Beth Manca is a Latin teacher who lives outside of Boston with her one-eyed rescue cat, Angelina. Her fiction has previously appeared online in Carve, Scribble, Howling Mad Review, Suburbia Journal, and Passengers Journal.
My friend Leona was planning a trip to Italy, and one suitcase was reserved for books—ancient Latin authors she would read in their native landscape and in their native tongue. The echoes of their words lingered daily in her classroom like the sound of the wine-dark Homeric sea whirling in a shell. But other indelible sounds intruded there—the buzzing of the fluorescent lights and ticking of the clock, the scraping as her students pushed their chairs in and out every fifty-five minutes, and the scratching of her own red pen correcting paper after paper.
In Italy there would be only sunlight and Leona and the words: “Carpe diem” and “Ēheu fugācēs, Postume, Postume” on the weather-rounded gray ruins of Horace’s Sabine farm; “O tempora! O morēs!” under the rafters of the Senate house, which once resounded with Cicero’s carefully modulated shouting; the Emperor Augustus’s List of Achievements, his Res Gestae, outside the still marble reliefs of his Altar of Peace, whose heavy bronze doors he had finally clanged shut during his reign proclaiming peace throughout the empire after decades of civil wars, wars which almost cost Horace that Sabine farm of his and which did cost Cicero his life.
But a suitcase full of moralizing, speechifying, and self-aggrandizement is a heavy suitcase indeed. Leona needed some lighter reading. “Do you think I could borrow your Ovid?” she asked me late one night over the phone, her ice cubes clicking in the background.
In those years my copy of Publius Ovidius Nāsō’s Metamorphoses was my pride and joy. It was a normal-enough looking volume on the outside: a chunky paperback rectangle about two inches thick and heavier than it appeared, so that one hefted it rather than picked it up and adjusted one’s balance as necessary afterwards. The cover was a dark sunflower yellow, hinting at the growths and transformations inside, with OVID’S Metamorphoses, Books 6 - 10 written in strong black typeface above a black-and-white medallion showing a centaur carrying off a woman. The bold color and print shone out as if in defiance of the Emperor Augustus who, two thousand years earlier, had banished Ovid to the shores of the Black Sea and pulled his wildly popular works from the shelves of Rome, all because of “a poem and a mistake,” as Ovid cryptically wrote.
Though we’re accustomed to reading books from front to back, Latin texts work differently. At the bottom of the cover in that same black print were the words Edited with introduction and commentary by William Anderson. As usual, the last three-quarters of the book consisted of the scholarly notes needed to understand Ovid’s poem fully. The reader flipped back and forth from those invaluable pages to the actual Latin, sometimes after reading as little as one word of the original. Pages of notes could be devoted to the five words of any one line of Ovid’s poetry, notes mostly in English but frequently quoting without translation French, German, or Italian scholars from any of the last two to three centuries, or even ancient Latin and Greek references in the original. Such were the end pages of the book, and I had stumbled my way through everything except the German.
But those front pages comprised the real treasure—the Latin words in plain print, five or six words per line floating tantalizingly in wide white margins. And I had customized my copy, annotating it with hundreds of tiny neat marginalia scrawled throughout a semester spent scrambling to get one professor’s inexhaustible knowledge down on paper, as if writing them could make the thoughts my own. The Metamorphoses was all about change—how the gods turned chaos into the world and later turned mortals into trees or water or animals for their hubris or for spite or just for fun. It had no illustrations and to me it needed none. For the poet had changed the words themselves into music by means of their carefully ordered and metered arrangement, and the music conjured pictures on its own. Thumbing through the pages, murmuring the syllables with their stresses and elisions, was a reminder of how loudly the written word could speak and of a time in my life when I’d had the inclination to listen. My name and an ancient Northampton, Massachusetts, phone number were inscribed in the upper left corner of the inside cover. How could I part with my Ovid? I wondered. And how could I deny it to Leona?
“Of course you can borrow it,” I said.
. . .
Leona was my colleague at the suburban prep school where she and I comprised the female half of the Classics department in the early 1990s. I taught Latin grammar to the seventh- and eighth-graders, who were confusingly called sixies and fifthies, for the seventh-grade students at this school started out as “sixth class” (citizens? travelers?) and worked their way up to the second class before graduating as “Seniors.” Leona taught Latin literature and an always-full literature in translation course to the upper classes. She was forty years old, about ten years my senior, a small woman with long, long black hair twisted up and held by large decorative barrettes or hair sticks. She drifted through the halls in flowing jumpers that grazed the tops of her comfortable shoes, and she covered up the whole ensemble with big soft wooly sweaters when the weather demanded. Nor did I ever see Leona without her travel mug of “iced coffee,” a euphemism which I didn’t immediately understand. She seemed to fit perfectly into the mold of the eccentric Latin teacher at an exclusive New England prep school, though she never joined any committee or coached a single sport despite whispered rumors of her having been a killer field hockey player in her own prep school days. She was at that school simply because they let her teach Latin to very intelligent students on her own terms, strolling out to her cluttered red Honda Civic for cigarettes and “coffee” refills at regular intervals throughout the day.
