The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  But the difference between Rackstraw’s reality and mine is separated by a hair—at least as things are now. For me too, reality comes in layers suffused by involuntary dreaming. Some mornings I wake to find Baynes standing by my bed with his silver salver in hand, though there is never any letter on it. He says: “Which way up will you have your reality, sir, today?” Yawning, I reply in the very accents of Rackstraw. “O, as it comes, Baynes. But please order me a nice L-shaped loveproof girl of marriageable age, equipped with learner plates. I have in mind some heart-requiting woman to lather my chin; someone with sardonic eyes and dark plumage of Irish hair. Someone with a beautiful steady walk and a thick cluster of damp curls round a clitoris fresh as cress.” He salutes and says, “Very good, sir. Right away, sir.” But at other times I think I must be dying really because I am beginning to believe in the idea of Benedicta.

  I had been about and around for several days when I caught sight of her, sighted along the length of the long corridor with its bow window at the end, standing in the snow in a characteristic distressful way. She had rubbed a small periscope in the frosty glass in order to peer in upon me, her head upon one side. A new unfamiliar look which somehow mixed diffidence and commiseration in one; I gave her the sort of look I felt she merited—O, it was all I could afford: a tired frog’s smile: it was a package, a propitiatory bundle of nails, hair, menstrual rags, old dressings—everything that our joint life had brought us. But it contained little enough venom—I felt too bad about it all, too emotionally weak to expend more upon the encounter. And yet there was something in her face at once touching and despairing; her inner life, like mine, was in ruins. It was the fault of neither. So when she tapped with her nail upon the glass I said not a word but unfastened the glass door into the garden and let her in. Of course it was suspicious. We stood, featureless as totems, gazing at each other, but unable to thread any words on the spool. Then with a soft groan she put her arms out—we did not embrace, simply leaned upon one another with an absolute emptiness and exhaustion. Yet the personage in my arms in some subtle way no longer corresponded to any of the old images of Benedicta—images she had printed on my mind. A qualitative difference here—you know how sometimes people return from a long journey, or from a war, completely altered: they do not have to speak, it is written all over them. What was written here? There was no discharge of electrical tension from those slender shoulders—the vibrations of an anxiety overflowing its bounds in the psyche. Her red lips trembled, that was all. “For God’s sake be kind to me” was all I said, was all I could think of. She started to cry a little inwardly, then began to cry. She crew buckets, but without moving, standing quite still; so did I, too, from sympathy, just watching her—but inside like usual: tears pouring down the inside of my body. “I am coming to you tonight—I have permission. Somehow we must try and alter things between us—even if it seems too late.” Only that, and I let her go, a snow demon in her black ski clothes against the deep whiteness of the ground and the clouds. She walked carefully in her own imprints towards the trees and disappeared, never once looking round, and for a moment this whole episode seemed to me a dream. But no, her prints were there in the snow. I swore, I raged inwardly; and when night fell I lay there in the darkness of my room with my eyes open staring right through the ceiling into the snow-sparkling night sky. I have never understood the romantic cult of the night; day, yes—people, noise, motors, lavatories flushing. At night one recites old phone numbers (Gobelins 3310. Is that you, Iolanthe? No, she has gone away, the number has been changed). Recite the names of people one has never met, or would have liked to sleep with if things had been different. Mr. Vincent five years. Mr. Wilkie five years. Yes, the night’s for masturbation and death; one’s nose comes off in one’s handkerchief, an arm drops off like Nelson….

  The minutes move like snails; the faintest shadow of a new hope is trying to get born. It will only lead to greater disappointments, more refined despairs, of that I am sure. Yet thinking back—years back, to the beginning—I can still remember something which seemed then to exist in her—in potentia, of course. I wrestle to formulate what it was, the thing lying behind the eyes like a wish unburied, like a transparency, a germ. Something like this: what she herself had not recognised as true about herself and which she was all but destroying by running counter clockwise to the part of herself which was my love. (Go on, make it clearer.)

