The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Why?” said I, “I’ll see what they want.”

  I went out into the hall where the little phone booth stood; it had been converted from a satin-lined sedan chair. Inevitably the line was poor and the voices were criss-crossed with whirrs and clicks—it was like talking across the reverberations of some giant sea-shell. But yes, it was Nathan, waiting patiently for me. “It’s Mr. Marchant, sir. He has been asking for you rather urgently. Hold on while I put you through to him.”

  Marchant sounded testy, as if he had been called out of bed in the middle of the night; and yet relieved. “I wouldn’t have bothered you,” he said “only Julian told me I should try and make contact and tell you that we’ve had rather a nasty accident on our hands here.”

  “Iolanthe!” I cried, my heart beating faster from sheer anxiety. “What has happened to her?”

  “No. No” said Marchant. “It’s the man, Adam. He’s a total wreck, a write-off I fear; but he’s gone and killed poor old Rackstraw, of all people. Completely unexpected.”

  It could not well have sounded more astonishing, more improbable. “But how? Where?”

  Marchant sighed with exasperation and said: “You know we had orders to let old Rackstraw into the lab to acclimatise himself to Iolanthe, and to test any reactions he might have. It was Julian’s idea; I wasn’t keen on it but he said he’d discussed it with you and that you had seen no reason why not. Well, anyway, we drew a blank from the point of view of reactions. The old boy simply stared at our girl-friend for ages without moving a muscle; I think he would have gone on for ever had he not been led away by Henniker. Incidentally the effect on her was terrific; I have never seen anyone cry so hard and so long and so passionately. She kept saying ‘My God, she’s so real’ over and over again and going into paroxysms, leaning against the wall. She is hardly calm as yet and they’ve been visiting us in the lab every day for a few hours. The old boy just hissed and croaked and wagged his eyebrows; but really they’d drawn a blank with him. He kept asking about the whereabouts of a chap called Johnson, that was all. Then yesterday we got so used to him standing there motionless that when I went to lunch Said forgot to lock up; or rather he just went out of the lab for a second overlooking the fact that Rackstraw was still there. The next thing is he heard a crash and smelt a roasting smell. He rushed back to find Rackstraw rolling all over the floor like a centipede with this Adam creature wrapped round his neck; it was what you’d call a muscular reflex with a vengeance. I don’t know what he could have been trying to do but he was badly burnt and concussed and covered with Ejax into the bargain. Well, Said gave the alarm, and of course we had some difficulty over the current, the dummy had become live. But anyway they finally turned everything off and disentangled Rackstraw who was led away to hospital. The next thing we heard in the middle of the night was that he had died of heart-failure. It’s being hushed up, the whole episode, and presented as a normal death—heaven knows it was about time; he’d long overstayed his welcome, the old man. But Julian said that you ought to be told. There is a bit of electrical damage to the big feeder but that can be repaired. Otherwise we are moving along; you will have to make a much stronger temperature control stat. or else she will overheat, and then she’s likely to write free verse: I suppose as any normal person might do in a delirium. It all happened yesterday. She lost optimum temperature control and committed a poem. Felix, are you there still?”

  “Yes. I was thinking of Rackstraw. Poor old thing. Is the dummy completely smashed, irrecoverable?” Marchant thought for a moment. “Yes” he said, but doubtfully. “But the funny thing is that Julian has told us to stop work on it and get on with Io. I had a funny sort of feeling that in a way he was almost jealous of the mate. He said ‘We don’t really need a male dummy do we?’ He said it in a funny sort of voice, too, kind of complacent and rather pleased—unless of course I am romancing, which I don’t think. Indeed when I spoke of trying to recover the outline drawings of Adam with a view to rebuilding he looked extremely peeved and told me sharply to lay off and consign the plans to the wastepaper basket. So there. The funeral was yesterday afternoon. I don’t believe anybody went except Julian. I didn’t, though I am sorry for the old sod. Anyway, I have told you all and done my duty. There is nothing else to report unless you would like to hear the fever-verses that Iolanthe produced yesterday. First verses from beyond the grave, my boy, and not half bad. I thought of sending them to a paper.”

