The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  Athens when at last it came was something quite other—at least for me; poised in its violet hollows like some bluish fruit upon the bare branches of night. The day had been brilliantly calm with here and there a mountain in the deep distance showing its profiles of snow, and a sea calmly pedalling away to a ruled horizon. But of course it was not only the old and often-relished beauty of the site, it was really the thronging associations. I suppose that Athens will always be for me what Polis must be for Benedicta—a place as much cherished for the sufferings it inflicted on one as for the joys. I had spent part of my youth here, after all, that confused and rapturous period when everything seems possible and nothing attainable. Here I had lived for a while with Iolanthe—not the semi-mythical star whom we were trying to recreate out of the pulp of rubbers and resins; but a typical prostitute of a small capital, resolute, gay, and beautiful. (I repeated her name to myself in the Greek way, reclaiming the original image of her, while I pressed Benedicta’s arm with all the recollected tenderness I felt for this other shadow-woman whom I had not recognised as a goddess when I actually owned her. Was I later to start almost to love her retrospectively, so to speak? And perhaps this is always the way? The amputated limb which aches in winter? I don’t know.)

  We moved now in a great fat bubble of violet and green sunlight, sinking softly down into the darkening bowl to where the city lay atrembling. The night was darkling up over Salamis way. The outlines were turning to blue chalk, or the sheeny blue of carbon paper. But always the little white abstract dice of the Acropolis held, like a spread sail, the last of the white light as the whole of the rest of the world foundered into darkness. Hymettus turned on its slow turntable showing us its shaven nape. We were just in time. We circled the city and its central symbol in time to see what was to be seen. Ants waved to us from under the plinth of the Parthenon and Caradoc waved back in a frenzy of amiability—to what purpose I could not discover since nothing could be seen of us save smudges of white. Nevertheless. Meanwhile my eye had taken a swift reading, basing itself upon the plinth, and was racing through the streets to find the little hotel where, in Number Seven, so much of my life had passed. But I was not quick enough; by the time I got my bearing right the street had slid into another and the buildings formed fours, obscuring the site I was hunting for. By now of course we had come down low for our landing, but must perforce carry out a long loop which would take us several miles out to sea, thus enabling us to run landwards into Phaleron and touch down upon its placid waters. Everything went calmly, smoothly; a naval tender full of chattering Greek customs officials carried us joyfully towards the shore, making us feel that we had been anxiously awaited and that our arrival had thrown everyone into ecstasy. It was simply the national sense of hospitality manifesting itself; later on land we started to have trouble with an elderly official but all at once Hippolyta’s chauffeur appeared. “Grigorie” we all cried and there was much embracing and dashing away of happy tears. Overcome by our bad Greek and obvious affection for the venerable Grigori the customs people passed us through with bows and smiles. We were in. There were two cars, and after a short confabulation we decided on our various objectives. Caradoc, Benedicta and myself were to go to Naos and stay with the Countess while Vibart elected to spend the night in Athens with the other members of the party.

  Caradoc was strangely subdued as we set off; Benedicta peeled a mandarin which a child had handed her; I thought, for no known reason, of the sunken rose-garden with its nodding yellow tea-roses, and of the draughts of music which flowed out into it on those still summer nights when we would sit so late by the cool air which hovered around the hushing lily-pond. It would be too cold to dine out as yet. It was an age since I had seen Ariadne. I asked Grigori how the Countess Hippolyta had been keeping and he shot me a glance in the mirror. “Since Mr. Graphos died,” he said “she hardly goes out any more. She is gardening very much and has built a little church for St. Barbara on the property.” He paused, racking his brains for something else to tell me, but obviously there was not much. Or perhaps he did not wish to speak too freely before the others. Grigori was a northerner and had rather a fanatical sense of rank and the general proprieties. Chauffeurs should be reluctant to discuss their mistresses, even with old friends. So!

  It was dark now, but the house was ablaze with light as we crossed the garden, leaving such luggage as we had to Grigori. She came to the door, she must have heard the engines of the car—Hippolyta, I mean. She stood rather shyly holding it open and gazing shortsightedly into the darkness from which, one by one, her friends—her lifelong friends—would emerge. The greetings were long and tender. Back in the firelight in the huge room with its medieval vaulting one could see how thin she had become.

