The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  “Why?”

  “Very simple: I should quite certainly have been killed if hadn’t”

  “Are you afraid of being killed?”

  “Of course. So is every man. You must not confuse courage with lack of imagination.”

  “But not every man runs away.”

  He sighs wearily. “We only have one life to spend—or to waste. I had no intention of squandering mine in a ridiculous war about some useless stretch of land in the Troad.”

  “Then what do you think is worth fighting for?”

  He grins: I fancy I detect a mild note of embarrassment as he says: “You’d better read my poems. I’ll send you a copy. You’ll find them very different from your own, I fear.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because”—the grey eyes glint with gentle malice—”your mother

  was kind enough to show me some of them.”

  “What? Oh no—”

  “My dear girl, you really mustn’t be so ashamed of your greatest gift; that’s a luxury you aren’t in any position to afford.”

  “Greatest gift?” I repeat stupidly, not yet taking in what he means.

  “Heaven give me patience. Your poetry. You have a quite extraordinary talent, didn’t you realize?”

  “Please—you don’t mean it—”

  “Indeed I do. What astonishes me is the way a pure talent like yours can sprout from such unlikely soil. Your mind is a really grisly mixture of stupidity, stubbornness, self-satisfaction, credulity, and plain ignorance. You thrive on noble platitudes. You’re so preoccupied with your own emotions that you can’t begin to understand other people; and for that matter you don’t seem to understand yourself.”

  “I’m not interested in people, anyway.” (No one has ever spoken to me like this in my life. I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted: as a result I merely flounder. But his final words touch a raw nerve.)

  “So I observe. But when you write about rivers, or apple-trees, or the moon, you’re really writing about yourself, aren’t you? You see summer as the sum of your own dreams.”

  Intrigued despite myself, I say: “And how do you see it?”

  “Dusty. Thirsty. Endless chirring of cicadas. Flowering artichokes. Randy women and exhausted men.”

  Now I see my chance. “You forgot the Dog-Star. Hesiod had a bit about the Dog-Star.”

  He grins cheerfully: almost, one feels, he enjoys being found out. “I see your literary education hasn’t been neglected,” he says. “That’s something, I suppose.”

  “At least my poems are my own, not other people’s.” (Insufferable adolescent smugness.)

  “You haven’t read mine yet.”

  “I bet I’ll find one like that, though.”

  “Of course.”

  It is really impossible to be angry with him for long.

  You see summer as the sum of your own dreams. It was true, of course; and nearly forty years later it is still true. Our ability to change, to impose new patterns on our lives by will and choice, is not nearly so great as we suppose. The Fates control us from birth, we say, not really believing it; we hang by the thread of our destiny. Yet these commonplace phrases contain a literal, unlooked-for truth. For half a lifetime or more we are allowed to enjoy an illusive freedom: then comes the twitch on the thread, and we jerk like puppets, obedient, mindless.

  So it is with me. Desire remains more constant than its object. I am, still, what I was, inescapably chained to the rock of my passions and beliefs. In that child, that girl, all my future was contained, infolded like the flower within the seed. Alcaeus, too, is caught in the same web of necessity, and when I see him today I am stung to pity: he, too, was foredoomed. What he has become is what he always was. Perhaps the priest, peering at heart and liver for a sign of the future, is expressing a truth more literal than we suppose.

  Any mention of priests, omens, predictions, astrology, or magic at once sends my mind back to Uncle Eurygyus, who was, I think, the most superstitious man I have ever known. We shared the house on the citadel with him for six years (he died when I was twelve) and my memory of that period is littered with amulets and nastysmelling herbs and stale incense and curious gibberish-prayers in foreign languages.

  There was always some new tame prophet slinking about the place, too, an Egyptian or a Persian or a Syrian: one of them left rapidly with the silver candelabra, another after trying to rape Aunt Helen (though we only had her word for this), while a third went splendidly mad in the middle of dinner, rolling about and foaming at the mouth, much to the delight of us children, who by now were hardened to such extravagant demonstrations of religious enthusiasm, and appreciated a good fit when we saw one.

