The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam
Page 60
I was startled to find that it was already ten o’clock; she had taken the launch into Polis, in order to spend the day wandering about its streets and mosques. Meanwhile the returning boat brought the little doctor with it. Jocas was wide awake and alert in his birdlike way. “She wants you to meet her in Polis” he said. I said I knew. From the only bathroom came the sound of prodigious swishing—as if a herd of elephants were hosing each other down. “It is Caradoc taking a bath” said Jocas solemnly, and then added (for all the world as if he had mind-read the whole of our conversation of last night): “I have told him that I do not wish to see any plans. He is free to design what he pleases. He has the money and the site. I will trust him to make a most characteristic thing for the family.” I whistled with surprise and pleasure. Presently Caradoc, hale and ruddy after his ablutions, emerged from the depths. He was looking happy for a change, indeed radiant. “Did you hear?” he boomed. “Jocas is going to trust me all the way.” This seemed to call for a celebration and despite the earliness of the hour and the slight trace of hangover I coyly accepted a glass of fiery raki.
I left the company gathered about the huge bed and (grateful for an old umbrella I had brought) found my way down through the gardens to where the white launch lay at the landing stage, waiting with steam up to take me into town. The sea was black and calm, luminous and bituminous all at once; we rustled across it at full speed. I studied with interest (perhaps amusement, so foolish am I) the prophecy of Zeno and the elaborate table-plan he had drawn for this classical last supper of mine. What the devil was it all about? It reminded me a little of the Banubula Tune talisman—twelve places of which three were empty. But the pencilled names were those of my friends—Vibart, Pulley, Marchant, Banubula, Nash, etc. etc. There were empty places, too, at this table and I wondered a little about them. It seemed that neither Julian nor Jocas was to be of the party; and perhaps one of the missing places might belong to Iolanthe? I don’t know. It was all pretty vague as these things so often are; and of course there was no precise date for the thing—there never is! However I felt charitably disposed towards occultism on Tuesdays, and I pocketed it with a sigh, and turned to regale myself with the black water and the livid marks we were making in it. And the sombre city came up like a long succession of “states”: I am groping for the image of an etching evolving through a number of different stages, slowly as the elaborations of detail are multiplied. I wondered what Benedicta might be doing; I closed my eyes and tried to imagine where she was—perhaps sitting on a block of masonry by her mother’s grave in Eyub or else (more likely) sitting in the little garden by the mosque where Sacrapant fell, drinking a benedictine and smoking a gold-tipped cigarette. There was time to kill. In this gloomy sodden-looking weather I found my way across the arcades of the grand bazaar to the little restaurant where once (how many centuries ago?) I had dined with Vibart and his wife, and listened to his histrionic dissertations on good books and bad. Pia, I had almost forgotten how she looked; I had a recollection of brilliant eyes, watchful, amused. For the life of me I could not associate her with Jocas—but there it was. And following out this train of thought I bumped into Vibart himself just as he was about to seat himself at a table. “Join me” he said, and all of sudden it was a new version of my old friend which presented itself to my vision; no more was he morose and cast down. He radiated rather a recovered composure, a temperamental calm. He saw me looking at him and smiled. “It’s come out, the equation” he said at last, turning his handsome smiling head sideways to examine himself in the mirror. “I spent all last night walking about until I found the missing collar-stud. I’ve solved it, man. It’s the smallest thing imaginable but it has been teasing my reason for so long now that it was a great relief to catch it by the tail. I was right to do it for myself and not ask poor Jocas foolish questions. It has to do with the quality of my loving, the subtle thing that didn’t click between Pia and me. It came from the fact that I loved her not as a man loves a a woman, but as a woman loves a man. In a subtle sort of way my attitude qualified my masculinity in the exchange. I wonder if you see? It is so clear to me. I’d turned the flow of affect or whatever upside down; and she was too much a woman to love except as a woman. It’s such a relief, I feel like singing.”
