The First Man in Rome (110 page)

This project she had cherished from the time she and Caesar first moved into the insula; Aurelia had discovered in herself a longing to make a garden, and dreamed of transforming the ill-kept central courtyard into an oasis which would be a pleasure to everyone living in the building. But everything had conspired against her, starting with the problem of Epaphroditus, also entitled to use the courtyard. Caesar had never seen for himself the goings-on of Epaphroditus; the actor was cunning enough to make sure his debaucheries occurred only when Caesar was out. And Caesar, she learned, thought all women tended to exaggerate.

Irksomely dense wooden screens were fixed between the columns of the balconies which looked down into the courtyard from every upper floor. Therefore, no one who lived upstairs could gain a glimpse of it. Admittedly these screens did keep the courtyard private—and helped stem the constant torrent of noise which emanated from every flat—but they also converted the light-well into a dreary brown chimney nine storeys high, and the courtyard into its equally dreary hearth, and rendered it impossible for any of the upper floors to obtain much light or much fresh air.

Thus as soon as possible after Caesar left, Aurelia sent for her carpenter and told him to tear down every screen.

He stared at her as if she had gone mad.

"What's the matter?" she asked, bewildered.

"Domina,
you'll be knee-deep in shit and piss inside three days," he said, "not to mention anything else they want to toss out, from the dead dog to the dead granny to the girl-babies."

She felt a tide of red suffuse her face until even her ears were on fire. It wasn't the unvarnished truth of the carpenter's statement mortified her, but her own naivete. Fool, fool, fool! Why hadn't she thought of that? Because, she answered herself, a lifetime of passing the doorways and staircases of apartment buildings could not give one who had always lived in a large private dwelling the remotest idea of what went on inside. Her Uncle Cotta would not have divined the purpose of that wooden screen any quicker than she had.

She pressed her hands to her glowing cheeks and gave the carpenter such an adorable look of confused amusement that he dreamed of her for almost a year, called round regularly to see how things were, and improved the standard of his work by at least 100 percent.

"Thank you!" she said to him fervently.

The departure of the revolting Epaphroditus did give her the opportunity to start making a garden in the courtyard, however, and then the new tenant, Gaius Matius, revealed that he too had a passion for gardening.

"Let me help!" he pleaded.

It was difficult to say no when she had spent so long searching for these ideal tenants.  “Of course you can help.''

Which led to yet another lesson. Through Gaius Matius, Aurelia learned that it was one thing to dream of making a wonderful garden, but quite another to actually do it. For she herself didn't have the eye or the art, whereas Gaius Matius did. In fact, he had a genius for gardening. Once the Caesar bathwater had gurgled down into the sewers, but now it was ducted to a small cistern in the courtyard, and fed the plants Gaius Matius produced with bewildering rapidity—purloined, he informed Aurelia, from his father's Quirinal mansion in the main, but also from anyone else who owned a likely bush or vine or tree or ground cover. He knew how to graft a weakly plant onto strong rootstock of the same kind; he knew which plants liked a little lime, which Rome's naturally acidic soil; he knew the correct times of the year for sowing seed, bedding out, pruning. Within twelve months the courtyard—all thirty feet by thirty feet of it—was a bower, and creepers were wending their way steadily up lattices on the columns toward the patch of sky high above.

Then one day Shimon the Jewish scribe came to see her, looking very strange to her Roman eyes in his long beard and with his long ringlets of hair curling around his little skullcap.

“
Domina
Aurelia, the fourth floor has a very special favor to ask of you," he said.

"If I can grant it, Shimon, be sure I will," she said gravely.

"We will understand if you decline, for what we ask is an invasion of your privacy," said Shimon, picking his phrases with a delicacy he usually reserved for his work. "But—if we pledge you our word that we will never abuse the privilege by tossing refuse or ordure—might we remove the wooden screens from around our light-well balcony? We could breathe better air, and look down on your beautiful garden."

Aurelia beamed. "I'm very happy to grant you this favor," she said. "However, I can't condone the use of the windows onto the street for disposing of refuse and ordure, either. You must promise me that all your wastes will be carried across the road to the public latrine, and tipped into the sewer."

