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CHAPTER 1
The Corpse
Your love has buried everything.
— Propertius
"I am dead, my king," I wrote to you, meaning that defeat had overtaken me, even before the battle at Actium. "I am dead, my king. The word will not scorch your mouth because I have been dead to you for some time now. Follow the steps of Dionysus. Your god has abandoned Alexandria. Attended by an ostentatious procession, he left by the eastern gate late at night, awash with music, bearing our laughter with him."
I can imagine how lost you must have felt, Mark Antony, on reading in that first sentence, penned by the living hand of Cleopatra: the details of my death. Around you, played your musicians, interpreting your sadness at the undeniable departure of your dear Dionysus. You read only the start of my letter, rashly jumping to erroneous conclusions and delivering yourself into the hands of your evil genius.
"I am a dead woman," I should have told you in my message. "I have been a corpse from even before the time I bore you twins, while you were celebrating your marriage to the sister of the man who wishes to turn himself into our torturer. From that moment on, I have been a dead woman. From that moment on, I suffocate, and I return to life only in your presence, rolling like a barren sphere toward the grave, or soaring like a golden orange from the Garden of the Hesperides, tossed from the hand of the handsome hero — all as your caprices dictate. My willpower is stolen from me by yours, enslaved by your destiny since the time we conceived a woman and a man, a sun and a moon, when first you lived with me in Alexandria. You, Mark Antony, my guide and my destroyer, once again you have lost me and this time for ever."
Defeat, Marcus Antonius Dionysus Osiris, befell us long before the events in the Gulf of Ambracia, south of Epirus, facing the promontory of Actium. There we planned to make our move as soon as the enemy fleet gave us an opening. To provoke this, we sent out Publicola, pretending to be a rowdy boor, to attack them. But then I released to the winds the sails of my squadron's sixty ships and, loaded with the treasures of the Lagids, I fled the Peloponnesus to avoid a pointless sacrifice. With abrupt swiftness you followed me, chasing me in a quinquireme. You ordered the other 180 ships in your fleet to do the same. On board your ship you had Alexander of Syria and Artavasde, king of Armenia, the last of the Arsacids, son and heir of the great Tigranes.
When you and your men came aboard my vessel, the "Antony"— its purple sails aloft, swollen by a favorable wind — Artavasde witnessed your foolish outburst of rage at not having won the victory. You blamed the advice I gave you — to wage war at sea and not on land. It was wrong, I admit, but you could have ignored it, General, and relied on your own strategists.
After your show of fury came silence. For the three days it took us to reach Tenarus, you refused to speak. You broke silence only to answer (and then merely in the form of a question) the shouts of a cocky, strutting youth who wagged his spear at you. His chest bare, his sinews bronzed by the sun, he humiliated you, saved from our rage by our bad luck. In his light Liburnian ship he had overtaken us, his hair and beard unornamented but for sea-salt and sand. Seeing you hunched up and motionless, your face hidden in your hands, elbows on your knees, he plucked up enough courage to shout at you, all bravado, befouling you with ugly epithets.
"Who are you to be pursuing Antony?" was all you said. With a few astute commands you could have captured him and, if your frame of mind had not been so enfeebled, you would have had him strung up for far less an impertinence.
"I'm Eurycles, son of Lacares, blessed with the luck you so badly need. I am here to avenge the death of my father."
You did not explain to me that Lacares had been convicted of theft and then beheaded on your orders. You were still refusing to speak a word to me. Somebody else had to explain things to me before I understood that outrageous scene.
With these words Eurycles, the son of a thief, turned his ship around and attacked another of our contingent, carrying off its load of silver, more out of greed than a sense of honor. It was typical of a man who dared no more than shout that he wanted to avenge the insult to his family's name; his squalid inherited character proved how just had been the death sentence passed on his father. On the periphery of the battle, under the pretext of vengeance, the rascal stole from us; he sullied his hands with theft, like the vile devourers of carrion that stalk their prey in cowardly style only after the battle is over.
While the coward behaved this way, you did not stir an inch. You remained seated near the ship's keel, elbows on knees, your face in the palms of your hands. I could not take the reins and avenge this humiliation because the shame you were inflicting on us had shattered my will to act.
As for those who witnessed your reproaches, your anger, your stony silence, I hereby give the order for their decapitation. I had been planning this ever since we disembarked at Tenerus. There I visited the shrines of Demeter and Aphrodite. Jupiter's temple I avoided, for they say it contains the entrance to Hell. I want no record to remain of that degrading scene, where you were the acrostolium on the prow of my ship, the "Antony," exposing us in your weakness to so much humiliation that even a common thief, without brains, honor, or money ventured to attack us.
Those witnesses have been silent for one year, but what guarantee is there that they will be so for two? Hence, I order their execution. From that order I except you, Diomedes, for your eyes are not eyes; you are the hand with which I write these words: Behead the witnesses! I especially want Artavasde dead.