  Every fool is somebody’s genius, I suppose. Just to have touched again those long, scrupulous yet sinister fingers gave me the sense of having reoriented myself with reference to the real Benedicta; it was because I myself had also changed a skin. Past suicide, past love, past everything—and in the obscurest part of my nature happy in a sad sort of way; climbing down, you might say, rung by rung, heartbeat by heartbeat, into the grave with absolutely nothing to show for my long insistent life of selfish creativeness. Put it another way: what I have left is some strong emotions, but no feelings. Shock has deprived me of them, though whether temporarily or so I cannot say. Ah, Felix! The more we know about knowing the less we feel about feeling. That whole night we were to lie like Crusader effigies, just touching but silently awake, hearing each other’s thoughts passing. I thought to myself “Faith is only one form of intuition.” We must give her time…. Are you stuck, then, dactyl? Come let me clear you….

  Later she might have been more disposed to try and put it into words: “I’ve destroyed you and myself. I must tell you how, I must tell you why if I can find out.”

  To find out, that was the dream—or the nightmare—we would have to face together; following the traces of her history and mine back into the labyrinth of the past. No, not simply looking for excuses, but hunting for the original dilemma—the Minotaur, which itself seemed to connect back always to Merlin’s great firm which had swallowed my talents as Benedicta had swallowed my manhood. It is this fascinating piece of research which occupies me to the exclusion of almost everything else now—perhaps you can guess how? With the help of my keys I have vastly extended the boundaries of my freedom; for example, I can now traverse Ward D, and make my way into the central block without being specially remarked by anyone; but more important still I have found the consulting rooms of the psychiatrists and the library of tapes and dossiers which form a part of Nash’s patrimony. Up the stairs, then, past the ward with the huge Jewesses (big bottoms and nervous complaints: fruits of inbreeding). Down one floor and along to the right, pausing to say a timely word to Callahan (pushed through a shop window, cut his wrist: interesting crater of a dried-up carbuncle on his jaw) and so along to the duty consulting rooms where the treasure trove lies. The tapes, the typed dossiers, are all grouped in a steel cabinet, according to year—the whole record of Benedicta’s illnesses and treatment….

  I thought at first that she might find this prying into her past objectionable, but to my surprise she only said: “Thank goodness—now you will trust me because you can double-check me. After so much lying to you … I mean involuntary lying because things were the way they were, because Julian came first, his will came first; then the firm. You have already guessed that Julian is far more than just the head of Western Merlin’s for me, haven’t you?”

  “Your brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “So much became clear when I discovered that simple fact—why did you never tell me?”

  “He forbade me.”

  “Even when we were married?”

  She takes my hand in hers and squeezes it while tears come into her eyes. “There is so much that I must face, must tell you; now that I’m free from Julian I can.”

  “Free from Julian!” I gasped with utter astonishment at so preposterous a thought. “Is one ever free from Julian?” She sat up and grasped her ankles, bowing her blonde head upon her knees, lost in thought. Then she went on, speaking slowly, with evident stress behind the words: “There was a precise moment for me, as well as one for him. Mine came when the child was shot—like waking from a long nightma
re.”

  “I fired that shot.”

  “No, Felix, we all did in one way and another.”

  She pressed my hand once more, shaking her head; continued with a kind of scrupulous gravity. “The image of Julian flew into a hundred pieces never to be reassembled again; he had no further power over me.”

  “And from his side?”

  “The death of that girl, Iolanthe.”

  “How?”

  “He described it to me in much the same words, a suddenly waking up with a hole in the centre of his mind.”

  Yet in Julian’s case the emptiness must always have been there; one could imagine him saying something like: “A faulty pituitary foiled my puberty, and even later when the needle restored the balance, something had been lost; I had lived a complete sexual life in my mind so the real thing seemed woefully hollow when at last I caught up with it.” Hence the excesses, the perversions which are only the mould that grows upon impotence and its fearful rages against the self.

