Roma Eterna Read online

  But no, no chance of that, a guide that she has hired is waiting for us after lunch, an excitable little bald-headed Greek who is bubbling with eagerness to convey us into the realm of antiquity. So off we go into the torrid Pompeiian afternoon, full of wine and lust, and he marches us up one dry stony street and down the next, showing us the great sights of the city that the volcano engulfed eighteen hundred years ago in the second month of the reign of the Emperor Titus.

  It’s terribly fascinating, actually. We modern Romans have the illusion that we still continue to design our cities and houses very much in the style of the ancients; but in fact the changes, however gentle they may have been from one century to the next, have been enormous, and Pompeii—sealed away under volcanic debris eighteen centuries ago and left untouched until its rediscovery just a few decades ago—seems truly antique. Our bubbly Greek shows us the homes of the rich men with their sumptuous paintings and statuary, the baths, the amphitheater, the forum. He takes us into the sweaty little whorehouse, where we see vivid murals of heavy-thighed prostitutes energetically pleasuring their clients, and Lucilla giggles into my ear and lightly tickles the palm of my hand with her fingertip. I’m ready to conclude the tour right then and there, but of course it can’t be done: there is ever so much more to see, our relentless guide declares.

  Outside the Temple of Jupiter Lucilla asks me, all innocence, “What gods do you people worship in Britannia? The same that we do?”

  “The very same, yes. Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Mithras, Cybele, all the usual ones, the ones that you have here.”

  “Not special prehistoric pagan gods of your own?”

  “What do you imagine we are? Savages?”

  “Of course, darling! Of course! Great lovely golden-haired savages!”

  There is a gleam in her eye. She is teasing, but she means what she says, as well. I know she does.

  And she too has hit a vulnerable point; for despite all our Roman airs, we Britons are not really as much like these people as we would like to think, and we do have our own little lingering ancient allegiances. Not I myself, particularly; for such religious needs as I may have, Jupiter and Mercury are quite good enough. But I have friends at home, quite close friends, who sacrifice most sincerely to Branwen and Velaunus, to Rhiannon and Brighida, to Ancasta, to the Matres. And even I have gone—once, at least—to the festival of the Llewnasadh, where they worship Mercury Lugus under his old British name of Llew.

  But it is all too foolish, too embarrassing, worshiping those crude old wooden gods in their nests of straw. Not that Apollo and Mercury seem any less absurd to me, or Mithras, or any of the dozens of bizarre Eastern gods that have been going in and out of fashion in Roma for centuries, Baal and Marduk and Jehovah and the rest. They are all equally meaningless to me. And yet there are times when I feel a great vacancy inside of me, as I look up at the stars, wondering how and why they all were made, and not knowing, not having even the first hint.

  I don’t want to speak of such things with her. These are private matters.

  But her playful question about our local gods has wounded me. I am abashed; I am red-cheeked with shame at my own Britishness, which I have sensed almost from the start is one of the things about me, perhaps the most important thing, that makes me interesting to her.

  We leave the ruins, finally.

  We return to our hotel. We go to our room. Our suite has a terrace overlooking the excavations, a bedroom painted with murals in the Pompeiian style, a marble bath big enough for six. We undress each other with deliberate lack of haste. Lucilla’s body is strongly built, broad through the hips and shoulders, full in buttock and breast and thigh: to me an extremely beautiful body, but perhaps she inwardly fears that it lacks elegance. Her skin is marvelous, pale as fine silk, with the lightest dusting of charming pink freckles across her chest and the tops of her shoulders, and—an oddity that I find very diverting—her pubic hair is black as night, the starkest possible contrast to the fiery crimson hair higher up.

  She sees the direction of my gaze.

  “I don’t dye it,” she informs me. “It just came that way, I don’t know why.”

  “And this?” I say, placing my finger lightly on the tattoo of a pine tree that runs along the inside of her right thigh. “A birthmark, is it?”

  “The priests of Atys put it there, when I was initiated.”

  “The Phrygian god?”

  “I go to his temple, yes. Now and then. In springtime, usually.”

