A Wound the Balm Reopened

Love, and poetry, and a lifetime all youth: what then, Catullus? And why this anguish of yours — wearing the garb of mourning at a wedding feast, and curses breaking from your lips in a temple?

What? The wellspring of your bliss is the wellspring of your grief, and the spring that enfolds you has struck you down an autumn? Is it love, and poetry, and youth, that make your body bone without covering and leave you a soul melting away?

Lesbia!

Your beloved — do you love loving her, or is it a captivity with no release? The inspirer of your poetry — from her you learned beauty, and from her you learned pain, and the beauty in your poetry and the pain are echoes. And youth — you knew her as a young man of twenty-three, the flower of life's years; and you left existence a young man, before thirty, by her doing...

Lesbia!

★

He came to Rome, and Rome was his ambition: might, and loftiness of station, and a house of learning. And he set about drinking in what the Greeks and the Latins had left behind, and swimming in the sea of culture.

Until he came to know Rome, and knew what might is, and what station, and what learning — until he abandoned all that, and his body was drenched in the waters of a new sea, wider, more tyrannical, quicker in its turnings:

the day he knew Clodia!

A woman of thirty: noble of father, noble of husband, and still in her second year with him. Her acquaintance with love began in childhood, and with seduction at the breast. Her brother planted in her the seed of love — and how abundantly the harvest yielded.

Catullus knew her as the first of his beloveds; Clodia knew him as one pebble among pebbles, without first and without last, gathered along the bank of her stream — their lips split open, and never yet are they sated.

Clodia, none other, is the Lesbia of his poetry. Some critics see in her a legend that lived between the folds of the diwan and not in life; it escaped them that the fragrance in every line the poet penned wafts from a living woman, who made him love, and hate, and dream, and suffer, and burn with jealousy, and be destroyed.

★

Society talked of that newborn love. And Catullus glimpsed in the faces of his companions, and upon their lips, marks of pity and smiles of mockery:

So Clodia and chastity had never met in harmony? What of it? Would not chastity, had it existed, have been a rival to drive off the love that filled his heart and left room for nothing else?

And her dignified husband? A consul — let him enjoy his influence, and toy with the problems of the province, and leave his wife alone; for Catullus is a master of toying, and how sweet are the problems he can entangle. And let the husband set his mind at rest: is there a day when she does not complain to him of Catullus, and show her vexation at his conduct? No fear, then, of any bond between the two.

She loves Catullus — even his name is fragrant. So she repeats it in her husband's ear time after time, that her lips may taste its savor.

And he whose mind suspicion had poisoned — the balm of his wounds poisoned his body... and he died suddenly, without ever falling ill.

★

Where is what you write, O Catullus, while the companions of your age indite volumes? Is living poetry better than speaking it?

And he went on communing with Lesbia — enough for him that she should hear; and what business is it of ours, that we bring our ears close to steal the echo of his outpourings:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and breathe in love:
the sayings of the old men are not worth, all together, a single dirham.
See, the suns set and rise again:
but our sun — once it sets at evening, our night is everlasting.
Give me, then, a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
then a thousand and a hundred, after a hundred and a thousand:
until, when we have delighted in these thousands, we mix them all together,

so that we ourselves lose count of them,
and no envier can look our way who knows the tally of the kisses we have stolen.

And you two have no envier — so sip them in bliss: for between the dawning of your sun and its setting is but a moment.

And Lesbia asks how many of her kisses would suffice him and sate him:

As many as the Libyan sands in Kairouan,
or as many as the stars that watch, while the night is silent,
over the trysts of love men steal.

And they mourn Catullus: he died before thirty. But one year that he lived is enough for him — as though he had lived long. Is not every night in which he took his delight with his Lesbia worth years of a life of misery and bewilderment? And this beauty that floods over him is too precious to endure.

And what beauty! As though she were the light, and the women around her shadows:
Does this one boast of a pair of eyes, and that one of a bosom?
Do you love a pair of lips in a mistress, and a figure in a wife?
Have it so — but come, gaze upon my Lesbia:
she has stolen for her own delight the eyes of this one and the bosom of that one,
she has seized for herself the lips of your mistress and the figure of your wife,
and gathered into herself all the charm and splendor in all beautiful women.

He loves her. O God, why did You deny mankind love, and let none know it but him? And can any woman in existence ever boast of a love bestowed upon her, as Lesbia can? For he gave her his very self, and consecrated to her his love and his poetry — and his invective: her enemies got a share of it, and her friends shares upon shares.

Even her little bird he detested, for it monopolized her lap; and when it met its end he turned his blame upon the glooms of death that swallow down every lovely thing: for by what they had done, the eyes of his beloved were reddened and swollen with wailing.

★

And Catullus was in raptures, while Clodia kept her brazen composure. She tilted her cup toward a new boon companion, and with it tilted the glances of her eyes.

