The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  Chloe said: “The steward’s looking after your baggage. Come up on the roof for a little and enjoy the view.”

  Lycurgus led the way up a broad wooden staircase: Chloe slipped her arm through mine as we followed. Behind me I could hear Arion’s neat, finicky footsteps on every tread: if Chloe looks like a cat, I thought, he walks like one. When we reached the top I paused, astonished by the breadth and splendour of the panorama spread out below us: this must be very nearly the highest point of the entire city. The roof itself was flat, with mosaic tiling and an ornate marble balustrade: it ran round three sides of the courtyard, and resembled nothing that I had ever seen on Mytilene. Even Three Winds seemed staid by comparison.

  There were pots and tubs everywhere: a sweet, heavy scent of stock and basil hung in the late afternoon air. A low table was set out with silver wine-server, bowls of fresh fruit—apples, figs, grapes, pears— and plates of honey-cakes. On either side of the table stood a cushion-strewn couch, with carved ivory facings: and at the head of each couch, like guardian statues, waited two male house-slaves, who stared through us and past us, immaculate in their white robes, so still they scarcely seemed to breathe. I caught my breath: I had never seen Nubians before, and the carved black planes of their alien features, the faint raised cicatrice on each cheek, came as an almost physical shock.

  Lycurgus beckoned to me, and I stood beside him, leaning over the balustrade. He took an obvious, and to me rather endearing, pleasure in talking about his city: a trait, I was to discover, which most colonial Creeks shared.

  “This hill we’re on forms part of the quarter of Achradina,” he said. “Down there in front of us is the Little Harbour—mostly for fishing-vessels, as you can see. The island with the causeway is called Ortygia—"

  “What wonderful old houses it has.”

  Behind me I heard Chloe laugh. “Indeed yes, darling. That’s rather a sore point. But we mustn’t be envious. Not everyone can live on The Island.” Somehow the way she pronounced those two words made it clear that they were a title rather than a mere description. “You have to be directly descended from one of the original colonists, and even then there’s a strict order of precedence.”

  “How extraordinary,” said Anon, looking as though he found it most impressive. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that there might be Syracusans who could patronize Lycurgus and Chloe in much the same way as they themselves could—and did—patronize Arion.

  Lycurgus ran one hand through his thick, bleached hair. How old was he? Thirty-eight? Forty? Odd to think that he was Aunt Helen’s brother. “Of course,” he said smoothly, “Syracuse probably comes as something of a change after Corinth.”

  “You must,” added Chloe, “find us terribly dull and provincial.” She bent mischievously over Arion: the little man’s nose was level with her full, creamy bosom, and his emphatic denial a trifle incoherent. All the same, I thought, there was just enough truth in what they both said to provoke reflection. Syracuse was no less rich and resplendent than its parent city: yet in a hundred and fifty years it had acquired a wholly different atmosphere, leisured, elegant, self-confident. Perhaps a hustling Corinthian businessman would be irked by the slow, formal rhythm of living, the way such rich material was subdued to brilliant yet essentially severe patterns, the traditional., almost hierarchic atmosphere. Yet this pattern was, I sensed, by no means so stable as it appeared on the surface: Lycurgus and Chloe, to look no further, had an outlook in some subtle way at variance with it.

  Lycurgus went on with oblivious enthusiasm, pointing out the Great Harbour, and the fortified headland of Plemmyrium opposite Ortygia, and the low, reedy marshes that stretched inland towards New City and the heights of Epipolae, with the Anapus River an invisible tree-dotted line running through them. There were the stonequarries, yes, there, down on my right beyond the Achradina wall. Eighty feet deep in places. Only slave-labour, of course, and mostly condemned criminals, they couldn’t last long in that appalling place, roasted by day and frozen at night and worked for twelve-hour shifts—

  “Darling,” said Chloe, sharply, “come and sit down: your guests don’t want to hear about quarry-slaves, they’re starving.” There was a sudden, momentary edge of irritation in her voice, and something more, something that eluded me.