  So she has indeed played a little game with me.

  “Atys! A devotee of Atys of Phrygia! Oh, Lucilla, Lucilla! You had the audacity to tell me that you think Britons are savages because some of us worship pagan gods. While all the time you had the mark of Atys on your own skin, right next to your—your—”

  “To my what, love? Go on, say its name.”

  I say it in Britannic. She repeats it, savoring the word, so strange to her ears, so barbaric.

  “Now kiss it,” she says.

  “Gladly,” I tell her, and I drop to my knees and do. Then I sweep her up in my great barbaric arms and carry her to the bath, and lower her gently into it, and lie down beside her myself. We soak for a time; and then we wash each other, laughing; and then, still wet, we spring from the tub and race toward the bed. She is looking for savagery, and I give her savagery, all right, hearty barbarian caresses that leave her gasping in unintelligible bursts of no doubt obscene Roman; and what she gives me in return is the subtle and artful Roman manner of loving, tricks going back to Caesar’s time, cunning ripplings of the interior muscles and sly strokes of the fingertips that drive me to the edge of madness; and no sooner have we done with each other than we find ourselves beginning all over again.

  “My wild man,” she murmurs. “My Celt!”

  From Pompeii we proceed down the coast to Surrentum, a beautiful seaside town set amid groves of orange and lemon trees. We tell our driver to wait for us there for a couple of days, and take the ferry across to the romantic isle of Capreae, playground of Emperors. Lucilla has wired ahead to book a room for us at one of the best hotels, a hilltop place called the Punta Tragara that has, she says, a magnificent view of the harbor. She has been to Capreae before. With whom, I wonder, and how many times.

  Lucilla and I lie naked on the terrace of our room, reclining on thick sheepskin mats, enjoying the mild autumn evening. The sky and the sea are the same shade of gray-blue. It’s hard to tell where the boundary lies between the one and the other. Thickly wooded cliffs rise vertically from the water just across from us. Heavy-winged birds swoop through the dusk. In town, far below, the first lights of evening begin to shimmer.

  “I don’t even know your name,” I say, after a while.

  “Of course you do. It’s Lucilla.”

  “You know what I mean. The rest of it.”

  “Lucilla Junia Scaevola,” she says.

  “Scaevola? Related to the famous Consul Scaevola, by any chance?”

  I’m only making idle talk. Scaevola is hardly an uncommon Roman name, of course.

  “He’s my uncle Gaius,” she says. “You’ll get to meet him when we go up to Roma. Adriana adores him, and so will you.”

  Her casual words leave me thunderstruck. Consul Scaevola’s niece, lying naked here beside me?

  Gods! These girls and their famous uncles! Uncle Gaius, Uncle Cassius. I am in heady company. The whole Roman world knows Gaius Junius Scaevola—chosen again and again as Consul, three terms, perhaps four, the most recent time just a couple of years before. By all accounts he’s the second most powerful man in the realm, the great strong figure who stands behind the wobbly young Emperor Maxentius and keeps him propped up. My uncle Gaius, this one says, so very simply and sweetly. I’ll have quite a lot to tell my father when I get back to Cornwall.

  Consul Scaevola’s niece rears up above me and dangles her breasts in my face. I kiss their pink patrician tips and she drops down on top of me like one of those fierce swooping birds descending
on its prey.

  In the cool of the morning we take a long hike up one of the hills behind town to the Villa Jovis, the Imperial palace that has been there since the time of Tiberius. He used to have his enemies thrown from the edge of the cliff there.

  Of course we can’t get very close to it, since it’s still in use, occupied by members of the Imperial family whenever they visit Capreae. Nobody seems to be in residence right now but the gates are heavily guarded anyway. We can see it rising grandly from the summit of its hill, an enormous pile of gleaming masonry surrounded by elaborate fortifications.

  “I wonder what it’s like in there,” I say. “But I’ll never know, I guess.”

  “I’ve been inside it,” Lucilla tells me.

  “You have?”

