The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  “I have good hopes of you” he said softly. “I will ring you up in a day or two. I am making arrangements to take Rackstraw back to England. He has moments, you know, when he becomes quite lucid and recalls quite a lot. I have spared no research into Iolanthe, you know—into her character and her habits. Almost everyone who knew her has had something to tell us, and we’ve built up a huge library on her, crumb by crumb, to feed into the Abel nervous system, if I can put it like that. I think the elegance of Marchant’s adaptation of Abel will please you very much—all sorts of new materials are to hand these days for modelling. My dear Felix, I can’t believe you’ll refuse me. It would be the crown of your life’s work I believe to help me make her so perfectly that nobody would ever believe it wasn’t her.”

  “Why Rackstraw?”

  “He was her lover. I want to suck him dry.”

  “What can he tell you?”

  He gave a small impatient gesture.

  “The least thing is important for her. Nothing is too trifling to be overlooked.” He said this with such childish impish seriousness that I was tempted to laugh. Quite insane! All this would end in catatonia, some delicious twilight-state which would make the doctors croon with joy. O boredom, boredom. Mother of the Arts! But if I didn’t do this, what else could I do to escape from it? I was a compulsive inventor, nothing else fulfilled me. I had an irrational rush of hunger and love for this new Benedicta staring into the clouds up there—perhaps she could save me from myself? No. I looked at Julian, and I realised with full force for the first time in my life what the theologians must mean when they speak of being tempted by the devil. The hubris, the insolence, to arrogate to oneself the power of the Gods! Vaulting ambition etc. I suddenly wanted to do a pee and be alone with myself for a second. I retired behind the hut for a moment while Julian sat motionless, waiting for me to come back. I did, and sat down. “You are insatiable” I said and he nodded in a thirsty sort of way. The inside of his mouth was very pink, very red, so that in some of his expressions one might descry a touch of vampire. “Iolanthe” he said in a low voice as if she explained everything, the whole earth and the heavens above. “I saw her, you missed her. Now the firm must recreate her. It must, do you understand? and you must help it.”

  “And when you have built your Adam and Eve, what then? Will you ask Whipsnade to find a corner for them?”

  “I am not going to speak to you as yet about that” he said in a sharp martinet’s tone, a soft peremptory flash of fire. “We will face that when and if we succeed in doing what I want done.”

  “We’ll ask Caradoc to build them a pretty little Parthenon to live in I suppose; dependants of the firm with a firmly guaranteed pension scheme and health insurance….” I badly felt the need to insult him, I loved him so much. Badly. He sat quite still and calm but said nothing. I went on truculently, irrationally, “I shall be forced to regard you as a case of intellectual Koro, artificially induced. A retractio ad absurdum.” He writhed and gritted his teeth with fury but said nothing, always nothing. It would have been pleasant to hit him with something but there was nothing to hand. Such weakness is despicable.

  “I think you will” he said at last. “I don’t really see what else you can do now you know about it.” And all of a sudden he expelled his breath with relief and shrunk down to half his size, as if from exhaustion. He became so pale I thought he would probably faint; he seemed to suddenly feel the cold, his teeth chattered. Then after a minute or so his breathing steadied again and he regained his posture, his norm. He became once more the pleasant conversational man. “As for Caradoc,” he said “as you know he is back and en disponibilité until the firm finds something worthy of his genius. But even a genius has a few intellectual holes in him and he is no exception; the sense of symbolic logic in architecture escapes him completely. He finds no significance for example in the fact that the diameter of the outer stone circle of Stonehenge is some 100 feet which is about the diameter of the dome of St Paul’s.”

  He stood up again and turned away to stare at the snowrange intently. Then he said, but in a whisper and as if to himself: “One dares not neglect symbolism in either life or art. It is perilous. I threw a lighted torch into Iolanthe’s grave!” I was in the presence of someone who had suffered the full onslaught of the European disease, poxier than pox ever was—Love! But of course allied as always to matter for he added in the same breath, “I own all her films now. I play them over and over to myself, in order to regale myself with all that she wanted to be, all that she could not realise of herself. My God, Felix, you must see them.”

