They lowered ropes from balconies, but the bull sidestepped them and charged on. It passed through the gate that gave onto the sea just as a group of men were struggling with all their strength to close its heavy weight. It slipped through without a moment to spare. It started to run along the wharf. Fishermen and soldiers were paralyzed with astonishment. Their nets remained motionless in their hands, their arrows and spears frozen in place. The only sound was the thudding of hoofs on the planks of the wharf. Seeing those mariners petrified, I breathed the cool air of the Mediterranean and felt the excitement of having a bull beneath me, clasping it between my thighs, as if I were the one urging it on. I enjoyed the thrill of it all. And not just in my legs. Shivers of delight rippled through my whole body. I thought, “This bull has carried me off, as its prisoner, and to what strange pleasures!” That thought made even more delicious the feel of its hide, the sweetness of its odor, the excitement of its gallop. As we reached the end of the wharf, the bull jumped. “I am bound to die!” I should have been thinking. But I couldn’t think at all. When we fell into the sea, my eyes were bathed in tears. And they were not tears of grief!
I am prepared to swear that right there, as we smashed hard into the water, the bull turned toward me, exposing its underside. I’d swear that even though its muzzle was animal, it knew how to kiss me, and that it possessed me physically, giving me a pleasure that nothing can rival, not even a dream or the imagination, much less gold or power or war. But I can’t swear that it was literally true, only that I wanted it to be true. My memory blurs now just as my eyes blurred back then. I saw nothing; my eyes were blinded with pleasure.
The indisputable fact is that, whether or not I was being serviced by it, we both came to the surface groaning and we continued our progress. Its hairy body, the back between my legs, moved over the waves. The breeze was stirred by our motion, the water splashed my feet, the sun blazed on the back of the sea that looked almost metallic under its fire; all these combined to heighten the ecstasy that its smell and the movement of its body had induced in me. We were bound together in one giant heart that pounded with the blood of the universe. I moaned, the bull moaned. Its swimming hoofs skimmed the sea. The water barely touched its extremities; the traveler of the waves carried me along without the water wetting me. We left behind us a wake of white hoof prints. Who controlled the reins of our watery charge? Since when did a country bull cut its way through the waves of the unharvested sea?
The bull’s bellows turned into words. Behind the animal sounds that my own body forced from my mouth, I heard it say: Kymothoe, Spio, Glauconome, Halie, Erato, Sao, Amphitrite, Eunice, Thetis, Eulymene, Agave, Eudora, Doto, Pherousa, Galataea, Actaie, Pontomedusa, Hippotoe, Lysianasa, Kymo, Eione, Haimede, Plexausre, Aucrante, Proto. .
“Oh bull!” I wanted to say, interrupting its listing. “Shut up! Your catalog of names is ruining my delirium. Shut up! You’re ruining things. Don’t ruin them! Give me more of the pleasure with which you transported Cleopatra to another side of the world. Shut up, please, my bull, my little bull, shut up!”
But the divine bull did not shut up. Its silky hide changed its feel and the water of the sea splashed salt on my skin. Without stopping it continued its listing, droning on in a hoarse voice like a bronchitic clergyman’s, drawing out the vowels, almost intoning: “Calypso, Panope, Cranto, Neomeris, Hyponoe, Ianira, Polynome, Autonoe, Melite Dione, Nesea, Dero, Euagore, Psamathae, Eumolpe. .”
I ceased to plead with it; the voice of the bull had left me cold. Its hide, hardened by the sea and sun, pricked me here and there. The wind now battered me with a cold fist; the galloping jarred my weary bones. The bull concluded its pedantic listing: “lone, Dynamene, Keto, and Limnoria!”
The Nereids suddenly emerged from the waves, responding to the invocation of the divine bull, to accompany our journey. The arrival of these beautiful guardians broke the spell that had bound us. I thought, “Now we are approaching Scylla and Charybdis. I suspect my bull called on them to negotiate our safe passage between the dangerous rocks and the deadly whirlpool.”
But I knew immediately, as if in answer to my suspicion, that the bull and I had ourselves been the fearful whirlpool across from the rocks. We ourselves were a twofold threat to ships. Behind our lustful pleasures lay the menace we fear and cannot avoid on our trip through life: the dangerous love for another and for that other’s body. The invocation of the sea-nymphs and their answering presence had drawn us away from the island where the rocks lay shrouded in smoke and fire.
The beautiful nymphs with their green hair were like sisters, different in feature but with some traits in common. There were some fifty in number. They followed us along, perched on the backs of whales. After them appeared the Tritons, swirling around us. We all moved along at a furious speed, the Greek garments of the females blown open like sails by the wind. My bull proved to be the swiftest of ships. The sun, round and enormous, like an orangey peach, pursued us relentlessly, blazing continually from the line of the horizon. One after another, the nymphs swerved from their tracks to introduce themselves to me.
“Cleopatra, my name is Galatea. I am as white as milk.” Really she was as white as the sea-foam left by our passage. On her green hair lay a spattering of white foam, and on her white breasts too.
“I am Actaea, she who shifts the restless sands. Greetings, royal queen!” Her skin was the color of sand. Her gleaming eyes were gold-tinted.
Each one was as enviably beautiful as the other. Beautiful! The evening sun was covering them with its velvety light and made them even more beautiful. How was it possible that these delightful bodies had ventured to interrupt the infinite pleasure the bull had been giving me? Compared with them, the bull was now nothing but a brute animal. The waters had darkened its coloring, dulling its appeal.
“I’m Euagore, my queen, she who murmurs softly.”
The Nereids did not crowd me or come all at once in a discourteous rush. First one and then another, giving me time to enjoy studying the shapes of the clouds or bathing in the foam raised by the dances of the chubby Tritons who performed the most unexpected moves, accompanied by their shoals of fish. I’d laugh, laugh with gusto, in admiration for the way their human-looking arms cut through the air like fins through water, forceful, elegant, swift. I’d listen to them trumpeting on their immense seashells. Then along would come another nymph, waving a branch of coral. Then another Triton, this one bearing an iron trident rusted and crusted by its long contact with salt water.
Though this scene was fascinating, it did not make the lasting impression that the simple act of crouching to get into the Roman cart had made on me. Nor did it thrill me the way my contact with the bull’s body had done. My brain started spinning from the rush of sensations. “Let’s begin at the beginning, Cleopatra,” I told myself, in an effort to compose myself mentally. “To begin, the bull repeats the myth of Europa’s journey, undertaken after her dreaming that two continents were fighting over her beauty. Why did you come for me, dear bull? So that Cleopatra will wage a struggle over two continents?” As I thought the words, Jupiter let out a howl, as if he’d been transfixed by a spear, and all the nymphs disappeared from sight. The Tritons fell silent, swallowed by the sea. The sun skulked behind a cloud. Slowly the bull sank into the water, which climbed up above my feet, covering my legs, thighs, and waist. “Cleopatra, you’ve misread things,” I told myself. “Think again!” And the sinking ceased.