Perhaps, I said to myself, if I scratch him hard enough, I may find a reference to the part of the world I find myself in now. Who knows, he might have had a fantasy, a vision. In this line of work that happens.
But you never were a visionary. Quirky, unpredictable, yes—but not a visionary. To advise a grief-stricken fellow to change his tune and sing Caesar's victories—this you could do; but to imagine another land and another heaven—well, for that one should turn, I guess, to Ovid. Or wait for another millennium. On the whole, you Latin poets were bigger on reflection and rumination than on conjecture. I suppose because the empire was large enough as it was to strain one's own imagination.
So there I was, lying across my unkempt bed, in this unimaginable (for you) place, on a cold February night, some two thousand years later. The only thing I had in common with you, I thought, was the latitude and, of course, the little volume of your Collected, in Russian translations. At the time you wrote all this, you see, we didn't have a language. We weren't even we; we were Geloni, Getae, Budini, etc.: just bubbles in our own future gene pool. So two thousand years were not for nothing, after all. Now we can read you in our own highly inflected language, with its famous gutta-percha syntax suiting the translation of the likes of you marvelously.
Still, I am writing this to you in a language with whose alphabet you are more familiar. A lot more, I should add, than I am. Cyrillic, I am afraid, would only bewilder you even further, though you no doubt would recognize the Greek characters. Of course the distance between us is too large to worry about increasing it—or, for that matter, about trying to shrink it. But the sight of Latin letters may be of some comfort to you, no matter how bewildering their use may look.
So I was lying atop my bed with the little volume of your Cannina. The heat was on, but the cold night outside was winning. It is a small, two-storied wooden affair I live in here, and my bedroom is upstairs. As I looked at the ceiling, I could almost see cold seeping through my gambrel roof: a sort of anti-haze. No mirrors here. At a certain age one doesn't care for one's own reflection, company or no company; especially if no. That's why I wonder whether Suetonius tells the truth. Although I imagine you would be pretty sanguine about that as well. Your famous equipoise! Besides, for all this latitudinal identity, in Rome it never gets that cold. A couple of thousand years ago the climate perhaps was different; your lines, though, bear no witness to that. Anyhow, I was getting sleepy.
And I remembered a beauty I once knew in your town. She lived in Subura, in a small apartment bristling with flowerpots but redolent with the smell of the crumbling paperbacks the place was stuffed with. They were everywhere, but mostly on shelves reaching the ceiling (the ceiling, admittedly, was low). Most of them were not hers but belonged to her neighbor across the hall, about whom I heard a lot but whom I never met. The neighbor was an old woman, a widow, who was born and spent her entire life in Libya, in Leptis Magna. She was Italian but of Jewish extraction—or maybe it was her husband who was Jewish. At any rate, when he died and when things began to heat up in Libya, the old lady sold her house, packed up her stuff, and came to Rome. Her apartment was apparently even smaller than my tender companion's, and jammed with a lifetime's accretions. So the two women, the old and the young, struck a deal whereupon the latter's bedroom began to resemble a regular secondhand-book store. What jarred with this impression wasn't so much the bed as the large, heavily framed mirror leaning somewhat precariously against a rickety bookshelf right across from the bed, and at such an angle that whenever I or my tender companion wanted to imitate you, we had to strain and crane our necks rather desperately. Otherwise the mirror would frame only more paperbacks. In the early hours it could give one an eerie feeling of being transparent.
All that happened ages ago, though something nudges me to mutter, centuries ago. In an emotional sense, that would be valid. In fact, the distance between that place in Subura and my present precincts psychologically is larger than the one between you and me. Which is to say that in neither case are "millennia" inapplicable. Or to say that, to me, your reality is practically greater than that of my private memory. Besides, the name of Leptis Magna interferes with both. I've always wanted to visit there; in fact, it became a sort of obsession with me once I began to frequent your town and Mediterranean shores in general. Well, partly because one of the floor mosaics in some bath there contains the only surviving likeness of Virgil, and a likeness done in his lifetime, at that! Or so I was told; but maybe it's in Tunisia. In Africa, anyway. When one is cold, one remembers Africa. And when it's hot, also.
Ah, what I wouldn't give to know what the four of you looked like! To put a face to the lyric, not to mention the epic. I would settle for a mosaic, though I'd prefer a fresco. Worse comes to worse, I would resign myself to the marbles, except that the marbles are too generic—everybody gets blond in marble—and too questionable. Somehow, you are the least of my concerns, i.e., you are the easiest to picture. If what Suetonius tells us about your appearance is indeed true— at least something in his account must be true!—and you were short and portly, then you most likely looked like Eu- genio Montale or Charlie Chaplin in the King in New York period. The one I can't picture for the life of me is Ovid. Even Propertius is easier: skinny, sickly, obsessed with his equally skinny and sickly redhead, he is imaginable. Say, a cross behveen William Powell and Zbigniew Cybulski. But not Ovid, though he lasted longer than all of you. Alas, not in those parts where they carved likenesses. Or laid mosaics. Or bothered with frescoes. And if anything of the sort was done before your beloved Augustus kicked him out ofRome, then it was no doubt destroyed. So as not to offend high sensibilities. And afterward—well, afterward any slab of marble would do. As we used to say in northern Scythia— Hyperborea to you—paper can endure anything, and in your day marble was a kind of paper.
You think I am rambling, but I am just trying to reproduce the train of thought that took me late last night to an unusually graphic destination. It meandered a bit, for sure; but not that much. For, one way or another, I've always been thinking about you four, especially about Ovid. About Pub- lius Ovidius Naso. And not for reasons of some particular affinity. No matter how similar my circumstances may now and then appear to his in the eyes of some beholder, I won't produce any Metamorphoses. Besides, twenty-two years in these parts won't rival ten in Sarmatia. Not to mention that I saw my Terza Roma crumble. I have my vanity, but it has its limits. Now that they are drawn by age, they are more palpable than before. But even as a young pup, kicked out of my home to the Polar Circle, I never fancied myself playing his double. Though then my empire looked indeed eternal, and one could roam on the ice of our many deltas all winter long.
No, I never could conjure Naso's face. Sometimes I see him played by James Mason—a hazel eye soggy with grief and mischief; at other times, though, it's Paul Newman's winter-gray stare. But, then, Naso was a very protean fellow, with Janus no doubt presiding over his lares. Did you two get along, or was the age difference too big to bother? Twenty-two years, after all. You must have known him, at least through Maecenas. Or did you just think him too frivolous, saw it coming? Was there bad blood between you? He must have thought you ridiculously loyal, true blue in a sort of quaint, self-made man's kind of way. And to you he was just a punk, an aristo, privileged from the cradle, etc. Not like you and Anthony Perkins's Virgil, practically working- class boys, only five years' difference. Or is this too much Karl Marx reading and moviegoing, Horace? Perhaps. But wait, there is more. There is Dr. Freud coming into this, too, for what sort of interpretation of dreams is it, if it's not filtered through good old Ziggy? For it was my good old subconscious the train of thought I just mentioned was taking me to, late last night, and at some speed.