatter of dice, and then the same voice, exultant amid groans of defeat: “The Venus Throw! The Venus Throw! It conquers all!”

Out in the street I breathed the fresh air and looked up at a clear sky spangled with stars. “Why such a rush to get me out of that place?”

“I couldn’t leave you behind to tell them everything I’d just told you . . . about her.”

“I wouldn’t have done that. And please, stop calling me Gratidianus. My name—”

“I know what you call yourself. But for me you’ll always have another name, the one I give you. Just as she has another name. In case I should write a poem about you.”

“I can’t imagine what sort of poem that would be.”

“No?

Gratidianus thinks he’s clever, and he must be,
because Lesbia loves him, far better than Catullus
and all his clan—”

“Stop, Catullus. You’re too drank to know what you’re saying.”

“A man is never too drunk to make a poem.”

“Just too drunk to make sense. I think I’d better find my way home.” I looked up the alley. Beyond the lurid glow cast by the phallic lamp above the door, the way was swallowed up by an unreassuring darkness.

“I’ll walk you home,” offered Catullus.

A drunken poet for a bodyguard! What would happen if Caelius and his friends decided to come after us? “Quickly then. Do you know another route? Where no one would think to follow?”

“I know every path leading to and from the Salacious Tavern. Follow me.”

He led me on a circuitous route, slipping between warehouses set so close that I had to walk sideways to get through, picking a way around trash heaps where rats scurried and squeaked, and finally ascending a steep footpath up the western slope of the Palatine. It seemed a good route for avoiding assassins, but rather treacherous for a man who had been drinking as much as Catullus. I expected him to fall and break his neck at any moment, taking me with him, but he attacked, the climb with only an occasional misstep. The climb seemed to sober him. His lungs were certainly strong enough. While I labored for breath, he had plenty left over to give vent to his thoughts.

“If only we could all become eunuchs!” he declared. “What man wouldn’t be happier?”

“I suppose we could become eunuchs, if we wanted.”

“Ha! The act is harder than you might think. I know, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. While I was in Bithynia, I took a journey to the ruins of old Troy, to find the place where my brother’s buried. So far from home! On the way back a stranger asked me if I’d like to see the initiation rites of the galli. He wanted money, of course. Took me to a temple on the slopes of Mount Ida. The priests wanted money, too. I felt quite the gawking tourist, dropping coins into all those eager hands, just another crass, thrill-seeking Roman looking for a taste of the ‘real’ East. They took me to a room so smoky with incense I could hardly see, and so loud with flutes and tambourines I thought I’d go deaf. The _rite was under way. The galli chanted and whirled in a weird dance, like fingers of the goddess keeping time. The young initiate had worked himself into a frenzy, naked, covered with sweat, undulating with the music. Someone put a shard of broken pottery into his hand—Samian pottery,’ the guide whispered in my ear, ‘the only kind sure to avoid a putrid wound.’ While I watched, the fellow turned himself into a gallus before my eyes. All by himself—no one helped him. It was quite a thing to see. Afterward, when the blood was running down his legs and he couldn’t stand any longer, the others swarmed around him, swaying, chanting, shrieking. The guide sniggered and poked me in the ribs and made a show of covering his halls. I ran out of the place in a panic.”

Catullus fell silent for a while. We reached the top of the path and entered the maze of dark, silent streets.

“Imagine the freedom,” Catullus whispered. “To leave the appetites of the flesh behind.”

“The galli have appetites,” I said. “They eat like men.”

“Yes, but a man eats and is done with it. The craving I’m talking about feeds on itself. The more it’s fed, the hungrier it grows.”

“A Roman controls his appetites, not vice versa.”

“Then perhaps we aren’t Romans any longer. Show me a man in Rome who’s larger than his appetites.”

I thought about this while we made our way through the winding, deep-shadowed, streets.

“But even castration can’t guarantee an end to passion,” Catullus resumed. “Look at Trygonion!”

“What about him?”

“Don’t you know where his name comes from? The famous epitaph by Philodemus?”

“Should I recognize that name?”

“Barbarian! Philodemus of Gadera. Probably the greatest living poet of the Greek tongue.”

“Oh,
that
Philodemus. An epitaph, you say?”

“Written years and years ago for a dead gallus called Trygonion. Can you follow the Greek?”

“I’ll translate in my head.”

“Very well:

Here lies that tender creature of ladylike limbs,
Trygonion, prince of the sex-numb emasculates,
Beloved of the Great Mother, Cybele,
He alone of the galli was seduced by a woman.
Holy earth, give to this headstone a pillow
Of budding white violets.

“That old poem is how
our
Trygonion got his name. I don’t remember what he was called before, something Phrygian and unpronounceable. One time, teasing him about his weakness for Lesbia, I called him our little Trygonion, the gallus who fell for a woman. The name stuck to Trygonion the way Trygonion sticks to Lesbia. I think of him whenever I consider castrating myself. It might do no good, you see. A useless gesture. Sometimes passion is stronger than flesh. Love can last beyond death, and in some rare instances a man’s weakness for beauty can even outlive his testicles.”

“Trygonion is that devoted to Lesbia?”

“He suffers as I suffer, but with one great difference.”

“Which is?”

“Trygonion suffers without hope.”

“And you?”

“While a man still has his balls, he has hope” Catullus laughed his peculiar, barking laugh. “Even slaves have hope, as long as they have their balls. But a gallus in love with a beautiful woman—”

“So much in love that he would do anything for her?”

“Any at all, without question.”

“So much in love that he might be blinded by jealousy?”

“Driven mad by it!”

“He could be dangerous. Unpredictable . . .”

“Not nearly as dangerous as Lesbia.” Catullus was suddenly giddy, trotting ahead of me and circling back, 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?”

T
he wrath of Achilles would pale beside the wrath of Bethesda.

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 smelting 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 of Gaius 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 polities, 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.