The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  Thus Abel: “If we could only make all time proximate to reality we could see a little more deeply into the heart of our perplexities; the syzygy with its promise of a double silence is equally within the grasp of man or woman. If ever they combine forces in their field you might speak of loving as something more than a term for an unclassifiable animal. It is unmistakable when it does happen for it feels as if the earth had subtly shifted its epicentre. How sad it seems that we, images of insipid spoonmeat, spend our time in projecting such strange figures of ourselves—delegated images of a desire perfected. The mystical gryphus, the ‘perfect body’ of the Alexandrian psychology, is an attempt on a telenoetic field. (What space is to matter, soul is to mind.) Some saints were ‘dry-visioned’. (Jerk, jerk, but nothing comes; taking the ‘distressful path’ towards after-images of desire.) They were hunting, poor buggers, for a renovated meaning or an infantile adoption by a God. Unhappily words won’t carry the charge in these matters, hence the deficit of truth in all verbal fields. This is where your artist might help. “A craft is a tongue, a tongue is a key, a key is a lock.” On the other hand a system is merely the shy embrace by which the poor mathematician hopes to persuade his bride to open up.” Koepgen never met her, I think, yet at his best he seems to be talking about her.

  * * * * *

  My frail old black recorders with their clumsy equipment were a source of the greatest concern; jolting about as they did with me on country buses, on caiques, even on mules. My livelihood depended on their accurate functioning, and this is where Said came in. The little watchmaker was a friend of Io. One-eyed, mission school, Christian Arab, he had his little workshop in a rotting hut in the Plaka, more fitting for rabbits than for a workman capable of craftsmanship of such extraordinary delicacy. Mud floor, fleas jumping in the straw and nibbling our ankles; we spent hours together, sometimes half the night, at his little workbench. He copied from any drawing. One-eyed Said with his watery optic pressed to a butter-coloured barrel, among the litter of fusees and escapements and hairs. Eager and modest in discussion of trade topics such as the use of invar etc. He made my echo amplifiers in a couple of weeks. Small as a garden pea, and beautifully done in mother of pearl. Graphos now! But I will be coming to that.

  It was the recorders that brought me to the notice of Hippolyta. Vivid in a baroque hat like a watering can she dispensed tea and éclairs in the best hotel, coiling and uncoiling her slender legs as she questioned me about the mysteries of the black box, wondering if I could record a speech which was to be made by some visiting dignitary. My impression squared with all I heard afterwards of her public reputation. It was typical of back-biting Athens that she sounded so unsavoury a figure; the truth was that she was a mixture of naivety and wrong-headedness punctuated with strange generosities. The hard voice with its deeper tones and the fashionable boldness of the dark eyes were overcompensating for qualities like shyness which even her social practice had not enabled her entirely to throw off. The green scarf and the blood-red fingernails gave her a pleasantly old-fashioned vampire’s air. “O please could you do that for me?” She named a figure in drachmae so high that my heart leapt, it would keep me for a month; and held my hand a trifle longer than formality permits. She was a warm, pleasantly troubling personage. Despite the impressive jewellery and the orchids she seemed more like a youth than a girl. Of course I accepted, and taking an advance made my way back to the Plaka delighted by such good fortune. She promised to let me know when the person in question—the speech-maker—arrived. “I can’t help liking slightly hysterical women” I confided to the Parthenon.

  At Spiro’s tavern, under the vine-trellis, I paused for a drink and caught sight of a familiar object at an empty table; the little yellow exercise book which Koepgen used for theology and musing alike. It lay there with his pen and a daily paper. He must have gone to the lavatory. At this time Koepgen was a theological student embarking on the grim path of monkhood. A typical product of white Russia, he spoke and wrote with equal ease in any of four languages. He taught me Greek, and was invaluable on out-of-the-way factors like the phonetics of this hirsute tongue; things like the Tsaconian dialect, still half anc. Doric. Well I sat and riffled while I waited.