  A walk with Uncle Eurygyus was something of an ordeal. Before he could so much as leave the house he had to wash, with much ritual splashing, in water specially fetched from a sacred spring two miles outside the city walls. He also kept a piece of bay-leaf in his mouth: as he was an excitable and spluttering talker, he frequently lost it, and this meant we had to go straight home again. The same thing happened, more often than not, if we met a cat; but as the town was swarming with them, my uncle would occasionally compromise by throwing three pebbles across the street, over his left shoulder. Once or twice he hit a passer-by: if it was a stranger there might be trouble, but most local residents knew about his habits and ducked. If there were no cats in sight he would peer up into the sky (he was dreadfully short-sighted) to see what omens he could deduce from passing birds. As the house faced due east, he practically never went out during the winter migrations.

  I have often wondered, looking back, just what was going on in Aunt Helen’s mind when she agreed to marry him. He was a decent, kindly, amiable man, well-connected and reasonably well-off, with no apparent vices except for this fiddling excess of piety: but not, somehow, the husband one would have expected Aunt Helen to choose. As Antimenidas once said to me, it was like an eagle mating with an owl. For Aunt Helen the simile is a peculiarly apt one: those great topaz-coloured eyes, that aquiline nose, that proud, poised head all suggested some royal and predatory bird. She was tall and dark, high-breasted, with quick movements, seldom in repose: a sense of latent energy pervaded her most casual gestures, her hair sparked and crackled when a comb was drawn through it. She affected a chaste, severe style (central parting, chignon, plain linen dresses) that was at piquant variance with her sensuous personality.

  Aunt Helen was twenty-nine when I first Met her. In eleven years of marriage she had borne four children and still managed to retain a lithe, elegant, dancer’s figure. Uncle Eurygyus was considerably older than his wife. I have worked out that he must have been forty-three at the time we left Eresus; but to a child he looked immeasurably ancient, a tall, thin, wrinkled man with sparse hair and a permanent stoop. They were both on the quayside at Mytilene to meet us, and I shall never forget the expression of sheer horror that came over my uncle’s face when he saw that my mother was eight months pregnant. He hastily spat in the fold of his robe, and made a finger-and-thumb gesture which (I knew from my nurse) was designed to avert the evil eye.

  Aunt Helen picked me up and kissed me. She smelt beautiful: warm, alive, with a faint aroma of some scent I could not then recognize, but later knew to be verbena. There was an unexpected impulsiveness about her physical gestures. I rubbed my cheek against hers, suddenly at peace, and felt her quick, instinctive response. Then I was on my feet again, with the crowd round me (tallymen, grainchandlers, porters with crates of plums and dried figs, sailors, merchants’ clerks, the inevitable crowd that gathers when a ship docks), trying to take my bearings in this strange new world.

  Smell of tar and fish. The great stone quay of Mytilene, and green mountains behind. A canal with worn wooden bridges, tall houses, the masts and spars of countless ships. Everywhere hurry and bustle, the smell of frying food. Hawsers coiled on the cobbles, drays rattling past, rows of wine-jars and oil-jars, each with its heavy lead seal. The frenzied cl
atter and squawk of cooped chickens, unmilked cows lowing in their pens. Everything bigger, noisier, more intense than the world I had left behind.

  Long familiarity has not dulled that first brief, vivid impression: if I shut my eyes now, I see, not the new modern harbour with its dockyards and hoists and resplendent marble-faced buildings, but the old port of forty-odd years back: vigorous enough, but patched, casual, shabby. A different world. I have lived through a revolution in more senses than one, and Alcaeus—a grizzled, drifting toper now, plotting in taverns, fumbling contemptuous boys over his wine—is not its only victim. Perhaps Aunt Helen, still, in her mid-seventies, magnificently alive, understood the truth better than any of us; though there were other, crueller words found for what she did, what she was.

  And is. Time crumbles the shell of us, scores and corrodes the outer surface; but the inner self remains intact. I see that scene on the quay: time stops for me, the figures freeze motionless, like the flies in amber hawked from house to house by Thracian pedlars. Now my mother is dead, and Aunt Helen a fiery recluse, her very name a stock joke for the lampoonists; and Uncle Eurygyus’ superstitious habits are only remembered as a fast-fading family legend. Now I sit at my desk, as the afternoon light fades; memory-racked, searching, eye caught and held by the delicate convolution of veins on my free hand—and then by the smouldering golden glow of the great snake-ring, which will not change, or tarnish, or be corrupted. Now or ever.

