The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  Footsteps go past in the passage, there is whispering, the chink of money, the creak of stair-joists. A moment or so later I realize that someone is making love with noisy abandon immediately overhead. Detached, remote, I listen: how grotesque the rhythms and utterances of passion seem to the onlooker! Yet it is for this that. I, too, am here. I find myself smiling at the thought.

  Soon the invisible lovers—lovers?—reach their climax: a silence falls, and then those slow, dragging footsteps come back down the stairs. A door opens and shuts. Boots ring on the cobbles. A pause, the sound of heavy breathing. Then, abruptly, a loud belch, a tearing, torrential flow of vomit, a groan, a muttered curse. The footsteps lurch away into the night.

  The innkeeper’s wife has just opened my door without knocking: to see if I want anything, she says, but in reality to make sure I have not, somehow, smuggled a man in behind her back, without paying for the privilege. She is a fat, hideous slattern of fifty or so, with a wart on one cheek and a cold, lubricious eye. She stares at my writing materials suspiciously. “Making up your accounts, then?” she asks. I nod in agreement: a very fair description of what I am doing, I feel. I send her out for a better lamp: she goes reluctantly, still not sure whether there may not be a man hidden under the bed. Besides, I intrigue her: such guests must be rare on the Corinth waterfront.

  As she shuts the door it strikes me that we are about the same age: yet she clearly expects me to have a lover. A compliment, of a sort: no one could imagine her attracting any man’s attention. Or—sudden and unpleasant thought—does she take me for one of those elderly matrons who will pay well to get the perfunctory embraces of some supercilious, hatchet-faced youth? And could she, I ask myself, be right? Hitherto I have always pitied and despised such women, sad mortal nymphs in whom beauty has faded, yet desire remains strong: yet are not they, too, victims of Aphrodite’s cruel caprice? Am I not ready, if all else fails, to offer what they offer, to buy the passion I cannot command?

  But Phaon never took money from me, never, never, though the Gods know he was poor enough. What he did was done out of passion and desire: I know that, I must hold fast to the certainty. Or did the Goddess touch him, too, with her cold enchantment? I asked him once, laughing, as we lay together in the cave above Mytilene, how he had acquired the secret of eternal youth. He was older than he looked, well into his thirties despite that hard, brown, unlined face and the thickly waving chestnut hair: perhaps more, if gossip was to be believed.

  He stirred, and sat up away from me, big hands clasped round his knees: the moonlight, streaming straight into the cave, shed a pale radiance on his broad, naked shoulders and breast. It was impossible, listening to that deep, burred voice of his, to tell whether he was joking or in earnest.

  He said: “Now there’s a thing, darling: and it’s a queer tale too. This is how it happened. One evening a filthy old crone came aboard my boat in harbour, a real bundle of black rags, and said, would I ferry her across to the mainland? Well, I hadn’t much to do that night, no trade and the shoals weren’t running; and besides, there was something about the old creature, the eyes in that walnut face of hers, so black and bright, every time she looked at me I felt a shiver go through me, and the short of it was I said I’d ferry her over for nothing.”

  I lay quite still, listening: behind his words I caught the gentle drip-drip of the spring, and far below a donkey suddenly brayed in darkness, a long, yearning, agonized note.

  “When we landed she thanked me, and then she said she wanted to give me a present, and I said I needed no present, she should keep it and buy herself bread. The gift was hers to bestow, she said, and I should have it, and the way she spoke made the hair rise on my neck, it was the command of a queen, or a Goddess. Then she put a smooth stone jar into my hand, a small thing, beautifully curved, fitting the palm so that it was a pleasure to feel and hold it, and she said, You will be grateful for this, and I stroked it with my fingertips and it seemed like alabaster to the touch. I said, What’s in it, then?—expecting honey, maybe, or wintergreen for a sore bruise—and she said—it was dark now, by the bye, and I couldn’t see her face too clear inside that black hood—she said, A salve to bring you your heart’s desire, Phaon, youth and beauty, the love of women. What must I do? I asked, and she said, Smear it on your lips and your breast and your manhood, speaking the woman’s name, and this secret prayer—which she taught me, and made me swear never to reveal. Who are you? I asked her then, and for the first time I felt fear as I looked at her. You have spoken my name many times, Phaon, she said. You have honoured me in the flesh. Take my gift, be thankful. And use it sparingly. When the jar is empty, you will be at the end of your chosen road. Then she left me, like a ghost, but I caught a glimpse of her face as she turned away into the shadows, and I would swear it was the face of a young and beautiful woman.”

