City of Light and Shadow
Venice comes alive in this ravishing tale by Michelle Lovric. Filled with believable and vivid personalities, both ribald and pious, the tale swirls between ancient past and present 15th-century Italy as lovers, businessmen, poets and sundries try to navigate the twisting paths of destiny The mysteries of the printed word casts its undeniable spell on the various characters and on this reader. But rising above it all is the seductive city of Venice, that gleams like a watery jewel.
Catullus has met the unapologetic, lusty, cool-headed and cold-hearted Clodia, daughter of Appius, wife of Quintus Metellus. She makes an impression on him, even though he cannot make one on her. So he falls madly in love with her, as so many other wretches have done.
Excerpt:
?Ah, the poet is arrived.? Her voice, cool and amused, turned me around. I started: she was sparingly dressed.
She did not rise to greet me, but fingered a cushion beside her, and smiled. As I walked toward her I saw hyenas carved on the headrests of her divan.
There were a few preliminaries and then, surprisingly, she gave herself to me without ceremony, as if the act meant nothing to her.
Yet I shall never forget that divan in the porch of her house and the thrum of the cicadas as I kissed her for the first time and fumbled with the cord of her robe, and the puffs of air that came from her pet sparrow?s beating wings. The bird circled around us the whole time, trying to alight if we were still for a second. I remember the lisp of wings in my ears, little claws scraping on my back. The scratches I found there that night must have been the result.
I realized from her deliberate style of lovemaking that she had arranged things so as to enjoy me for as long as she wanted, to test my stamina, to audition me. There were moments when the divan felt like a trough in which she was trying to drown me; others when it seemed to float over the ground. She kept me until a wan and wasted moon swung above us.
I was conscious that she was older than me, perhaps fifteen years older, but instead of disgusting me, that merely made me feel more grown-up myself, as if this were my true arrival not just in adult life, but also in the adult life of Rome and therefore the world. Suddenly all my adolescent desires and flirtations were transformed into earthy male lust.
Her coolness was?alluring. From the start I was drunk as a wineshop fly on the challenge of it. It was on this premise that I fell in love with every part of her, just as all the others had done. I could barely wait to tell the world that I had bedded her, and more eloquently still, how I had already begun to suffer for it. I wrote the first poem that very evening.
End of excerpt.