  “The hubris, the overweening, is always there; but it is a matter of scale. The Greeks traced its path with withering accuracy, watching it lead on to ate—the point at which evil is mistakenly believed to be good. Here we are then at the end of the long road—races dehumanised by the sorceries of false politics.” Koepgen weeping for Russia again. I always want to shout “stop it!” At last he stood before me, full of a devout nonchalance. He was a small dapper man, contriving to look clean despite the threadbare soutane and grotesque smelly boots. His long hair, captured in a bun, was always clean. He seldom wore his stovepipe hat. He reproached me for my inquisitiveness and sat down smiling to hear my tale of good fortune. Of Hippolyta he said: “She is adorable, but she is connected with all sorts of other things. I came across her recently when I did some paid translation—O just business letters—for an organisation, a firm I suppose, in Salonika. She organised it. But something about it gave me an uncomfortable feeling. They offered me very large sums to keep on with the work, but I let it drop. I don’t know quite why. I wanted to keep myself free in a way. I need less and less money, more and more time.”

  There are other data, floating about like motes in a sunbeam, waiting to find their place: the equipment in the abortioner’s leather bag. The needle-necked appurtenances which mock the spunk-scattering troubadours of a courtly love. The foetus of a love-song. (“One way” wrote Koepgen “might be to take up Plutarch’s idea of the Melis-ponda. This should be within the grasp of anyone.”) Mara the hag with a pair of tongs worked off a car-battery. I am not so sure whether in the brothels of Piraeus he did not achieve the mare pigrum of the philosophers and alchemists. Here one bares one’s sex to a whole landscape—internal landscapes of empty sea, nigger-head coral, bleached tree-trunks, olive-pits burnt by lye. Islands (each one a heart and mind) where the soft spirals of waves shoulder and sheathe floors awash with the disquiet of palaces submerged in folded ferns. Symbol of the search is the diver with the heavy stone tied to his belt. Sponges!

  Then lying about among my own records I come upon some stone memoranda like altars and tombs; stuck in among them some moments of alarming happiness. If the portly Pausanias had seen the city’s body through that of a young street-walker his catalogues would have had more life. Names and stones would have become the real fictions and we the realities. After dark we often sneak through the broken fence and climb to the cave below the Propylea. Her toes are fearfully dirty in her dusty sandals, as are mine, but her hair is freshly washed and scentless. We are never quite alone up here. A few scattered cigarette-points mark the places where other lovers wander, or lie star-gazing. Up on these ledges in winter you will find that the southern gales carry up the faint crying of sea-mews, sacred to Aphrodite; while in the spring the brown-taffeta nightingales send out their quiet call-sign in the very voice of Itys. “Itú, Itú, Itú” they cry in pretty iteration. Then by moonlight come the little owls. They are tame. (No more!) Turning their necks in strange rhythms—clearest origin for ancient Greek masked dancing.

  Down below in the later sequences of the play the tombs face east with their pathetic promise of resurrection. The modern town rolls over it all like surf. Prismatic gleams of oil-patches on macadam; coffee-grounds and the glitter of refuse (fish-scales) outside the smelly taverns with their climbing trellises and shelves of brown barrels. Once a golden apple was a passport to the underworld, but today I am only able to buy her a toffee-apple on a stick which she dips in sherbet, licking it like a tame deer.

