I was afraid, knowing that he was drifting away from me into his sadness, his mortal sickness. I was afraid I would lose even his shadow. I wanted to keep him with me. Though I did not and could not understand it as he did, I knew what the bond between us was, and how to use it to bring him back.
I said, “I want to know about Aeneas. After he left Africa, after he looked back over the water and saw her funeral fire burning… where did he go then?”
The poet kept his dejected posture for a while. He shook his head a little. He said hoarsely, “Sicily.” He looked around, shrugging his shoulders slowly to get the cramp out.
“He’d already been there, hadn’t he?”
“He went back to celebrate the Parentalia for his father. While he was in Africa with Dido, a year had passed since Anchises died.”
“How did he celebrate?”
“Properly. With ceremony and sacrifice, and then with games and competitions and a feast.” His voice had grown stronger. The music was coming back into it. “Aeneas has a very just sense of what’s appropriate. And he knew his men needed heartening. Seven years wandering and here they were back where they’d been a year ago. So he gave them games. What he forgot was the women.”
“That hardly seems surprising.”
“Very well, my cynic. But Aeneas is not a forgetful man. He thinks about all his people. A lot of women had entrusted themselves to him in the escape from Troy. He’d tried to make the long voyaging bearable to them. But when he announced that they were setting off yet again to seek the promised land, it was too much. Juno got into them, she goaded them. They rebelled. They went down to the shore and set fire to the ships.”
“What do you mean, Juno got into them?”
“She hated Aeneas. She was always against him.” He saw that I was puzzled.
I pondered this. A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can’t “get into” me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.
The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names—Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren’t people. They don’t love and hate, they aren’t for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.
I was entirely puzzled. I finally asked, “Why does this Juno person hate Aeneas?”
“Because she hates his mother, Venus.”
“Aeneas’ mother is a star?”
“No; a goddess.”
I said cautiously, “Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus.”
He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. “So do we,” he said. “But Venus also became more… With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite… There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light…”
It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy. I said at last, “Why would anyone hate her?”
“Jealousy,” he said.
“A sacred power jealous of another?” I could not understand it. Is a river jealous of another river, is earth jealous of the sky?
“A man in my poem asks, ‘Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?’”
He looked at me. I said nothing.
“Great Homer of Greece says the god lights the fire. Young Lavinia of Italy says the fire is the god. This is Italian ground, Latin ground. You and Lucretius have it right. Offer praise, ask for blessing, and pay no attention to the foreign myths. They’re only literature… So, never mind about Juno. The Trojan women were furious at not having been consulted, and determined to stay in Sicily. And so they set fire to the ships.”
That I could understand well enough. I listened.
“The whole fleet would have burned if a rain squall hadn’t come up and drowned the fires. They lost four ships. The women ran, of course, took to the hills… But Aeneas never even thought of punishing them. He realised he’d pushed them too far. He called a council and let them all choose freely: stay in Sicily, or sail with Aeneas. Old people and many women, a lot of mothers with young children, chose to stay. Others chose to keep on looking for the promised land. So, after the nine days of the festival were done, and another day for the tears of parting, they sailed.”
“This way? To Latium?”
The poet nodded. “But first he put in at Cumae.”
I knew there is an entrance to the underworld there. “To go down? Why?”
“A vision: his father Anchises told him to come find him, across the dark river. And having always obeyed his father and the fates, Aeneas went to Cumae, and found the guide, and the way down.”
“And he saw the marsh where the babies lie crying,” I said. “And his friend who was murdered so cruelly that even his ghost was not healed. And Queen Dido, who turned away and wouldn’t speak. But he didn’t look for his wife Creusa.”
“No,” the poet said humbly.
“It doesn’t matter. I think there is no rejoining, there,” I said. “Shadow cannot touch shadow. I think the long night is for sleeping.”
“Daughter of Latinus, foremother of Lucretius! You promise me what I most desire.”
“Sleep?”
“Sleep.”
“But your poem—”
“Well, my poem will look after itself, no doubt, if I let it.”
We both sat in silence. It was quite dark. The wind was down. Nothing stirred.
“Has he left Cumae, by now?”
“I think so,” the poet said.
We spoke very low, almost in whispers.
“He’ll stop at Circeii, to bury his nurse Caieta, who begged to come with him; but she’s old and ill, and she dies in the ship. He puts ashore to bury her. That will delay him some days.”
A chill of fear had come into me. Too much was coming to me, too soon. I wanted the poet to tell me what was coming, and I didn’t want it. I said, “I don’t know when I can come back here.”
“Nor do I, Lavinia.”
He looked across the dark air at me and I could tell that he was smiling.
“Oh my dear,” he said, still very softly. “My unfinished, my incomplete, my unfulfilled. Child I never had. Come back once more.”
“I will.”
I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story. Anger, in part, perhaps. But not an easy anger. I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you made betrayal inevitable.
Who was my true love, then, the hero or the poet? I don’t mean which of them loved me more; neither of them loved me long. Just sufficiently. Enough. My question is which of them did I more truly love? And I cannot answer it. One was my husband, the beautiful man whose flesh my flesh enclosed to make my son in me, the author of my womanhood, my pride, my glory; the other was a shadow, a whisper in shadows, a virgin’s dream or vision, yet the author of all my being. How can I choose? I lost them both so soon. I knew them only a little better than they knew me. And I remember, always, that I am contingent.