  “Have you got them on you?”

  “Just a sec. Yes, I have.”

  “Read them, then.”

  It was a strange feeling to hear these dissociated ramblings which had been produced by a simple temperature rise; was it an illusion or did they make a strange kind of sense, perhaps “poetic” sense—since poetry isn’t a stock report on experience, or written for a seed catalogue. (So I have been told.)

  Just supposing because

  death is never too fervent

  though water suffer little damage

  and women have a descriptive function

  simple conjectures about loving

  in adolescence sweet and turbid

  brief caption on the love-box merely‚

  will announce her engagement to spring

  or winter or one of its forms, yes,

  its memory kicks back and throbs

  if bivouacked on Windermere

  made one with the ferny forms.

  All and none of these functions

  would be valid, a cause for surprise

  when reality is so taut and gnomic,

  digestible and without unction,

  all and none, I say, all and none.

  just supposing because, now

  surely every allowance should be made for such things?

  “Bravo” I said, but in a confused puzzled sort of way. The line went dead. The roaring in the sea-shell stopped.

  Somewhat to my surprise they had all taken themselves off to bed save Ariadne who was waiting up for me; she sat, lost in thought, and gazing into the fire. I poured myself another drink and joined her—extremely depressed by the story of poor Rackstraw. I had got quite fond of him, of using him as a sort of touchstone for my own sanity in the Paulhaus where, at a certain time, I even placed Benedicta among the disorderly figments of my own waking dreams. Fancy to find when I woke that she was really there, in my arms! Not just a daymare. “Thinking?” I said and she: “Yes. A lot of muddled and inconsequent thoughts—what a jumble. Thinking about you all with an affectionate concern—it’s allowable in a friend, no?”

  “Concern, Ariadne?”

  “Yes. For example this new Benedicta—she’s suddenly normal, sensible, in full possession of herself; won’t you find her diminished, less interesting than the other?”

  I groaned. “My God, you aren’t wishing me another long spell of misery with her are you?”

  “But the whole mystery must have gone.”

  “Thank God it has, if its only manifestation is in hysteria. Besides, she’s exactly how I wanted her, always imagined her. I almost invented her. It was written on the package so to speak; if the contents were different there was many a good reason. We now know the reason. But when I fell for her I saw the possible person embedded in the witch. I fell for the blueprint of what she might be. It was a terrific gamble, but I’ve won, don’t you see? Ariadne, you’ve always thought of me as one of nature’s mother-fixated cuckolds who revelled in his suffering; but it doesn’t go very deep, my masochism. You must have misjudged the issue.”

  She looked at me with smiling relief tinged with doubt. “And you don’t hate Julian any more?”

  “How can I now I can see him in close-up? His life has been such a calamity, and the type of genius he was given was a catastrophic gift for someone condemned to impotence.”

  She put her hand on my cheek and I kissed it. “You are an ass” I said. “I’m sorry” she replied, and then went on. “Strange how we ascribe fixed qualities to ourselves—and really we are only wh
at others think of us: a collection of others’ impressions merely.”

  We sat a long time in silence now, smoking and pondering. Vague thoughts passed through my mind like shoals of fish. I thought of the effect that her love for Graphos had had on her life. Then of a sudden a fragment of my intuition stirred and an original thought made its appearance which was disturbing and upsetting. It was: “Ariadne has outlived the death of Graphos now, it has melted, with all the luxurious pain and emptiness it conferred. She is now in mortal danger of relinquishing her hold on life, of dying from pure ennui.” I took her hand as if to hold her back, as if to prevent her slipping downstream. And as if to confirm and echo this dispiriting thought she said: “We can’t believe it, can we? That we are all condemned, that it’s only a matter of time? Death is something we accept as part and parcel of others. Why do we never get used to it in regard to ourselves? O the boredom of waiting! One has the impulse to race towards it, get it over.” There! I had no consolations to offer; neither love nor opium ever really meet the case. For a pure scientist and an impure man—how to steer a safe course between the inconsequent and the outrageous?