And yes, it's true, Mark Antony, you didn't want to take me to the confrontation with Octavius. You wanted me to stay in Alexandria. But I bribed your general, Canidius, to convince you of the advantages of taking me to the battleground. I allowed him to export, tax-free, 10,000 sacks of wheat and to import 5,000 ceramic jars. Hence he found the means to make you see how much you needed to take your Cleopatra to the scene of the battle.
If Diomedes does not know this — and I can see by your eyes you don't — it's because it was his own secretary who presented Canidius with the terms I sealed with my own signature. I wasn't thinking about war; I just couldn't bear, Antony, for you to be far away from me, to see you stolen again from your Cleopatra by the charms of a Roman wife.
I came back to the "Antony" to make that notorious return crossing. All the while, you, Antony, bent over, almost kneeling, sunk deep inside yourself, you were humiliating us both, all because of that sickly, second-rate weakling who had pursued us. Meanwhile that nobody, Octavius, was crowing over a victory that neither he nor his clever Agrippa deserved credit for. Standing high on the stern, he relished the thought of the praises his poets would lavish on him in the near future.
And you, Antony, did nothing but freeze into a stone. Mark my words, you were committing the worst of disgraces, thefoulest of your crimes. There you were, transformed into a stone copy of a thinker, a bad-luck symbol aboard my ship, when you should have been acting the astute strategist, combining intelligence with daring, taking risks, giving the lie to everything your enemy wanted from you: that you had accepted defeat, that you had admitted his triumph, that you had accepted your overthrow and finally your departure from this life.
It was you who gave him the one thing he was seeking, a victory he did not deserve. You let your personal anguish deny access to you, to me, to Egypt, to our men, to my people, to our children.
With your head in your hands, motionless, stony in your rage against me, you made a gift to that ignoble creature of the entire Nile and its seven mouths — the Nile, "the Father of Life, the secret god who rises from secret shadows, the deity who floods the fields, who quenches the thirst of the flocks, who gives drink to the soil, who allows seeds to grow, the pasture to green, who provides delicious victuals. Along the Nile the wheat flows regularly to the granaries. Through it everything comes to new birth, everything receives nourishment, and the land tingles with joy." You surrended to Octavius the date palm and the sycamore, the crocodile, the birds, the papyrus, the lotus flower, Upper and Lower Egypt, the red crown and the white crown, and the psen that unites them both. You handed over the dark soil, kerne, that generates life on the banks of the river, and the reddish sands, dasre. You gave away the dark country, with all its fertility, and the golden country of the desert, dense with the memories of Hatseput, of Prince Sebeki, of the Theban king, Ahmes, of Tutankhamen in his war chariot. You bestowed on a despicable soul all the baggage of our dead, the pyramids gilded by the sun. You gave him our floods, our winters and summers. And worst of all, along with yourself, you handed him the surrender of our gods, Atum-Ra, the father of all the gods, and after him, Su, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Set, Isis, Neftis, and Toth, the god of wisdom. Along with you there died everything we hold beautiful, nefer like the goddess Hator, kind as well as beautiful, tut, menej, and tehen.
You have permitted the man who schemed our overthrow to ready himself for writing his name on our temples, glory superimposed on glory, usurping what is rightly ours. You made him a gift of total control over Judaea, a control you so often denied to me. You surrendered Nabatea, Cyprus, and Ascalon. You bestowed on him our sages, astronomers, philosophers, poets, the library of Alexandria, the automata that Architas built in the shape of a wooden cock pigeon that flew. You showered him with our treasures, not only those that hands can touch and eyes can see, but those that only the soul can appreciate. You made him a present of the power of Greece, the power that we Lagids claim as our rightful inheritance. Enough!
You sowed the seeds of a conflagration, total and definitive, upon our two bodies interlocked in love's battles, and upon the indomitable Eros, the only god by whom you and I can be enslaved.
Defeat overtook me early. Even before the swallows nesting on the poop of my galley were attacked by others, late arrivals with savage beaks. On seeing the abandoned nests of their predecessors, they vented their fury on them as well, ripping them apart — a frightful omen. Before, the morale of our army declined at the first victory of Agrippa. Before, at our camp on the peninsula of Actium, you had Iamblicus, king of Arabia, put to the torture for his disloyalty. Before that, you had a Roman senator executed and embittered the spirits of our men even more. Before the fall of Corfu, before losing dozens of ships at Leucadia, before the disasters of Patras and Corinth.
