Thus old Tarao always returned to the objective. Aulei listened while sprinkling dark wine on the delicate flesh of the pike, but Foedus protested.
“No,” he said, “it is truth and justice that govern the World and explain it. The world lives under laws, like men. It is only beautiful by accident. Ugliness inhabits the depths of the sea, the tempests of the sky and the faces of our fellows. In the same way that there is only one beautiful woman in a thousand, there is only one beautiful thing among a myriad. I love beauty, but like one fresh apple hidden among rotten apples.”
“I disagree,” Dionys interjected. “Injustice dominates justice everywhere—good is a debilitated infant before the colossal figure of evil—but beauty is present in all things. It’s only a matter of knowing how to recognize it. Lucretius has seen it amid the fury of tempests. If the monsters of the abyss seem ugly to us, it is because their structure frightens us at first. On looking at them, one discovers a strange splendor in them. Life is dolorous, but so beautiful that one can no longer imagine limits to its beauty. And we name ugliness the beauty that is less beautiful, in order to encourage us to assemble the elements of a superior harmony.”
“Those are irreproachable words!” cried the master-potter. “The man who has thought such things has not lived in vain.”
A roasted cockerel was brought in, surrounded by thrushes, which exhaled a vapor of spices. The priest, full of tender enthusiasm, said: “It is very just to say that beauty resides in all things, young man. I contend that it is as manifest in these roasted thrushes as it is in the body of a perfect woman.”
“Just as,” replied Foedus, “the wing is manifest in the chicken as well as the hawk.”
Meanwhile, dusk was falling. A magical breeze came in through the window and the open door. The sky was tinted with subtle fires, dark blues and mauves fringed with nacre. The soft plaint of the dying day settled over the guests.
Dehva had risen to her feet. She remained standing in the fragile strength of her beauty. The light of the setting sun surrounded her with a melancholy redness. She seemed to be glory made flesh, the sensible image of all human desire. And the guests looked at her with a secret bitterness, while a tumultuous army swelled Dionys’ bosom.
She crossed the room and went out on to the terrace, and as soon as the immense sun was swallowed by the Occident she rang the great clay bell that Tarao had constructed for his dwelling and sang:
Voyager of abysms,
Terror of the eternal night,
Luminous seed that the veiled Gods
Dart into the bosom of Chaos;
Your red twilight is the world’s blood,
Which appeared in the dawn of things,
And will vanish in their decline.
Everyone remained pensive as they listened.
When it had disappeared, Tarao had sealed vases brought in for the commisatio and said to Dionys:
“That is the song of the old Etruscans. They knew the primitive gods, the imprecise powers. They knew that, in the beginning, the mysterious intelligences had not put on form, for they were not yet individuals but multitudes. The Rasenas attained the gods of the fabulous night, and transmitted to the Romans the veiled Gods, the Penates, the Lares and the Manes.” A great sadness caused his lip to sag and hollowed out his eyes. He added: “Our race is not dead. It will project its beauty over the world. I sense it quivering in future times and flourishing like divine Hellas. Over Rome, dead without having left Roman art, the vanquished sons of the Rasenas will weave the immortal crown.”
They drank old wine full of souls. The skiff of Hecate rose over the horizon.. Through the open door the goddess mingled her light with that of clay lamps.
“Let’s go refresh out heads,” proposed Verus, who sensed too much blood in his temples.
Old Tarao consulted his guests and, having the drinking-bowls filled, he said: “We’ll walk as far as the Wall of the Ancestors. Phoebe is enchanting the pathways.” He led his guests out on to the terrace.
The land of Campania was casting it perfume to the stars. An extraordinary transparency united distant things with things close at hand. The four men followed their shadows, sometimes elongated over the white path, sometime confounded with the shadow of a tree or a bank.
“Selene,” remarked Foedus, “is the enemy of horses. Her face fills them with fear.”
“She irritates dogs no less,” said Aulei, “but it seems that they stand up to her.”
“Unless,” said Verus, “they are saluting her and offering her their services for the hunt.”
