CHAPTER L

L

I stayed like that, cuddled up inside myself until late noon. Sheltered within that piercing lacerating cold, in spite of that heap of furs on top of me, alien to hunger and other needs. I obviously refused Cornelia’s visit. I did not even want to know anything about Marcia. How lonely my existence would be from then on….apart from the fact that, like a piece of furniture, I was bound to be moved out, into that domus, whose lecti must still keep traces of your body juices. Nevertheless, today was Anna Perenna’s feast, on which all the years which span from my birth to the moment that I had to become a loyal matron, the whole family –Lucius Calpurnius, Rutilia …. Oh Gods..Rutilia… my brother and friends would go to the temple for the celebration. It always used to be a day of hope, freshness and serene joy, according to the promise of life renewal that day really meant. That intense mixture of freshly-cut flowers and incense perfume… the same scents that seemed to get through my skin pores and nostrils, blocking my breath and finally letting out that tide of wild tearing which dragged me away, depriving me of that intangible thing within myself that might have defended me from fateful prostration for so long… It had to be Lucius Calpurnius Piso himself who found me like that, reddened-faced and heavy-breathed. ..Why, for the first time in his life, should he have entered my cubiculum with no previous warning, while, in scared puzzlement, I hastily covered my naked body, still dirty with your seed and my own secretions? I grew as pale as his wax-like face, noticing him somehow crooked, leaning on the entrance of the room in dismay… My eyes began questioning him…. I understood that, like me, he was too weak to cry or moan as he would have wanted to.

–My child…

He rushed towards me, sinking his head on the furs. I felt him convulsing slightly. Maybe you had already told him about what had happened between us that morning.

–…Twenty and three….

–….Twenty-three stabs… one by each of those senators, including that Decimus Brutus, who he had even included in his will!

His voice, which had become unrecognizable, made a pause to take a breath and go on.

–….Servilia’s son himself….

Gods…no…my Portia….

–… Brutus’ brother-in-law…Even Cornelius Cinna …His former brother-in-law, the brother of that whose love made him defy Sulla himself!

He could not go on speaking. Like myself a while before, he noisily collapsed on my furs while the serfs crowded at the entrance of the cubiculum, more alarmed by all his shriek invading the peristylium than by what had just been known in Rome. The man  whose seed could have rooted in my womb today was lying in a puddle of blood inside Curia Pompeiana…. I cautiously took my naked arms out of the fur cover and held him, sharing his thundering sobs, letting my tears damp his almost white hair, away from my own being, flowing into abandonment….

–Calpurnia, my little girl, Calpurnia…

Cornelia’s broken dismaying voice was hanging over my sightless eyes. I let myself be sheltered by her motherly embrace whereas another female hand, Marcia’s, took mine in silence with that complicity which would suit to a woman who has also suffered her man’s untimely loss, at the same time as she caressed my sweat-damped hair, keeping her head next to mine and suddenly ageing Cornelia’s.

The sun was about to set when the cart arrived at Domus Publica. It was my father, helped by Cornelia, Marcia and Marcius Philippus, who managed to arrange it all and give orders to your personal physician so that he would wash and tidy…the body. I was not allowed to see it .Neither would I be given any further detailed explanation about how the wounds had been made until days after. It turned out to be quite a wise decision. Otherwise, I would not have survived the fact of watching you like that, all stabbed through, with those torn-out genitals and face…. Nobody apart from our families came to see us that night, which I spent embracing my father, Cornelia and Marcia… To say the truth, why should I wish to see anyone?

–He worries me…Antonius.

Cornelia, absent-looking like a sibyl, broke the silence. Everyone’s amazed eyes gave her a questioning look. Everyone’s….except mine.

–Why wasn’t he inside the Curia?

My father watched her, assenting. A serf came in the middle of the night and whispered something to him. Yes, there really seemed to be some Sibyl-like stuff about her….

–Marcus Antonius has come to give his respects. – Lucius Calpurnius announced.

And there he was. Massive, conveniently sorrowful-looking, wearing a toga under which a bulging cuirass could be seen. I cannot remember the words he told me. I was not even able to pay enough attention….

–My child… Marcus wants to access to your husband’s documents and money…

He spoke slowly, looking straight into my eyes… Yes, my father was aware that my faculties were fatefully diminished that day…But…. Why didn’t he do anything? Why on earth could he consent that scoundrel to take it all? I think that I was sure that there must have been a misunderstanding about what had happened that morning and that the day after you would return home to clear things up….