  “Welcome to Naos” she said softly. “O strangers to the Greeks.” A quotation doubtless, and perhaps a soft reproof for so long a neglect. “But still out of season” she added, leading us in to divest ourselves of our coats. Yes, the rose-gardens, the green citrons, the oleanders would have to wait until the spring became more generous with its sunlight. But the big awkward country house was gay with light. Fires blazed hospitably in the long vaulted rooms with their oil-paintings of three generations of Hippolytas echoing each other. Degenerate trophies of the past—she had once called them that. The vaulted monastic rooms echoed with our voices. We had a chance to really look at each other. Ariadne, though very much the Countess still, and though transformed by age and experience—as we all had been—registered no really critical change for the worse. She had become thinner, yes, but this only emphasised the new frail boyishness of her figure, the slenderness of her arms. But nothing could submerge the dark mischievous Athenian eyes, with their swift sympathies and swifter touches of mirthfulness. The naïveté, the candour, these were there still; and from time to time touched by a kind of lofty sadness. Watching her smiling, and thinking about her love for Graphos the politician, and what it had done to her life: and then of his death—I searched in my mind for a word which might do justice to this new maturity. She had the fruitful, sad yet happy look one sees on the faces of young widows. “Undamaged” I cried aloud, at last; and she gave a tiny shrug.

  “I mean you are still living a life” I went on.

  Now she laughed out loud and said: “Get thee to a nunnery, Felix, and see how it feels. The boredom! Ouf!”

  The servants brought in trays of drinks and olives now, and we pledged each other in the firelight. Once Ariadne had hated Benedicta, but now this feeling appeared to have given place to a warmer one. At any rate she held B.’s hands and shook them until the bracelet of ancient coins on her wrist clicked. Then she said in her frank way: “Once I remember hating you; it was because I was jealous of Felix and sorry for him and you were hurting him. But it didn’t go really deep with me. Do you think we could be friends now? Shall we try?” Benedicta, with a word, put an arm round her waist, and together the two slender women walked the long length of the room in sisterly comradeship, saying nothing. I was delighted.

  The companionable silence was broken only by a vast and somewhat typical hiccough from Caradoc. “Alcohol provokes the fruitful detonations from which ideas flow. But my digestion is not what it was, I must beware.” Ariadne smiled down upon him benignly. “An echo from the past” she said. “For when did whisky never detonate you?”

  “I am old, my locks are white” he replied gravely.

  But she clapped her hands softly together, saying “No; it is just that we have all changed places, haven’t we? The pack has been shuffled. Everyone will be going round counter-clockwise now. I expect the good to get badder and bad to get gooder; except in the exceptional cases—where one or other have got up enough momentum to stop the pendulum. Then if bad, they will achieve greatness by becoming horrible, unspeakable. If good they will become angels. What do you say to that?” In the calm of the great country house such propositions did not sound what they perhaps were—a trifle sententious.

  “All change for
the worse” said Caradoc testily. “Why since last we met I have been dead in Polynesia. I have been a bigamist, a trigamist, and heaven knows what else. I have been unrepentantly happy, Ariadne, and still am. I am just in the right mood to build Jocas the mausoleum he wants.”

  “Good Lord” she said. “Has he started all over again, poor darling Jocas? There’s an echo for you. Do you remember the last time?” She laughed and replenished Caradoc’s drink. He too gave his histrionic lion’s roar and slapped a knee. “Damn him, yes” he said. “He wanted nothing less than the Parthenon. At least he wanted the Niki temple—I just had to add a few rooms to that for members of the Merlin triple and he would have been quite happy. The ass!”

  I remembered in a vague and indeterminate fashion the movement and bustle—and not less the mystery—of this long ago period. I had first met Caradoc here, in this house, and had subsequently spent a night in a brothel called the Blue Danube with him—a brothel run by Mrs. Henniker of all people, and where Iolanthe herself had worked for a while before being swept away on the wings of good fortune into the world of the film.

  “I simply never got to the bottom of that business” I said. “Nobody would explain anything.”

