The Laughter of Aphrodite
Page 23
The Gods answered the first part of your prayer, Antimenidas: but who chat vouch for the second? Every night, when I sit at my dressing- table between the star-pointed flames of those great seven-branched candlesticks, with their legacy of unexpiated bloodshed and horror, I remember your words. The curse is corning home now, Antimenidas: the Gods have waited too long, their cold eternal passions must be satisfied. Blustering Ares brought you back like Agamemnon, took your life with casual spite, wastefully, to no purpose. Now I am left, watched by malevolent Aphrodite: her laughter haunts my sleep, the clear, thin mirth of a mad child. But it is when the laughter ceases, when the Goddess tires of her sport, that my true hour of reckoning will have come.
The second letter was from Aunt Helen. Like many women with a strong, vivid, colourful personality, she had less than no gift for correspondence. What filtered through on paper was a pale reflection only of that eagle-bright individualism: she needed to touch, to see, to hear. Physical actuality was as vital to her as the spilt blood to those squeaking wraiths who gathered about Odysseus in Hades. Like Chloe, she found words a thin, disappointing substitute for life; and as a result they would not, somehow, work for her.
But now, reading these four pages of trite, conventional phrases, I sensed a constraint, an embarrassment, as though she were covering up her real thoughts. This was so utterly unlike Aunt Helen that at first I refused to believe it. Yet, obstinately, the nagging instinct persisted. Half-way down the final page, with careful casualness, she wrote: “I had hoped to give you better news, the news you have been waiting for too long now. But the authorities, because of various complications, are proving obdurate.” This was the only reference she made to my exile, and the second sentence seemed evasive in the extreme. Under her signature she had scribbled, as an afterthought: “The bearer of this letter may prove useful to you in Syracuse. Extreme charm, I have found, should always be handled with caution: but Cercylas of Andros has done more than most men to convince me that it does not invariably denote a rogue. I smiled at the postscript: in its own way, I thought, that sentence was singularly evasive, too.
The third letter was from my mother. She wrote at long, irregular intervals: spiky notes, often half-illegible, full of unexpected wit and scathingly malicious anecdotes. Rather to my surprise, I found myself enjoying them a good deal: they revealed a side of my mother I had never appreciated when we were living together. Our abrasive contacts, unhappily, blinded both of us to much we would have found congenial in the other; and when our eyes began to be opened it was already—though I at least did not know it—too late. Too late, too late: those hopeless, fatal words recur again and again in my life.
“From what one can gather,” she wrote, “you seem to be all the rage in Syracuse: don’t let it go to your head. Or, for that matter, your heart. Sicilian Greeks have a certain reputation, as you will doubtless have discovered for yourself: so I hope Lycurgus displays more responsibility over your welfare than his sister did.”
(Letters are so unreal: voices from the past, unknowing comments on a flux of moods and actions that renders them, often, obsolete before they reach their destination, an ironic gloss on the now-accomplished future.)
“Helen is really becoming an open scandal: I suppose, to be charitable, we should blame it on her time of life, though when you look at her past record-1 And in any case, a woman of forty-six who suffers from sexual infatuation is repellent enough, without incurring public ridicule by making no attempt to conceal, let alone restrain, her desires.”
[Voices from the past: voices from the grave. The cruel words stung me then: now they have a deeper, more personal application. Reading them again, I ask myself: Is this, perhaps, my only motive, an act of defiance against her intolerable, ineluctable domination? Am I a puppet, whose strings are twitched by dead hands?]
“When young Archaeanax—you remember him?—came courting Telesippa, Helen simply made a dead set for the boy, I’ve never seen anything like it; and when I asked her what she thought she was doing, she had the effrontery to say that a girl like Telesippa deserved something better than a well-mannered male virgin with one lame leg: those were her exact words.