  I found myself trembling violently, though it was a warm night. I said: “Is that a true story?”

  “Now, would I ever lie to you, darling?”

  “More often than I care to think,” I said bitterly.

  “This happened,” he said. “On my father’s head I swear it.”

  I said: “Your father has sorrows enough already.”

  “Aye: he lost the better of us, that’s true. Pelagon was the dutiful son always, a hard worker, a sober man for the night-fishing, right.” He spat on the ground. “And where’s my fine brother now? Dry bones under, with a salt-white oar and creel on his grave.”

  We sat silent for a moment, apart, brooding.

  “Your story,” I said at last.

  “Yes?” He sounded suddenly bored: with me, with himself, with life.

  “How do you explain it? What’s the truth?” My voice was taut, urgent, anxious.

  He shrugged. “How should I know? Does it matter?”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “It makes no difference to me,” he said, and stretched his muscular arms, and yawned, for all the world like a giant cat. “Perhaps it was the Goddess, I don’t know. I sacrifice a lamb once a month just to be on the safe side. Perhaps it was nothing but some cracked old witch with a pot of scented goose-grease. Your guess is as good as mine.” He gave a quick, complacent snort of laughter. “I look young. I get the women I want. That’s what matters.”

  I said, schooling my voice to calmness: “Tell me one thing—did you use the salve on me?”

  There was a tiny pause. Then he said: “Ah now, sweet, would I need to do that? You’re not the shy sort, you’ve passion enough and to spare. Besides, it’s old wives’ nonsense, I’d never have told you if I’d known you’d take it seriously—”

  “Did you?”

  “I did not, indeed—”

  “You’re lying,” I said, “I know you’re lying—” but the truth was worse: I did not know. Whatever he might say now, I would never be certain. In my heart there would always remain a nagging fear that this passion of mine, for all its violence, all its seeming reality, had been engendered by some cold aphrodisiac trick of the Goddess, and was—like so much else in my life—mere illusion.

  “If you don’t care to believe me—” he said, and shrugged again, safe, indifferent.

  “I’m sorry. I believe you.”

  “That’s better now.” He gave his easy, too easy, laugh.

  With a quick, desperate movement I thrust myself against him. “Now,” I whispered. “Please. Take me now—” But he shook me loose, good-humouredly, as he might have put away a troublesome puppy.

  “Not again,” he said. “It’s getting late. We’ve not the time.”

  That was the last time we met in the cave. He must already have seen Charaxus, already have agreed to leave Lesbos for Sicily. But he said nothing—unless those final words were a kind of valediction.

  For two months after my haemorrhage—five years ago: the day that Atthis left me—no one was sure whether I would live or die. I had lost too much blood, the Coan surgeon told Megara, I lacked the strength to fight my sickness.
To me it meant being trapped in a long and dreadful nightmare between sleeping and waking, from which there was no way out, an iron circle. The dead and the living walked together through my mind’s barren, rocky landscapes. Then, one day, without warning, the nightmare shredded away, and I came back—a weak, skeletal-thin traveller—to the world I knew, my skin like old parchment, my hands pitiful bird-claws, yet alive, alive, moved to tears by sunlight, by all minuscule living things, by the greenness of leaves and the glint of water, by the whole miraculous pageant of existence. I willed myself to eat, I endured medicines and purges. Day by slow day the flesh crept back to my bones, my thin blood pulsed stronger, till at last, with huge effort, I stood, and tottered a few steps, and then I knew that the danger was gone, that I would recover.