  “What? Oh, yes. I’m so sorry.” He turned reluctantly from the balustrade: his smile was boyish, disarming. I came to know that smile very well after a time. We all sat down: Arion and Lycurgus on one couch, Chloe beside me on the other. I was intensely aware of every movement she made, of the way her hand held the cup as she drank from it (she wore no rings except for a plain gold wedding-band), of the way chin and throat tilted, the pout of her lips against the cup’s rim, the embossed silver bright behind wrist and fingers. Her bitter-sweet perfume, a little acrid, filled my nostrils: I drew it in hungrily, as though it were a physical extension of her, glancing sidelong at the swell of her breasts, the way her thigh beside me, shadowy under the lime-green summer dress, spread a little where it rested on the edge of the couch, amazed at myself, but not afraid, not afraid at all, exulting in the violence of feeling that coursed through me, wondering at life’s sudden diamond-bright simplicity.

  Lycurgus was saying to Arion: “Of course, Him ‘ era is much less out of touch today than when you were last in Sicily. This festival now: it would have been impossible to hold it there twenty years ago.”

  Arion nodded, his eyes on the silverware: he looked as though he were mentally pricing it.

  “So I gather from my prospective host.”

  The Nubian slaves, dark as their own lengthening shadows, filled cups, carried round dishes of fruit, always alert, anticipating every command, mute, expressionless.

  Curiosity and reticence battled for an instant in Lycurgus’s eyes. “And that would be—?” he murmured.

  “Teisias, son of Euphorbus.” Arion was carefully off-hand: a celebrity himself, he could not afford to sound over-impressed by rival Maims to fame, and thus went about his name-dropping with some circumspection.

  “Ah: of course. A foregathering of lyric eagles.” The way Lycurgus said this did not make it sound an unqualified compliment.

  “Teisias,” said Arion, weighing his words as though he expected, or at least hoped, that they would be passed on to the person under discussion, “is a very great artist: his fame and influence are international. His technical innovations—”

  “Ah yes,” said Lycurgus quickly: he had no intention, it was clear, of letting Arion get launched into so perilous a subject, sensing, with some justice, that once the little musician was under way, nothing short of physical violence would stop him. “Technical innovations, yes, well, so you admit that? We too, you see, can nurture genius. Sicily is not so backward as they would like to think in Athens or Ionia.”

  “I am honoured to be his guest,” said Arion, bridling.

  “Of course,” Moe put in, “you’ll be his fellow-competitor, too, won’t you? It sets a nice problem in etiquette. Should the perfect host allow his guest to defeat him, or does artistic ambition outweigh mere good manners? Not,” she added, a shade too artlessly, “that the situation need arise in your case, of course.” I could have hugged her.

  “The Muses,” Arion pronounced, getting quite appallingly pompous as he was forced on to the defensive, “do not appreciate such mundane considerations. The true artist offers them the tribute of integrity, devotion, craftsmanship: they reward him with the divine gift of inspiration.”

  “Sometimes,” Chloe said, “they appear a little slow in recognizing his virtue. Perhaps, being ladies, they become bored by repetition: what would you say?”

  Arion popped a ripe fig into his mouth, and chewed it with lingering relish. “I would not,” he said at last, black eyes twinkling, “presume to judge the motives of any ladies—least of all those with divine connections.”

  “And valuable patronage to bestow: of course not. How prudent of you. Teisias is not, I believe, marrie
d?”

  Arion glanced, with swift comprehension—and scarcely veiled malice— from Chloe to myself and back again. “Only to his art, Lady Chloe: only to his art. Like our charming and brilliant young friend here.”

  I felt the hot flush rise to my cheeks: there was nothing I could say.

  “Sappho is young still, Arion.” The voice remained cool, amused; but I could sense the anger under it. “You mustn’t try to marry her off prematurely—even to so chaste and impeccable a suitor.”

  “I bow before your experience, Lady Chloe. In the field of matchmaking I would not venture to argue with you.”

  The sun was sinking beyond the western mountains: a chill breeze suddenly sprang up, and the streets below us lay grey and shadowed. Lycurgus said: “I think we should go in: it gets cold at nightfall,” and we all moved towards the stairs. Far away on the northernmost horizon, Etna lay, snow-capped above her subterranean fires. Chloe smiled and ran her hand lightly down my bare arm. I began to tremble: Arion’s eyes contracted till they seemed mere black pinpoints. But he said nothing.