“He was Helen’s lover for months, the whole city knew about it. Then the affair cooled off, and can you imagine what happened next? He married Telesippa after all. The scene at the wedding-banquet was quite grotesque, have you ever been to a reception where the bride’s mother was the bridegroom’s ex-mistress, and most of the guests knew it? But all three seemed the best of friends, it was quite unnatural, I thought. In fact Telesippa’s fonder of Helen now than she’s been for years, she’s always in and out of the house these days, though being pregnant may have something to do with it.”
(That, too, makes uncomfortable reading for me now. How old was Hippias then? Five? Six? And Cleïs, my daughter Cleïs, was not yet born. How the Cods must laugh as they look down on us from their eternity of foreknowledge, and see our pitiful delusions of freedom, self-mastery, individual choice!)
“But then, Helen can get away with anything. Do you know what the latest rumour is? They say she is going to marry Myrsilus, and when I told her the stories that were going round she merely laughed—but she made no serious attempt to deny them.
“There is one quite repulsively vulgar song being sung in the taverns at the moment—it’s supposed to be a sea-shanty, but no one could mistake its real subject—all about an old ship with rotten, leprous timbers, worn out by endless voyages, stem sprung, seams forced apart, barnacle-ridden: you see the kind of thing I mean. Now, the song says, they’re going to get a few lusty shipwrights to go over her, put a lick of paint on her bottom, and send her to sea again: this time she’ll hit a reef and go down for good. Just the kind of scurrilous nastiness your friend Alcaeus might have composed—in fact, some people say he did compose it, but as no one, to my knowledge, has had a word from him since he vanished into Egypt, this seems unlikely.”
As I read my mother’s words over now, I remember the promise I gave Aunt Helen after our visit to the temple of Aphrodite: Whatever may happen, she said, don’t judge me too hard. Try to understand. Well, I have kept my word. Experience has brought me understanding; it has also robbed me of the right and the desire to judge. But then, so soon after Chloe’s death, alone in her white, silent house, with that warm ghostly presence all about me, it was hard to remember the promise I had given; harder still to keep it. But I tried. Bitterly I thought: Well, at least I know what was wrong with that letter of hers. And then: What she does makes no difference to what she is, to the relationship between us. We are, inescapably, what we always were, and will be.
“But if Helen does marry Myrsilus,” my mother went on, “I can only say that they’ll be a well-matched couple. That vulgar old satyr had the effrontery to pester me with his attentions—considering the official position he holds I could hardly hope to avoid all the time—and then, when he had me alone, he would begin pawing me, like some lecherous pot-boy. Still, I flatter myself that I discouraged him in the end. Public opinion of the better sort does count for something in Mytilene, even today. But when I think of all our futures being determined by that contemptible creature, I almost envy you your Sicilian exile.”
I found this very strange indeed, and in its own way almost as devious as Aunt Helen’s more patent evasions. My mother obviously knew that her behaviour had been, at least in part, the direct cause of my continued exile, and this was as near to an apology as she could get. But the whole account of her relationship with Myrsilus sounded fundamentally false; and if it was false, what had really happened? The more I read, the less certain I became: truth, once so bright and clear-cut a concept in my mind, now began to recede through a mist of ambiguities, suppressions, and special pleading. Nothing was what it seemed: below the surface of appearances, horrors crawled.
“If I sound—as I suspect I must—somewhat moody and querulous, put it down to ill-health. I won’t go into unpleasant physical details, but I am
suffering, in a fairly acute form, from the same irksome condition of late middle-age as Helen.”
This, too, was most uncharacteristic. Apart from the candour, it showed my mother attempting, if not to apologize for herself, at least to offer some explanation of her conduct. Normally she was hardly aware that other people existed, let alone that they had feelings which one should take into account. Was she, perhaps, more seriously ill than she suspected—or would admit? At the thought I found myself, much to my surprise, swept with a kind of childish panic. However much I had resented my mother, she had always been there, a symbol of stability amid change, the embodiment of home. No, I whispered, no, not that.
As though catching my mood and adapting herself to it, my mother now, with her usual brisk dispatch, set about giving me the latest domestic news.
