I Am Livia (20 page)

Of course his approach had not come uninvited. I had desired him from the first moment I saw him, nearly five years ago. And he had known it from the first. He had to have known it. And when he had come to my house for dinner I had not been able to take my eyes off him.

My face flamed. I wanted to run away and hide.

“What do you feel for me?” he asked.

“All your guests are looking at us.”
The truth is I was beyond focusing on other people’s faces. I could not tell if we were being watched.

“If you care nothing for me, say you care nothing, and I’ll leave you alone. But you must spell things out for me, just as if I were some provincial boy from Velitrae. Because that’s actually who I am in these matters, and I have to know.”

“I will spell this out for you: I remember who my father was and who my mother was. And you should remember it too. I can’t help what I feel. But I’m not to be had cheaply.” My gaze traveled around the room. I could see more clearly now. On the opposite couch, two women stared in my direction. I whispered, “And by sitting here, talking to me in this way, you are making me an object of gossip and disgrace.”

He stiffened. “I’m sorry I’ve given you offense,” he said. Then he got up and walked away.

I stared after him. Of all emotions, what I felt was this—longing. Because he was gone.

I became aware of
Tiberius Nero sitting down beside me. “In the name of all that’s sacred,” he said in a low hiss, “what is going on between the two of you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” My voice sounded far off, remote. I felt almost disembodied, as if my husband’s presence had no reality for me.

“He looked put out or insulted when he walked away.”

“Yes, perhaps he felt put out or insulted.”

“If he suggested something improper—”

“No, he didn’t. He didn’t suggest anything.”

“Then what—? Was he flirting with you? Couldn’t you just be pleasant to him?”

“No, I really couldn’t,” I said.

Tiberius Nero said, “I think you’ve lost your mind.”

I knew what I had done. I had not done it with forethought. Still, I had done it.

Caesar had said,
If you care nothing for me, say it, and I’ll leave you alone.
But I had not said that, had I?
No, for all my indignation, I had not. I had told him that I was not to be had cheaply. Those words—it seemed to me my usual self had not chosen them. Yet they had not come to my lips accidentally. They had been honed by a part of me with which I was barely acquainted.

I imagined Caesar examining my words, holding them up in the sunlight, so to speak, slowly taking in their meaning. And then deciding how he would respond.

Four days later, Caesar’s wife gave birth to a daughter, and that day the new parents divorced. People said Caesar had ended his marriage for love of another woman, and they knew the other woman’s name, Livia Drusilla. Meanwhile, we hadn’t even kissed. But I had become a public figure, of a certain kind. My sister came to me almost weeping because she had seen a picture, supposed to be me, drawn on a fence—a grotesque charcoal sketch of a lewd, naked woman with a pregnant stomach. And scrawled beneath the drawing was a dirty joke about Caesar’s whore. “What is happening?” she demanded. “What are you doing?
”
When I told her there was nothing—nothing!—between Caesar and me, I knew she didn’t believe me.

It was impossible that Tiberius Nero, by this point, did not know about the talk. But he did not confront me. I think he was in a state of stunned disbelief. He was out most of the day or else behind the closed door of his study.
We hardly spoke to each other.

Then, early one morning, a message came from Caesar, not for me but for my husband. Would Tiberius Nero please call upon him that day? There was a matter they needed to discuss.

Tiberius Nero sent the messenger back to Caesar. “Say I will visit him within the hour.” He looked at me when the man had gone. “Livia, do you know what this is abou
t
?”

I did not say,
How would I know?
I just shook my head.

You would have had to have been acquainted very well with Tiberius Nero to notice the tight set of his mouth and recognize it as a sign of fear. My husband had a grievance against Caesar, not the other way around. Caesar was rumored to have seduced his wife. Just a few generations before, it would have been considered an outrage for a public figure to have carnal relations with a married woman. Divorces were rare and viewed as an affront to the gods. Roman women were expected to be chaste, and did not even recline at dinner parties but sat upright like well-behaved children. It was not even considered proper for us to drink wine. A man could kill an adulterer—however prominent that adulterer happened to be—and everyone would applaud him for it. Under the Republic, it would have been Caesar who had cause to be afraid of my husband. But the Republic was dead.

Tiberius Nero went and donned his toga. I watched him leave, and then I walked out to the garden. It was late September. I could smell autumn in the air. Sometime after the new year, I would bear my husband’s child.

What would happen between these two men? I could imagine, like scenes in a play, two benign possibilities. In one—which I did not for a moment believe was even possible—Caesar had perfectly valid and mundane senatorial business to discuss with Tiberius Nero; it turned out this summons had nothing to do with me at all. In another, more likely scene, he acknowledged the unfortunate talk about us, assured Tiberius Nero it was groundless, offered him some office or honor as a sop, and sent him on his way.

Other possibilities, I refused to allow myself to envision.

As I sat on a garden bench, waiting for Tiberius Nero to return from seeing Caesar, the baby inside me began to kick frantically. I caressed my belly and murmured reassuring words to my unborn child.

I asked myself what I wanted.
What I should want was obvious. For my husband to come home to me, for our life together to continue unchanged. To remain a faithful wife to the man to whom my noble father had given me.