“She is the friend of elephants,” said Tarao. “They go down every month to the banks of rivers in Libya, when she is nascent. They worship her and consecrate great reeds to her, which they throw toward her image in the current.”
“She is redoubtable,” said Dionys. “It cannot be denied that she rules over madness, gives fever and presides over blindness.”
“Harsh to men, she seems gentle to monkeys,” said Foedus. “They are afflicted on seeing her decrease, and rejoice on her return.”
They arrived at the Wall of the Ancestors. The place was as white as the surf. The village was visible, drowsy between the olive groves. The light spilled over the pale walls, over the flowers, over the waters, and mysterious paths appeared and disappeared in the night. There was a charming and very sad calm, full of a melancholy of eternity, with the taste of death and the subtle potency of a thousand hidden desires.
“Enchant the night, Dionys” said old Tarao. “You will see the festival of slumber spring forth.”
The Sicilian’s flute launched rapid sounds into space, which seemed to pursue one another from tree to tree and join together in the depths of gardens.
At first, the calm was untroubled. One might have thought that the voice of a light god was passing on a moonbeam. Then, the doors of houses opened, shadows moved in the orchards, and a slight sound of footfalls filled the silence. First, women appeared on terraces, and then somber men, who gradually began to laugh and show their bright teeth. And one sensed an ardor of pleasure rising, the insatiable sensuality of those individuals saturated with the embalmed sunlight of Campania.
Then Dionys played a grave and profound dance, which people practiced from Rome all the way to Syria. A woman mimed it, and then another, and adolescents, in their turn, with exclamations, agitated on the spot. The spectators accompanied the flute with a voice, muffled at first, which gradually grew stronger. And those people with delicate ears, effortlessly, filled the night with a chorus worthy to sing the glory of Priam or the great Atreides.9
They became animated. The joy of living spread over their faces, like streams over the mountains in April. One sensed an artistic and sensual race, made to savor the graces of form and become intoxicated on the mere sensation of being in a crowd.
Eros also impelled them, ever present on those odorous terraces; and brown men slid next to the black hair of women.
A voice cried: “The Arquinian dance!”
That was an Etruscan dance, only practiced in villages. The dancers, mingled in garlands and rounds, alternately going to meet one another or turning in spirals like the gulfs of the sea. It went back to the times of the great glory of the Rasenas and had scarcely spread beyond the peoples of that race, although vestiges of it were still found in Bacchanals. It was voluptuous, complex and variable. It required an exquisite sense of rhythm in the fullest frenzy. In the course of his travels, Dionys had learned the plaintive song that led the dance in question.
“Ah!” said Tarao, as soon as the musician had commenced. “I seem to be hearing my ancestor Farntho. The soul of sounds resides in you, traveler from Syracuse.
The crowd showed by its exclamations that its members approved of that eulogy.
Meanwhile, a woman came forward, followed by a lame old man, whose dazzling visage effaced the beauty of all the others. She smiled at Dionys, and then, in a loud voice, as pure as a silver mirror, passionate, ardent and winged,
she accompanied the flute with deft undulations.
Immediately, with an infallible instinct, the crowd supported her in low voices, and one might have thought that one was hearing, from the depths of the ages, an Etruscan tribe celebrating its as-yet-unvanquished glory and its profound instinct of sensuality.
The dance began, grave and slow but full of ardor. The men and the women pressed against one another therein, flesh mingling in a desire rendered stronger by constraint.
Dionys only perceived the woman who was singing alongside him, with such a languorous and penetrating voice. Everything about her was charming, even her shadow. Her face, in accordance with the flexions of her neck, sometimes turned toward the star, sometime toward the shadow, seemed to be made of jasmine pulp or silver silk. Her eyes were as variable as fish-ponds rippled by brightness and clouds. Her mouth smiled in an extraordinary manner, so much did it signify simultaneously sensuality, dreaming, mockery and soft languor. Her red stola, falling in great heavy pleats, rendered her leonine hair even tawnier.
