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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.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 28, 2022 at 5:02 PM

    Hari OM
    ...or, as we age, we come to understand the wisdom that elders and widers had tried to impart, that lust fades and only intellectual understanding can open the heart? YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 1, 2022 at 7:08 AM

      Indeed. Lust is quite an animal passion. Understanding and Wisdom are at the other pole.

      Delete
  2. AnonymousMay 24, 2022 at 7:50 PM

    "Nay, but this dotage of our general's
    O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
    That o'er the files and musters of the war
    Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
    The office and devotion of their view
    Upon a tawny front: his captain's heart,
    Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
    The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
    And is become the bellows and the fan
    To cool a gipsy's lust.
    Look, where they come:
    Take but good note, and you shall see in him.
    The triple pillar of the world transform'd
    Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see..."

    ReplyDelete

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