What did I actually wan
t
? Two contradictory things. I wanted to be a worthy child of my parents, not to be defiled by passion for a man who had helped destroy them, to keep my wholeness and integrity. And I wanted Caesar’s arms around me, his lips on my lips, to be pressed to him, body to body, soul to soul, in excruciating and unending bliss.

W
hen Tiberius Nero came home from his encounter with Caesar, he walked silently past me into his study and sagged into a chair. He called for a slave to bring him wine, though he rarely drank it so early in the day.

I sat down on the study couch. The slave came with the wine. “Leave us—and close the door,
”
T
iberius Nero told him. He drank a cup of wine in silence
.
W
hen he finally spoke, his voice had a stilted and pedantic tone. “Livia, Caesar feels that by reason of your Claudian bloodline and your father’s rank among the defenders of the Republic, marriage to you would bring him unique political advantages. It would help conciliate certain portions of the nobility, you see. Therefore, he has asked me to play the part of a patriot and, for the peace of Rome, free you so that you can marry him.”

I absorbed it. Caesar wanted me to be his wife. I looked down for a moment. I did not want Tiberius Nero to see my joy. “He asked you to divorce me?”

“For Rome’s sake.”

“And what did you say?”

Tiberius Nero shut his eyes.

“What did you say?” I asked again. I waited, unable to breathe.

He licked his lips. “I told him I would not stand in your way.”

A woman’s heart is not a simple thing. I had never been in love with my husband. But when I realized Tiberius Nero would not fight for me I felt as if I had been slapped across the face. I wanted him to give me up to Caesar, oh, I wanted it. And yet in this moment it stung me that he would agree to do it.

I suppose what he read in my expression was contempt. He flushed. “Understand, I don’t believe Caesar has taken it into his head to marry you without encouragement from you. I’m not as big a fool as you may think. I won’t destroy myself for a woman who’s given her heart and her body to another man.”

“I haven’t given him my body.”

As soon as the words were out, I realized what I had revealed. I doubt I had fully admitted the truth to myself until that moment. I covered my face with my hands and began to weep.

Tiberius Nero cursed softly.

After a time, I stopped crying. I went to my bedchamber and called Pelia to bring me a basin of water and my mirror. I washed my face, and Pelia combed my hair. Then I ordered my litter fetched.

When I was walking through the entranceway, about to leave, Tiberius Nero came after me and caught me by the arm. “I hope you’ll admit that I have been no bad husband to you. If you suffered hardship, it wasn’t through any fault of mine, but because of the times we’re living in. If anything, I’ve been only too willing to accommodate myself to your wishes.”

“What you say is true.”

Why was he saying it, though? I realized that he feared my enmity, and this shook me to the core. I could have wept again over the awfulness of the situation. I carried my husband’s child but was betraying him. And instead of living in the virtuous Republic of my father’s dreams, we were ruled by a young man with an army at his back. A senator even feared saying no to this young man when he asked for his wife. To give it all one final twist—it was this young man I could not help loving. None of it was as it should be.

I had no right to blame Tiberius Nero for anything, I thought. What a net he had been caught in. “Why, Tiberius, you are the father of my son and the child I will soon bear. I will always be your friend.”

He dropped my arm and took a step away from me.

I went outside, where my litter was waiting. I told the bearers to carry me to the house of Caesar Octavianus.

His slave led me in through the entranceway, and Caesar met me in the atrium.
We stood still at first, just looking at each other.

He thought that by asking my husband to divorce me so that we could be married, he was doing what I wanted him to do. But we had not discussed this explicitly. I believe he considered it possible that I had come to tell him that he had misunderstood, that marriage to him was not my desire. So there was a moment in which I saw doubt and vulnerability in his expression. This moment was inexpressibly sweet to me. But it passed. He said in a businesslike tone, “I’m glad you’re here, Livia Drusilla. There are matters we must discuss.” He led me into a small room furnished with worn-looking couches.

My litter, of course, lay outside his door. Someone would recognize it; the gossip mills would be at work. People would imagine what was happening inside between the two of us. They no doubt conjured up scenes of passion. Meanwhile, we sat down on couches facing each other, as if we had met to negotiate some business contract.

“What you told Tiberius Nero makes little sense,” I said. “I don’t think marriage to me is a good political move for you.”

“No?” he said, his expression impassive.

“No. If I were unmarried, it might be. Some people might be reassured by your choosing to marry someone of my background. However, the idea that you will heal whatever breach exists between you and the nobility, by demanding the wife of one of the nobility’s more prominent members, is on the face of it absurd.”

“You think so?”

“I am sure of it,” I said.

Caesar shrugged. “It’s hard to ask a man to give you his wife, without in the process paying him such a mortal insult that he’ll gladly sacrifice his life to stick a knife in you. I think my meeting with Tiberius Nero was a great success because at this moment you are here with me, and he and I are both alive. It was better to spout nonsense about politics to him than to say the truth.”

“By the truth, do you mean that you’re in love with me?”

He said in a constricted voice, “I already told you I want you.”

He did not say the word “love.” But why shouldn’t he be guarded? I had replied with mockery when he spoke of love before.