“I can see Nash,” I said “bicycling like mad towards you and muttering things about the ‘homosexual component’.”
“Yes, it would seem from my diagnosis that I am a common or garden bugger at heart. What do you know?”
He burst out laughing. Thunder crackled and a brief skirl of rain fell. “Just like last time we were here, isn’t it.”
“What a weird light; the whole damn city so subaqueous and sfumato. How is Jocas?”
I gave him an account of the patient to which he listened thoughtfully, patiently, nodding from time to time as if what I had to say confirmed his inner convictions. (The strictest style in classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. Why? This singular fact has never been satisfactorily explained. Must ask Caradoc what he thinks about it.)
“I bet you” he said, falling to work with knife and fork “that Benedicta hasn’t gone up to Eyub with all this uncertain weather; bet you she’s hiding in Gatti’s eating ice cream or something. Anyway it’s on the way so we shall see. And by the way there’s a telegram for you from Marchant which they gave me down in town. Take.”
It was a simple and brief message to tell me that our model was “critical”—a word we used to denote the final stages before she woke up. That meant in about a fortnight’s time. I felt my pulse quicken at the thought that we were so near launching day. Perhaps mingled with the feeling was a small touch of misgiving; this parody of a much loved person, how would it stand the test of scrutiny by those who had known her?
There was time before my rendezvous with Benedicta, and we elected to dawdle away an hour or so in the Grand Bazaar where I surrendered completely to the long stride of Vibart and the longer memory he had for everything in it. It was delightful to hear him talk now, with nostalgia and affection for the past—no longer hatred and shock. As for the Bazaar—despite its size he knew every flagstone, every stall; and despite gaps and changes brought by the times there was enough for him even to evoke what was absent as we rambled about it. The circumference of the place cannot be less than a mile, while about five covered arcades radiate from its hub, the so-called Bezistan. It is really a walled and gated city within the city, and it claims to contain 7,777 shops. Mystic numbers? Vibart walked about it all with a sense of ownership, like a man showing one round his private picture gallery. He had, I think, come to realise how intensely happy those long years in Turkey had been for him, and indeed how formative; yet he had spent the whole time grumbling about books he could not write. The little square Bezistan, so clearly Byzantine in feel, is less than fifty yards long; square and squat, it spiders this stone cobweb. The one-headed Byzantine eagle over the Bookseller Gate places the building as tenth century, after which time the eagle became two-headed. The gates are called after the quarters which they serve, each characterised by a product—Goldsmiths, Embroidered Belt Makers, Shoemakers, Metal Chasers….
I could see now that Vibart was living in the romantic schoolboy glow of the mysterious East. These empty rainy stalls once held damascened armour, silver-hilted pistols, inlaid rifles, musical instruments, gems of every water, seals and terra-cottas and coins. Even what wasn’t there he was able to describe with complete fidelity in this new youthful voice. I think too that in a way he was talking to Pia in his mind, remembering for her, to so speak. I fell silent and let him go, as one lets a hound off the lead.
“And to think” he said “that in a few days we’ll be back in bonny Blighty facing up once more to all the contingencies which face the creative man—buggery, gin, and menopause Catholicism. Well, I shall take it all calmly from now on. To each his well-deserved slice of sincere dog. To each his cinema picture—the best way of trivialising reality.”
Catching a glimpse of her sitting this way, her blonde head turned away to scan the nebulous city with its turrets and minarets, I suddenly thought of what Vibart had been saying about Pia and realised not only how much I loved her but also why; and by the same token why she must love me, why she would never break free again. It was one of those cursed paradoxes of love which hit one like an iron bar. I sat down with a bump in the chair next to her and said to myself: “Of course, we are most united in the death of Mark, our son. The child we unwittingly murdered. At bottom what brings this hallowed sadness to our loving is a sort of criminal complicity in an evil deed.” I longed at that moment to embrace her, to comfort her, to protect her. But this train of thought would not do. Instead we listened to Vibart in full exposition while she let me hold her ungloved hand in mine. (Bookstores near the Mosque of Bayezid in the old Chartopratis or paper-market; here in an old Byzantine portico resided a turbaned and gowned old gentleman who sat at a table with reed pen and colour box, with gold leaf and burnisher, filling page after page of parchment with exquisite illuminated script. Left over from a forgotten age in which his art was as necessary as it was graceful. Now all he got in the way of commissions were a few petitions from government clerks or illiterate farmers. For the jewellery and the silks you must try Mahmoud Pasha Kapou….)