  Later, towards midnight, I sat up in bed, unable to sleep, pleasantly warm from the wine I had drunk at dinner, chasing fugitive scraps and phrases of a poem which obstinately remained just out of reach. (A child again, vainly pursuing the bright crimson-and-black butterfly that looped and fluttered above me in the spring sunshine, plunging shoulder-high through tall green barley all dabbled with crimson and yellow and white: poppies, kingcups, giant &ides.) My senses were taut, expectant: I was intensely conscious of textures, shapes, colours, smells—the smooth white wax of the writing- tablet, its wooden back pressing flat against my raised knee through the coarse woollen coverlet; the bumbling insect that fluttered, bent on self-immolation, round a cluster of six steady lamp-flames (the lamps were grouped on a little inlaid table where I could easily reach them); the faint scent of rosemary and lavender from the sheets, the oval mirror in its scroll-gilt frame. All sharp, intricate, distinct: all now pressed indelibly on my memory.

  She came, as I knew she would come: still in that lime-green dress, smiling her secret smile, green-eyed as an Egyptian cat, broad gold bracelets aglint in the lamp-light, thick smooth black hair drawn back above her ears, bitter-sweet scent in the air where she walked, a dark enchantress whose every movement had power. She sat on the bed and took both my hands in hers: the pendant necklace lay heavy between her swelling breasts, deep green emerald resplendent on that pale, cream-smooth skin.

  “Well, my darling?” she said very gently, and her dark eyebrows lifted in a gesture that was at once interrogative and ironic. I nodded, lips parted, scarcely knowing what I did; and then Chloe’s warm arms were round me, and her soft, open mouth on mine.

  “Are you happy, my love?”

  “Happier than I’ve ever been, than I dreamed I could be.”

  “You’re so young, so sweetly young.”

  “Oh, Chloe—I never knew—”

  “Hush, my sweet.”

  “It’s so new, so strange.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Of you? How could I be? And yet—”

  “I know: I know.”

  “It’s so violent and sudden, like an autumn storm, when you’re walking in the forest and then, before you know it, a great gale is thundering down through the oaks—”

  The finger on my lips, the warm hair lying loose across my breast.

  “There are no words for this. Hush—”

  “There must be words, words give shape, life—”

  “Ah, no: words are the shadows fluttering behind life. Life is, life exists: enjoy the bright moment, be grateful.”

  “How else can I express my gratitude? Words are the gift the Goddess has bestowed on me: I can offer you no other tribute.”

  The slow turn of warm flesh, the scented drowsiness: memory’s golden net.

  “Sappho, my darling, it’s you I want, here, now, alive: your love, not your tribute. Keep tribute for queens and Goddesses, I am neither.”

  “Call words a spell, then, an enchantment to catch sunshine, call down the moon of your beauty.”

  “My beauty must fade: you cannot stop time for me with your enchantments.”

  “What, then? What can I give you?”

  “This. And this—”

  “Yes. Yes. Oh, love—”

  “Hush, my sweet: hush.”

  Moonlight filtering through half-open shutters, a twist and a flicker of bats in the starlit air. Round the full moon the stars lose their brightness, fade in that cold unearthly refulgence which now, incredibly, silvers Chloe’s warm, smooth body, her generous breasts, the long curve of one thigh. Barred and patched with shadow she lies, a Circe of darkness with strong enchantments at her command.

  I fled to you as a child to its mother, Chloe, with the same warm instinctive trustfulness, the same unrestrained physical response. How shocked I would have been had anyone—even you—told me that at the time!

  You were my first lover, Chloe: you taught me to accept, joyfully, the passions in myself which you aroused. But what sprang up between us, like some long-dammed fountain from the living rocks was also that gush of pure tenderness which unites mother and child, the tenderness I knew afterwards for my own daughter: no less intense, no less physical, yet wholly alien from the passion of desire. You were the mother I never had, warm, soft, spontaneous: you drove out my daemons, destroyed my fear, gave me back myself.

  Those first months in Sicily were dreamlike, unreal. I seemed to move, a bright dancer, through some glittering, enchanted masque: Syracuse was a rare jewel I held in my hand for my delight, a mirror where I saw reflected all the passionate awareness of life that Chloe’s love had given me. Chloe herself did everything she could to encourage this delightful state of mind. (What was it Aunt Helen had said? You show every sign of possessing naturally luxurious tastes. With any luck, Lycurgus and Chloe will indulge them to a point where you refuse, thereafter, to put up with anything less. Like most of Aunt Helen’s predictions, this one proved remarkably accurate—though I have often wondered if she also foresaw, knowing Chloe as she did, what other tastes I would develop in the process.) I was showered, dazzled, by new dresses, rare jewellery, exotic perfumes. My room seems, in memory, always to have been littered with unrolled bales of material—rose-pink Syrian damask, saffron muslin from Cos, heavy Egyptian linen embroidered with stars and strange, stiff, heraldic beasts; woollen fabrics from the wide looms of Italy, woven in soft green checks or black and scarlet stripes, delightful to handle, smelling faintly of herbs and wood-smoke.

