Carmen Boullosa - Cleopatra Dismounts

I was sitting under a palm tree. The shade of its trunk fell directly on my body. It was easy to miss me. Nobody had noticed me while I was making my mental journey to Robirius. The sun was setting on the waves. Under its thin silvery light, from behind my lashes, I watched the pair. His penis erect, he was stroking her thighs and passing his lips over her breasts. They had now changed all their laughter for sighs and moans. They stretched out on the blanket and he penetrated her. They continued with this game till night had fallen. The only light was the candles, until the half-moon appeared. I did not dare move or even think of moving. At that time of my life I had touched neither man nor woman. Ever since my thoughts had left Robirius and returned to the beach, my own penis had been erect. Thankfully, my throat was accustomed to spending its days in silence, so I had no problem in stifling my moans. I was enjoying the two of them. I did not need to touch them. I had them. I saw them. I felt them, the buttocks of Antony, the perfectly shaped breasts of Cleopatra, who was infinitely more beautiful in her body than in her face. It was not simply that I did not need to touch them; I did not want to touch them.

I had ceased to be a child. I had become a youth and then a man, writing down what others dictated, lending my body to the voice of others. As long as I was taking down dictation, my mind and my inner voice followed their own courses, as if my consciousness could split and be in two places at the same time. That was happening on this occasion. I was in two places, leaning against the hefty trunk of the palm tree, my hands stroking my penis, never so painfully erect as it was right then, but I was also lying on that soft blanket of linen that the ladies-in-waiting had staked to the sand. I was the body of Mark Antony but at other times the body of Cleopatra. Bodies of gods. He ejaculated twice. I ejaculated with him. And in her body I was shaken by orgasm. But it went beyond mere amusement. The second time, bent double with pleasure, I rolled on top of my scroll and stylus and smudged my notes.

That was the only time I damaged anything dictated by her. Before, that is, I became the betrayer of the scrolls, at the time I guided the underlings of Caesar Augustus to every one of the copies and when I, who had been the hand dedicated to perpetuating her voice, contributed to the death of the Queen’s memory. But this minor error should not be added to the list of major damages, because it was only the key words that scribes would amplify on wax tablets into koine, the common tongue of the Mediterranean.

Before I became a traitor, I was the one who jotted down her words and gave them permanence with the sharp point of my stylus, sheltering them against the annihilating winds of time. I was faithful to the dictated word. But later I was responsible for the fires that obliterated them. I don’t have time to explain why I did it, nor do I care to. I have not resorted to this ink to write my apologia. I will only say that I needed to remain alive, and that I did remain alive while so many others perished. And there was no one who spoke to me about her who did not reject what I told them. I am human and I need to relate to other people. That’s why I became a connoisseur in false truths. So deep are my lies, that now that I want to put to rights the wrongs I have done, I find I have taken the same path as her enemies. And what started as an imposed task has become a routine. I have filled my pockets out of a base motive. But the money has not served to buy me a protective space. Thus I spend the years listening to them explain one version after another of Cleopatra’s character, none of them remotely like the truth. It’s decades now since I refuted them — but, to be plain with you, I never really succeeded. It is decades since the jokes about them stopped. You no longer see drawings on walls of Antony and Cleopatra mating like two dogs on a boat. For decades now, the world’s contempt has been so absolute that there is no need to damn a man for desiring Cleopatra. Hatred for them has lost its excitement. Curses invoking them no longer have impact. The tall tales about Antony cravenly submitting to an Egyptian queen have had their gaudy day. For decades now, I have been going along with the Roman version of things Egyptian. I keep my mouth tight shut. Disputes don’t lead to friendships. I told you, I’m only human and I need friends. But I am not an unmitigated liar; it did not come easy to me to fabricate lies in order to converse with my neighbors. I struggled to alter the minutest details of my recollections, satisfying my neighbors by concocting a Cleopatra who never existed. Rome, likewise, has changed; it has recovered from the losses that attended its triumph, in particular the fall in the price of gold, made twice as bad by the loss of the substantial returns on investment Cleopatra was so adept at securing.

Many things have changed since Egypt fell. Facts have acquired a dizzying speed and I, slow as I am, have been caught up in the rhythm, with nowhere to lodge my recollections. Yes, yes, I know I have boasted of my keen memory, but I have also admitted to the ravages wrought on the records of Cleopatra. Now that I am close to death, it is better for me to die with integrity, not as a scattering of parts in some cheerless corner of the world. I need to recover some wholeness for myself.

That is why I write this. But try as I may, I cannot recapture the voice of Cleopatra. When I attempt it, I simply repeat the errors I have been compounding over the years. I started here with the intention of being utterly faithful, of cleansing my memory of the false trails I was forced to take, in order to promote the lies of Rome. I wanted to find some consolation for my solitude. But there is a wide gap between intention and achievement.

After so many decades of lies and distortions, I can find no way to set the record straight. If I begin imitating the voice of Cleopatra, within no time at all I am sounding like Propertius, who hated her, or like Cicero, who couldn’t even bear to see her portrait, or like Virgil who cheapened her.

Already stiff with the approaching cold of the grave, the voice stumbles. My stylus begins to take me where it wants. The point of my stylus doesn’t give a damn whether I am faithful to a woman it had neither known nor cared to know. All it wanted was to have her speak in a frantic, shrieking tone, in the way you have heard. To have her speak out of an irrational heart. But here I am beginning over. I am escaping the tyranny of my stylus, the implement that writes with fear, even when danger is distant, the fear fed to me and gobbled down from sly Roman spoons. Here I strike back against what I swallowed, here on the bed where I expect to die. And I recall exactly the words she dictated to me when she, too, was expecting to die. I jot them down here, without betrayals, just as she spoke them to me, after she had loosed herself from the rigid embrace of Antony’s corpse.

Even if I could recapture in its entirety my memory of the conflagration that Rome has fanned to fury over the identity of Cleopatra, even if I were to note down word after word of what she said beside Mark Antony’s corpse, I do not, however, have the skill to set before your eyes the mirror in which she might appear — motionless, so that you might contemplate her — in action, so that you might admire her. My undertaking has its necessary limits. Hence I will have no chance to bring her back to life, or of recounting in what her greatness consisted, or of communicating to you what reactions she provoked in those who witnessed her splendor. A poet, I am not. Behind me, I have no Caesar Augustus to spur me on. Before me, I have no palace to reflect the image of the queen in all her majesty. Worse still, with the same zeal employed in destroying the papers of Cleopatra, Augustus has insisted that poets celebrate his Roman self and not omit any opportunity to see to it that his memory defy the assaults of time. Always a crafty man, he set his sights on the future. If we owe Cleopatra the calendar we use today, it was Augustus who left his mark on one of the names of our months. There is no month named for Cleopatra. The Roman populace would have forgotten her long ago, were it not for the cats that invade their premises. When she left Rome on the death of Caesar, she set her cats loose in the streets. But it will not be long before they forget cats came here from Egypt; the presence of a cat in Rome shortly will summon up no more memories of Cleopatra.