“I’m afraid that this marriage will bring you ill fame,” I said.

“Everything I have done for the past five years has been so well calculated. Don’t I have the right to just once…?” He paused as if unable to find the right words.

“…act foolishly?”

“Livia Drusilla, I’ve considered all the possible consequences of marrying you. I find them acceptable. I’d like you to tell me if you wish to be my wife.”

This was the moment of choice I had never had before. I would decide my destiny. I could say “No.” I knew that if I did, he would not force me to marry him. Or I could say “Yes.”

People would whisper that I’d angled for what marriage to Caesar would give me—power and riches. I would not have sold myself for either. I saw Caesar sitting there, his features tense, his eyes on mine, waiting.
What I wanted was not power, not riches, but him.

I said, “I wish to be your wife.”

He smiled. “Then all is well.”

“No,” I said. “All is not well. Don’t you see? You were my father’s enemy. And I’m married. I have two children—one not even born—whom I will lose if I divorce. I feel—terrified.”

“Sometimes you reach a place where the earth seems to open in a great fissure,” Caesar said. “Retreat is impossible. So what you must do is leap.”

“Leap,” I repeated.

“Livia, it can’t be all perfect and right the way you want it. You have to choose between two imperfections, because that’s all there is. Either you stay Tiberius Nero’s wife, or you divorce him and marry me. We can’t change your parents’ fate. As for your children—a father must have custody, but do you think Tiberius Nero will try to prevent my wife from seeing her children? I doubt if he’d even want to. I promise you, you’ll see them every day if that’s your desire.”

“Do you know what I wish?” I found that for the second time that day I was crying. “I wish it were five years ago. And I had never married, and a boy from Velitrae came to my father and asked to marry me. And since he was such a fine young man, with such a good head on his shoulders, my father liked him the moment he set eyes on him. And there was no such thing as civil strife in Rome, and so we married and prepared to lead very uneventful lives. Why couldn’t it have happened that way?”

Caesar came over to the couch I was sitting on and put his arms around me.

I imagined the last five years had never happened. All who had died in these years, beginning with Julius Caesar, still lived, and Caesar Octavianus was that boy from Velitrae, an innocent boy with no blood on his hands.

I raised my face. I wanted to be kissed by that boy. And he kissed me.

To be kissed by the person you have longed for so deeply is joy beyond measure.

He held me close. My arms were around him. I felt the soft wool of his tunic, and I was conscious of his body underneath, its clean male scent. Our lips met again and again in burning kisses.

When I finally drew away from him, I was trembling. The air felt warm. He stroked my cheek, and his merest touch filled me with longing.

Only the most virtuous and pure, they say, go to the Elysian Fields after death. In that far-off place, existence is unending bliss. I am sure my father and mother are there. I doubt if I deserve to join them. But I experienced Elysium on earth, in the presence of Caesar Octavianus. To sit in a room with him, alone as we had never before been alone. To rest my head against his shoulder and feel his warmth. To hear his voice. To look at him. That was bliss beyond bliss to me.

“Caesar—how can I go on calling you Caesar? It sounds so formal—so—” It was a name I associated with years of enmity.

He hesitated and then said in a low voice, “My family has always called me Tavius.”

“Tavius,” I said. The boy from Velitrae was called Tavius.

At that moment, Caesar Octavianus became Tavius for me.

We were strange people, Tavius and I, as anyone who had watched us during those first hours we spent alone together would have realized. If his oddity and mine did not take precisely the same form, still the edges of one seemed to fit those of the other, like two sides of a split piece of pottery. Maybe in some way we had both sensed this, and this was part of what had drawn us together. Every time his hand so much as brushed mine, I felt desire. But it was not the moment, with me pregnant, for us to consummate our love. So what we could do was talk. We did not exchange sweet nothings or fantasies of our future life together. We talked about Rome. A conversation began that day that would continue for a very, very long time.

I remember him saying in an almost harsh tone, though we still sat pressed together on the couch, “Livia, do you think things have happened the way they have because I’m ambitious? Oh, I am, but it’s also the situation. Things have gotten so rotten that someone had to come along and not flinch from doing what was necessary to put them right. Had to. Sometimes I can feel history blowing right on the back of my neck, pushing me along.”

“You feel history blowing on the back of your neck?”

“I was using a metaphor. Look, do you think we can go through another ninety years like the last ninety? Even another ten years? How much more can any country stand? I sometimes wonder why Italy hasn’t broken off from the mainland of Europe and sunk into the sea.”

He went into an account of the last ninety years. Assassinations of the good and pure. Senators, holding office for life, who would do nothing to address Rome’s ills but would kill to protect their own wealth and position. Times of relative peace ending in violence. Civil war and again civil war. His account was detailed and complete and brilliant. I was sure he had gone through it before, probably many times, maybe to persuade others of his viewpoint, or maybe to persuade himself. It was self-justifying; I knew that, even as I sat there listening, loving him, and, if such a thing were possible, falling even more deeply in love with him because I perceived the luminous nature of his mind. The Republic had been governed by a corrupt oligarchy. Rome needed to be led by a single strong and enlightened leader. He was that leader.