  Always Chloe was there, laughing, elegant, full of enthusiasms that bubbled and flowed like a hillside waterfall, snatching up a length of silk and draping it round me, arguing with harassed dressmakers, iridescent as a dragonfly, the centre round which all our lives revolved. She introduced me to a whole range of cosmetics I had never known in Mytilene: soon my dressing-table was crowded with a bewildering assortment of flasks and pots and bottles, with lipstick, rouge, eyebrow-brushes, nail-enamel, scents, lotions, subtly tinted powders.

  Here, on the third finger of my left hand, above my wedding-ring, are the entwined gold snakes that were Chloe’s first gift to me, symbol and pledge and commemoration, untarnishing, chthonic. I moved in the bright burning circle of our love, and time flowed past softly, leaving the bubble for a while intact.

  Close to the sea, so close that only a narrow causeway separates them, rises the spring of Arethusa. I often used to linger there, drawn by some obscure fascination, standing for an hour or more with my elbows propped on the old stone parapet above the pool. Deep and still it lay, its surface a dark green mirror to my thoughts, ringed by a selvedge of feathery. Egyptian papyrus, guarding its secret and its legend: the nymph surprised naked, while bathing, by that great Arcadian hunter Alpheius, and changed by chaste Artemis into pure, eternal water, a deep stream flowing under the Ionian sea to far Ortygia. (Some say that Alpheius, too, was metamorphosed into a subterranean river
, and thus, at last, consummated his love.) Chloe told me that a cup dropped as an offering in the waters of Alpheius had been found, months later, in Arethusa’s spring.

  If I watched that green, mysterious surface long enough, its depths would come alive: between still fronds a thin, barely visible thread of bubbles ran surfacewards, forced up from unimaginable stone caverns where no light ever shone and where, they say, strange blind white fish live out their sunless days. Sometimes, at such moments, I seemed to be myself the secret spring in which that delicate thread rose to break and shape itself in patterns of singing words.

  During those months poem after poem flowed, fully formed, from my fermenting mind: I was possessed, in every sense, bound by enchantments I had never dreamed of, and the pure crystal waters of creation ran bright through my green veins. Still in a dream, I moved across the chequered chessboard of Syracusan society, an exiled pawn among peacock queens and swarthy, side-stepping knights: there were receptions, dinner-parties, and, at last, a recital, my recital, alone in front of invited guests, the famous, the wealthy, the influential, all gathered to hear the dark, tiny poetess from Lesbos— and perhaps to take a closer look at Chloe’s latest lover. I sang and played for her alone; hers was the magic and the tribute of words, the dancing music that caught and held them, close as the twined gold snakes bright on my finger, my gift for hers, my heart in her body.

  They applauded and wept: I saw only her green eyes, alight with tender laughter, her warm lips, the dark, smooth hair drawn back above that lovely face. When, at last, the dream ended, I found I had, without knowing it, become a famous artist, a figure to inspire the passions—admiration, envy, even awe. The poets mythical aura had descended on me unawares: I wore it awkwardly at first, like some late inheritor of a throne who steps out in crown and royal purple to face the crowds after his anointing.

  Lycurgus and I are standing together on the roof-terrace, looking out across the crowded white houses of Ortygia towards the Great Harbour. I have never broken through his smooth, smiling outer defences, the mannered mask he presents to the world: my relationship with Chloe makes it doubly difficult for me to be at ease with him. What is he thinking, what does he know? What do he and Chloe talk about when they are alone together? The questions swarm in my mind, clamouring for an answer. It is characteristic of me, of Chloe too—though for very different reasons, I suspect—that we have never discussed Lycurgus, never plotted his true position in the complex pattern of our love. Daemons of fear and jealousy prowl in my mind, guarding a gate I dare not enter; and meanwhile Lycurgus is easy, polite, charming, an amused husband (one would say) encouraging his wife in her efforts to bring out and launch this small, shy, adoring chrysalis as a resplendent butterfly.