  When my mother died, she left me, among other things, a locked iron strong-box containing her personal papers. I have sometimes wondered whether she destroyed any of the more interesting or self-revelatory ones before her death: on the whole I am inclined to think not. Such posthumous reticence would have been very out of character. For instance, there is abundant evidence (from her journal in particular) that my mother was, at one period, passionately in love with Pittacus; but there is nothing which suggests that she ever revealed this passion to Pittacus himself, let alone became his mistress. Knowing her private romanticism no less than her more obvious forthrightness, I regard it as far more likely that she did, in fact, nurse an undeclared love than that she destroyed all evidence of an illicit affair when it was over.

  No; the gesture was, at one and the same time, an admission of our failure to understand one another while we both lived, and a pathetic attempt to mend matters in the only way she knew. There was something so deep and instinctive about the dislike I aroused in my mother that it effectively precluded any kind of normal relationship. Every simple attempt at communication was distorted, if not destroyed, by the violence of emotion which mere contact between us aroused.

  I think my mother knew this in her heart; I think she knew, too, that much of her resentment was due to the fundamental resemblance between our characters. One of the most curious discoveries I made when I went through that strong-box was a bundle of poems she had written. They were very bad poems, either over-sentimental or full of ringing political platitudes; but they revealed a side of her I had never really suspected. How she must have hated, envied, and (in some strange way) lived through me!

  Alcaeus once said that anger is the last passion to die in a man, and it is certainly true of him. Perhaps, after so many years, the hard knot of unacknowledged hatred I felt for my mother has been finally purged. Knowing that, I can see how much of her own bitterness was due to self-reproach, for (as she believed) having borne a daughter who was not only small, dark, and unattractive, but also in some way physically malformed (though this I am not, unless tiny, delicate bones be counted a deformity). What odd, secret guilt did that conviction of hers represent?

  It is strange to compare my mother’s impressions of those first days in Mytilene with my own childish memories:

  “. . . Settled in at last, though how long I’ll be able to stand this madhouse I don’t know. Helen is impossible—a mixture of all the worst vices produced by inbreeding: selfish, arrogant, patronizing, with (if half what one hears is true) the morals of a waterfront whore. How she and Draco can be brother and sister I cannot imagine. Must have a serious talk with him about her. The way money is wasted in this house is simply scandalous. The whole domestic side needs thoroughly overhauling. Shall set about this as soon as possible.”

  The fruits of her investigation were recorded in a slightly later entry:

  “Went down to the kitchens this morning to get things sorted out. Found the cook doing something quite bestial to one of his scullions, in broad daylight, they might have been farmyard animals. I was nearly sick. Remonstrated with Helen as coolly and as reasonably as I could. She heard me out, with that infuriatingly supercilious expression of hers and then said, ‘My dear girl, so long as dinner’s served on time, why should you care about what happens to little slave-boys below stairs?’ When I pressed the point she said, in a most unpleasant way, ‘This is my house, and I run it my own way. If you don’t like what you see in the kitchen, I should keep out of it.’ Obviously she intends to use my financial embarrassment as a way of imposing her own will, regardless of what is reasonable or logical behaviour.”

  An attempt to enlist Uncle Eurygyus on her side was no more successful:

  “Have made one or two attempts to begin a private discussion with E., but find him quite unresponsive. All this superstitious nonsense must have addled his brains.”

  Reading those words evokes a long-forgotten picture in my mind of my mother and uncle standing together on the terrace one summer evening: I can only have been seven at the time. My cousins Megara and Telesippa and I shared a bedroom at the top of the house. We heard a noise below, opened the shutters a crack, and peeped down. Poor Uncle Eurygyus was literally in a corner, his willowy back against the balustrade, just where the ornamental flower-pot stood. My mother was in front of him, hissing sibilants like an angry goose. Though not one word was distinguishable, I instantly recognized her “confidential manner.” Uncle Eurygyus, being much taller than my mother, could stare into space over her head, which he did with the most magnificently glassy aplomb, nodding at intervals whenever she paused to draw breath.

