Pandora Page 9

  The Empire was the world. All that lay beyond was chaos and misery and struggle and strife. I was a soldier. I could fight. I dreamt I was putting on my armor. My brother said, “I am so relieved to discover you are a man, I always thought so.”

  I didn’t waken till the following morning.

  And then it was that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before.

  Note this. Because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.

  The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.

  I was alone. I went from room to room of this small house, banging upon the walls with my fists and crying with my teeth clenched, and whirling. There was no Mother Isis.

  There were no gods. Philosophers were fools! Poets sang lies.

  I sobbed and tore at my hair; I tore at my dress as naturally as if it had been a newborn custom. I knocked over chairs and tables.

  At times I felt a huge exhilaration, a freedom from all falsehoods and conventions, all means by which a soul or body can be held hostage!

  And then the awesome nature of this freedom spread itself out around me as if the house did not exist, as if the darkness knew no walls.

  Three nights and days I spent in this agony.

  I forgot to eat food. I forgot to drink water.

  I never lighted a lamp. The moon nearing her fullness gave enough light to this meaningless labyrinth of little painted chambers.

  Sleep was gone from me forever.

  My heart beat fast. My limbs clenched, then slackened, only to clench again.

  At times, I lay on the moist good Earth of the courtyard, for my Father, because no one had laid his body on the moist good Earth, as it should have been done, right after his death and before any funeral.

  I knew suddenly why this disgrace was so important, his body rent with wounds and not placed on the Earth. I knew the gravity of this omission as few have ever known the meaning of anything. It was of the utmost importance because it did not matter at all!

  Live, Lydia.

  I looked at the small leafy trees of the garden. I felt a strange gratitude that I had opened human eyes in this darkness on Earth long enough to see such things.

  I quoted Lucretius:

  “That which comes from Heaven ascends to Heaven”?

  Madness!

  Alas, as I said, I wandered, crawled, wept and cried for three nights and days.

  4

  INALLY, one morning, when the sun came spilling down through the open roof, I looked at the objects in the room and I realized I didn’t know what they were, or what they’d been made for. I didn’t know their common names. I was removed from their definitions. I didn’t even know this place.

  I sat up and realized I was looking at the Lararium, the shrine of the household gods.

  This was the dining room of course, and those were the couches, and there the glorious conjugal bed!

  The Lararium was a high three-sided shrine, a little temple with three pediments, and inside stood figures of old household gods. No one in this profane city had even taken them away with the dead woman.

  The flowers were dead. The fire had simply gone out. No one had quenched it with wine, as should have been done.

  On hands and knees I crawled in my torn dress around the garden of the peristyle, gathering flowers for these gods. I found the wood and made their sacred fire.

  I stared at them. I stared for hours. It seemed I would never move again.

  Night fell. “Don’t sleep,” I whispered. “Keep watch with the night! They wait for you by dark, those Egyptians! The moon, look, it’s almost full, only a night or so from being full.”

  But the worst of my agony had passed and I was exhausted, and sleep rose to embrace me. Sleep rose as if to say, “Care no more.”

  The dream came.

  I saw men in gilded robes. “You will be taken now in the sanctum.” But what’s there? I didn’t want to see. “Our Mother, our beloved Mother of Sorrows,” said the Priest. The paintings on the walls were rows upon rows of Egyptians in profile, and words made of pictures. Myrrh burned in this place.

  “Come,” said those who held me. “All the impurities have gone from you now, and you will partake of the sacred Fount.”

  I could hear a woman crying and moaning. I peeped into the great room before I entered it. There they were, the King and the Queen on their thrones, the King still and staring as in the last dream, and the Queen struggling against her golden fetters. She wore the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. And pleated linen. Her hair was not a wig but real plaits. She cried and her white cheeks were stained in red. Red stained her necklace and her breasts. She looked soiled and ignominious.

  “My Mother, my goddess,” I said. “But this is an abomination.”

  I forced myself to wake.

  I sat up and I laid my hand on the Lararium, and looked at the spiderwebs in the trees of the garden, made visible by the climbing sun.

  I thought I heard people whispering in the ancient Egyptian tongue.

  I was not going to allow this! I would not go mad.

  Enough! The only man I had ever loved, my Father, said, “Live.”

  It was time for action. To get up and get going. I was suddenly all strength and purpose.

  My long nights of mourning and weeping had been equivalent to the initiation in the Temple; death had been the intoxicant; comprehension had been the transformation.

  It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.

  The facts of my predicament warranted action.

  I poured out a cup of wine, and took it with me to the front gate.

  The city seemed quiet. People walked to and fro, casting their eyes away from a half-dressed, ragged woman in her vestibule.

  At last a workman trudging under his burden of bricks.

  I thrust forth the wine. “I have been ill for three days,” I said. “What of the death of Germanicus? How goes it in the city?”

  The man was so grateful for the wine. Labor had made him old. His arms were thin. His hands shook.

