"The Wolf Den"

[fiefoe]

Right, of course life as a prostitute in Pompeii (five years before everything went boom) isn't a bed of roses. Among all the characters in the book, Elodie Harper perhaps put most care into the slave-turned-master Felix.

• “Clear off now, both of you. And take that rag bag of whores with you.”
• Salvius plays festival music, perhaps guessing their unfamiliarity with local folk tunes. Amara and Dido sing together, and for the first time since coming to Pompeii, Amara is almost happy.
• “Only two visits? Not very determined.” <> Menander laughs. “I’m a slave. Rusticus is a generous master but not that generous.”
• “You stood your ground. That was magnificent,” Menander replies, switching to Greek. “The cocks were incidental.” <> “I wish they were.” <> She says it to make him laugh, but Menander catches the dark undercurrent.
• After Amara’s father died, her mother asked everyone they knew for help, measuring out what she could afford to entertain her guests in exchange. How far would a handful of dates stretch? Would her father’s former patron be offended by the chipped plate? When the visitors were captive in the house, she would recount the hardships of widowhood, holding back tears while trying not to sound too desperate. Amara would sit quietly, head bowed at her mother’s instruction, watching the flow of sympathy and money slowly dry up.
• “Forgive me,” Amara replies. “But discretion is the cornerstone of my master’s business. Loans are not his main concern, and he takes great care not to expose his clients.” She turns back to Marcella. “If you want to secure a loan, tell me the amount, and I will meet you with the proposed agreement and my master’s steward at the Temple of Apollo tomorrow morning.”
• His movements are so fluid and graceful, he looks like a stag in a herd of cattle. It’s painful, now, to remember how she felt when he bought her. Her sense of relief that at least he was attractive. What a limited imagination she had then when it came to human nature.
• “Same commission as we all get for sex,” she replies. “I know Victoria gets extra because she brings in more business, and that’s only fair. But if I get you more money through loans, rather than men, what’s the difference?”
• Everything her parents had hoped for, every gift they gave her, including her mother’s last desperate act of love, has been taken from her. Timarete no longer exists, except as a brief reflection in the eyes of a boy from Athens. She will have to survive as Amara.
• She opens her father’s bag, searching for the broken stylus she once picked up in the street. It has already come in useful. She used it to draw a bird in her own cell the other day, a small act of defiance against the endless fucking and sucking that hems her in. She walks over to the message, starts to gouge into the stone, her hand shaking with anger. A man’s profile takes shape, the letters of the boast becoming his forehead, transforming his own words into a slave brand.
• His pale eyes stare at her with a lack of focus, as if he doesn’t expect to see anyone looking back. <> Amara thinks of her father. The crooked way he would smile when he talked about the power of the Roman state. Everything they have is borrowed from us, Timarete. Always remember that. “I am from Aphidnai,” she replies, speaking fluent Latin. “Twelfth city of Attica, once the home of Helen of Troy.”
• Victoria’s voice is loud in the corridor, praising some man to get him in the mood. At any moment, they will be interrupted by a customer. The women have no time for themselves at night, not even for grief.
• Neither have watched the Vinalia before, still less taken part. The April festival of whores and wine is hardly an event a respectable girl would attend, or even try to glimpse from the window.
• To spend your life classed as infamia, unable – even if you win your freedom – to rub off the taint is a shame that can eat into your bones if you let it. But the Vinalia upends the usual order. Today, they own the streets. Nobody can deny the whores’ importance to Pompeii’s most powerful patron.
• She takes her sprig in both hands, crushing it to release the scent. May men fall to me as this offering falls to you, Greatest Aphrodite. May I know love’s power, if never its sweetness. Amara drops her mangled garland on the ever-growing pile of heaped offerings from the desperate whores of Pompeii.
• Instead, she looks at Dido. The performance has lent her the confidence of a stranger. She is holding herself with a boldness she never manages walking the streets.
• Quintus smiles at Felix, the sort of grimace the rich reserve for servants. “How much to rent the pair for the evening?”
• The slaves guarding the pie stand aside as another man in red strides towards it brandishing an enormous knife. He bows to his master then skewers the pastry with a flourish, lifting the lid and standing back. He pauses. Something was evidently meant to emerge, but there’s no movement. The cook leans over, poking at the inside with his knife. A handful of sparrows fly out, dazed and twittering. Two don’t make it far from the platter before collapsing.
• Zoilus and Fortunata lie on their couch, watching. She knows she can neither speak to them with the crudeness of a whore nor the modesty of a doctor’s daughter. There is no language from her past or her present. She will have to fashion a new one.
• The guests laugh as Dido chases her, the song becoming more and more ridiculous, until they shift into another tune, allowing Flora to transform Crocus into a beautiful flower and Smilax into ugly bindweed.
• He reminds her of an overfilled wineskin, not quite contained in the tight folds of his clothes.
• She and Dido sing in unison, as quickly as they can without gabbling.
  “Oh lovely Flora!
  Goddess of flowers and fucking,
  With your lovely toes and your dainty nose,
  Your fanny like corn ripe for shucking,
• She follows her memories of the night, like a series of scenes painted round a room.
• She takes it from him. He turns away as she changes. It makes her shiver, wrapping herself in a dead woman’s clothes. The sadness of her own loneliness, of Salvius’s grief, brings a lump to her throat.