  A true Athenian, free from all this antiquarian twaddle, she knows and cares nothing for her city; but yes, some of the stories alert a fugitive delight as she sits, sugaring her kisses with her apple. It is pleasant to babble thus, floundering among the telescopic verb-schemes of demotic; telli
ng her how Styx water was so holy as to be poisonous, only to be safely drunk from a horse’s hoof. They poisoned Alexander this way. Also how Antony once set up his boozing shop in the Parthenon, though his was a different sort of poisoning, a chronic narcissism. (She crosses herself superstitiously as a good Orthodox should, and snuggles superstitiously up to me.) Then … about embalming bodies in honey—human toffee-apples: or curing sick children by making them swallow mice coated in honey. Ugh! But excited by this she responds by telling me of witches and spells which cause nausea and impotence and can only be fought with talismans blessed by a priest. All this with such earnestness that out of polite belief I also make the sign of the Byzantine cross, back to front, to ward off the harms of public utterance from us both. (“There is no difference between truth and reality—ask any poet.” Thus Koepgen sternly, eyes blazing, a little drunk on ouzo.) The quiet wind blew dustily uphill among the moon-keepers. To make love in this warm curdled air seemed an act of unpremeditated simplicity that placed them back once more in the picture-book world sacred to the animal kingdom where the biological curve of the affect is free from the buggerish itch of mentation. Warm torpid mouth, strong arms, keen body—this seems all the spiritual instruction the human creature needs. It is only afterwards that one will be thrown back sprawling among the introspections and doubts. How many people before Iolanthe? Throats parched in the dry air we drink thirstily from the sacred spring. She washes the sugar from her lips, washes her privates in the icy water, drying them on my old silk scarf. No, Athens was not like other places; and the complicated language, with its archaic thought-forms, shielded its strangeness from foreign eyes. Afterwards to sit at a tin table in a tavern, utterly replete and silent, staring at each other, fingers touching, before two glasses of colourless raki and a plate of olives. Everything should have ended there, among the tombs, by the light of a paraffin lamp. Perhaps it did?

  * * * * *

  The news of Caradoc’s coming was conveyed to me by Hippolyta one fine Sunday afternoon; once more bidden to tea, I found her in a corner of the Bretagne where she kept a suite permanently available, playing patience among the palms. She looked a little less forbidding this time I thought, though she was fashionably turned out in the styles of the day. Bejewelled, yes, but this time without much warpaint. Moreover she was short-sighted I noticed; raising a lorgnon briefly towards me as I advanced, she smiled. The optic changed her clever aquiline face, giving it a juvenile and somewhat innocent expression. The eyes were noble, despite their arrogance of slant. She was immediately likeable, though less beautiful this time than last. I compared her mentally to her reputation for extravagant gesture and detected something which seemed at variance with the public portraits, so to speak. Somewhere inside she was a naif—always a bad sign in a woman connected with politics and public life.

  “You remember we spoke? He is coming—you may have heard of Caradoc, the architect? No? Well….” She suddenly burst out laughing, as if the very mention of his name had touched off an absurd memory. She laughed as far back as a tiny gold stopping on a molar and then became serious, conspiratorial. “The lecture will be on the Acropolis—will your machine be able …?” I was doubtful. “If there is wind it won’t be very clear. But I can make some tests in the open air? Sometimes very small things like dentures clicking, for example, ruin the quality of the sound and make the text difficult to recover on playback. I’ll do what I can, naturally.”

  “If you come to Naos, my country house, in the garden…. You could practise with your instrument. He will come there. I’ll send you the car next Friday.” I reached for a pencil to give her my address, but she laughed and waved away my intention. “I know where you live. You see, I have been making enquiries about you. I did not know what your work was or I would have offered my help. Folk-songs I can get you two a penny.” She snapped white fingers as one does to summon a waiter in the Orient. “On my country properties I have singers and musicians among the villagers…. Perhaps this would interest you later?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then first make this speech for us.” She laughed once more. “I would ask you to stay and dine but I have to go to the palace this evening. So goodbye.”

  That evening the fleet came in and Iolanthe was summoned back to the naval brothel in Piraeus leaving me alone to pursue my studies with Said. Three of my little orient pearls had been manufactured now, and I was mad keen to find a deaf man to try them out on. Koepgen had said that he knew a deaf deacon who would be glad of a mechanical cure so that he would not flounder among the responses! But where was Koepgen? I left messages for him at the theological school and at the tavern he frequented.