Leona showered me with little gifts the whole time we worked together: dangling earrings hung with gold stars and blue fish; a silk-covered lipstick case with a tiny utilitarian rectangle of a mirror glued inside; a quilted silk change purse made to nestle in a pocket; a little round bowl with the face, tail, and fins of a fish, crackle-glazed in the colors of the Mediterranean Sea; a palm-sized version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. I puzzled over the meanings of these presents. The sonnets because both she and I were small and dark like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose appearance had earned her the nickname “the Portuguese”? The earrings because we both favored the color blue? The significance of the Asian-themed items at last became clear when I learned that Leona’s mother was Japanese, married to an American diplomat in the aftermath of World War II. Leona had spent her early childhood in Japan, where she was ostracized for looking too American, before coming as a young girl to this country, where she was mocked for looking too Japanese, field hockey demon or not.
These were eventful years for both Leona and me, years full of personal changes, and it was no wonder I forgot about my book for a while. The summer I lent her my Ovid, she returned from Italy married to her pale willowy boyfriend, who was younger even than me by quite a few years. Joe and I, still just dating, visited Leona and Brian in their North End apartment, where every square inch seemed crammed with cushions and books. Brian prepared prosciutto-wrapped fresh figs stuffed with goat cheese, and we squeezed together on the futon to watch the video of the spur-of-the-moment civil ceremony. Surrounded by lipstick-pink blossoms on the rooftop patio of a white municipal building, Leona let down her black hair, tucked a flower behind one ear, and was married by the mayor of the town, who translated the vows mostly into English as he read them while his stout wife stood by as the witness. We stared as Brian and Leona wandered through their dog-eared honeymoon villa with their camcorder, filming a multi-lingual cast of characters including the owner, a childhood friend of Leona’s who serenaded them nightly on his grand piano. Then the four of us went to dinner together at a restaurant where tables were squeezed between a long open kitchen and a fresco of the owner’s seaside Italian town. Many plates of pasta and bottles of wine later, Joe and I stumbled out, glad that we lived on the Red Line and didn’t have to drive.
One frigid December afternoon six months later, when the wind was howling in from the harbor over the cobblestone sidewalks, I was in the North End again to spend a girls’ afternoon out with Leona at another trattoria, where she and I warmed ourselves polishing off two bottles of white over a lunch that must have lasted hours, though nobody kept track of the time. I had a secret I didn’t share with Leona: I knew Joe was planning to propose that night and our luncheon kept me from passing a restless day on my own. I was thirty-one years old and rather happy with my life, and the fact that half a year of marriage hadn’t changed Leona was a comfort to me. I rode the Red Line blurrily home, showered, changed my clothes, and went out to dinner, where I indeed became engaged to my future husband, hungover and staring in nauseous dismay at the Boston skyline as it swung by the windows of revolving Spinnaker restaurant on top of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. At my reception that summer, Leona was there to snap, “And isn’t it wonderful,” to a particularly WASPy colleague of ours who muttered under her breath, “This is such an ITALIAN wedding…” as Joe and I danced our first dance to “Fly Me to the Moon,” which we had chosen because we’d seen Tony Bennett performing it live a few months earlier and because it didn’t run too long. Leona and Brian gave us a silver frame engraved with the Latin marriage vow, Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia, “Wherever you are Gaius, I will be your Gaia.”
I’d never known what to give Leona in return for all her little gifts and had settled on lending her my ear at any time of day or night, in restaurants, in school, or over the phone. So, I was relieved when she requested that my new husband and I search out her favorite bright pink lipstick on our honeymoon in Italy. She had found it there the previous year and her supply had run out. We carried an empty tube with us into farmacia after farmacia, only to learn that the color had been discontinued. We finally tracked down a supply in a shady, laundry-hung alley in Naples and bought up all five tubes, which I happily handed over to her along with the money she had given me for the purchases and a hand-painted ceramic plaque from Assisi which read PAX ET BONUM, Peace and Goodwill. And, of course, the previous summer I had lent her my Ovid.
. . .