And Dionys mingled the magnificence of that woman with the sinuous silhouette of Dehva. The obscure village obtained a glory therefrom. Like those solitary places in which one finds a temple or an illustrious oracle.
By Kypris! he said to himself, while casting the ancient song into the night. It’s a divine place that bears two such images. Neither Syracuse nor Neapolis can boast of anything comparable!
And in the Etruscan dance, the tunics, the stolas and the chitons of the women mingled their blue, green, yellow and red waves like colored waters; quivering tresses sowed spirals sparkling with gold and silver pins, and rendered the young woman enveloped in a crimson veil finer and more enigmatic.
Meanwhile, the flute has fallen silent. The ardent multitude still want to dance; it would dance all night. Those dry and passionate beings are on fire. Their eyes and mouths are scintillating with pleasure. The women are blooming. Their skin is more beautiful, their gestures more captivating. They spread the atmosphere of Eros.
And words go from face to face, leaping, rapid, sonorous, enveloping the crowd like another crowd, a more ephemeral, more vivacious, more confused crowd, troubling and stimulating.
But the master-potter, putting his hand on Dionys’ shoulder, says: “It is time, my guest, to confide ourselves to the light gods of repose.”
Dionys darts and oblique glance at the singer and follows the old man along the clay path.
He asked him: “Who was that beautiful woman? She would adorn the house of Emperors.”
“She’s an Umbrian,” replied Tarao, with a hint of ill humor. “She’s a slave of that rich old man, as lame as Vulcan, who has been unable to make use of her for a long time. It’s something contrary to divine laws. Beauty is offended by it. Of all offenses, I know of none more sacrilegious.”
He walked in silence, and then resumed speaking: “Nature and the gods have nothing comparable to a woman or man of harmonious forms. It is odious that that grace does not make them as free and honored as demigods among their peers. I cannot succeed in understanding it.”
The songs of the belated Veilans could still be heard in the distance. Sweet Campania sent her odorous breath toward the stars.
The Volturne shone softly amid the reeds, the willows and the black poplars. The two men had an obscure sensibility of that exquisite hour, and the words of Virgil came to the lips of the old Etruscan:
Qualis in Eurotae ripis, aut pet juga Cynthi
Exerce Diana choros...10
III. The Refuge
Veila awoke early. The bulk of the work was done in the shady hours of the morning or at the approach of dusk.
Nowhere, from Rome to Neapolis, was there a more seductive depiction of happiness. For the village united its charming industries, the fecundity of the soil and the grace of its gardens, and did not know odious poverty. Ten generations of artists had created the instinct of the beautiful there without having given birth to suffering. The earnings of the potters were not sufficiently considerable to introduce wealth, and that voluptuous people ardently savored the fruits, the perfumes, the gaiety of the sky and the suppleness of the women.
Dionys got up at Tarao’s signal.
On the balcony of the garden a little blue table with twisted feet bore bread from Picenum, milk, honey and figs.
The master-potter and Dehva were waiting for the guest. The air, full of shade, mildly refreshed by the vapors of the river, traversed the garden in short bursts and caused the virgin vines to quiver. There were still dewdrops in the grass, which the sun was gradually drinking. Brightly-clad children, chickens, geese and piglets were running around little farms, among barking dogs. The hills were clad in ardent mist; luminous roses incensed the expanse. The plain, beyond the river, strewn with sycamores, pines, fields of wheat, with pale sinuous paths, hamlets of white stone and blue clay amid the olive groves and vines, extended all the way to a horizon dented by cliffs.
Tarao’s granddaughter divinized that landscape. She was clad in a turquoise stola that brightened her skin of pearl and petal magnificently. Her long hair, freshly reknotted, spread a mauve and blue light.
The reflections of the sky, the vines, the tunic and the hair agitated over the slender neck, varying at every instant the tone of that dazzling skin. Her arms were half-bare, still moist from ablutions; the young woman emitted an odor of irises, roses and youth, which seemed to be part of her movement. And Dionys admired the line that, descending in delicate rhythms from the shoulder to the knee, brushed the contours of the cleavage, the waist and the loins, incessantly transformed with euphony like the sounds of a perfect lyre.