  We watched, enthralled. Finally Uncle Eurygyus smiled, excused himself, half-patted, half-pushed my mother aside as though she were some importunate puppy, and vanished into the house. My mother then gave way to one of her rare fits of real temper, which were most impressive. She picked up the ornamental flower-pot in both hands (a remarkable feat for a woman: it must have been very heavy indeed) and hurled it down to the flagged courtyard below, where it disintegrated with a satisfying smash. She looked round to see if anyone had observed this performance, brushed off her hands, and quickly—but not too quickly—went back to her own part of the house. Presumably this is what she meant by finding Uncle Eurygyus “quite unresponsive.” The problem of the broken flower-pot was never solved, but I rather think one of the kitchen-boys got whipped for it, on suspicion. Just which kitchen-boy it was, and how the suspicion arose in the first place, I cannot exactly recall: but my mother was never averse to killing two birds with one stone.

  Looking back, seeing these events in some sort of perspective perhaps, I can feel a certain sympathy for all the adults in this period of my childhood. Aunt Helen and my mother were natural enemies; in the best possible circumstances they would have detested one another, and sharing a house was a form of mutual torture for them. The one quality common to them both was a pure autocratic will; and as they never wanted the same thing, some sort of battle-royal was always going on. Poor Mama: her only way of getting herself, and us, out of that house would have been to sell our remaining land at Eresus; but this, understandably enough, was a drastic final step she could never quite bring herself to take.

  Nor was the situation very pleasant either for Uncle Eurygyus or Aunt Helen (though the latter, at least, had a strong position to attack from when it came to a head-on clash). They, were fairly wealthy people, and their town house a large one; but it must have imposed a great strain on them—by no means only a financial strain, ei
ther—to absorb Uncle Eurygyus’ brother’s widow, and her three (shortly afterwards four) children on top of their own brood. For a man who regarded childbirth with such superstitious terror and loathing, Uncle Eurygyus seemed surprisingly partial to the act which set this dreaded process in motion. My mother, in one of her more waspish asides—ostensibly to herself, but loud enough for the children to hear and pass on—claimed that he only did it to keep Helen out of mischief.

  When I think of my childhood in Eresus, what I see, first and foremost, is a landscape, bright, shimmering, changeless, its harsher moods all forgotten. There are figures moving in this landscape, but they remain subordinate to mounts ins and sea, the smell of spring flowers, sunlight on still water. With the move to Mytilene there comes a change in this picture: slowly but unmistakably the figures move into the foreground until they dominate it altogether. My intensity of vision grew no less in those years, and I still remain, now as then, acutely sensible to the natural world around me. But the bright and single light of childhood was fading, little by little, and one day I would wake to the knowledge of what I had lost.

  I sit here on a fine autumn morning and try to picture the house as it was then—the heavy Lydian rugs in the corridors, the odd foreign knick-knacks that Uncle Eurygyus had picked up on his travels abroad; the exotic smell that permeated every room, a mixture of scent and incense and strong spices; the old, gnarled carob-tree in the courtyard, the well where, at any hour of the day, a couple of muleteers were to be found lounging about, scratching themselves and throwing dice for the next drink; the bustle and clatter from the street beyond our high wall, the cries of hawkers and watercarriers, the early morning smell of fresh bread.

  But when I attempt to evoke this scene, I cannot visualize the house without its so-well-remembered occupants: Uncle Eurygyus and Aunt Helen, my mother, the old steward (who may, as my mother alleged, have drunk to excess, but who taught us to whittle dolls with pen-knives and to make cages for grasshoppers), a bevy of much-loved nurses, gardeners, grooms, cooks, and kitchen-maids, and, above all, my four cousins—grave, adoring Megara; Hermeas, who was so fatally pliable, so anxious to be loved at any price; pert Telesippa, her long blond hair always done up in a black ribbon; and Agenor, the eldest, emotionally diffident, as first children so often are, but always inventing games for us, sorting out our problems with a rough and Rhadamanthine private justice, adult beyond his years.