  “So you bought her out at last!” I simply could not resist the bitter note in my voice. He nodded with set jaw. How I hated this mechanical vulture!

  “I finally forced her to abdicate” he said, but sadly now, as if the victory were a hollow one. “She abdicated only after her death; and I could do nothing about her life or about mine. Fixed stars!” In a long sad pause he repeated the phrase like an incantation. “Fixed stars!”

  Poor Julian! Rich Julian! Vega and Altair!

  “Now I must leave you,” he said “and find my way down to the bottom of this damned mountain.” He gloved his precise small hand and stood up. Together we walked across the snow to where Benedicta was. She watched us quietly advancing towards her, unsmiling, calm. “Eh bien” she said at last on a note of interrogation, but there was not much more to be said.

  Julian took her hands in his in a somewhat ceremonial fashion. “B., you betrayed us over Count Böcklin, didn’t you? Quite deliberately.” But there was no rancour in his tone, perhaps just a touch of regret. Benedicta nodded in perfectly composed fashion and kissed him in sisterly wise on the cheek. “I wanted to show myself that I was finally free, Julian.” Julian nodded. “That word again” he said reprovingly. “It has a dying fall.” B. put her arm through mine. “All too frequently” she agreed. “But not any more, at least for me. You know, if Felix hadn’t disappeared and left me alone I would have refused the task when you put it to me. But I was scared, I was scared to death of you.” Julian started to put on his skis, tenderly latching up the thongs and testing them with precision on one leg and then the other. “And now you can only pity me I suppose. Don’t Benedicta. That might make me turn dangerous again.” Strange, agonisingly shy man!

  “No” she said. “You are de-fused for us, Julian.”

  He looked from one to the other for a long moment; then he gave a little nod as if of approval at what he saw. “I shall order you some happiness for a change now that we have crossed the big divide in ourselves. You might even come to love me one day, both of you. I doubt, though. Yet the road has opened in front of us. But there is still quite a lot to be done in order to earn it. Felix, I shall ring you up in a couple of days when you have had a chance to reflect.”

  “No need” I said. “I am your man and you know it.”

  “What luck,” he said in a low voice “what luck for me to have you at my side once more. And so farewell.”

  He shuffled his way uphill until he gained the edge of the practice slope and then ebbed forward on his skis, propelling himself with his paddles; gathered momentum, curved up small, and glided away like a swallow into the valley. Suddenly with his going we felt that the world had emptied itself; we felt the evening chill upon us as we returned to the hut to pack up and trudge back to the téléférique.

  “You are signing on again” she said. “Darling, this time I think you should; now I am at your side and you at mine, armed. I’m holding my breath. Do you think some happi….?”

  I kissed her breathless. “Not a word, not a single word. Just go on holding your breath and we’ll see what happens.”

  Sinking down the mountain side in the dark purple cusp of evening was more beautiful than the morning ascent; a somewhat inexplicable sensation of delayed shock had seized me. I repeated in my own mind the words “Well, so Julian actually exists and I have met him in the flesh.” The phrase generated a perfectly i
rrational relief and—indeed why not?—happiness. Also physical relief: I felt done in, exhausted. Why? I don’t know. It was as if, during the meeting itself, my mind had been in such a daze that I couldn’t fully grasp the fact. I suppose ordinary people might experience this sort of grateful shock-anaesthesia on meeting an admired film-star unexpectedly in a grocer’s shop. It was clear for me at any rate. Julian had appeared like some figment of a lost dream flashed, so to speak, on the white screen of the snows. He had disappeared just as dramatically—a dwindling black spot turning back into tadpole and racing away into the huge blue perspectives of the valley. Gone!

