Cleopatra’s Lovers

Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra

I was in love with Cleopatra as a young man. Yes, the same Egyptian queen who lived and died a few decades before Christ. The one who enticed many a great man including Mark Antony, the Roman General. I had a cat named after her until a few months back, a tabby with seductive eyes and who loved to lie in my lap. My feline Cleopatra could not survive her third litter.

Shakespeare portrayed Cleopatra as a royal seductress. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” Shakespeare made one of his characters describe her. Mark Antony fell in love with that variety of moods and passions. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra could laugh and weep, love and hate, chide and exalt as she pleased and all of that suited her. It is that kaleidoscopic Cleopatra that I fell in love with.

That Cleopatra once inspired a short story of mine in which a young soldier of the ordinary rank falls perilously in love with the queen. He is aware of the dangers of his longing. Nevertheless he approaches the queen with his request. He yearns to spend a few moments in the queen’s embrace. He longs to feel her heartbeat and breathe in the aroma of the sweat between her breasts. Cleopatra looks at this adventurous young lover of hers. A variety of emotions flits through her skittish soul. Amusement takes the lead.

“I will grant your wish,” she says royally as well as playfully. “But there is a condition. Once your wish is fulfilled, you won’t be alive to see the light of day.”

The soldier accepts the condition without a second thought.

The lot of the man who sees life romantically is doom. Preachers and moralists can go on uttering platitudes about the folly of human passions. But human nature won’t dance to the tunes they sing. If it did, Shakespeare and Shelley, Hemingway and Marquez, and even our popular movie directors would all have been utterly bankrupt.

I wonder whether I have become emotionally bankrupt. I started writing this post with the intention of re-creating my old short story about the young soldier’s passion for Cleopatra. But my heart did not palpitate. I could not decipher the aroma between Cleopatra’s breasts. So I converted this post into this drab piece. But somewhere among the withering passions of my aging heart there stirs a nostalgic and romantic yearning, however feeble that may be.