“Astonishing how much you’ve remembered and how much I’ve forgotten” said Benedicta; to which Vibart replied with a certain smugness, “Isn’t it, though?”
Clouds furled back to admit a streak of sunlight; we were joined by a relaxed and almost gay Baum. “So they didn’t put essence of powdered rat in your soup?” He shook his relieved head and sighed. “To my intense astonishment I found them most receptive to this new idea; the religious leaders heard my exposition in complete silence. Am I to assume that there are passages in the Koran which sanction solitary practices—unless I misunderstood the interpreter I think that is the case? What impressed them was the insistence on the modern world with its change of viewpoint. After all Turkey abolished the fez out of a desire to make itself a modern state, and then the Latin alphabet replacing the Arabic … I rubbed it all in. And when I had finished they practically gave me a standing ovation, if I may use the phrase without indelicacy, and rushed to fill in membership forms at once. Moreover from every minaret and pulpit in the city the news will go out and true believers will flock to the standard. I am so relieved.” He smiled all over his face.
Our rendezvous with the pinnace was for dusk, so we idled away the afternoon in the shelter of Gatti’s awnings while Baum and Vibart completed several small purchases in the immediate environs. Once again we were favoured by a calm sea. It was dusk by the time we landed once more at the jetty and straggled our way up to the house, to the bed, the lamps and candlesticks; to Jocas who was completing his toilet, but in a very good mood. “Everything has gone well” he said. “All our plans agree. Even Caradoc is happy and when has he ever been happy?”
Caradoc was enthroned in a Voltaire and was playing with coloured bricks, absorbed as a child; it was indeed a child’s toy—this architectural kit. And I could see that having sat for an hour or two on the site by daylight had fired his fancy and given him the itch to begin his task. The evening passed very pleasantly indeed; we almost forgot the plight of Jocas he was in such a good humour, and so lively. But at last when dinner was brought in he said: “So you will go tomorrow will you? Yes, I think it is best. Now that I have seen you all I am quite content to say goodbye.”
It was the end of an epoch I suppose, but it did not feel very momentous so natural were the talk and banter in the firelight.
It is retrospectively that one marks up and weighs the value of experiences. Looking back—as a matter of fact looking down—over Polis as the huge lumbering aeroplane swam in widening gyres, gaining height over the capital, I was touched by a nostalgia which I had not felt on terra firma. Benedicta too I suppose felt it, and perhaps more sharply than I. Yet she said nothing. Dawn was breaking over the forest of tilting masts and spars, the long walls turned briefly poppy-coloured before the lengthening rays of sunlight made them revert to bronze, then to umber. I had a feeling that I should not come back for a very long time, if ever; and I was also glad in a perverse sort of way that the pilot had decided to overfly Greece on the return flight. The melancholy and solitude of Ariadne had saddened me; it was so absolute that one could think of no consolations worth the offering—you cannot console anyone against reality.
“Thinking?”
“Yes. Thinking and cross-thinking; all the map references are criss-crossed. I was thinking of Jocas, of you as a child, of Ariadne in Athens. And I was thinking of that absurd prophecy of Zeno.” I took it out of my pocket to study once more. The idea of destroying the firm’s entire contract system had begun to tease the edges of my mind; of course it was preposterous, but then everything was. What was more preposterous than returning to England to set Pygmalion’s image walking?