  “That’s her perfume over there.” Amara picks up the bottle, dabs a little on her neck. Salvius stares at her. “You look so like her.” He sighs. “Is there someone you would like me to… I mean, I can pretend to be someone else, if that’s easier?”
  Of all the things Amara expected him to say, this was perhaps the last. The wall outside The Sparrow blazes into her mind, the new graffiti she spotted there only this morning. Kallias greets his Timarete. “No,” she says, emphatically. “That wouldn’t help.”
• I will wait for you by the second gate, Timarete. May fortune smile on us both! She was the one who suggested the timing underneath. Then she spent hours agonizing over whether that looked too keen or too cool.
• “You get used to having nothing, don’t you? And then suddenly to have something, to feel something, it’s…” She trails off.
  “It’s happy–sad?”
  “Yes, because nothing belongs to you, not even the happiness.”
  “Timarete, even slaves own their happiness. Feelings are the only things we do own.”
• “Sometimes I think it must be harder for you. Because my life is just completely different, there’s nothing left of the past. But for you, it must be like living on the wrong side of the mirror.” <> “To be the potter’s slave, rather than the potter’s son?”
• Pliny, the Admiral of the Fleet. <> He is an austere-looking man, with dark grey hair and a hard-set jaw.
• “Yours is such a lovely natural shade. Soft like a squirrel.” He leans over and gives her a dry kiss on the nose. <> He is such a bewildering mixture of affectionate and creepy, Amara isn’t sure what to say.
• “My master gave it to me,” she says, and the mention of Felix is like the cold of a knife laid flat against her heart. “He told me it is halfway between love and bitterness.” <> “Yes, amare, amarum,” he says. “A bit poetic for a pimp.”
• His face lights up. “There’s nothing more truthful than a play, is there? I love them all, but do you know, I think comedies are braver somehow. All of life up there on the stage, and actors have the courage to say what one cannot say elsewhere.”
• She tries to let go of her hatred for a while, to study him the way she has watched him study other people. If he were a stranger what would she notice? His love of money, his determination, his cruelty, his surprising fascination with the thoughts and feelings of others. His total lack of compassion. The last, she almost cannot admit to herself: his loneliness.
• “Doesn’t hurt to show off the wares,” Felix says. He puts an arm around her, and for a bewildering moment, she thinks it is a gesture of affection. Then she feels his fingers, hard and pinching at her waist, like a baker checking the quality of his dough.
• “He can be so loving and gentle. And he’s always really sorry when he’s hurt me. He begs me to forgive him; he really begs. I see a side of him the rest of you don’t.” Victoria is unrecognizable in her desperation; Amara almost cannot bear to be near her. “He’s lonely, like I am. I love him so much.”
• “He is just as he appears,” she continues. “But it is strange how men can grow on you, even Quintus.”
• She is not afraid of Fuscus, but when he manoeuvres her into a painfully awkward position, purely to get a better view of Telethusa, she realizes the distance between him and Trebius is not as great as she imagined. Her body, which is too familiar to be exciting on its own, is a means to heighten his pleasure in the dancers. She is trapped by him, his weight like the waves of the sea, pushing her under. She thinks of Cressa, lost beneath the water, and turns her face to the side, gripping the expensive fabric on the bed.
• Amara does not know what to say. Drusilla just told her Veranius meant everything to her, yet the man sounds as monstrous as Felix. “I loved him,” Drusilla says, as if guessing her thoughts. “And I despised him. What else is possible towards the man who gives everything and takes everything?”
• She stares at the clay buried in his throat then scrambles out from underneath, not wanting to be stained in the spatter. She stands back, watching, Victoria beside her, the remnants of Cressa’s clay pot on the ground at their feet.
• There is a tenderness to him Amara could never have imagined. She watches, a pain in her chest that she cannot name. He has never been like that with her, not even when she told him about Cressa, when she would have done anything to be comforted. Nobody but Menander has ever held her the way Felix is holding Victoria. The thought upsets her. She is not sure whether it makes Felix worse, if he is capable of love.
• It seems most of Pompeii has left their gift buying until the last moment. Eventually, Amara spots the man with his gruesome trophies, a range of goods soaked in the blood of gladiators killed in the arena. They range in price, depending on the fame of the dead.
• Felix’s study is crammed, his entire motley household of whores and thugs spread around on various stools and blankets like Pompeii’s most peculiar family. Felix himself sits on his desk, an unlikely Paterfamilias, while Thraso and Gallus serve Paris and the women with sweet buns and wine. According to the true Saturnalian spirit, it should be Felix serving everyone
• Amara realizes everyone has forgotten Paris. He is sitting slightly away from the gathering, holding his thin knees in his arms, face pinched with disappointment. Fabia is waving at him from across the room, motioning that he can have her five asses. Paris ignores her. As ever, it’s not his mother’s attention that he wants.
• The lamp smashes at Menander’s feet. <> The shock of it makes her gasp. She and Menander stare at one another. She understands, seeing his face then, that whatever affection was once between them has ended. Amara looks down at the ground. Shards of glazed clay are scattered at her feet. All that work, engraved with such love, marked with memories of home and who she used to be, gone. She remembers Cressa’s smashed pot at the necropolis, the man dying, the sacrifice Victoria made to save her life. The only choice she can ever make is to survive.
• Amara is beginning to suspect that, for Rufus, the pleasure of opening his hands to see the bird fly will never be quite as satisfying as feeling its fragile form beneath his fingers. <> He did not enjoy her grief after Dido’s death. It wasn’t a pretty flurry of tears he could kiss away, but a frenzy of pain and hysteria that swamped her gratitude and his glory.