And Catullus? How could she cast him off so, when he had robed her in garments of purple, and bestowed upon her such attributes of beauty as made her the idol of the fair? She acknowledges the favor he has done her; only she is confident that she has bound him fast, and thrown him into a captivity from which he will not easily free himself. What harm to her, then, if she turns to another — and in constancy to one there is tedium?

And what is it to her, or to him, if jealousy blazes — is there love without jealousy?

And see: one smile of hers at a comrade of his
robs him of every sense he has:
his tongue stammers,
flame leaps through the delicate limbs of his body,
his ears ring of their own accord,
and his eyes are lost in pitch-dark night.

And his life became a restlessness that knew no settling. She turns toward him, and his face changes color and spring runs in his veins; she turns from him, and life is a hell, and scorpions crawl out of his verse; she comes back to him, and with her comes back a hope in leaf, and its luster.

And she knows this of him; and were it not for her confidence in his enslavement, she would have been guarded in her recklessness, or would have left him beyond all return. So she made of it a continuing game: rebuff and welcome, following one upon the other, time after time after time — for the disease is one, and the remedy one.

And he beholds the state he is in, yet cannot make out what it points to. Does she truly betray him? Is it his own trust, or a trick of appearances? And the bleeding heart that beats in his breast refuses to do anything but reassure him, as though to postpone the catastrophe; so some of his visions return to his pale face, and he tells himself again that Lesbia loves none but him:

Lesbia opens her mouth to revile me,
and forever speaks ill of me.
Yet may I die if she does not love me!
The proof? Her case is my own:
do I not speak ill of her, I too —
and may I die if I do not love her!

★

But the catastrophe was on its way.

And now loathing began to stir within his love — though it was a lover's loathing, not the loathing of foes. He loves and he hates, and does not know how his heart can be peopled by both passions at once; he knows only that he hates and loves, and that he is, therefore, wretched.

And she is far from him, far from the current of his thought. Shall he beg her to return to him? Shout, Catullus, in a forest — even the echo comes back nowhere but in your poem.

Shall he implore the comrades of yesterday, the adversaries of today, not to forget him?

And Lesbia took up her game again: she leaned toward him, and tasted for the first time the bitter aloes she had poured down her lovers' throats through long years. And she grew tender toward him, sincerely — after what? She had never supposed that he would deal harshly with her. And she coaxed him, and reminded him. But his heart had been shut against her, and his dignity had gained the upper hand. And he thrust her from him:

Be gone, and wanton with your lovers — three hundred, are they? With them all, then. And do not expect the return of the love he once bore you: that love has perished, through a fault of yours, like a flower at the end of spring, struck by the plow, that withered and died.

And if ever her phantom comes again to shade your imagination, and from her body a memory returns to tease you, then master the trial, and depart from the mother of the world, and from the homeland — to the East.

*

And to Rome once more.

What has become of Lesbia in your absence? Just as you knew her, Catullus — and do not despair: for Lesbia, your Lesbia, whom you loved beyond your own self, lies in the streets and the alleys, stripping the passersby of what chastity remains to them.

You have forgotten her? Yes — but we are doubters, and your sickness is our proof. And alas for your lamp: Lesbia lit it, and it illumined her, and crowned all the darknesses of her name with a halo — then she put it out.

And on the day they carried your body forth before its time — in what bedchamber, one wonders, was she wallowing?

His beloved? And what would he say, were they to answer: who is the robber, and who the robbed?

*

Come to your senses, O wretched Catullus, and admit defeat.

Come to your senses — have you not truly had enough! The sun that lit a part of your past has set. How long will you torture yourself, and until when remain her slave? Withdraw from the field — withdraw.

An adventure? And when was love ever free of adventures? Break loose from your captivity, for the hour of your deliverance has come, and you have lain numbed too long.

Have you not now come to know yourself — and so come to know her? Yes: none gave birth to her but a lioness in the deserts of Libya, or a savage she-demon. Is that a woman, who mocks the broken of heart the morning she glimpses the blood dripping?

Have you not come to know woman, in coming to know her? And woman's promises: words written on the deep and on running water.

Indeed. Farewell, then, Lesbia. Catullus loves you no longer, nor will he entreat you to grant what you withhold. And you will be sorry one day, when you find no one to entreat you. Who will visit you, and who will praise your beauty? Whom will you greet, and by whose name will you be called? Whom will you kiss, and whose lips will you crush?

... If that is what troubles you, Catullus, then be not wretched: the feet of the visitors jostle one another, the lips are in their prime, and the body is forever light: covered a moment, then uncovered, and the darkness is routed.

And by God, O gods, if you are living and immortal, accepting sacrifices from her and raising up to yourselves the incense we offer: deliver him from his deadly plague, and let Lesbia be blotted from his memory. You turned away from all his supplications in the days when his whole care was a glance from Lesbia and a smile; give ear to him now, when he has forsworn his gilded idol.

*

And he returned to his poetry — but to compose for weddings and festivals.

And he returned to his companions, whom only yesterday he had pelted with his most violent epithets, out of jealousy of them for robbing him of his girl. They had met what he had met: and the stings made them one.