I sat in silence. I wanted to cry, but had no tears.
“I will be gone soon,” the poet said. “I will join the crowd, return to darkness.”
“Not yet—”
“Keep me here. Keep me here, Lavinia. Tell me it is better to be alive, better to be a slave living than Achilles dead. Tell me I can finish my work!”
“If you never finish it, it will never end,” I said, speaking only to speak, saying what came into my head, to give him some comfort. “Anyway, how are you going to end it, if not with a marriage? With a murder? Do you have to decide how it ends before you get to the end?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t, in fact. It’s not exactly a matter of deciding. Rather of finding out. Or, as it now stands, of giving up, because I haven’t the strength to go on. That’s the trouble. I am weak. So the end will be cruel.” He paced back and forth once, between me and the altar. I could hear no sound of his steps on the earth. But finally he sighed, a long, rather noisy sigh, and sat down again, his arms round his knees. “Tell me what you and Silvia do, what you talk about. Tell me about her deer. Tell me how you make the salt. Tell me when you spin, when you weave. Did your mother teach you those arts? Tell me how you unlock and clean out the storeroom early in summer, and leave it open for a few days, praying to the Penates that it be refilled with the harvest…”
“You know it all.”
“No. Only you can tell me.”
So I told him what he asked, and comforted him with what he knew.
I spent the next day alone in the forest of Albunea. The air was heavy under the trees, and the sulfur smell stopped my breath when I went near the springs. Wandering away, I found a path up the steep hill, almost a crag, that rises up over the forest. Clearings at the top gave a wide view west to the bright line that was the sea. I sat up there in the sunlight in the thin grass, my back against a fallen log. I had my spindle and a bag of wool; a woman usually carries some of her Penates with her. I was spinning the very finest thread for a summer toga or palla, so my light bag of wool would last me a good while. I sat and spun and thought and gazed out over the hills and woods of Latium, all green with May. At midday I ate a little cheese and spelt bread and found a spring to drink from. There were shepherds’ lettuce and watercress growing at the spring, and I ate that, too, though I had intended to be very sparing, even perhaps to fast; but fasting comes hard to me. Then I explored the hilltop a little more, and when the sun was halfway between high heaven and earth I made my way down into the depths of the woods again. I passed the stinking springs on the windward side and came again to the altar place. There I slept a little, for I had had little sleep the night before. When I woke, in the dusk, big white moths were fluttering in the air within the sacred wall, rising and falling, circling round about one another in an airy maze, wonderful to see. I watched them sleepily, and through their dance I saw my poet standing near the altar.
“The moths look like souls in the underworld,” I said, still only half awake.
He said, “It is a terrible place. On the far side of the dark river are marshy plains, where you hear crying—little, weak, wailing cries, from the ground, everywhere, underfoot. They are the souls of babies who died at birth or in the cradle, died before they lived. They lie there on the mud, in the reeds, in the dark, wailing. And no one comes.”
I was awake now. I said, “How do you know that?”
“I was there.”
“You were in the underworld? With Aeneas?”
“Who else would I be with?” he said. He looked about uncertainly. His voice was low and dull. He went on, hesitant, “It was the Sybil who guided Aeneas… What man did I guide? I met him in a wood, like this. A dark wood, in the middle of the road. I came up from down there to meet him, to show him the way… But when was that? Oh, this dying is a hard business, Lavinia. I am very tired. I can’t think straight any more.”
“You’re not thinking straight about the babies,” I said. “Why would they be punished for not having lived? How could their souls be there before they had time to grow souls? Are the souls of dead kittens there, and of the lambs we sacrifice, and of miscarried fetuses? If not them, then why babies? If you invented that marsh full of miserable dead crying babies, it was a misinvention. It was wrong.”
I was extremely angry. I used the second most powerful word I know, wrong, nefas, against the order of things, unspeakable, unsacred. There will be many words for it, but that was the one I knew. It is only the shadow, the opposite, the undoing, of the great wordfas, the right, what one must do.
He sat down, doubling up his tall shadowy figure, and I could see how wearily he moved, how he bowed his head down like a man spent, defeated; but I would not have pity on him.
“If cruelty comes of weakness, as you said, then you are very weak,” I said.
He did not answer.
After a long time I said, “I think you are strong.” My lips and voice quivered as I spoke, for I did pity him, though I did not want to, and my heart was full of tears.
“If it is wrong, I will take it out of the poem, child,” he said. “If I am permitted to.”
I wanted so much to be able to help him, to give him a fleece to sit on or my own toga to put round his shoulders, for he sat hunched as if he was shivering cold. But I could do nothing for him, and could touch him only with my voice.
“Who is it that permits or forbids you?”
“The gods. My fate. My friends. Augustus.”
I knew what he meant by his fate and his friends. At least I knew what the words meant. The others I was not certain of. And I did not know who his friends were and whether he could trust them. As for his fate, we none of us know that.
“But surely you’re a free man,” I said at last. “Your work is your own.”
“It was till I got sick,” he said. “Then I began to lose my hold on it, and now I think I’ve lost it. They’ll publish it unfinished. I can’t stop them. And I haven’t got the strength to finish it. It ends with a murder, as you said. Turnus’ death. Why does it? Who cares about Turnus? The world is full of fine fearless young men eager to kill and be killed. There’ll always be enough of them for every war.”
“Who kills him?”
The poet did not answer my question. He only said after a long time, “It’s not the right ending.”
“Tell me the right ending.”
Again he was silent for a long time. “I can’t,” he said.
It was almost dark. Leaves and branches that had stood out sharp black against deep blue had begun to blur away into the dimness of night. Venus shone for a minute low between dark tree trunks in the west, and I prayed to the power of its beauty. There was no wind at all, and no bird or creature made any noise.
“I think I know why I came to you, Lavinia. I have wondered—Of all the people of my poem, why were you the one who called my spirit? Why not my great, my dear Aeneas? Why can’t I see him with my living eyes as I saw him so often with the eyes of my art?”
His voice was extremely low, almost breathless. I strained to listen. I did not understand much of what he said, then.
“Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it’s too late, you have it to give to me. My life. My earth of Italy, my hope of Rome, my hope.”
There was a desperation in his voice that wrung my heart. His words died away and he sat still, his head bowed. I could barely see him.