“I saw Sipple” said Vibart. “He’s blind now and pale and ghostly as a mouse. He is head of the embalming section which Goytz has started up. He does everything by touch, like a mouse nibbling at cheese. He was at work on a small corpse, a boy, silently, happily. It terrified me. I buzzed off hastily.”
He looked round carefully to see that Goytz was sleeping tranquilly, and had not heard the remark. Goytz was so easily offended when his craft was mentioned in flippant tones. “He’s become like one of those pink transparent eyeless lizards which live in caves in total darkness. Opaque, completely opaque. You can see the sunlight shining right through him, Sipple.”
I had forgotten until now that the clown was still with us, in the land of the living, the land of the dying. A steward brought drinks. Benedicta had fallen into a doze now with her head on my shoulder. Soon we would be booming across the high spurs of Albania, bound for England, home and Iolanthe.
VI
I have the impression that if anyone had seen us that evening as we wheeled our trophy of love across the crisp green lawns, down the winding gravel paths, through the woods, until we could settle her into the little villa—if anyone had, he would have been tempted to smile at the solemnity and concern written upon our visages. As for her—why she was breathing softly but regularly under her parachute silk shroud; you could see that faint rise and fall of her breast as she lay stretched out on the long steel trolley. She was gradually coming out of the anaesthetic, so to speak. The last threads had been snipped which attached her to the machines that had been feeding slumbering life into her all these long months; the life which, in due course, she would be free to turn to her own uses, to the exploitation of good or evil. “Today she wakes, today she walks” Marchant had chanted with schoolboy enthusiasm which masked, I think, a concern nearly bordering upon hysteria. He had worked harder than any of us on the model. When first her breasts began to rise and fall, her lips to move into the soundless shapes of words, his surprising reaction had been to burst into peal upon peal of laughter, high girlish laughter. And he was still poised on the edge of a triumphant giggle whenever she gave the smallest sign of responding to the demands made upon her by the life-currents into which she was entering. His pink scalp shone through his thin silvery hair; his silver-rimmed spectacles, which gave him a slightly White Rabbit look, steamed over all too easily with emotion. He had to wipe them in his apron. It alarm
ed me, this laughter, I must say.
I confess that I too felt a nudge of concern and perhaps even horror as she began to take her cues—sorry, it. She was moving like a planet into camera range, telescope range….
She licked her lips slowly, tentatively, and her small red tongue flickered over them like that of some marvellous copperhead. Then she sighed once, twice, but it was a very small boredom as yet. We had allowed ourselves a quarter of an hour to dress her and conduct her to the little villa where she might wake in surroundings appropriately familiar to her intricate memory-codes. After all, we wanted her to feel at home, to be happy, just like everybody else. So here we were, wheeling her away across country with Marchant dressed in the elaborate white intern’s coat and Mrs. Henniker tricked out as a nurse. Myself, I was still a civilian, so to speak. Marchant was going to play the doctor who by a brilliant operation had saved her life. As for Mrs. Henniker, she was ashen pale, her hair was glued to her scalp with perspiration. But she was behaving very nobly. I had given her a long talking-to about this excessive emotion. There was no need for it, after all, and there was a risk that the experiment, so delicate in its various contingencies, might be spoiled unless she kept a straight face, so to speak. “Above all nothing must be said in the presence of the dummy to suggest to her that she is one, that she is not real. She must not be made to doubt her own reality—because that might lead to some sort of memory collapse; whatever doubts she may eventually have must come out of her own memory-fund and its natural reaction-increment.” Easy to say, of course, but the thing was that she was so damn real that it was difficult not to think of her as a “person” … already! And she not walking and talking as yet—the acid test of her mock-humanity! Yes, she could even read, and by her bed lay the familiar bundles of film papers and weeklies which she would nose through like a dog, quizzing the fashions as she picked her front teeth with a slow fingernail. Yet, she was typical, as contemporary as a mere man could make her.