  Benedicta had burrowed her slender hand into my pocket and was softly pressing mine. “It is fatuous to feel so serene,” I said “and possibly dangerous too. Do you know what he is up to? Building a human being, if you please. Moreover one we know. God, I love you, Benedicta. Wait!”

  I had a perfectly brilliant idea for a new sort of jump-circuit. It was so rich I feared it might disappear if I didn’t make a note of it; yes, but pencil and paper? Fortunately she had a very fine lipstick with her and in her methodical camper’s way she had brought a few sheets of toilet-paper against emergencies since she knew there was no lavatory at the huts. Saved! She looked over my shoulder as I blotted and blatched with this clumsy tool. I couldn’t stop to explain for fear that the idea might fade. It was my sort of poem to the blue evening, the sliding white mountains, the buzzing prismatic corolla of the sinking sun bouncing off the slopes, the trees, the world, to Benedicta herself. And how patient she was; probably disappointed that it wasn’t a love letter but a set of silly pothooks, equations. (If it worked it might spell the death of the ordinary light-bulb as we know it.) “I love you” I said. “But don’t speak for a moment. O I love you desperately, but shut up please.”

  Ouf! But I felt guilt when it was all duly noted down and stuffed into my pocket. So I wrote on the window a rebus based on the word TUNC with a heart in the middle instead of a you-know-what and the words Felix amat Benedictam. In fact such was my euphoria that I missed a step on the ramp and fell headlong into a snowdrift.

  “That really is a sign of returning health” said Benedicta approvingly after her first concern about broken limbs was allayed. “With the return of absentmindedness on such a scale we can really prog-nose a total cure.” That is all very well, but in fact I was whacked; I had a bath, got my dressings changed, and was all ready for visiting her at the chalet, but instead I lay down on the bed for a few moments of repose and reflection and fell instantly asleep. It was early morning when I woke to find myself stiff as a lead soldier but wonderfully refreshed. Beside me, scribbled on the temperature chart, was a note from B. which said: “Alarmed, I came to find you. But I like you almost better asleep than awake. You look such a fool, such a contented fool. All the algebra has been drained from your body. You look how one ought to look when one is dead but alas we don’t. Anyway I have enjoyed sitting beside you watching you going up and down in a steady purposeful sort of way. In your Chinese book I read the following passage which pleased me. ‘Drunk, in a huge green garden, among flowering cherry trees, under a parasol, among diplomats, what a death, Tu Fu, poor poor dear.’ So goodnight. (P.S. I want to sleep with you.)”

  * * * * * *

  But she had gone into town to do some shopping so I spent the morning in the so-called danger ward learning to tie seaman’s knots from Professor Plon who was a specialist in the garotte; he had already disposed of a wife and two daughters in exemplary fashion (running bowline?) and was technically not supposed to have any access to rope. But he had found a piece, I don’t know how, and was shaping all kinds of elaborate and diverting knots and bows. I finally got it away from him when his attention was diverted, though it was really a pity. He could have emptied that whole ward by lunchtime. But I didn’t want poor Rackstraw to go the way of all flesh; though it was almost inconceivable that he should have anything very special to tell us about Iolanthe, it was only fair to let Julian satisfy his curiosity. What else had I been doing but just that? Those elegant debauched hands had roved all over that lovely body, touching it now here, now there, moulding the breasts and stroking the marvellous haunches of the paragon girl, the nonpareil. I felt a sort of sick pang of tenderness when I thought of it. Iolanthe the waif, and Iolanthe the breastless goddess of the silver screen; the sick romance of all our Helens, for whom somebody’s Troy always goes up in flames.

  Rackstraw himself was enjoying a period of rare lucidity. “I have been invited to go away” he said happily “to a place which is a country house to stay with a man I used to know vaguely—I have forgotten his name, but anyway it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

  “Julian?” I said.