Delighted, Shimon promised.

Down came the screens around the light-well balcony on the fourth floor, though Gaius Matius begged that they be retained where they covered the columns, so that his creepers could continue to grow upward. The Jewish floor started a fashion; the inventor and the spice merchant on the first floor just above asked next if they could take away their screens, and then the third floor asked, and the sixth, and the second, and the fifth, until finally only the freedman warrens of the two top floors were screened in.

In the spring before the battle of Aquae Sextiae, Caesar made a hurried trip across the Alps bearing dispatches for Rome, and his brief visit resulted in a second pregnancy for Aurelia, who bore a second girl the following February, again in her own home, again attended by no one save the local midwife and Cardixa. This time she was alerted to her lack of milk, and the second little Julia—who was to suffer all her life under the babyish sobriquet of "Ju-Ju"—was put immediately onto the breasts of a dozen lactating mothers scattered through the various floors of the insula.

"That's good," said Caesar in response to her letter telling him of Ju-Ju's birth, "we've got the two traditional Julian girls over and done with. The next set of dispatches I bring for the Senate, we'll start on the Julian boys."

Which was much what her mother, Rutilia, had said, thinking to offer Aurelia comfort for bearing girls.

"You might have known you were wasting your words," said Cotta, amused.

"Yes, well—!" said Rutilia irritably. "Honestly, Marcus Aurelius, that girl of mine baffles me! When I tried to cheer her up, all she did was raise her brows and remark that it was a matter of complete indifference to her which sex her babies were, as long as she had good babies."

"But that's a wonderful attitude!" protested Cotta. "As those of us who can afford to feed the little things gave up exposing girl-babies at birth a good four or five hundred years ago, it's better that a mother welcomes her girls, surely."

"Of course it is! It's the only attitude!" snapped Rutilia. "No, it's not her composure I'm complaining about, it's that maddening way she has of making you feel a fool for stating the obvious!"

"I love her," chuckled Publius Rutilius Rufus, party to this exchange.

"You would!" said Rutilia.

"Is it a nice little girl-baby?" Rutilius asked.

"Exquisite, what else could you expect? That pair couldn't have an ugly baby if they stood on their heads to make it," said the goaded Rutilia.

"Now, now, who's supposed to be a proper Roman noblewoman?" Cotta chided, winking at Rutilius Rufus.

"I hope your teeth fall out!" said Rutilia, and pitched her cushions at them.

Shortly after the birth of Ju-Ju, Aurelia was obliged to deal with the crossroads tavern at last. It was a task she had avoided, for though it was housed in her insula, she could collect no rent, as it was regarded as the meeting place of a religious brotherhood; while it didn't have temple or
aedes
status, it was nonetheless "official," and registered on the urban praetor's books.

But it was a nuisance. Activity around it and in it never seemed to abate, even during the night, and some of its frequenters were very quick to push people off the sidewalk outside it, yet very slow to clean up the constant accumulation of refuse on that same section of sidewalk.

Cardixa it was who first learned of a blacker aspect to the religious brotherhood of the crossroads tavern. She had been sent to the small shop alongside Aurelia's front door to purchase ointment for Ju-Ju's bottom, and found the proprietor—an old Galatian woman who specialized in medicines and tonics, remedies and panaceas—backed against the wall while two villainous-looking men debated with each other as to which set of jars and bottles they were going to smash first. Thanks to Cardixa, they smashed nothing; Cardixa smashed them instead. After the men had fled, howling imprecations, she got the tale out of the terrified old woman, who had been unable to pay her protection fee.

"Every shop has to pay the crossroads brotherhood a fee to remain open," Cardixa told Aurelia. "They
say
they're providing a service to protect the shopkeepers from robbery and violence, but the only robbery and violence the shopkeepers suffer is at their hands when the protection fee isn't paid. Poor old Galatia buried her husband not long ago, as you know,
dominilla,
and she buried him very well. So she doesn't have any money at the moment."

"That settles it!" said Aurelia, girding herself for war. "Come on, Cardixa, we'll soon fix this."