Not only did Antonius take that chest in which you kept your small treasure, so to call it, with your letters and bundles but also your will, which my father had to fetch from the Vestals’ house I think that my friends and I shared the same shivering while seeing him take charge

 of everything that you had controlled by yourself only a few hours before with my own father’s condescension. However, I would not be aware of all of this until a few days after. I still had the whole night in front of me. The next dawning, under the influence of those brewings which Cornelia was a master at, I would make an effort to recover all that life that, like yours, had been taken away from me in the morning of Anna Perenna ‘s Day in the year 709 a.u.c.

CHAPTER XLIX

                                                                     XLIX.

–Calpurnia...

Never before had my name been pronounced with such a harshness that woke me from that sleep in which I had sunk, dirty and exhausted... I sat up in distress, impulsively covering my naked body. Those eyes that were me were not a husband’s anymore. I watched you while I felt my tongue dry up.

–Calpurnia.. I’m off for the Senate... Afterwards, I’m staying with my troops until we set off for Parthia...

Your cold hard voice was blocking my breath.

–....No, don’t worry about your position or economical situation. If you are discreet, you can stay here until you can manage to settle down in my domus on the other side of the river...

You finally got aware of my puzzlement.

–Calpurnia ....Calpurnia... how on earth...Oh, damned Lucius Calpurnius! I always knew that I should only have a business rapport with him....

I felt my eyes wilder and wilder, on the verge of suffocation. Gods... what? Your sharpened eyes, grey like daggers, kept controlling me.

–In any case, I don’t even blame you...He...Always he... His intelligence exceeds human cunning, so it enables him to defeat all of us. Why didn’t I feel it then, when, being a quaestor in Gades, I knew he was still alive and had not missed any information about me through the years? Yes...there’s no doubt. In the same way as he once intended that I should owe him my own glory thanks to that clemency he showed when he once spared my life... Gods, clemency!

Some sort of sardonic laughter invaded the cubiculum. Ecastor, the serfs! No, you did not care anymore...

– What an irony, that he should dare boasting on such a virtue which, by the way, he did not use up when he signed so many bloody proscriptions! Yes, now, once again he seems to be determined to save my life and, simultaneously, gain absolute ascendancy over the Pontifex Maximus’ discreet, virtuous, most honest wife, my greatest pride as a man…. This would be his greatest legacy, according to himself. To deprive Rome of the evolution that it must experience form now on…. No, certainly, since he was not a Dictator Perpetuus, I should not have the right to it, either…Nor to be proclaimed rex…

 

 

Suddenly, silence sprang up. You had eventually realized that your unusual voice might be being listened to by those who ought not to. I saw you deeply inhale more than once while I remained awaiting, unable to proffer any words. My breathing seemed to

become steady again.

– Calpurnia… I was trying to convince Decimus Brutus of that foolish thing you had forced me to promise. Maybe inspired by some wicked skills you may have been taught…. Obviously, my kinsman considered them what they really are, brainless tricks, proper of such a weak mind as yours. But I was still blurred by that bewilderment and exhaustion you had deliberately aroused on me. I could never have imagined that you would even turn to forcing me to take pleasure on you in order to find your purposes…. Perchance… have you been instructed on this, too?

My suffocation came back. I did not even have the strength to shed tears or sob.

–…. I was beginning to wake up from that lethargy in which you had induced when, suddenly, a serf came in to tell me that a noble Roman wished an urgent private meeting. The slave’s strange, almost scared look prompted me to leave Decimus Brutus and welcome the newly-comer in the room on the other side of the atrium. That man was apparently slightly older than I, dressed like an aruspex, with that look, blue and transparent, ravishing away all that I might be thinking about, scrutinizing each corner of my inner self… I recognized those eyes, as well as his strangely expressive, slender translucent hands…. “Caesar, listen to everything you wife may warn you”…Why should I have remained there, almost gelid, with no capacity to respond for a few minutes? Perhaps because I thought he had died, even though I had had the feeling that he might still be alive when I decided to spare the temple of Venus Marina in Gades from any fine after the battle of Munda. Besides, I would have never dared going to meet him…but I could never think he might be in Rome. He told me what he thought I ought to know, including that story of your shared ancestry and that both of you come from the race of the sibyls, those who were born from lineages dating back to the time of Etruscan kings, when there were frequent couplings of simple human beings and the so-called nymphs. Gods, Calpurnia! I hope all that mad nonsense has not spread around Domus Publica…..