  “Madam, thank you,” he said. He drained the cup, as if he could not stop himself. “Our Germanicus was laid out in the public square for all to see. How beautiful he was. Some compared him to the great Alexander. People could not determine. Had he been poisoned or not? Some said Yes, some said No.

  “His soldiers loved him. Governor Piso, thank the gods, is not here and dares not come back. Germanicus’s wife, the gracious Agrippina, has the ashes of Germanicus in an urn she carries next to her breast. She sails for Rome, seeking justice for Tiberius.”

  He handed me the cup. “I humbly thank you.”

  “The city is as usual again.”

  “Oh, yes, what could stop this glorified marketplace?” he declared. “Business goes on as always. The loyal soldiers of Germanicus keep the peace, waiting for justice. They will not let the murderous Piso return, and Sentius gathers to himself here all who served under Germanicus. The city is happy. The flame burns for Germanicus. If there is war, it won’t be here. Don’t worry.”

  “Thank you, you have helped me marvelously much.”

  I took the cup, locked the gate, shut the door and went into action.

  Nibbling on enough bread to give me strength, and murmuring aloud the common sense of Luretius, I surveyed the house. It had a large luxurious bath on the right side of the courtyard. Full of light. Water flowed steadily from the seashells of the nymphs into the plastered basin, and the water was fine. There was no need to light a fire for it.

  In the bedchamber were my clothes.

  Roman dresses were simple, as you know, just
long shifts or tunics, and we wore two or three of them, plus an outdoor cover-up tunic, the stola, and finally the palla, or mantle, which hung to the ankles and belted below the breasts.

  I chose the finest tunics, composing three layers of gossamer silk, and then a brilliant red palla that covered me from head to toe.

  In all my life, I had never had to put on my own sandals. This was hysterically funny and annoying!

  All my toilet articles had been laid out on tables which held burnished mirrors. What a mess!

  I sat down in one of the many gilded chairs, pushed the burnished metal mirror close, and tried to work with the paints as my slaves had always done.

  I managed to darken my eyebrows, but my horror of the painted Egyptian eyes stopped me. I rouged my lips, put some white powder on my face, but that was it. I couldn’t attempt powdering my arms, as would have been done for me in Rome.

  I don’t know what I looked like. Now I had to braid this damned hair, and I managed it, and fixed the braids in a big coil on the back of my head. I used enough pins for twenty women. Dragging down the loose curls around my face, on my forehead and cheeks, I saw in the mirror a Roman woman, modest and acceptable, I thought, her brown hair parted in the middle, her eyebrows black and her lips rosy red.

  Gathering up all this drapery was the biggest nuisance. I attempted to match length with length. I tried to get the silk stola straight and then belt it tightly beneath my breasts. I mean, all this folding, all this drapery and fastening. I’d always had slave girls around me. Finally with two undertunics and a long, fine red stola, I snatched up a silk palla, a very large one, fringed and decorated all over with gold.

  I put on rings, bracelets. But I intended to hide under this mantle as much as possible. I could remember my Father cursing every day of his life that he had to wear the toga, the official outer garment of the highborn Roman male. Well, only prostitutes wore togas. At least I didn’t have to cope with that.

  I headed straight for the slave markets.

  Jacob was right about the population here. The city was filled with men and women of all nations. Many women walked in pairs, arm in arm.

  Loose Greek cloaks were entirely acceptable here, and so were long exotic Phoenician or Babylonian gowns, both for men and women. Long hair among the men was common, as were heavy beards. Some women went about in tunics no longer than a man’s. Others were completely veiled, revealing only the eyes, as they walked, accompanied by guards and servants.

  The streets were cleaner than they might have been in Rome, the sewage flowing to wider gutters in the center and more swiftly to its destination.

  Long before I reached the Forum, or the central plaza, I had passed three different doors in which rich courtesans stood arguing sarcastically over price with wealthy young Greeks and Romans.

  One said, as I passed, to a handsome young man, “You want me in bed? You’re dreaming. Any of the girls you can have, as I told you. If you want me, go home and sell everything you own!”

  Rich Romans in their full togas stood at the corner wine shops, and respected my quick glance away with a simple nod as I passed.

  Pray none of them would recognize me! It was not a likely thing, by any means, and we were so far from Rome, and I had lived so long in my Father’s house, happily reprieved by him from banquets and suppers, and even ceremonial gatherings.

  The Forum was far larger than I had remembered from my brief glimpse. When I came to the edge of it and beheld the huge square flooded with sun, flanked on all sides with porticoes or Temples or Imperial buildings, I was amazed.

  In the canopied markets, everything was for sale, silversmiths grouped together, the weavers in their own place, the silk merchants in a row, and I could see down the side street that came in to my right that it was dedicated to the sale of slaves—the better slaves, who might never have to go to an auction block.

  Far away I saw the high masts of the ships. I could smell the river. There stood the Temple of Augustus, its fires burning, its uniformed Legionnaires in lazy readiness.

  I was hot and anxious, because my mantle kept slipping, in fact, all this silk seemed to slip and to slide, and mere were many open wine gardens where women gathered in groups, chatting. I could have found a place near enough to someone to have a drink.