  “’Pon my soul yes!” said Rackstraw. “You do know him then? He came to see me yesterday and told me about it. It’s more like a film-studio than a country house, it’s full of inventors. They keep popping out of doors and saying things like ‘I’ve got it, old boy. Look no further. The answer is untreated sewage.’ It might prove boring in the long run; but they are going to make a long recording lasting months, perhaps years.” Ah the blessed intervals of insulin coma! But he was radiant in a funny etiolated way. He had cleaned his shoes and was fussing over an egg-stain on his waistcoat.

  “Rackstraw” I said. “What about Iolanthe?”

  “I made the mistake” he said surprisingly “of treating women as grown-ups without believing in the idea; but later I found to my horror that they were. It was I who was the child.” He shook his head slowly and looked around him. “If only I could have a word from old Johnson. There’s no knowing if he will have a happy Christmas or not, down there in Leatherhead. It is very remiss of him. At our age, you know, there aren’t very many more shots on the spool.” Then he said “Iolanthe!” in a tone of the greatest contempt, and suddenly shuddered with horror as if he had swallowed a toad. “What does that mean?” I said. He looked at me with blazing futile eyes and hissed: “Have you seen the sharks in the Sydney zoo? Then I shall say no more!” If he went on like this I could see that it was going to be a very long and very costly recording. “To be belonged to!” he went on in the same tone of high contempt. “Pah! She killed someone and I found out because she talked in her sleep.” He knelt down and patiently undid my shoelaces, then stood up again apparently completely satisfied with his handiwork. “My success with women” he said modestly “was all due to my voice. They could not resist it. When I wanted one I used to put on a special husky croony tone which worked like a charm. I used to call this ‘putting a lot of cock into it’. It was infallible. Naturally I took great pleasure in their company.”

  He walked up and down in his strange tottering fashion but with quite a strut of sexual vanity. Then he stopped and raising his hand in a regal gesture said “Now go! Vanish! Decamp! Vamoose! Buzz off!” So I did, albeit rather reluctantly, for I was intrigued by even this glancing reference to Io. Who knows, perhaps if he sat week after week in the red plush projection room where Julian now spent so much of his time, staring at the films he had helped her to make, something might be evoked in him, some concrete response? And yet to what end? Once dead … God, I wondered what sort of toy was in the process of being fabricated; a copy of the human dummy which would pose once more the eternal problem (how real can you get?) without ever being able to answer it. Iolanthe! I had missed her somehow and Julian had never enjoyed the real girl whom Henniker described in the words, “It was her animal fervour, her warmth, her slavishness which won men’s hearts, going down to the ugliest client like a humble and devoted dying moon. Later she became tired, and worse still something of a lady: and intelligent, worst of all. She discovered she had a sensibility. This tied men into worse knots, intellectual ones. They were always trying to find metaphors to express things which are best left unexpressed.” All right. All right.

  I hadn’t seen a paper for months, indeed had had no desire to know what was going on in the world. So I was intereste
d to catch myself lifting a copy of The Times from a consulting-room desk, to read with my lunch. Nothing very much. I missed Benedicta as I read. Sometimes in some of our expressions, straying into the visual field, so to speak, I saw my son very clearly. Then he dimmed away and she became once more herself. It made me feel shy in a way, and guilty; I had mounted that toy in order to kill Julian and it had recoiled on my head. Bang! I could never have foreseen, even with the help of Abel, that Mark himself might opt out of the whole compact, press the trigger. I had such an ache too when I thought that Benedicta had never mentioned it, never alluded to Mark. I saw now to what extent she had been a prisoner in this fantastic web spun by the firm—a web held firm by the fanatical tenacity of Julian. Well, I read a little bit into the extraordinary fantasy of reality as captured by the so-called press. The world had not changed since my absence, it was the same. Fears of war as usual. They were crying “punish me, punish me”. And of course a war was coming. Hurrah! Everybody would be miserable but gay, masochistically gay, and art would flourish on the stinking middens of our history.