I saw you quiver ostensibly.

–

He was making such a clear, cool-headed account that he even convinced me. Lucius Cornelius’ own mother, who was thought to have been dead since his childhood, had really got away from her husband’s cruelty with Lucius’ twin brother… who accidentally met his sibling back when this was working as a spy for Marius beyond Cisalpine Gaul and trying to make believe he was Gallic…. Lucius Cornelius did not clear up what had really happened .The fact is that he was somehow blackmailed, according to his words. That is, his brother would replace him, adopting his identity, which, in fact was that which would correspond to him as a noble patrician of such an ancient though impoverished lineage, as soon as Lucius Cornelius would set off for the

Eastern provinces at the time of Cinna’s consulship. That Lucius Cornelius Sulla who returned to Rome and Pompeius met, worn-out, bruised-skinned, deprived of that Apollonian brightness of his, was his Gallic brother whereas the Lucius who I met as a small child was already devoted to depurate his body and mind and instructing himself on the arcane wisdom, as he calls it, on the other side of our sea.

Though I felt unable to utter any sound, you noticed my avid look and, then, went on.

–What could he get in return? Supposing he was blackmailed, death-threatened or maybe….menaced about something which could destroy that dignitas he was so obsessed to restore, it’s obvious he must have accepted certain conditions. What’s more, being aware that someone else is forging a place in history for you while you keep yourself hidden and safe, training and taking care of your body and mind so that the passing of years seems not to leave any traces on them, could be tempting for such a unique person as he is, Unlike so many other human beings.…. How did Lucius Cornelius manage to make his substitute well-prepared enough to face all that task? To start with, he discovered that his mother had made sure that his brother could grant himself a suitable education for a Roman. It seems that an eques from Cisalpine Gaul took them to live with him. However, the twins’ reunion might not have been fortuitous. I think that not even Lucius Cornelius himself is sure about it. The real thing is that he made his brother pretend to be a slave so as to have him by his side and, thus, make him learn about with political skills. … Which of them was the real maker of Sulla’s proscriptions, I wonder?

You shrugged, absent-looking.

–They both kept in touch in the distance… How much did Cornelia know about it while his father was still alive? The truth is that for many years there was a rapport between the wise man from the temple of Venus Marina in Gades and Lucius Cornelius Sulla’s daughter, intensified by cunning Cornelia’s fruitful commercial exchanges, long before you remained alone in Domus Publica…. He also told me that he wouldn’t have come here to see me if he hadn’t learnt that Decimus Brutus was making his way here so as to convince me to go to the Senate today… Gods…Calpurnia… How on earth have you let yourself be bewitched by this being who is beyond time and what’s purely human…What could you have got in return?

Your voice had become chocked, but it was still cold, aloof, belonging to that stranger who you had started to be for good. No, I could not mention all that story about my need to have a place of my own and my refusal to let myself be buried under the solitude of Domus Publica. Miraculously, I felt my voice alive again.

–Caesar… I had to save you… Just remember I explained it to you yesterday….The Egyptian….

–So do you think I can trust someone who has let herself be infatuated by that… character…? At least Cleopatra is much too intelligent not to be deceived… and has dignity…

I saw that the coldness in your eyes was growing into the previous night’s fear. Yes, they had discovered that violent, mischievous heavy force which, beyond my painful desire, was driving me to generate some kind of life flowing beyond myself, addressed to possess the Egyptian’s being, poisoning her fate… Almost sobbing, I yearned that she could be despoiled of that child who was her main pride and that her womb went barren…that her power could vanish and she should be forced to search for a shelter in her madness and emptiness. Yes, Cleopatra knew that, even against my own will, she was already damned one way or another….You were aware of it, my husband.

I saw you hurry out, perhaps relieved as this unexpected circumstance had allowed you to solve this situation, which had meant quite a serious moral controversy for you for so many years, even since long before going to Alexandria… I stayed there, sitting on my lectus, petrified among those furs, unsuccessfully trying to melt that ice which was making my body crackle inside my bones and head. Unable to utter a single sound, to lie down…. Maybe it was that alien force, which was poisoning me instead of heading for reborn Isis….