Those years were professionally transitional, too. I was changing from a high-school Latin teacher, who slipped on one beat-up driving shoe (and usually remembered to remove it) to speed down to the nearby middle school a few times a week, into a middle-school teacher, where it was more about teaching students than teaching Latin. I did still deal with Latin in a myriad of different ways, passing a nightly phone quiz by my husband-to-be on legal phrases from Black’s Law Dictionary and unfailingly providing answers during our Sunday afternoon crossword puzzle marathons to clues like “Q.E.D. part” or “Hello, to Caesar” or “mother of Helen of Troy.”
But instead of being struck breathless by Ovid’s brilliant use of synecdoche and anaphora, my students (and I) were bursting into laughter when we realized that nautae in undīs natābant implied that the sailors in the easy-to-read Latin story of the Cambridge Latin Course textbook were swimming not only in the waves (in undīs) but also, “In their undies, Ms. Manca! Get it? Get it?!” Instead of drilling my students on obscure Latin grammatical constructs like “imperfect subjunctive in a relative clause in indirect discourse,” I was teaching them to think of simple English sentences “as stoplights—start going at the green subject, slow down at the yellow verb, and stop at the red light of the direct object,” so that they could begin to make sense of the mixed-up Latin word order as they read it and ultimately read Latin as it was written instead of pulling apart the carefully crafted sentences and gluing the pieces back into a messy ransom-note-like mish-mash of mundane never-changing English order.
Teaching the stoplight approach was also subtly gratifying to me. It was, after all, based on a very basic level on the scientific analysis of language, and linguistics had been my true love since before I even knew what it was, calling it simply “word games” in high school. After my second linguistics course in graduate school, during which we learned about the wholly re-constructed and theoretical Indo-European language, which humans across Europe and Southern Asia theoretically spoke in common in the prehistoric times preceding the Tower of Babel, I understood why I had always loved learning Latin vocabulary and decoding Latin grammar. If I had been brave enough to follow a job anywhere at the drop of a hat, I might have tried to become a linguistics professor, the teaching positions for which are very few and very far between, instead of a middle-school Latin teacher. But I liked to nest in one place with all my things set up just so around me, so instead of tracing the development of cognates from their Proto-Indo-European origins through Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin to English, I banged away on my rainbow-colored plastic xylophone and listened to my students sing back to me a song about the perfect tense to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”
Soon I began to have children of my own. I left the prep school and moved in and out of a couple of one-year, part-time public school positions, always Latin I with its simple basic grammar and vocabulary. Eventually I stopped teaching altogether, as daycare for two small children would cost more than my salary. Leona’s mother died and Joe and I dropped my two-year-old daughter at my in-laws’ to go to the funeral. Once there, I didn’t discuss Latin with the other Latin teacher from the school where I used to teach, but rather how convenient it was to have relatives close by to take care of young children as needed. The headmaster of the school came to pay his respects, and Leona’s husband hurried over to tell her, but she was sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette and replied, “Who cares?” Japanese prayers were read with much bowing and gongs were struck in the incense-laden air of the North End restaurant where the service was held. Buffet tables offered sushi and bruschetta to the mourners. I avoided the sushi because I was pregnant with my son and raw fish was forbidden, as was wine, unfortunately. At the end of the ceremony, Joe and I hugged Leona and her long-haired sisters and stepped carefully over the rain-soaked cobblestones to our car in which we rode back home to our suburb.
Whenever we returned to the North End for one of the Feasts, where we took our Louis-Prima-loving kids to hear Sammy Butera live and stuff themselves with Richie’s Slush and sugar-dusted fried dough, we rang Leona’s and Brian’s buzzer, but we never found them in. I left notes stuck behind the buzzer on whatever scraps of paper I could dig out of my purse—We were here but we missed you! Call us!—and I even left our phone number but received no response.
I learned that Leona had broken her wrist badly after tripping over some kid’s backpack at school. “Leona drinks, you know,” confided the teacher who’d called to tell me the news. Tell me about it, I thought, but I just said, “I know.” She had sworn off alcohol now, the other teacher added, because of the painkillers she had to take for the wrist. She was attending physical therapy in Watertown a mile-and-a-half from my suburban house. “Come by and see the kids,” I told her on the phone and sent directions to the email which she hardly knew how to use. She agreed without setting a date and then she never came. Eventually I stopped sending her an annual Christmas card. I tried the buzzer and left a note whenever I went to the North End, but I didn’t get there very often, and after half a dozen years, we fell completely out of touch.
. . .
I didn’t miss the Ovid right away. In fact, I thought I had it when I packed the contents of my Cambridge bookcases into boxes to store in the attic of our new house a few miles away in Belmont. I didn’t need many of those books during the years when my children were small.
When I climbed the pull stairs to the attic to consult a volume now and then, I would see a thick orange paperback which I mistook for Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was only when we finished the basement and built bookshelves down there that I pulled the orange book out of the box in the attic and saw its title, MEDIEVAL LATIN, in white block letters on the cover.
