We’re at a hotel near the Little Italy sign. We have a pleasant courtyard, where Mom and I string beads or put together her lighthouse puzzle. For breakfast, we order cappuccinos and cornetti from the café.
Today I write from the courtyard while Mom naps. I taped a sign to the phone with my cell number in case she wakes up, but I’ll check on her when I finish my glass of wine.
A lot of boys could be Patrick, here. When I imagine how he used to be, I keep thinking of peanuts: a thin shell of armour. Sun-brown. Two faces that turn into four faces, both at each end. The Latin name for peanuts is hypogaea, or “under the earth.”
Back in Victoria, I’ve been working on a translation of Ovid’s Fasti. The Book of Days. I started the project in the new millennium, but the house repairs have kept me busy. So has Mom. Still, I’ve enjoyed tinkering with the odd passage on a Sunday morning, as you would a crossword puzzle. Ovid wrote the Fasti as a treatise on the Roman calendar, starting with the first day of January. The work we know ends in June, though the first six books of the poem allude to the full twelve months. One of his poems, addressed to Augustus, says he wrote the Fasti in twelve books, and though he planned to dedicate the entire work to the emperor, his exile interrupted him. It’s not clear if that’s true.
I completed January this spring. The month opens with a description of the poem’s theme as a calendar. Then the speaker interviews Janus, god of passageways and beginnings, namesake for the month itself. His temple, Ianus Geminus, stood on the main road that approached the Forum from the northeast. No archaeological remains have been found, but its depiction on coins suggests a rectangular building with two arched doors. The long sides were constructed from ashlar blocks, which culminated in a frieze of vines and palmettes. One gate faced east, to greet the rising sun, the other west. The two directions represent the god’s faces—one fixed on the future, the other fixed on the past.
Here’s a passage I’ve translated from the middle of Book 1: Kalends.
I’ve told you my name, now learn my shape though you already understand it in part. Every doorway has two sides, outward and in, one facing the public, the other the home. And like a doorway seated at your threshold, who watches incomers and outgoers, so I, doorkeeper of the divine hall, look east and west at the same time. You see Hecate’s faces turned three ways to guard the forking crossroads: where I, lest I lose time swivelling my head, see both ways without moving.
This morning we ordered our cornetti to go and found Erwin Powell’s house. I parked at a nearby supermarket and left Mom in the car with the radio on and her tin of beads. The bungalow sat at the far end of a road without sidewalks. It could have been built in the thirties or forties. Or more recently, I’m not sure. The cactus would have been there, though. It looked over a century old. Maybe the cactus connects us through time, if nothing else. Erwin on one side. Me on the other.
In the poem, the God of Doorways continues:
Here, where Rome is now, uncut forests thrived, and all this was grass for scattered cattle. My citadel was the hill people of this age dubbed Janiculum after my name. I ruled then, when Earth could still bear the Gods, and deities mingled in mortal spaces. Justice had not yet fled the sin of mortals (she was the last god to leave the Earth). Honour, not fear, governed the people without force, and it was no labour to expound the Right to righteous men. I had nothing to do with war: I guarded peace and doorways. And this, he said, exposing his key, was my weapon.