“Marriages seem to be in the air at the moment: poor Ismene is very much taken up with some middle-aged bachelor dilettante, and looks like abandoning her role as the inconsolable widow of Three Winds. (There are rumours that she means to sell up the estate piecemeal: what would Phanias have said, I wonder?) Mica is still busy painting—lice you, she has begun to attract fashionable commissions—and little Atthis has grown into a very presentable sixteen-year-old: quite out of the gawky stage now, but not, I’m glad to say, liable to blush or giggle when addressed by a member of the opposite sex. What they both make of their prospective step-father I can’t imagine: such a change after Phanias, and in any case they’re bound to be horribly jealous, all stepfathers are monsters by definition where children are concerned.”
I paused a moment, the letter in my hand: how long had it been since I thought about Atthis? And was my sudden melancholy now due to missing her, or to the thought of Three Winds being sold— another landmark gone, another childhood stronghold stormed and destroyed? Like Phanias’ grandfather, I had always assumed unquestioningly that Three Winds would go on for ever.
“Your cousins Megara and Agenor send their love: they, at least, seem to have resisted the current passion for plunging headlong into matrimony. Hermeas has been very moody and sullen—quite unlike, himself—but they are pleased with his work in the Treasury, which relieves me: it took a good deal of backstairs persuasion to get him the appointment. Larichus is too young for marriage, but not, alas for the role of Ganymede: he has been appointed an honorary cupbearer at official banquets in the City Hall—which means, as far as. I can gather from Helen, that slightly tipsy councillors and visiting ambassadors will have the privilege of pinching his nice little bottom as he serves them wine. He has turned out an almost embarrassingly beautiful boy, a kind of adolescent Apollo.
“This, I fear, is more than can be said for Charaxus—but I mustn’t be uncharitable: he is my own son, after all, a fact I often need to remind myself of when I look at him these days. (For his age he has put on a really astonishing amount of weight) I know you and he never hit it off, either: he does have an unsympathetic personality, I fear. But he has matured in the most surprising way since he attained his majority and took over control of what’s left of the family estate: his natural flair appears to be for business, which doesn’t make him more attractive, but is undeniably useful.
“Now he intends to take a wife, too: his chosen bride is none other than Gorgo’s little sister Irana, whose freckled insipidity has changed not a whit since she left the schoolroom. At first I thought—unjustly as it turned out—that they picked on each other because no one else would ever look at either of them. But then I discovered, what Charaxus had somehow wormed out of the girl long before, that her grandfather in an eccentric moment had entailed three-quarters of his estate to her—on the condition that she married before she was twenty-five. Otherwise the bequest would revert to her parents. No wonder Draco and Xanthe kept that a dead secret for years! And how typical of Charaxus to have sniffed it out: for his nose for money is as unerring as a pig’s for truffles. Oh dear: there I go again.
“A pity we can’t talk. We would have more to say to each other now, I think. Good-bye, Sappho.” After my name she had written something else, then scratched it out: despite all my efforts I have never managed to decipher those last words. What spontaneous phrase had her iron self-control instantly checked? Sometimes, even now, I pore over that small, rusty, thicket of heavy pen-strokes, struggling to wrest its secret from it, to tease out the one bright word which, in so many years, my mother never used to me. Perhaps it is as well the phrase remains illegible: at least I can cherish, always, one small and constant spark of hope.
I was still brooding over these letters when, three days later, Meg’s brief, awkward note reached me (forwarded express, at vast expense, by the official dispatch-boats) and I learnt that my mother had died suddenly, of a haemorrhage, only ten days after Cercylas sailed from Mytilene.
If that had been all, I could, perhaps, have borne it. But, for the only time in her life, Meg showed a flicker of the thwarted passion and jealousy that lay deep under that selfless, devoted heart: she enclosed, without comment, the report of the surgeon who had attended my mother in her last illness. That, surely, was an act of gratuitous cruelty. She could have destroyed the evidence, buried the truth with my mother’s body, left me that one shred of illusion.
