CHAPTER XLV

XLV

There was no doubt that my letters showed some kind of paradoxical limitation which, however, could turn into boldness and even alarming imprudence as a result of this helpless hopelessness. No, no more should Calpurnia be thought of as that discreet exemplary wife of long ago... I realized that it was impossible to expect anything else of someone who your eyes did not see as a true uxor anymore....Neither you nor most Romans, despite the mistrusting puzzlement that the Egyptian inspired to a large amount of the population. Would it be worthwhile, that I still went on keeping that extreme discretion, mainly at that time when most patrician ladies were utterly alien to Republican matrons’ prudence? No, there was no choice. I had to prevent you from being destroyed by that spectre-like shadow, even if I had to abandon my customary silent cautiousness.

The Ides of February and the beginning of Parentalia were approaching. This year the single thought of what would imminently happen deeply shook that inner being of mine, which had been showing me some kind of reality beyond the tangible world for so many years....

“It is similar to what Samhain festivity means for both Gallic people and Britons. It is the memory of those who no longer live among us and are believed to dwell in another world which is her but we cannot see. They think that the night before Kalendae Novembris both realms join and those mounds which lead to the subtle world open up and send out all those beings that are made of a substance which is alien to all we know. One of the four great annual celebrations, as it celebrates the end of the year and the beginning of the dark season... which is no more than the other side of the bright fertile season, which is hailed on the other three festivals: that which is held on Kalendae Februarii, exalting the awakening of the earth and flowering, that on Kalendae Maii, which celebrates physical sensuousness and fertility and Kalendae Sextilis, which symbolises the harvest. Like Janus, the Goddess is no more than a double-faced reality, in which fruitful life and barren death are but opposite sides...anyway, just as in Rome, Calpurnia, though this could seem unbelievable to you. Why else should our Lupercalia, on which fertility has been prayed for since a remote age, have been celebrated amidst the memory of our dead kinsmen for hundreds of years. Never forget this, Calpurnia....”

No, how could I have ever taken this into account? This year the contrast between fruitfulness and death was something which seemed to hold on to my thoughts and event on my physical being, as if making a desperate effort to scare away this limited

nature of mine –barren, failed, just like a messenger of Death –through whatever thing that might conjure that up, like those magical rites which were held by Gaul priestesses and you informed Romans about...Blodwynn? Why could I almost perceive the Sibyl’s motherly echo clinging onto my skin pores and the slight trembling of my fibres? That voice of real fruitfulness and. simultaneously, the laments of those unearthly female beings of whom I had been told – maybe by Blodwynn or Kornel – and who were Death’s heralds among Britons There were still women who would let themselves be flogged by Lupercian priests’ februa as a last desperate attempt to do away with their infertility....

–Can you believe it? Antonius himself, that lecherous piece of meat, running there, all naked except for his loan cloth.... What would Romulus ...or Apius Claudius the Blind have said? What would the Gracci themselves have made of it? Believe me, Calpurnia... One more sign which makes us see that our old Republic is on the verge of being shrouded. You see, the turn of events should not seem strange to us at all...

Portia... Oh, Gods....Portia.

–It also worries me that he had not let himself be seen for a long time, Calpurnia. As if intending to hide away for some sort of...who knows what kind of plotting!

Cornelia had grown paler. I could clearly see that she knew –or felt – something .

–Fortunately, Portia’s father won’t see how things turn out... Neither will Bibulus. Who knows if, in spite of all, they were the only loyal Romans of our time?

Yes, but Marcus Portius Cato was still present, ghost-like, between his daughter and his nephew and son-in-law, Marcus Iunius Brutus.. Might they be his instruments beyond his physical absence? Who knows if any previous year, perhaps in more than one occasion, I had unconsciously desired to stand there, in front of one of the Lupercii and let myself be flogged until my blood could splash all over my palla , feeling fertility running through myself in some sort of unknown delirium .Had I ever felt that before? Why was I able to evoke it so vividly? No...My skin shrank as I caught my breath?....Yes, I had felt it on those occasions when my fibres and vital organs seemed to dematerialize into invisibility, sliding into ...another world? Could it be that dimension which was said to be inherited from those beings that were woven with a subtlest substance, alien to human solidity?