Carmen Boullosa - Cleopatra Dismounts

One thing seized my attention mightily. I commanded the chariot come to a halt. A few yards back I had seen a cart with a yoke of four robust bulls, a rare sight in Egypt, and for a second I thought it was only the effect of my tiredness. For one thing, on this side of the Mediterranean we did not see such carts, and certainly never drawn by sacred animals. But additionally, I had observed from the corner of my eye that it was identical to the one in which I had made my escape from Rome to Brundisium all those years before.

Deciding to clear up the matter, I got down from the chariot and hurried back to the cart. The vision was real enough. There stood the cart with its four strong oxen. I checked it over. “Identical!” I kept saying over and over, more shocked by the likeness than by the profane use of the animals. I got up onto it and was suddenly flooded with memories. On the planks were hundreds of scratchings: Queen of Kings. I was flabbergasted. I had to sit down. The sacks of soil were just like those we had rested on years before, as we had accommodated ourselves to the narrow spaces. The memories of that journey blinded me. I was speechless. What was it doing on this side of the waters, close by the seven mouths of the Nile, the cart the sailors had hired to help the child-princess escape from her shameful condition? I was too overwhelmed to seek an answer to the question, swamped by dreams of other times. Traitors had lured me out of Upper Egypt, where the people were loyal to me. After snatching my throne, they were now on my heels. I could not afford to lose an instant. Yet there I was, still not having received the welcome of the dignitaries, snubbing my key allies, staring at an old cart. The sight of it had reduced me to just another of its sacks of earth. A strange odor roused me from my daydreams. It was truly sublime. I leaned halfway out of the back of the cart; the odor did not come from there. But from the front. I jumped down hurriedly to trace its source. Behind my back, as if coming from a great distance, I heard the voice of my loyal Apollodorus: “It’s the cart that got us away from Rome!” If it was a vision, it wasn’t exclusive to Cleopatra.

I followed my nose. The bulls! It was the bulls that were giving off that odor, wholly out of character with animals. It was not hard for me to decide which of the four it was; one had a tawny hide and in the middle of its forehead gleamed a silver circle, and its light blue eyes burned with desire, while its horns curved on its head like a crescent moon on its back. The bull was breathing out an intense, divine odor that I could not pull myself away from. Its shiny hide was soft to my touch. It bent its legs without withdrawing its eyes from mine. It was offering me its broad back. Fascinated by the sight, I got up on the animal. As soon as I was mounted, it stood up abruptly, slipping out of the traces that fastened it to the cart. I could not save myself by grabbing hold of the traces, for it carried me off, as agile as a rapacious feline, as rapid as lightning. As we passed under the gate of the city, I turned my head and I saw my company and the reception committee charging after me, yelling and gesticulating. In an instant we left them behind. We raced down the streets of Pelusium. Our passage created an uproar. At one corner they tried to halt us. The bull flew over a barrier and crossed the square faster than the sound of the cries that had been reaching us: “It’s carrying off the queen! The bull is stealing our Cleopatra!”

They lowered ropes from balconies, but the bull sidestepped them and charged on. It passed through the gate that gave onto the sea just as a group of men were struggling with all their strength to close its heavy weight. It slipped through without a moment to spare. It started to run along the wharf. Fishermen and soldiers were paralyzed with astonishment. Their nets remained motionless in their hands, their arrows and spears frozen in place. The only sound was the thudding of hoofs on the planks of the wharf. Seeing those mariners petrified, I breathed the cool air of the Mediterranean and felt the excitement of having a bull beneath me, clasping it between my thighs, as if I were the one urging it on. I enjoyed the thrill of it all. And not just in my legs. Shivers of delight rippled through my whole body. I thought, “This bull has carried me off, as its prisoner, and to what strange pleasures!” That thought made even more delicious the feel of its hide, the sweetness of its odor, the excitement of its gallop. As we reached the end of the wharf, the bull jumped. “I am bound to die!” I should have been thinking. But I couldn’t think at all. When we fell into the sea, my eyes were bathed in tears. And they were not tears of grief!

I am prepared to swear that right there, as we smashed hard into the water, the bull turned toward me, exposing its underside. I’d swear that even though its muzzle was animal, it knew how to kiss me, and that it possessed me physically, giving me a pleasure that nothing can rival, not even a dream or the imagination, much less gold or power or war. But I can’t swear that it was literally true, only that I wanted it to be true. My memory blurs now just as my eyes blurred back then. I saw nothing; my eyes were blinded with pleasure.

The indisputable fact is that, whether or not I was being serviced by it, we both came to the surface groaning and we continued our progress. Its hairy body, the back between my legs, moved over the waves. The breeze was stirred by our motion, the water splashed my feet, the sun blazed on the back of the sea that looked almost metallic under its fire; all these combined to heighten the ecstasy that its smell and the movement of its body had induced in me. We were bound together in one giant heart that pounded with the blood of the universe. I moaned, the bull moaned. Its swimming hoofs skimmed the sea. The water barely touched its extremities; the traveler of the waves carried me along without the water wetting me. We left behind us a wake of white hoof prints. Who controlled the reins of our watery charge? Since when did a country bull cut its way through the waves of the unharvested sea?

The bull’s bellows turned into words. Behind the animal sounds that my own body forced from my mouth, I heard it say: Kymothoe, Spio, Glauconome, Halie, Erato, Sao, Amphitrite, Eunice, Thetis, Eulymene, Agave, Eudora, Doto, Pherousa, Galataea, Actaie, Pontomedusa, Hippotoe, Lysianasa, Kymo, Eione, Haimede, Plexausre, Aucrante, Proto. .

“Oh bull!” I wanted to say, interrupting its listing. “Shut up! Your catalog of names is ruining my delirium. Shut up! You’re ruining things. Don’t ruin them! Give me more of the pleasure with which you transported Cleopatra to another side of the world. Shut up, please, my bull, my little bull, shut up!”

But the divine bull did not shut up. Its silky hide changed its feel and the water of the sea splashed salt on my skin. Without stopping it continued its listing, droning on in a hoarse voice like a bronchitic clergyman’s, drawing out the vowels, almost intoning: “Calypso, Panope, Cranto, Neomeris, Hyponoe, Ianira, Polynome, Autonoe, Melite Dione, Nesea, Dero, Euagore, Psamathae, Eumolpe. .”

I ceased to plead with it; the voice of the bull had left me cold. Its hide, hardened by the sea and sun, pricked me here and there. The wind now battered me with a cold fist; the galloping jarred my weary bones. The bull concluded its pedantic listing: “lone, Dynamene, Keto, and Limnoria!”

The Nereids suddenly emerged from the waves, responding to the invocation of the divine bull, to accompany our journey. The arrival of these beautiful guardians broke the spell that had bound us. I thought, “Now we are approaching Scylla and Charybdis. I suspect my bull called on them to negotiate our safe passage between the dangerous rocks and the deadly whirlpool.”