Why was it you, why did it have to be you I tied myself to? Why you? You had corruption sown in the depths of your being. The roots of your life were dead to nourishment. But it was you whom I joined in a single life. Is love more fully itself only when it finds rottenness, impossibility, death, and violence? If so, then I too have been eaten away by rottenness. Since first I became a woman and desired a man, I, too, must have been rotten, since only in love did I find the means to burst with happiness, and only with this happiness could my intelligence and other powers attain their fullness. Only when love was satisfied, reciprocated, and rendered happy, could I feel complete. So, if it was only through love that I knew how to be myself and if love is born only from rottennness, it must be that I was a decomposing corpse from the first moment I kissed a man with desire. For it was from that moment that I knew how to gather my strength — with a man standing beside me as my accomplice and my beloved. Only then did I feel whole.
Rotten are they who feed only on love and wish to satiate themselves on one single person, rotten to the heart of them, whether king or triumvir or Caesar, woman or man. And Mark Antony was rotten from birth so it served me nothing to be a scion of the House of the Lagids, to reign in Egypt and set my mark on Rome.
The idea of rottenness both appalls and obsesses me. Who will mummify our bodies, Antony? I am going to speak my innermost thoughts aloud. They have left us alone with your corpse, denying entrance to anyone with the skill to mummify us. I am alone and there is no one nearby who can care for your loving body as it deserves. No one will care for mine, either. They have left us alone, you and me here, to die in a manner unworthy of a human being, to die like kaffirs, without form or ceremony. Is there a sharper sorrow, a bitterer disgrace, a crueler punishment? Does one need to be Antigone to know it? We deserve it, you and I. Did we merit this isolation, for being the lovers that we were in our first days here in Alexandria? Tell me, Mark Antony, could I have loved another who was not you? Could he have been totally different from you? Did Destiny trap me? Did it place beside me, here in this cage called Egypt, only a man doomed to failure? For there was no one else beside me. No one else forced the bars of the gilded prison where the Lagid Queen lay confined.
Was there no second Caesar for me? A complete man with whom I could have been reborn? Did the only true man die assassinated by his own followers? Were you my better-than-nothing? Certainly in Egypt there was no man with the power to seduce me. The kings of Nabatea and Judaea had no Rome with which to woo me. Was it this lack of choice that destroyed me as a queen and as a woman? Was it this that cast a stormcloud over me and made me grasp at the ungraspable?
Could I perhaps have learned to feel complete beside a man of lesser strength than I? One with less authority, fewer riches? No. My self-respect as a woman made that impossible. Men know how to love a female slave. But we women who have nothing slavish in our natures, who are owners of ourselves, who have enlarged and cultivated our personalities, who have achieved an understanding of ourselves, who live our lives to the limits permitted by the gods — we do not know how to love a man who does not merit it in the eyes of the world, a man who lacks power or intelligence or that jewel of jewels, genius. The rich, old women of whom the poets sing, they who can be seduced into loving a man who covets their possessions or, worse still, who would see them dead so that he can inherit their wealth, what of them? I do not belong to their world. They need to placate their vulvas. To satisfy their carnal appetites, they stoop to buying love, like the graceless men who must pay cold cash for what is freely granted only by looking a woman in her eyes and desiring her. Such men seek a commercial transaction and nothing else; they use their coins to protect themselves from the women they abuse in the pursuit of pleasure. What does any of that matter to me? Nothing is further distant from Cleopatra. And yet they tell me that in the streets of Rome the people sing that Cleopatra is a prostitute Antony fattens with pieces of the Empire. They chant:
Cleo is a dusky whore.
She costs a pretty penny.
Mark Antony must pay and pay.
If not, he don’t get any!
I had my servant sing me the latest chant. Ugly words, ugly tune, typical of Rome and its musicians. The only part worth hearing was the voice of the Egyptian who sang it. He was trembling like a leaf in an angry wind, but he sang with a voice that the Nile, the sun, the Mediterranean, the proximity of the desert, the papyrus, and the lotus flower produce in the people of Alexandria, the heart of rich Egypt — all the while knowing the penalty for being the bearer of bad news.
Mark Antony, I say it again: you were my destruction. You were the only one with whom I was made a complete being, entire. Caesar, I tell you, was different, altogether different. Neither he nor I ever had the illusion of forming a whole, for we never succumbed to the arrogance of locking ourselves into a closed circle, never tried to make two into one. Antony, you were my glory. Out of you was born the best of me. Out of you and only you was I born complete, you my father, Antony, and my mother!
We were our own worst torments, Antony. We let ourselves be swept away by the foolish fantasy of creating the perfect unity.
In my grief, I have lost the thread of what I was saying. I wanted to describe what you and I were like and how we drove ourselves to our defeat. It was never within Octavius’s power to destroy us. He had no part in our story. You and I hurled ourselves to this terrible conclusion. He merely took advantage of our collapse, like the son of Lacares and the others, who squalidly grabbed at the possessions of the vanquished, snatching their booty from the leftovers and boastfully representing it as a triumph.
After that incident, the joke of the salted herring, Antony still did not pay serious attention to the matters of state. Thanks to this neglect, his wife and his brother were able to involve themselves in a war against Octavius. That would never have happened, if he had listened to me. When I drew it to his notice, he cut short my lecture. But he never left off loving me, in his way. My insistence that he return to face reality and use our love as a citadel to make more of himself merely drove him to look for easier and more comfortable ways to turn his back on everything. He was determined to use our love as a means of escape. He loved life so much; yet he was set on eluding it. Can someone explain to me what motivated such behavior?