On the second floor lived a retired ex-centurion, whom nobody ever saw, and his middle-aged mistress, who fluffed about her balcony like a peachy powder-sponge. Caenis won her confidence and found her a lonely woman who lived in terror that the centurion would die and leave her penniless. In the end she worried herself to death first; the centurion was heartbroken, and Caenis had to help him with the funeral.
On the third floor lived two separate families of equestrian rank who were enduring temporary shortages of funds. These good people felt no necessity to pass the time of day.
On the fourth floor lived four brothers all engaged in running a second-rate gymnasium for third-rate gladiators. They constantly quarreled with various strangers who rushed up from the street to complain when slops were sluiced from their windows onto clothes and heads. The law took a strong line on flinging down slops; however, in the Twelfth District, law took second place to huge men with brutal tempers who trained gladiators.
On the fifth floor at the front lived Caenis.
At the back were several other ladies on their own. Eumolpus said he liked female tenants because they were quiet, and keen to pay their rent. Caenis soon worked out that Eumolpus was disappointed if they paid up in minted coin rather than by taking him to bed; she herself stoically paid him in coin, to his visible distress. The other ladies who shared her landing kept households that constantly ran out of flour or oil or salt. One or two could be abusive, but on the whole they were a feckless, bleary, harmless group. Most were caring for infants of the tousled, gravy-faced sort who were put out for long periods on the stairways playing with surprisingly expensive toys while their mothers, who did a lot of entertaining, entertained.
On the sixth and seventh floors above lived innumerable groups of people in several sad generations, crowded many to a room. To these belonged swarthy men with set faces who broke roads, stoked furnaces, and unbunged the sewers. With them lived weary, bowed, meticulously clean women, who looked sixty but were probably not yet thirty, women who embroidered marvelous scarves, threaded cheap beads, and stood at street corners silently offering penny packets of sunflower seeds for sale. Some of these families disappeared abruptly sometimes; others seemed to have existed in that place for many decades. They spoke strange languages, when they spoke at all, and occasionally burst into wondrous song. With them, more than anyone, Caenis felt a dark affinity.
* * *
One of the painters from the Palace decorated her apartment with purloined paint. "I've sealed up the walls with new plaster as best I could," he told her cheerfully. "Hardly soundproof, but it might hold back the bugs." Caenis swallowed. "I take it you're familiar with the mouse?" She had seen the mouse.
There had been much mention locally of Doris, the previous tenant of her rooms. Apparently this Doris had been a very peculiar girl. Caenis made no comment; she was peculiar herself—and probably proud of it. The oddest thing Doris appeared to have done was to rush screaming from the apartment when she first saw the mouse, threatening to take Eumolpus to court. Foolish people sometimes did that. It was very expensive; landlords learn the art of litigation with their mothers' milk.
When Caenis first saw the mouse she walked quietly onto her balcony until it went away. She stopped up its hole with depilatory wax, then watched in horrified fascination as it chewed its way straight out. Burrius, the painter, brought her some poison, which he said came from the private cabinet of the late Empress Livia; the mouse dropped dead before it had time to jump back from the saucer where Caenis had laid the bait.
She had her few rooms painted the color of mature honeysuckle flowers, a thin dry gold through which the pale plaster beneath seemed to gleam.
"Want an erotic fresco in the bedroom?" offered Burrius. "Satyrs with gigantic phalluses? Get your men in the mood? Nice?"
"Nice; but no thanks," returned Caenis drily. "I'm having a rest from moody men."
"That's very sad!" commiserated Burrius. Like everyone, he knew her history.
Caenis laughed. She bore no grudges against men. She regarded her past as fortunate. "The saddest part about it is the fact I do agree with you it's sad."
Burrius thought about that. Any casual painter tries his luck. "I don't suppose—"
"Quite right," agreed Caenis mildly. "Don't suppose!"
* * *
Despite her own occasional depression and the constant amazement of her friends, Antonia Caenis lived in the Twelfth District for over three years. She was surrounded by life at its most varied, life at a level to which she dismally believed she belonged. Luckily she had never been afraid to be alone.
She was sometimes afraid of going mad.
"People who see the risk," Veronica assured her, "never manage to go mad, however hard they try."
Caenis simply recognized that she thought now, as she always had thought: Life was hard; life was foul; but if you were too poor and too unimportant to have hopes of a heroic eternity in the Elysian fields, you must make the bitter best of it, for life was all there was.
It was toward the end of the first year, when madness still seemed a vague possibility, that something happened that could well have tipped a less robust person into that long slide down into the desolate pit. She was walking in her self-contained way along the Via Appia toward home. She had been to see Claudia Antonia, the daughter of Antonia's son Claudius by one of his enforced marriages. As his mother's freedwoman, a client of the Claudian family, Caenis was helping informally with the young girl's education.
Returning home, her slaveboy ambled with her. Veronica had taken on the wistful little girl Caenis had owned in Antonia's house, whose regret at the loss of Vespasian's bribing coppers had grown too much to bear. So now Caenis had instead this boy, Jason, a dim but cheerful child, constantly ravenous, who carried up her water, carried down her rubbish, and on trips out loafed along behind her with a meat pie in one hand and a truncheon slipping through his belt. He was supposed to be her bodyguard. Looking after Jason occupied much of her mind.
It was a wild day at the end of spring. After a long spell of wet weather the streets were choked with mire. Picking her way to try to avoid taking in squelchy sandalfuls of mud, Caenis soon noticed irritably that the hem of her dress and mantle had been heavily splashed by less careful passers-by. At the crossroads where she would turn off the main highway she found herself in the middle of a curious crowd. The source of the commotion was not the normal dog fight or stall-holders' argument.
The Twelfth District was being visited by the Emperor.
* * *
By this time Caligula had developed the startling mania for which he would become a legend. The previous year he had suffered a devastating illness. Rumors ran riot about what form this took—epilepsy, perhaps, or some inflammation of the brain brought on by stress. Whatever it was, once he recovered he had changed fully into the monster that had been merely foreshadowed before. He was ready to test his power to the limit—and there was no limit.
He killed his rival, Gemellus. Son of Livilla, Antonia's disgraced daughter and according to scandalmongers son of Sejanus too, Gemellus had been pushed aside by the Senate in the euphoria that greeted Caligula's accession. Although Caligula had formally adopted him as a gesture assuring the family succession, his generosity soon gave way to suspicion and contempt. His own illness caused him to accuse Gemellus of plotting to seize power. He complained that Gemellus was afraid of being poisoned—a wise enough fear—and that he constantly stank of antidotes (Gemellus was a hypochondriac, who regularly took linctus for a cough).