The door of Isis’ temple has been sealed tight, so I am out of the reach of Octavius’s vile minions and others that have believed the stupid chatter he attributes to a Cleopatra who is neither I nor anything like me. This fellow with water in his veins set the gossip going to justify his destroying people he had envied for years. For Octavius, with his squeezed and plunging voice, bony, bleak, and abrupt, knows well he is my inferior, that neither his mind nor his body nor his glance nor his understanding of the world could ever outdo the qualities of a certain foreign woman, a Greek from Egypt, forbidden by Roman law to wed a Roman citizen, but the greatest of the Lagids, the last Pharoah of glorious Egypt. And it goes without saying that he is inferior to my Antony. His own poetasters have confessed it:
No noble deed Octavius did
’gainst Macedonia’s throne.
The spoils of victory belonged
to Antony alone.
Envy lent its energies to this spindly nephew of my Caesar, to the usurper who challenged the clause in Caesar’s will that required his son be taught by the best tutors Rome could supply. Octavius is a small man; he wears elevated shoes to add height to his appearance. He is stingy. When gifts are exchanged at the festival of Saturn, others give presents of silver and gold, but he offers sponges, pokers, pincers, and other knicknacks. He is graceless; his puny presents are accompanied by curt notes that say one thing and mean another.
Once again I have postponed your arrival, Antony, by all this talk of the loathsome Octavius. But time is racing by, and with it the last hours of my life. Once more, to the point.
Here in this Temple of Isis I am secure. I designed it to keep intact and undiminished the dignity of my person. But there has entered the one thing that could harm Cleopatra — my Mark Antony on his way to death. There, in front of the doors you presented yourself, my emperor, my husband, my accomplice, my happiness. We had barred the doors to protect ourselves, so we had to lug you up by the ropes with which they had tied you, Charmian and Eira, my faithful maidens, and I. Six arms could barely raise you. You were heavy, rapt in yourself. Your eyes tried to find me but they were more occupied with the vision of the Underworld. They were saying:
Step back, you servant of the timeless gods.
You come in search of this, my living heart.
’Tis not for you to take. Here I advance
And lo, the gods accept my offerings,
Prostrate themselves to honor me and mine.
These words lent a superhuman weight to your body, as they marked your entry into death. We pulled harder still on the ropes, for I had to be beside you in your last snatches of life. The closeness of your body stole the breath out of my lungs. You stank of blood, you the most manly of men. You smelled like a cloth soaked with the menstrual blood of women for month after month. I had to let go the rope, and Charmian and Eira were left to drag you through the window.
“What did you do?” I asked you. “You fool, so imprudent, so ignorant and hasty!” while pale and disfigured, like a bad portrait of yourself, you babbled I don’t know what nonsense. You were weeping, Mark Antony, you had renewed your laments over my death. Not even the sight of me could convince you that I was alive. Diomedes had scaled the wall after you, wanting to help where no help was possible. The remedies he had provided proved of little use. You were soaked in your blood. Olympus, the doctor, came in on the heels of Diomedes, but we all recognized that his visit was futile. We removed you from the stretcher and made you comfortable in my bed. I took off my robes to cover you. You asked for wine and I gave you some. You drank it at a gulp. Lying beside you, I embraced you. Glueing myself to your body, I kissed you. Your mouth was cold and dry. I made you promises. I spoke rebukes. I called you my emperor, ally, enemy, slave, guiding light, taskmaster. I told you how deeply I loved you, and I called you a noose around my neck, a suffocating force, my madness and my ruin. I called you my grape and fig, serpent and lion. I recalled our last, magnificent journey to Athens, then the decorations, lights, and celebrations of our first meal together, the joke we played at a party on the King of Armenia. Once again I criticized your wrongheadedness in leaving Herod in power in Judaea, and your idiotic debauchery in Leucocome, where you had scurried after being thrashed by the Parthians. I made a point of describing the sleepless night we passed together in Antioch, after you were widowed and had remarried, a night that centuries will never forget. We made love that night, till daybreak, without feeling one moment of weariness or satiety.
Vesper got drunk tonight and now he dreams,
The Great Bear’s stars have not traversed the night.
The moon still stands where first she showed her beams,
The Pleiades and Venus keep in sight.
Holdfast, brave Night; serve Love, the best of gods. .
Plunged in that recollection, I abstained from life in the present and lived in memory, for no other source of happiness lay open to us. We were stretched out, the two of us, on the bed I had them bring to the Temple of Isis. Here, speaking to you, clasped to you, I spent the night, suffocating, like you, in blood. Some dream-vision came to taunt you, and to restore your serenity, I sang to you. Even when I knew that no breath of life remained in you, I still clung to you. Then I fell asleep, cradled in your rigid arms, pressed against your stone-cold breast, abandoned by the tide of your being. We were three on that sodden bed: your sword, the triumvir, and Egypt’s queen. We were three: my death, my life, and your corpse. We were three: my memories, my desire for you, and my rage. We were three: Mark Antony’s Rome, the Egypt of the Nile, whose pharoah I am, and the Greece of my ancestors of which you are a citizen, an Athenian. We were three: the mother of Caesar’s only son Caesarion, the daughter of Auletes, and your parents’ son. We were three: the war that Rome declared on us in the voice of that beardless youth, the war that blazed between us two, and the peace of our embracing bodies.
“Do not leave!” I wanted to shout at you. “Do not leave. Let me find you one last time, let me embrace you, let me fasten my lips on yours. Raise yourself a little. Kiss me while your kiss is still alive. Let the breath of your soul race to meet my mouth and heart. Let me drink of your love and I will preserve that kiss as if it were you! You go in search of the king of inhuman gloom, but I am alive and follow you I cannot!”
Blood gives birth to roses,
Tears to anemones.
I weep for my Mark Antony
And my golden memories.
I dreamed with my head propped on your chest. And once again the two of us were living out our timeless intoxication with life. It was night and, disguised as beggars, we were dancing in the streets of beautiful Alexandria. We went from house to house, pleading for wine and music. Exactly the way we did when we were making every effort to produce our first child. You were kissing me, and it was your kiss that awoke me, a kiss that left your true taste in my mouth, a kiss from your still-warm mouth, your true mouth, your living mouth, a kiss that invited me to lose myself in you, to follow you, drawing me toward the irresistible joy of your body, to final oblivion and to the fullness of our divine condition.