Out her front door she marched, down past her shops on the Vicus Patricii, stopping at each one to force its proprietor into telling her about the brotherhood's protection fees. From some she discovered that the brotherhood's business extended far beyond her own insula's shops, and so she ended in walking the entire neighborhood, unraveling an amazing tale of blatant extortion. Even the two women who ran the public latrine on the opposite side of the Subura Minor—under contract to the firm which held the contract from the State—were forced to pay the brotherhood a percentage of the money they received from patrons well off enough to afford a sponge on a stick to clean themselves after defaecating; when the brotherhood discovered that the two women also ran a service collecting chamber pots from various apartments for emptying and cleaning, and had not revealed this, every chamber pot was broken, and the women were obliged to buy new ones. The baths next door to the public latrine were privately owned—as were all baths in Rome—but did a lucrative trade nonetheless. Here too the brotherhood levied fees which assured that the customers were not held under the water until they nearly drowned.

By the time Aurelia finished her investigation, she was so angry she thought it wise to go home and calm down before confronting the brotherhood in their lair.

"Out of my house!" she said to Cardixa.
"My
house!"

"Don't you worry, Aurelia, we'll give them their comeuppance," Cardixa comforted.

"Where's Ju-Ju?" asked Aurelia, taking deep breaths.

"Upstairs on the fourth floor. It's Rebeccah's turn to give her a drink this morning."

Aurelia wrung her hands. "Why can't I seem to make milk? I'm as dry as a crone!"

Cardixa shrugged. "Some women make milk; others don't. No one knows why. Now don't get down in the dumps—it's this brotherhood business that's really upsetting you. No one minds giving Ju-Ju a drink, you know that. I'll send one of the servants upstairs to ask Rebeccah to keep Ju-Ju for a little while, and we'll go down and sort these wretches out."

Aurelia rose to her feet. "Come on, then, let's get it over and done with."

The interior of the tavern was very dim; Aurelia stood in the doorway outlined in light, at the peak of a beauty which lasted all of her life. The din inside subsided at once, but began again angrily when Cardixa loomed behind her mistress.

"That's the great elephant beat us up this morning!" said a voice out of the gloom.

Benches scraped. Aurelia marched in and stood looking about, Cardixa hovering watchfully at her back.

"Who's responsible for you louts?" Aurelia demanded.

Up he got from a table in one back corner, a skinny little man in his forties with an unmistakably Roman look to him. "That's me," he said, coming forward. "Lucius Decumius, at your service."

"Do you know who I am?" asked Aurelia.

He nodded.

"You are tenanting—rent-free!—premises which I own," she said.

"You don't own this here premises, madam," said Lucius Decumius, "the State do."

"The State does not," she said, and gazed about her now that her eyes were getting used to the poor light. "This place is a downright disgrace. You don't look after it at all. I am evicting you."

A collective gasp went up. Lucius Decumius narrowed his eyes and looked alert.

"You can't evict us," he said.

"Just watch me!"

"I'll complain to the urban praetor."

"Do, by all means! He's my cousin."

"Then there's the Pontifex Maximus."

"So there is. He's my cousin too."

Lucius Decumius snorted, a sound which might have been contempt—or laughter. "They can't
all
be your cousins!"

"They can, and they are." Aurelia's formidable jaw jutted forward. "Make no mistake, Lucius Decumius, you and your dirty ruffians are going."

He stood gazing at her reflectively, one hand scratching his chin, what could have been a smile lurking at the back of his clear grey eyes; then he stepped aside and bowed toward the table where he had been sitting. "How about we discuss our little problem?" he asked, smooth as Scaurus.

"There's nothing to discuss," said Aurelia. "You're going."

"Pooh! There's always room for discussion. Come on, now, madam, let's you and me sit down," wheedled Lucius Decumius.

And Aurelia found that an awful thing was happening to her; she was starting to
like
Lucius Decumius! Which was manifestly ridiculous. Yet a fact, nonetheless.

“All right,'' she said.  “Cardixa, stand behind my chair.''

Lucius Decumius produced the chair, and sat himself on a bench. "A drop of wine, madam?"

"Certainly not."

"Oh."