  “They claim that some of the rooms and furnishings go all the way back to Tiberius’s reign. There’s an indoor swimming pool with the most absolutely obscene mosaics all around it, and that’s where he’s supposed to have liked to diddle little boys and girls. But I think it’s all mostly a fake put together in medieval times, or even later. The whole place was sacked, you know, when the Byzantines invaded the Western Empire six hundred years ago. It’s pretty certain that they carried the treasures of the early Emperors off to Constantinopolis with them, wouldn’t you think?”

  “How did you happen to see it?” I ask. “You were traveling with your uncle, I suppose.”

  “With Flavius Rufus, actually.”

  “Flavius Rufus?”

  “Flavius Caesar. Emperor Maxentius’s third brother. He loves southern Italia. Comes down here all the time.”

  “With you?”

  “Once in a while. Oh, silly, silly! I was sixteen. We were just friends!”

  “And how old are you now?”

  “Twenty-one,” she says. Six years younger than I am, then.

  “Very close friends, I suppose.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a fool, Cymbelin!” There is laughter in her eyes. “You’ll meet him, too, when we’re in Roma.”

  “A royal prince?”

  “Of course! You’ll meet everyone. The Emperor’s brothers, the Emperor’s sisters, the Emperor himself, if he’s in town. I grew up at court, don’t you realize that? In my uncle’s household. My father died in the war.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Commanded the Augustus Legion, in Syria, Aegyptus, Palaestina. Palaestina’s where he died. You’ve heard of the Siege of Aelia Capitolina? That’s where he was killed, right outside the Temple of the Great Mother just as the city was falling to us. He was standing near some old ruined stone wall that survives from the temple that was there before the present one, and a sniper got him. Cassius Frontinus delivered the funeral oration himself. And afterward my uncle Gaius adopted me, because my mother was dead, too, had killed herself the year before—that’s a long story, a scandal at the court of the old Emperor—”

  My head is swimming.

  “Anyway, Flavius is like a brother to me. You’ll see. We came down here and I stayed the night in the Villa Jovis. Saw all the naughty mosaics in Tiberius’s swimming pool, swam in it, even—there was a gigantic feast afterward, wild boar from the mountains here, mountains of strawberries and bananas, and you wouldn’t believe how much wine—oh, cheer up, Cymbelin, you didn’t think I was a virgin, did you?”

  “That isn’t it. Not at all.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “The thought that you really know the royals. That you’re still so young and you’ve done so many astonishing things. And also that the man I was arguing with the other night was actually Cassius Lucius Frontinus the famous general, and that you’re the niece of Gaius Junius Scaevola the Consul, and that you’ve been the mistress of the Emperor’s brother, and—don’t you see, Lucilla, how hard all this is for me? How bewildering?”

  “My poor confused barbarian!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. Even if it’s more or less true.”

  “My gorgeous Celt, then. My beautiful blond-haired Briton. That much is all right to say, isn’t it?”

  We hire one of the little one-horse carriages that are the only permissible vehicles on Capreae and ride down to the beach to spend the afternoon swimming naked in the warm sea and sunning ourselves on the rocky shore. Though it is late in the day and late also in the year, Lucilla’s flawless skin quickly turns rosy, and she’s hot and glowing when we return to our room.

  Two days, two unforgettable nights, on Capreae. Then back to Surrentum, where our charioteer is dutifully waiting for us at the ferry landing, and up to Neapolis again, an all-day drive. I am reluctant to part from her at my hotel, urging her to spend the night with me there, too, but she insists that she must get back to the villa of Frontinus.

  “And I?” I say. “What do I do? I have to dine alone, I have to go to bed alone?”

  She brushes her lips lightly across mine and laughs. “Did I say that? Of course you’ll come with me to Frontinus’s place! Of course!”

  “But he hasn’t invited me to return.”

  “What a fool you can be sometimes, Cymbelin. I invite you. I’m Adriana’s guest. And you’re mine. Go upstairs, pack up the rest of your things, tell the hotel you’re checking out. Go on, now!”