  So lying beside her thus in the darkness I found myself looking back down the long inclines of the past which curved away towards the Golden Horn and the breezes of Marmora; towards the lowering image of the Turkey I had hardly known, yet where my future had been decided for me by a series of events which some might regard as fortuitous. What a long road stretched between these two points in time and space.

  Real birds sang all day in the gardens while indoors the mechanical nightingales from Vienna had to be wound up; at certain times one became aware of the beetles ticking away like little clocks behind the damascened hangings, full of dust. The corridors were full of beautifully carved chests made from strange woods—delicately scented sissu, calamander, satinwood, ebony, billian, teak or camphor.

  Somewhere among the wandering paths of these old gardens overgrown with weeds and brush-marked by cypresses I saw the pale figure of Benedicta wandering, stiff and upright in her brocade frock, holding the hand of a nurse. How would it be possible to bring her back here again, to my side in this cream-painted sterile room among the snows? It was a puzzle made not the less complicated by the new tenderness and shy dignity which now invested her, and which aroused my worst suspicions; I could not see how a new array of facts alone could clear the air, could exculpate her—or for that matter myself. Ironic for a scientist who cares for facts, no? We sat here side by side on the white bed eating mountain strawberries and staring at each other, trying to decipher the pages of the palimpsest. “You see,” she said slowly, staring deeply into my eyes “we have lived through these fearful experiences together, killed our own child, separated, and all without ascribing any particular value to it. It has brought us very close together so that now we can’t escape from each other any more. The numbness is wearing off—you are beginning to see that I was in love with you from the very beginning. My appeals for help were genuine; but I was in the power of Julian—a power that dates back to my early childhood. I loved him because I was afraid of him, because of all he had done to me. I was trapped between two loves, one perverse and sterile, the other which promised to open up a real world for me, if only you could see in time how truthful I was—and act on it.” Then she bowed her head like a weary doe and whispered: “It’s easy to say, I know. Nor is it fair perhaps. You were as much in Julian’s power as I was, after all, and he could have had you killed at any moment, I suppose, had he not been in doubt about losing me for ever. He took refuge from me in this strange love for that girl you call Io—and that perhaps saved us from his wrath, his fearful impotent fury which he hides so well under that calm and beautiful voice of his.” I said nothing for a long time. In my mind’s eye I saw once more those steamy gardens abandoned to desuetude, those chipped and dusty kiosks standing about waiting for guests who never came: the stern sweep of the tombs decorating the beautiful slopes of Eyub. “In the cemetery there—it was your mother’s tomb?” Benedicta nodded sadly. “She hardly enters our story. She was ill, you know. In those days syphilis, you couldn’t cure it.”

  It dated back, dated right back. “Nothing could have exceeded the passionate rage and tenderness of Julian for Mother.” Here as she lay, after so very long, anchored in the crook of my arm: and talking now softly, rapidly, unemphatically: I saw come up in my mind’s eye (beyond the golden head) the sunburnt mountains and peninsulas of Turkey rising in layers towards the High Taurus. “Jocas was the illegitimate one, the changeling; he was never allowed to forget it. He was ugly and hairy. Whenever he spoke my father would get up without a word and open the door into the garden to let him out. And Julian smiled, simply smiled.” Though I had never seen Julian I seemed to see very clearly that aquiline smile, the sallow satin skin, the eyes with the thick hoods of a bird of prey. I saw too the landscape of their minds, locked up together in those tumbledown seraglios; a Turkey that had been so much more than Polis with its archaic refinements. Plainland and lake and mountain, blue days closed by the conch. “There was only hate or fear for us to work on after my mother died.” Yes, it was not simply themselves she evoked, the tangled pattern of questions and answers their lives evoked; but more, much more, which could only find a frame of reference within the context of this brutal humble land, kneeling down like a camel in the shadow of Ararat snow-crowned. Her inner life lay with Julian, her outer with Jocas; one represented the city, the drawn bowstring of Moslem politenesses, the other the open air, the riding to falcons, the chase. Remote encampments on the rim of deserts mirrored in the clear optic of the sky: to sleep at night under the stars, balanced between the two open eternities of birth and death.