But the report was there, and I read it: it still lies among my papers. In that cold, curiously brutal jargon so beloved of the medical fraternity, the surgeon—an Egyptian, with a passion, it seemed, as strong as any diviner’s for probing among dead entrails—informed me that for some years my mother had suffered from progressive, incurable cancer of the womb: a disease, he added (with the cheerful insensitivity of his kind) which in its final stages was liable to produce, among other effects, a violent and irresistible sexual frenzy.
There. I have got the words out, exposed the horror in daylight. My hands are trembling: when I touch my forehead it is cold and clammy. The shadow hangs between me and the sun. I am my mother’s daughter. So many recurrent patterns spring from our inescapably shared flesh: why should this one, too, not be what in my darkest hours I name it? It is a jest the Goddess would relish: the illusion of passion, the fearful claws ready to close.
I have said already that I do not believe my mother permitted herself any sexual irregularities. I still believe that. There is nothing in her papers which suggests otherwise: not a word, not a hint. It is easy—too easy to put these disjointed pieces of evidence together and draw them into a persuasive pattern. I will not, must not, do this.
Why did Thalia look at me so strangely today? I have no visitors: my friends—even Meg and Agenor—avoid me as though I had some contagious disease. Perhaps (take it which way one likes) I have. I sit in the silent house and write: memories whisper, down the reaches of the lamp-lit night fear circles my self-imposed solitude, a wild beast prowling ever nearer the fires I have lit to hold it at bay.
Cercylas said very gently: “Sappho: what do you want?”
I sat there in the garments I had first put on to mourn Chloe: the same black silk robe, the same heavy veil. The fingers of my right hand kept on at the snake-ring, twisting it over and over. I said, in the flat, dulled voice of a small child, who half-recalls some magic formula taught him by his nurse: “I want to go home. I want to go home.”
He looked at me, the lines of his face deepening with compassion. He said: “There may be a way. I can’t promise.”
“You mean it?”
“Oh yes. But it will take time, and it will—demand something of you. A sacrifice, if you like.”
“A sacrifice?”
He said, picking his words: “I can only guess what personal motives were involved at the time of your original exile. But some people, I suspect, have made serious errors of judgment; and others have changed their attitude in the time you have been away. To put it bluntly: while Myrsilus lives, I doubt whether you, or any of your fellow-exiles, will be allowed back to Mytilene in your own right as citizens.”
I stared at him hopelessly.
“I can�
�t tell,” he went on, “whether your mother’s death will make any difference. I rather think not.”
Our eyes met for a quick moment: then he looked away again, staring out at the cloudless summer sky framed in the pillars of the colonnade. He said: “On the other hand, I happen to have a certain amount of personal influence, both at Corinth and at Mytilene. If I were”—he hesitated only fractionally—“in a position to stand surety for your conduct, to be your guarantor in every sense, I think the thing could be done.”
There was a long silence. Why do I argue and hesitate? I asked myself weakly. This is inevitable. It has been inevitable from the first moment we met. I do not know if I love this man, if I am capable of loving him. But I trust him. That is something. And now, here, I need him. He may be able to give me what is as precious to me as living breath: the safe homecoming I have prayed for so often, and so despairingly.
Perhaps I hesitate because I am taking so much: what have I to offer in return? Perhaps I still, even in my extremity, baulk at marrying a man for what may well be wholly selfish reasons. Perhaps I resent his putting me in the position where I am forced to weigh such a choice, between my heart’s most private and conflicting intimacies.
The last bridge, the final hesitation.
“I am still in mourning, my lord.”
“A formal betrothal would suffice, I think.”
“Betrothals have been broken.”
“With unhappy consequences.”
“Marriages are not always happy.”
Cercylas smiled. “Life is not always happy; would you deny life?”
“The temptation exists.”
“To be conquered. By patience and understanding. There are no demands, no rights. Only what is freely given.”