Where was my Metamorphoses? My shocked heart pumped out a surge of adrenaline and I searched through box after box in the hot attic, but the book was nowhere to be found. I thought and thought and remembered lending it to Leona years earlier. Did I want it back?
From the time I was fifteen years old until the time I was close to thirty, I realized I had read Latin literature almost every single day. Through high school and college and grad school and in teaching after that, I plowed through then translated piecemeal then finally read with some fluency everything from Julius Caesar’s description of all Gaul divided into its three famous parts to the bawdy plays of Plautus, some of whose lines caused my high-school teacher to remove all the girls from the room one day, to the sharp writings of Juvenal, who looked at his times and wondered how anyone alive could possibly not write satire, to Vergil’s emotion-laden hendecasyllabics and Ovid’s wit-laden ones. But as I sat sweating in the attic, those days were more than ten years past.
Reading great literature in any language is a lot like reading a painting. The reader closely observes all the parts and determines the meaning of the symbols in order to understand the whole. But Latin poetry is something altogether different. Because of the significance of the word order, which the poet can change at will, and the meter, which can also be made heavier or lighter to reflect the subject matter, as well as all the requisite mythological and literary allusions and omnipresent rhetorical devices, Latin poetry must be read in layers. It’s as if you came upon a meadow and bent to the task of cataloging every earthworm and every blade of grass, every wildflower and honeybee and breeze; once you’ve finished, many years later, you stand back for a moment and consider all you didn’t see before; only then do you run through the meadow for all you’re worth. Such was Latin poetry, which I always read first for understanding of the grammar and vocabulary, then for meter and for rhetorical devices, and next for symbolic meaning, and finally for echoes of past authors whose works may not even have survived, but of whom we know because of other authors’ writings. Reading it is a skill which takes years to learn and which grows rusty with disuse.
Even when I was a stay-at-home mom, I would climb Tuft’s high stone steps or ride the bus to Harvard once every couple of years to sit around a table reading a random Latin author with a few like-minded people for just a few hours of a few weeks in order to keep my teaching certification valid. Such courses didn’t honestly have much to do with my ability to teach stoplight sentences and Old MacDonald to whichever little charges might be in my future. But I counted out the money and churned out the papers and exams anyway. I still needed my run through the meadow every so often.
Though my book was gone, it wasn’t as if Ovid’s poetry was irretrievably lost to me. If I Googled “Publius Ovidius Naso Metamorphoses,” I could discover digital version after digital version of the entire fifteen-book work in Latin. I could click on my favorite stories and read them all again. But it’s not the stories that were important to Ovid; it’s what he could make the stories become—a showcase for his ironic attitude and poetic gymnastics, a mockery of the dramatics of the traditional epic genre, a metamorphosis of epic into something more fitting for the Augustan Age, when people’s morals were slipping, when an emperor who had come to power not by election but by force was trying desperately to enforce laws against the ubiquitous divorces, affairs, and ostentatious displays of wealth of Rome’s nobility, when a true epic hero like pious Aeneas would be well-nigh impossible to find. The myriad “heroes” in Ovid’s poem are actually victims of the gods and of each other, and they survive not by remaining true to themselves but by changing into something else. But my old Metamorphoses, with Professor Phinney’s comments immortalized in the margins, was stuffed full of insight, and those insights were irreplaceable.
. . .
The Roman author Seneca tells this story about Ovid. Some friends once challenged the poet to let them choose just three lines to be erased from the thousands he had composed, in the Metamorphoses and in many other works. In their judgment, he’d gone too far with the stylized wit in certain places. He agreed on the condition that he be permitted to choose three lines which could under no conditions be sacrificed. In the end, without peeking, he saved the very three verses his friends had wished to delete, and the integrity of his opus stood. We know that one of the lines was semibovemque virum semivirumque bovem, describing the unfortunate mortal Pasiphae’s tragic lust for a bull, which resulted in the birth of the Minotaur, “both a half-cow man and a half-man cow.”
Leona asked me for just one book to take away, and my Ovid is the one she chose. If I could have picked just one that she couldn’t take…? I continued to look for him every time I was in the attic, thinking he might lie hidden under some other tome after all. But I never found him. It didn’t really matter. Things change, as Ovid teaches. Mortals morph into just about anything at the whim of the gods, poetry turns into mockery in the hands of a bold and ridiculously skillful poet, the circumstances of that poet’s life change from toast of Rome to Black Sea exile when he unwittingly offends an emperor’s sensibilities. I was in a different place, and so was my heavy yellow Ovid. He was in a better place. He was with Leona.