  We said goodnight; Ariadne spent all her mornings in bed reading, and would not be awake when the cars came for us at nine. She opened a window to purge the room of its cigarette smoke. The smell of lemons came in out of the darkness like a friendly animal. We did not know when we would meet again—if ever.

  We had been put in the room with the ikons and the heavy old-fashioned beds; the sheets were of coarse island linen. Prison-bars on the windows. By the light of a single guttering candle Benedicta slept, her pale blonde head on her arm; so utterly motionless was she that she might have been dead. I climbed in beside her. She was naked and deliciously warm. She turned in her drowsing and asked me about the telephone call, and I told her of the death of Rackstraw and the destruction of the model. This awakened her. She stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and then at me. Then she said: “There! You see?” as if the mishap proved something, as if she had foreseen it. “But I wish to God it had been the dummy of Iolanthe. That would have solved something.”

  I was outraged. “Darling,” I said “take pity on me. You aren’t developing a jealousy of my poor dummy, are you?”

  “In a perverse way yes. I expect you will want to sleep with it out of curiosity one day—to see how real it is, to compare it with me perhaps.” My breath was taken away by this scandalous statement. “With Iolanthe?” I said in tones of mortal injury. “And why not?” she went on, talking to herself almost. “It must stir up all the most perverse instincts. Wait, vampirism. I know exactly what Nash would say.”

  Ah! so did I, so did I. And not merely the matter but the manner as well—oblique regard of the cuttlefish, fussy voice and so on. And the ideas all neatly laundered and folded by courtesy of Freud. (Now him I love for his modesty, his hesitancy, his lack of a dogmatic theology; it is what poor Nash has done to him that I condemn, avaunt, conspue.) Anyway I had a long dream colloquy with him in which I manfully defended my dear dolly against the penetrating criticism of this marvellous but as yet incomplete science. Ah, the infantile theory with its congeries of undigested impulses jumping about in the mud like fish leaping from the subconscious water. Who was I, poor Felix, to deny the double fantasy—both of birth and of coprophilia: the faecal matter which the infant will one day knead into cakes, and then from cakes, into sugar dollies and statues of bronze and stone? Yes, but dead dollies these. Ah, there we were—poor Iolanthe for ever dead, for ever part of the merde, that cosmic element which makes up the Weltanschauung of the groping analyst; element in which the poor fellow struggles waist high, holding his nose, and yet convinced on the basis of the evidence that what he is slithering about in is really gold. GOLD, remark you—the cement of a basic material value which binds together the shabby cultural brickwork of the times. The citizen’s toy and talisman, the giver’s gift and the receiver’s wafer…. Gold, bread, excitement and increment pouring from the limited company of the dreaming big intestine. And then, via the same nexus of associated ideas direct from the chamber-pot to Aphrodite, the austere and terrible and mindless, her sex tolling like a bell. What a vision of judgement for a simpleton like Felix … I heard Marchant singing at his work!

  O‚ O‚ O‚

  You great big beautiful doll.

  Benedicta stirred in her sleep, dreaming no doubt of the scarlet Turkish slippers she had promised herself, of the slices of holy muslin out of which she would make a ballgown. Softly breathing as she circumnavigated those vast and shadowy fields of sleep—the other reality which is a mirror image of our own. A living corpse like myself suffering only from the beta decay of the world within us. (The wish to die together is the image of the wish to lie together.)