  I awoke, too, to the realization—never before wholly accepted—that I had become a living legend, that my nearness to death (as I learnt from many letters) could personally affect people in distant places whom I did not know, for whom I existed only as the words that spoke my passion, and perhaps theirs too: a voice that spanned the many-tongued night, the sundering seas, the long death of the heart.

  In those first days of convalescence an unspoken amnesty seemed to come about between me and my enemies. I had some unlikely visitors as I lay on my day-bed, wretchedly weak still, shocked by the memory of that waxen mask I had glimpsed briefly, in the handmirror Praxinoa tried—with such clumsy tact and zeal—to keep from me. Andromeda came, as awkward and hoydenish as ever, with a gift of books and wine: I received her peaceably, we talked of trivial things, and Atthis was never once mentioned between us. Pittacus came, gouty and aphoristic in his retirement, offering wise advice and exotic herbal remedies, very full of some unofficial diplomatic mission he had been asked to undertake in Lydia. “Can’t do without me, you see,” he said, “even now—” And he wheezed, and chuckled, and told endless anecdotes, so that as I lay back against my pillows I wondered: Why was I ever afraid of this man?

  So many others, too: Aunt Helen and Uncle Draco, who was then— though he did not know it—on the verge of his own last, fatal illness; Mica and Melanippus, elegant, childless, who filled my sickroom with great bunches of Lebanese roses and the latest smart social gossip; Telesippa, respectable, matronly, her once-blond hair flat and streaked with grey; Agenor, a middle-aged bachelor, fast developing old-maidish habits; Larichus, his Apollonian good looks blown now, like the summer rose he picked from my bedside table, fluttering its petals groundwards, blown with rich living and idleness and the indulgences of the Athenian heiress whom he had married. Last of all, Agesilaïdas and Ismene and Atthis came together from Pyrrha, and from Three Winds Ismene’s son Hippies, now nearly thirty, with his sister’s grey eyes and dark, coppery hair and sudden, dazzling smile, and the room swam in sunlight so that I seemed to float on a golden tide as I looked and listened.

  While we were talking, Cleïs and Meg came in together, and I saw Hippias turn his head, and Cleïs pause, slim and white and elegant as a lily, while their eyes met and brightened in that sudden, momentous recognition. Then, I felt nothing but happiness, the filaments of love spreading out through my senses, the pattern of the future dancing before my eyes in a shaft of sunlight. It was only afterwards that the dark clouds gathered and the pattern was struck awry.

  The last revellers have departed, the moon is down. Even the cats have fallen silent. Overhead I hear a mumbling snore, the restless creak of a bed as some unknown body thrashes on it in nightmare. Through the slats of the shutters a false dawn glimmers. I am alone here in Corinth, utterly alone, with a pen and a lamp and the past I carry in my head—luggage, passport, what you will—anonymous, unregarded, a middle-aged woman passing through Corinth to her elusive future, and now crouched over the table of a shabby, peeling room in a waterfront whorehouse. Making up her accounts.

  Spring had come before I was fully recovered, bird-song and apple-blossom mocked my slow descent into angry melancholy, the sense of time irretrievably lost, the enchanted doorway now closed to me for ever. When the Coan surgeon congratulated me on my remarkable recovery—as complete a cure, he said, as he had ever assisted at— he also unwittingly pronounced my death sentence. Cheerful, kindly, insensitive, a still-young man who lived with death on too-familiar terms and therefore, perhaps, had become coarsened in his approach to life, he sat out with me on the southern porch, eating cherries and flicking the stones up at my poor nesting swallows, and gave me professional advice for the future.

  “You’ve got to remember, Lady Sappho, that you’re not a young girl any more, but a middle-aged woman. You’ve had an extremely serious illness which—I must tell you this—might well have proved fatal. In future you will have to make certain—adjustments to your way of life.”

  “Adjustments?”

  He looked at me shrewdly from under those thick black eyebrows. “It would be most unwise for you ever to dance again,” he said. “In fact, the strain, generally speaking, of your, ah, professional activities is something which, medically speaking, I must deprecate in as strong terms as I may.”

  I said bleakly: “You mean I should disband the House of the Muses.”