  But I had to have a household. I had to have loyal slaves.

  Now, in Rome, of course I had never gone to a slave market. I would never have had to do such a thing. Besides, we had so many families of slaves on our land in Tuscany and in Rome that we seldom if ever bought a new slave. On the contrary, my Father had a habit of inheriting the decrepit and wise from his friends, and we had often teased my Father about the Academy, which did nothing in the slaves’ garden but argue about history.

  But now I had to act the shrewd woman of the world. I inspected every quality household slave on display, quickly settled upon a pair of sisters, very young and very frightened that they were going to be auctioned at noon and go to a brothel. I sent for stools and we sat together.

  We talked.

  They came from a small fine family household in Tyre; they’d been born slaves. They knew Greek and Latin well. They spoke Aramaic. They were angelic in their sweetness.

  They had immaculate hands. They demonstrated every skill I required. They knew how to dress hair, paint a face, cook food. They rattled off recipes for Eastern dishes of which I’d never heard; they named different pomades, rouges. One of them flushed with fear, and then said, “Madam, I can paint your face for you, and very quickly and perfectly!”

  I knew this meant I had made a mess of the job.

  I also knew that, coming from a small household, they were far more versatile than our slaves at home.

  I bought them both, the answer to their prayers; I demanded clean tunics of modest length for both of them, got the tunics, made of blue linen, though they weren’t very fine, then found a roaming merchant with an armful of pallae. I brought each sister a blue mantle. They were in such happiness. They were reticent and wanted their heads covered.

  I had no doubt of them. They would have died for me.

  It didn’t occur to me that they were starving until, while searching for other slaves, I heard a nasty slave dealer remind an impudent educated Greek that he would get no food until he was sold.

  “Horrors,” I said. “You girls, you’re probably hungry. Go to the cookshop in the Forum. Look down the street. See there, the scattering of benches and tables.”

  “Alone?” they said in dismay.

  “Listen, girls. I have no time to feed you like birds from my hand. Don’t look any man in the eye; eat and drink what you want.” I gave them a seemingly shocking amount of money. “And don’t leave the cookshop till I come for you. If a man comes to you, pretend to be in terror, bow your heads and protest as best you can that you don’t speak his language. If worst comes to worst, go to the Temple of Isis.”

  They ran together down the narrow street towards the distant banquet, their mantles such a beautiful blue as they ballooned in the breeze that I can see it even now, the color of the sky streaking through the tight sweaty crowds beneath the jumble of canopies. Mia and Lia. Not hard to remember, but I could not tell them apart.

  A low derisive laughter surprised me. It was the Greek slave who had just been threatened with starvation by his Master.

  He said to his Master:

  “All right, starve me. And then what will you have to sell? A sickened and dying man, instead of an unusual and great scholar.”

  Unusual and great scholar!

  I turned and looked at the man. He sat on a stool and did not rise for me. He wore nothing but a filthy loincloth, which was plain stupidity on the part of the merchant, but this neglect certainly revealed that this slave was one very handsome man, beautiful in face, with soft brown hair and long almond-shaped green eyes, and a sarcastic expression to his pretty mouth. He was maybe thirty years old, perhaps a little younger. He was fit for his age, as Greeks lik
e to be, having a sound musculature.

  His brown hair was filthy, had been hacked off, and around his neck by a rope was the most wretched small board I ever beheld, crowded with tiny cramped letters in Latin.

  Pulling up the mantle again, I stepped up very close to his gorgeous naked chest, a little amused by his audacious stare, and tried to read all this.

  It seemed he could have taught all philosophy, all languages, all mathematics, could sing everything, knew every poet, could prepare whole banquets, was patient with children, had known military service with his Roman Master in the Balkans, could perform as an armed guard, was obedient and virtuous and had lived all his life in Athens in one house.

  I read this a bit scornfully. He glared at me impertinently when he saw this scorn. Impudently, he folded his arms just below this little plaque. He leaned back against the wall.

  Suddenly I saw why the merchant, hovering near, had not made the Greek rise. The Greek had only one good leg. The left leg below the knee was made of well-carved ivory, complete with carefully engraved foot and sandal. Perfect toes. Of course it had been pieced together, this fine ivory leg and foot, but in three proportionate sections, each girded with decorative work, and separate parts for the feet, nails defined and sandal straps exquisitely carved.

  I had never seen such a false limb, such a surrender to artifice rather than a meager attempt to imitate nature.

  “How did you lose your leg?” I asked him in Greek. No answer. I pointed to the leg. No answer.

  I asked again in Latin. Still no answer.

  The slave trader was rising on his toes in his anxiety and wringing his hands.

  “Mistress, he can keep records, run any business; he writes in perfect hand, keeps honest numbers.”

  Hmmm. So no mention of tutoring children? I did not look like a wife and mother. Not good.

  The Greek sneered and looked away. He said softly under his breath in piercing Latin that if I did spend money for him, I was spending it for a dead man. His voice was soft and beautiful, though weary and full of contempt, his enunciation unaffected and refined.