  It was much more than the facts which mattered, which had shaped their peculiar destinies, it was also place. I mean I saw very clearly now the tiny cocksure figure of Merlin senior walking the bazaars dressed in his old blazer and yachting cap; high white kid boots and high collars fastened with a jewelled tie-pin: flyswish held negligently in small ringed fingers. Behind him strolled the resplendent kavass—the negro dressed in scarlet and brocade, carrying the drawn scimitar of his office with the blade laid back along his forearm. This was how it all began, with Merlin shopping for the firm, which at that time must have consisted only of a raggle-taggle of sheds and godowns full of skins or poppy or shrouds. Yes, shrouds! The Moslem custom of burying the dead without coffins but wrapped in shrouds had not passed unnoticed by that blue jay’s eye. (Was it the little clerk Sacrapant who mentioned this?) Seven shrouds to a corpse, and in the case of the richer and more distinguished families no expense was spared to secure the most gorgeous embroidered fabrics the bazaars could offer. Old Abdul Hamid used to order hundreds of pieces of the choicest weave—China and Damascus silk. These were sent to Mecca to be sprinkled with holy water from the sacred well of Zem Zem. Thus the dead person was secured a certain translation to Jennet, the Moslem Paradise. It was not long before the caravans of Merlin carried these soft bales. But all this was at the very beginning, before Julian could say of the firm: “It has great abstract beauty, the firm, Charlock. We never touch or possess any of the products we manipulate—only the people to a certain extent. The products are merely telegrams, quotations, symbolic matter, that is all. If you cared for chess you could not help caring for Merlin’s.” He himself loved the game in all its variety. It is easy to see him aboard the white-winged yacht which the firm had given him, anchored upon the mirror of some Greek sound, sitting before the three transparent perspex boards in stony silence; playing three-dimensionally, so to speak. How beautifully those little Turkish warehouses had metastasised, so to speak, forming secondary cancers in the lungs, livers, hearts of the great capitals. In the long silences of Julian one saw the slow curling smoke of his cigar rise upon the moonlit sky.

  “But Benedicta, all that rigmarole about them being orphans and all that….”

  “My father invented that to get round some complicated Turkish legislation about inheritances, death duties.”

  “But he said it with such feeling.”

  “Feeling! Jocas had
murder in his heart for many years against Julian. But by repressing his hatred he turned himself into a fine human being; he really did come to love Julian at last. But Julian never loved him, never could, never will. Julian only loved me. Only me.”

  “And your father?”

  “And my father!”

  She said it with such a withering emphasis that I instantly divined the hatred between Merlin and Julian. “Julian would not let me love him, forced me to hate him: at the end drove him out. He too had reasons, Julian.”

  “Drove Merlin out?”

  “Yes. As he had driven out my mother.”

  In the long silence which followed I could hear her shallow breathing; but it was calm now, confident and regular. “Nash always said that real maturity should automatically mean a realised compassion for the world, for people. This Julian never had, only sadness, an enormous sadness. Nor for that matter did my father. He was a bird of prey. What was I to do between them all—with no real human contact to work upon? I dared not show my sympathies for Jocas even, hardly dared to speak to him. You know, Felix, they were all killers by temperament. I never knew who might kill who—even though Julian was away so much, being educated. If they met they met on neutral ground, so to speak, usually some dead spa like Smyrna or Lutraki. All staying at different hotels with their retainers. A sort of armed truce somehow enabled them to survive—it is very Turkish, you see. Formal exchanges of meaningless presents. Then discussions, perhaps in a special train on the Turkish frontier. That was all. Later of course the telephone helped, they did not need to meet, they could be cordial to each other in this way.”