  He coughed. “Ideally, yes.”

  “That’s out of the question. It’s my whole life. Can’t you understand?”

  “Of course, if it were reduced to a small circle of friends again—” He looked to see what effect he was having, then plunged on: “But these endless pupils and guests—”

  I shook my head violently. “You’re asking the impossible, I’m sorry.”

  He said: “Forgive me if I seem presumptuous, but I believe your attitude is dictated, in part at least, by financial considerations?”

  I felt suddenly deflated: “Yes. Of course. I can’t afford to lose the fees.” It was the most humiliating admission I have ever made in my life. This brusque, kindly, thick-skinned surgeon was perhaps the only person who could have wrung it out of me.

  He said, in a cheerful, matter-of-fact way: “Well, there would be no harm in your under-taking commissioned work And you could always get your brother to mortgage your share of the estate to tide you over any difficulty—at the beginning.”

  “You seem to have been investigating my affairs very thoroughly.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I want to make sure I get paid myself: it’s a purely selfish instinct.” He flicked another cherry-stone up at the roof of the colonnade: it struck the pleached mud nest fair and square, and the occupant shot out with an indignant squawk

  I said: “I respect your advice, but I doubt whether I shall take it.”

  “I expected that. But don’t be too sure. Other factors may be involved besides your will.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I never prognosticate too far in advance. Let me give you one last very conventional piece of advice, though: take a sea voyage as soon as you feel up to it. A change of air and scene is the best medicine for convalescent depression I know.”

  “I might.”

  “Your brother Charaxus did suggest a trip to Samos. I don’t know whether that would attract you?”

  I said carefully: “I have nothing against Samos.”

  He laughed. “Cheer up,” he said. “We all have to make do with the brothers we’re given, and yours—if you’ll take my unsolicited private opinion—is a pleasanter fellow than you give him credit for being.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said demurely. “Did he promise to underwrite your fees?”

  The Coan paused, a cherry half-way to his mouth, and regarded me with a pensive professional eye. “I think,” he said, “that your recovery may be progressing faster than I supposed.”

  But the House of the Muses, however hard I struggled to maintain it, was doomed. My illness marked the close of an era, and everyone, whether consciously or not, seemed to recognize this. Beauty, in every sense, was central to the life we made there together: these were the precious years of our youth, the days that were lit
by passion, creativity, hope, when time seemed inexhaustible, the senses ran riot, and the deep well of physical well-being could never, we thought, run dry. The greying ghost who walked those corridors now had come back too late.

  For a little while, loyally supported by Meg and my daughter Cleïs, I tried to defy the truth, call back the old days. It was useless. The stream of pupils became a trickle, the trickle soon dried up altogether. A shadow had fallen, and the air struck chill: I was no longer the ideal teacher and lover at whose feet young girls travelled half-across the world to sit, but a tired, impatient, semi-invalid woman of nearly fifty.

  Newcomers were soon warned about my screaming, unpredictable rages, my occasional descent into tearful hysteria, my arbitrary whims and cruelties. Worst of all, never admitted consciously, was the dreadful sense of boredom that began to pervade me; pretty butterflies who once would have captivated my heart now left me wholly indifferent, or stirred me only to irritation and distaste. It was this, more than anything else, which hastened the end. Long before the House of the Muses ceased to exist, I had destroyed it in my heart.

  Financially, I was almost bankrupt. I took the Coan’s advice, and persuaded Charaxus to mortgage my share of the estate. I turned out wedding odes and epitaphs and hymns to order, but my creative gift, like my body, had been dulled by illness, and what I wrote no longer possessed that elusive vitality, even in the expression of commonplaces, which had made me so sought-after a poet during my Sicilian exile.

  Yet I could not bring myself to abandon any part of my luxurious way of life: if anything I spent more, desperately staving off reality, running deeper and deeper into debt on bills that had little chance of being redeemed. I became obsessed by my own advancing age, haunted by images of death and decay, increasingly solitary: friend after friend was snubbed and alienated, it was as though I were trying to cut myself loose from life, to exist like a revenant in the place where I had once known happiness.