With all that happening, what did it matter that we had already detected the treason of Domitius Enobarbus, though youhad appointed him governor of Bythinia? We had also guessed at the treason of King Amintas, even after you had given him the throne of Bactria and Kabul. I paid him my respects by issuing a coin to commemorate his coronation. It bore the legend "Of the great, victorious King Amintas," though his only victory consisted of being named king by Mark Antony, and then only because he fascinated me with his description of the frontiers of Bactria, to the northeast, where on a chain of hills there stands a line of artificial prominences built in unsettling shapes out of huge, unbaked bricks and whose walls have a thickness equivalent to the height of ten men. Then followed the treason of King Deiotarus of Armenia, then that of Danidius, who was to be commander of the legions.
What did it matter that the cavalry and our fleet had surrendered to the crude seductions of Octavius? That your generals had scurried like lambs seeking the refuge of the farmyard, the minute they heard the name of Rome? That there were enough deserters to make up an army against us? What difference did it make that, thwarting our last chance of success, the quadriremes and quinquiremes I had had transported overland to the Red Sea were put to the torch by the treacherous King Malchus of Nabatea, by whose side you had only recently fought against Octavius?
You and I would have recovered everything, if we had still possessed our old vigor — if we had not allowed ourselves to be beaten by our greatest enemy. Worse for us than all the desertions was the scandal that befell Publius Ventidius, your master general, the sole Roman ever to bring the Parthians to their knees — it robbed you of him forever. With Publius Ventidius at our side, we could have crushed Agrippa to dust! And Agrippa is the only real strength that Octavius possesses.
While these betrayals were working against us, one thing did even more damage — a recurrent dream that haunted me in the small hours of the night, just before the sun rose. In it, my father Auletes, usually so kindly, turned solemn and cold, rebuking me and fixing on me an angry stare. My Caesar was seated with him at the same table and he, too, rebuked me with uncharacteristic wildness. Reclining by Caesar's side, as though he were his equal, was Apollodorus, my trusty Apollodorus, and he turned on me as well, glaring fiercely. He was the only one of the three I dared address.
"What makes you all so angry with me?" I asked.
"I am more than just angry with you," he replied. "Once too often you have spoken like an imbecile. An imbecile. An imbecile."
Then I would wake up.
This nightmare had a more powerful effect on me than all the betrayals that followed the battle of Actium. Now even in the depths of my mind, those who had once loved me most were deserting me.
Before you misunderstood my words, Antony, the words I dispatched from this mausoleum, before you snatched up your sword and with tears in your eyes implored one last favor of your faithful slave Eros: "Put me to death. Pierce my heart with this point, rip it out of my chest with its sharp edge, tear me asunder till I am only an unrecognizable lump of flesh" — before all that, you were already the incarnation of darkness. You were the blood that formed the slippery mud on which the sphere I mentioned to you went sliding toward the grave. You were the breath of life to me. You were also my death. Something welded us two into a third being that was neither you nor I, and I do not mean the notorious beast with two backs, the fleshy animal of desire.
You read the opening of my letter: "I am dead, my king." Without understanding my meaning, you shouted: "Do it, Antony. Do not delay one instant. Fate has robbed you of the only reason you had for wanting to live any longer!" You entered your bedroom and, opening your breastplate, handed a sword to faithful Eros, saying: "Stab me here. I follow Cleopatra, the greatest of the Lagids, monarch of the world's oldest kingdom and my beloved! More than the pain of her loss is the shame of knowing myself a greater coward than she!"
Eros, handsome, noble-hearted youth with his clear gaze, bravely brandished the sword but then, without shedding a tear, he plunged it into himself.
"What have you done, my loyal Eros?" you asked, as if unable to believe the fearful sight.
Eros made no answer. With fixed, wild eyes, he stared at you, struggling to reach the land of the dead with all possible speed.
"Well done, Eros. You have shown your master how to do what you did not have the heart to do."
Then you, Antony, sighing and grieving, took a dagger and stabbed yourself twice in the lower stomach. Your words turned to screams as Diomedes, my secretary, entered the room to tell you that Cleopatra was summoning you, that I needed to see you. I have told you, Mark Antony, that I cannot breathe outside your presence. When did I ever fail to call your name? Even today, when your lungs contain no air, I speak to you, I call upon you: "Come, breathe through me. Give me what the water gives to the lotus flower!"
Diomedes, who is both wise and practical but turns pale at the sight of blood, put to good use what little of the Seleucid inheritance he received from his mother. They stripped you naked and carefully loosened the dagger held tight in your frozen fist. With the serene calm of a Syrian, a calm we Lagids find so irritating, he ordered you to be bandaged immediately so that your intestines would not obtrude through your wounds. He had them cover your body with blankets and fasten you to a stretcher.
"And if you're lying, Diomedes, what then? Without my queen, I will thrust that dagger a thousand times into my body until not one recognizable piece remains." You had stopped screaming and weeping, but your lips were now babbling.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cleopatra Dismounts"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Carmen Boullosa.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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