  And then all the shaggier motives which wake and howl like ravening mastiffs after dark. Through them I could align my faecal image of the ideal Aphrodite with everything that woke and stirred in the bestiaries of necrophilia, in the huge syllabaries of vampirism. Sliding, sliding the good ship Venus through the conundrum of the anus mundi‚ plop into the ocean where time has run wild: to circle the huge constipated Sargasso of the reason and melt at last into the symbolon tes gennesiois‚ the symbol of rebirth which Plato knew was the sea, cloaca of the archetypal heart. (“The grave so longed for is really the mother’s bed.” “All right, Nash, I take your point.”)

  And then of course a natural and completely ineradicable sadism is always inflamed by the thought of communion with a dead body—partly because of the helplessness of the latter; it cannot defend itself: “lie down, dead dolly, and come across”: and also partly, but much more important is the idea (so firmly implanted) that the dead mistress cannot be wearied by excessive caresses. In death there is no satiety. Yet beyond the foetal pose and the faecal death the mystery of decomposition offers the promise of renewal, of a new life for dolly. Grave Aphrodite, formed from the manure out of which we are all constructed, has coaxed the gift of fertility—for manure also nourishes; death is defied by a change of code, of form. The smoking midden is also of this world, of this culture, of our time—indeed of all time. The compost generates another life, another echo, to defy with its heat the fateful laws of decomposition, of dissolution.

  “You groaned, my darling, in your sleep.”

  “A nightmare; I dreamed we were at the World’s Fair and I bought you a pretty sugar doll. And you ate it, crunch, and the paint ran all over your tongue, turning it scarlet. And when we kissed my lips grew bloody too.”

  Somewhere a dog barked, and the wind lightly shuffled the sleeping trees; listening hard I thought I could perhaps discern the sound of the sea. I rose mechanically and lit a candle under one of the little ikons in the niche; other eyes in other corners woke and winked. Then I got back into bed and took her in my arms. The pretty seizures of the love act brought us once more to comfort, to wholeness and at last to sleep—a sleep so innocent that it seemed we had invented it for ourselves, as the only fitting form of self-expression.

  Tomorrow would be Turkey. Tomorrow would be Turkey.

  * * * * *

  So we embarked on the next long leg of our journey, skimming over the taut and toothy ranges of the northern chain of mountains—much higher now, and a good deal snowier; although we in our heated cabin were blissfully warm and were made welcome by innocent morning clouds, soft cirrus. No boundaries to this airy world save the very last peaks stretching out their necks like upward flying geese. Then at long last, clearing them, we moved down once more to a lower octave over an evening sea which played quietly, half asleep. Water and sky here divided the lavender dusk, parted and shared its clouds, and presaged a spring nightfall.

  Here somewhereabouts scouts came out of the sky to salute us—grim visages staring out of the fighter-planes like Mongolian dummies; faces like medieval armoured knights’ of the Japanese Middle Ages. Yes, but they were all smiling and beckoning, and they wished us softly down until we landed in a den
se whacking of waves and great spools of white foam, almost under the heroic bridge itself. Through this thick water we taxied like mad, hunting for a windless lea which might let us moor safely.

  We had taken it all in, however: there had been time and light enough: the huge thickets of spars moving in soft unison, the beetle-grooves carved by the tankers and small brigantines upon the blue skin of the gulf. It was sunset, too, and blowing fresh and keen from Marmara. And my goodness, how sinister it all felt to me as I sat smoking and gazing down upon the long walls once more—the long irregular buckler of hide or mud-daubed osier such as savages might run up about a stockade. From a great height they looked absurdly flimsy but as we scaled down out of the sky the whole mass began to take up a denser stance, obdurate and threatening: and softly the tulips rose like the horns of shy snails, to take the colours of the sinking sun upon their pale skins. Benedicta, leaning at my side, stared down with me; her nostrils dilated a little, and with an expression of mingled horror and anticipation, of nostalgia and regret, upon her pale face. We were swimming together once more into the great tapestry of Polis—and at a certain moment, quite precisely, everything spun round as if on a jeweller’s turntable, to present its profile: fused into the single dimension of an old shadow-play manipulated by the fingers of some great invisible shadow-master.