“Hail, traveler from Syracuse!” cried the master-potter. “The gods have, I hope, watched over your slumber?”
“They have made it an enchantment,” replied Dionys. “Blessed be the host to whom I owe that sweet repose; it has effaced all the baneful days.”
Smiling, Dehva served the milk, the honey and the bread. And all three came together in the fresh repast.
Tarao sometimes looked into himself and sometimes at the landscape; and, comparing numerous images, he said: “The river and its trees, the plain and the hills, are such as I saw them on similar mornings when my stature was still growing. And I have not been able to weary of living here. I sense that I could discover unknown things here eternally. The world always has our stature and our age. We are its veritable measure.”
For Dionys, however, the measure of the world was then the seductive young woman who was biting into bread of Picenum dipped in honey. She was laughing and full of the joy of living.
She said: “It’s good, the morning, the honey, the bread and the milk!”
And those words, like a magic formula, gave a new grace to the repast.
“Yes, Dionys replied, “these placid foodstuffs are sweeter in the youth of the day.”
He bit into them with an agile haste; a fluid of wellbeing seemed to be flowing within him. He seemed to be one of those ancient voyagers tossed from shore to shore, who finally encounters Nausicaa and good King Alcinous. His desire increased to live in that mouth of the Volturne, where the plain almost became an island.
He said: “This land is magical venerable host. The man who has known it cannot quit it with a light heart.” His tone had become melancholy.
The master-potter looked at him in silence, and then said: “Can you regret it, having only seen it for a few hours?”
Dionys replied in a low voice: “How could I not regret it, further embellished by the memory of your brilliant hospitality?”
“What care forces you to depart, traveler? Your art can recompense your hosts, and, if it pleases you, a few hours of a potter’s labor would deliver you from scruples.”
A quiver of repose passed through the weary heart of the exile. He consulted the old man’s hollow eyes and the laughing face of Dehva. He saw them full of hospitable promises, and his heart filled with a profound emotion.
“It would have been har
d for me,” he said, with a smile, “to reenter into exile immediately. I will try, my host, to render my sojourn tolerable.”
They remained silent, in a tender softness. A charming bond linked them, the mysterious ardor that mingles with rapidly arisen sympathies.
Dionys added: “In my short terrestrial voyage, your generosity will remain unforgettable, divine Tarao. And this house will always be as sacred to me as a temple.”
IV. The Potters
In the large house, under the vines that enveloped it, the young potters toil. Their arms and torsos are naked. The wavy hair of the girls falls back over the nape of the neck and becomes entangled with the eyebrows.
The master-potter teaches with an indefatigable fervor. His old soul cannot weary of desiring beautiful forms, He goes from the one who is holding the chisel to one who is tracing the fine line with a stylus, to those who are applying the pattern to the belly of a urn or the background to an ornament.
“Don’t confuse,” he said, “this vase, which ought to contain oil, with that one, in which a more generous liquid ought to reside. There is a harmony in things that it is necessary not to break, under pain of rendering life less sweet... Enlarge this girth…and you, redo that line; it is false, like the sound of a poorly tuned instrument... It’s necessary to put more brightness into that background, Claudius...”
He took up the fashioning chisel or the stylus himself and corrected the forms. His hand was sure, his eye precise. And while repairing the awkwardness of the pupils, he sought to give some new elegance to the structure of cups, olpes, amphorae, komasts, urns, and even vulgar jars and plates.
The need to create was united in him with that of keeping old models intact, even unskillful ones devoid of harmony. He had children reproduce Villanovan pottery, such as it is found in sepulcher pits, vases in which the reliefs resemble the handles of baskets, which it was once customary to put there, and the first efforts of black earthenware, in which Etruscan art was seeking an original ceramic. Thus, the child followed the groping of humankind and reached the refined and proud forms issued from Greece, after having run through the cycle of the primitive Etruscans, the Phoenicians, the men of Egypt, and the Asiatics of Assyria and Persia.
Pan's Flute Page 4