  * * * * *

  Naos, the country house of Hippolyta in Attica, was large enough to suggest at first sight a small monastery skilfully sited within an oasis of green. By contrast, that is, to the razed and bony hills which frame the Attic plain. Here were luxuriant gardens rich with trees and shrubs within a quarter of a mile of the sea. Its secret was that it had been set down, woven round a double spring—a rarity in these parched plains: oleander, cypress and palm stood in picturesque contrast to the violet-grey stubbled hills, their fine soils long since eroded by weather and human negligence. The dangling rosegardens, the unplanned puffs of greenery made full amends for what was, at close sight, a series of architectural afterthoughts, the stutterings of several generations. Barns climbed into bed together, chapels had cemented themselves one to another in the manner of swallow-nests to unfinished features like half-built turrets. One huge unfinished flying buttress poked out nature’s eye, hanging in mid air. One step through the door marked W.C. on the second floor and one could fall twenty feet into a fishpond below.

  A series of gaunt and yet dignified rooms had been thrown down pell mell about a central cruciform shape, rambling up two floors and petering out in precarious balconies which looked out on the ravishing mauve slopes of the foothills. On reflection one established the origins of the whole place. Clearly Hesiod had started it as a grange for his cattle; Turks, Venetians, French, Greeks had carried on the work without once looking over their shoulders, enlarging the whole place and confusing its atmospheres. In the reign of Otho utterly nonsensical elaborations had tried to render it stylish. While one corner was being built up, another was crumbling to ruins. Finally those members of the family lucky enough to have been educated in France had added the ugly cast-iron features and awkward fenestration which would, one presumes, always make them nostalgic for St. Remo in the ’twenties—Marseille tile, Second Empire furniture, plaster cherubim, mangy plump mouldings. Yet since every feature was the worst of its epoch and kind the whole barrack had a homogeneity, indeed a rustic dignity which endeared it to all who came, either to visit or inhabit it. It was here that Hippolyta held court, here that her old friend, sheepish Count Banubula, worked in his spare time cataloguing the huge library hurled together rather than collected by several generations of improvident noblemen more famous for their eccentricities than their learning. Wood-rot, silverfish, death-watch beetles—all were active and industrious though nobody cared except the poor Count, tip-toeing along creaking balconies or shinning up precarious ladders to rescue a rotting Ariosto or Petrarch.

  Here Hippolyta (the Countess Hippolyta, “Hippo” to us) lived when she came home—which was rarely; for the most part she preferred Paris or New York. Other members of the family (with whom she was not on speaking terms) also came from time to time, unheralded, to take up residence in various dusty wings. (There was one ancient and completely unexplained old lady, half blind, who might be seen crossing a corridor or scuttling off a balcony.) Two younger cousins were ladies-in-waiting at court, and also occasionally put in an appearance attended by beaky husbands or lovers. Hippo made a point of not letting her own visits coincide with theirs; it was we, the members of her little court, who usually ran into them—for there was always someone staying at Naos; permission was freely given for any of us to spend a summer or winter
there.

  Here then in Naos, of a spanking summer evening, I was carried to the lady with my devil machines. (Tapes A70 to 84 labelled G for Greece have been fed back into Abel.) Well, she was clad in Chinese trousers of fine Shantung, inlaid Byzantine belt, and an impossible Russian shirt with split sleeves; she lounged in a deck chair by the lily pond while a hirsute peasant clumsily assuaged our thirst with whisky and gin. She was smoking a slender cheroot, and was surrounded by a litter of fashion papers and memoranda gathered in coloured folders—esoteric Greek pothooks which I feared might be the beginnings of a book. Two huge pet tortoises clicked across the paths and came bumping into the legs of our chairs, asking to be fed; and this Banubula undertook with an air of grave and scrupulous kindness shredding lettuce from a plate. My little toy was greeted with rapture and some amusement; Hippolyta clapped her hands and laughed aloud like a child when I reproduced a strip of conversation harshly but clearly for her consideration, while old Banubula cleared his throat in some surprise and asked whether it wasn’t rather dangerous, such a machine? “I mean one could take copies of private conversations, could one not?” Indeed one could; Hippo’s eye shone with a reflective gleam. The Count said in his slow bronze-gong voice: “Won’t Caradoc mind?” She snorted. “He knows these machines; besides if he is too lazy to write it all out, if he prefers to extemporise … why, it’s his affair.”