  And so it is. In Druso Tiberio’s absurdly splendid quadriga we ride back up the hill to the villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus, where I am greeted with apparently unfeigned warmth and no trace of surprise by our jolly host and given a magnificent suite of rooms overlooking the bay. Uncle Cassio is gone, and so are the other house guests who were there on the night of the party, and I am more than welcome.

  My rooms just happen to adjoin those of Lucilla. That night, after a feast of exhausting excess at which Druso Tiberio and his gladiator playmate Ezio behave in a truly disgusting way while the elder Frontinus studiedly turns his attention elsewhere, I hear a gentle tapping at my door as I am preparing for bed.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me.”

  Lucilla. “Gods be thanked! Come in!”

  She wears a silken robe so sheer she might as well have been naked. In one hand she carries a little candelabrum, in the other a flask of what appears to be wine. She is still tipsy from dinner, I see. I take the candelabrum from her before she sets herself afire, and then the flask.

  “We could invite Adriana in, too,” she says coyly.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “The two of you—?”

  “We’re best friends. We share everything.”

  “No,” I say. “Not this.”

  “You are provincial, Cymbelin.”

  “Yes, I am. And one woman at a time is quite enough for me.”

  She seems disappointed. I realize that she has promised to provide me to Adriana for tonight. Well, this is Imperial Italia, where the old traditions of unabashed debauchery evidently are very much alive. But though I speak of myself as Roman, I’m not as Roman as all that, I suppose. Adriana Frontina is extraordinarily beautiful, yes, but so is Lucilla, and Lucilla is all I want just now, and that is that. Simple provincial tastes. No doubt I’ll live to regret my decision; but this night I am unwavering in my mulish simplicity.

  Lucilla, disappointed or not, proves passionate enough for two. The night passes in a sleepless haze. We go at each other wildly, feverishly. She teaches me another new trick or two, and claps her hands at her own erotic cleverness. There are no women like this in Britannia: none that are known to me, at any rate.

  At dawn we stand together on the balcony of my bedroom, weary with the best of all possible wearinesses, relishing the sweet cool breeze that rises from the bay.

  “When do you want to go north?” she asks.

  “Whenever you do.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Why not?”

  “I warn you, you may be shocked by a few of the things you see going on in Urbs Roma.”

  “Then I’ll be shocked, I suppose.”

 
; “You’re very easily shocked, aren’t you, Cymbelin?”

  “Not really. Some of this is new to me, that’s all.”

  Lucilla chuckles. “I’ll educate you in our ways, never fear. It’ll all get less frightening as you get used to it. You poor darling barbarian.”

  “You know I asked you not to—”

  “You poor darling Celt, I mean,” Lucilla says. “Come with me to Roma, love. But remember: when in Roma, it’s best to do as the Romans do.”

  “I’ll try,” I promise.

  Yet another chariot is put at our disposal for the journey: this one Ezio’s, which he drove down in alone from Urbs Roma. He’s going back north next week with Druso Tiberio, and they’ll ride in one of his, but Ezio’s chariot has to be returned to the capital somehow, too. So we take it. It’s not nearly as grand as the one Lucilla and I had just been using, but it’s far more imposing than you would expect someone like Ezio to own. A gift from Druso Tiberio, no doubt.

  The whole household turns out to see us off. Marcello Domiziano urges me to think of his villa as his home whenever I am in Neapolis. I invite him to be my family’s guest in Britannia. Adriana gives Lucilla a more than friendly hug—I begin to wonder about them—and kisses me lightly on the cheek. But as I turn away from her I see a smoldering look in her eyes that seems compounded out of fury and regret. I suspect I have made an enemy here. But perhaps the damage can be repaired at a later time: it would be pleasant enough work to attempt it.

  Our route north is the Via Roma, and we must descend into town to reach it. Since we have no driver, I will be the charioteer, and Lucilla sits beside me on the box. Our horses, a pair of slender, fiery Arabians, are well matched and need little guidance from me. The day is mild, balmy, soft breezes: yet another bright, sunny, summer-like day here in the eighth month of the year. I think of my homeland, how dark and wet it must be by now.

  “Does winter ever reach Italia?” I ask. “Or have the Emperors made special arrangements with the gods?”