  “Nobody could; or rather everybody thought something quite different. We were misled by Julian and also by Graphos. I only pieced it together slowly over the years. I don’t think even Benedicta knew what was going on; all she knew was that you were in some sort of danger in Polis—you were then regarded as quite expendable, since the firm had complete possession of your notebooks. Yes, but here in Athens something else was going on; first of all a tug-of-war between Julian and Jocas, all over this blasted temple. Julian, as you know, had set his heart on getting control of the Parthenon for the firm. Now of course it’s a fait accompli, everyone is used to it, but then … where would he find a politician daring enough or crooked enough to sign a secret protocol vesting the Parthenon and the hill it stands on in Merlin’s? Of course Graphos was the obvious choice, but he demanded a very heavy price, partly out of patriotism and partly out of personal greed. On the one hand Merlin’s must wipe out the National Debt, on the other rig an election to get him in as Prime Minister and keep him in until he had invested a personal fortune in Switzerland. They all told me lies: Graphos said he was saving the Parthenon from Julian, not selling it behind my back. Jocas, getting wind of this, wanted to walk off with the temple of Niki. That would have given the show away, so he had to be stopped. Julian did it somehow. But then came another complication. You remember a small, rather despicable figure called Sipple, the ex-clown? Caradoc does. He admired him extravagantly I remember. Well Sipple got wind of the protocol from some indiscretion of Caradoc and rang me up, hinting at blackmail. Silly fool … one word would of course have ruined Graphos. So Sipple had to be neutralised and sent away. We did that, and we were lucky to be aided by a personal scandal which made the little spy anxious to leave Athens and hide away somewhere. There, that is my story, at any rate. How right and how wrong I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

  “It was all my fault” said Caradoc.

  I thought vividly of the boy with his throat cut lying on his side in Sipple’s bed; of the birds beginning to chirp and preen as the dawn came up over the Salamis sealine; I saw Sipple standing there in his braces with traces of clown’s makeup still on his face, round the eyes. I thought of Iolanthe who had committed the murder. It was unbelievable really. Unbelievable.

  “It’s all like a dream” I said.

  “So much is. Time plays such strange tricks. Do you remember the old brothel, the Blue Danube, Caradoc?”

  “Of course” he said robustly. “How could I ever forget what it taught me from the great book of life?”

  “Well,” said Ariadne “the other day I was driving along the corniche and I suddenly thought of you; I was passing the place in the car and I decided to stop and look at it. But my dear, it had gone. There was nothing but an empty sand dune where this quite considerable villa had once stood. I could hardly believe my eyes. I stopped the car and started to search like a lunatic. I knew the spot like the back of my hand. No good. There was nothing there. Yes, by dint of poking about in the sand I uncovered a few pieces of plaster and the tracing of what might have been a bit of foundation … yes, but an archaeologist would not have dated it as different from the old pieces of the Themistoclean wall one sees down towards Phaleron. Gone! The windows, the doors, the cupboards, the beds … all vanished. Even the house had vanished. What do you make of that? I wondered if there weren’t gaps like that in the middle of our memory, vanished people and events. I felt so awful that I had to lean against a wall. I was very nearly sick when I thought of you and Felix moving from room to room there. I suddenly thought of you as if you were dead. So long ago, all of it.” She repeated the phrase in Greek in her low musical voice, and then added under her breath, “And death behaves in such an arbitrary fashion, striking when you are not looking, not expecting.”

  “I refuse to be sad” said Caradoc. “May my dying breath be a giddy oath, that’s all I can say.” Benedicta patted his hand reassuringly as if to comfort him.

  Ariadne turned to me and in a lower register said: “I saw a good deal of Julian, of all people; he was in Switzerland when I was. To my surprise he decided to manifest and was most attentive in his strange way. You are building him some sort of echo of her—Iolanthe—aren’t you? He told me and I felt suddenly alarmed. Not for the fact but from his way of speaking about it. What has come over Julian? He seems to have lost his devil, to have become somehow subdued. For example he said in a sweet resigned sort of way: ‘Obviously Felix will betray me when he can’ and I wondered whether he was serious or not. As for what you are building, any Greek would warn you against hubris—tempting the wrath of the Gods….”

  “The Gods are all dead, or gone on holiday” I said gloomily. “They’ve left their looms and spindles behind for us to use as we see fit. Has Julian really changed so much?”

  “Yes. A sort of resignation. ‘The firm has given and the firm has taken away; blessed be the name of the firm.’” She intoned softly but mockingly with her arms crossed on her breast. “No Felix. Some new element has entered the picture. Julian has become so human!” I don’t know why, but the remark seemed to me to be one of the most sinister I had ever heard. It was ridiculous, of course, but a sort of shiver ran down my neck. I looked over at Benedicta and saw, or thought I saw, that she herself had turned quite white; but it may only have been her hair, the candlelight. “Human” I said, turning the word over like a playing-card and gazing at its face, so to speak. Spades or hearts, which? There was a silence broken only by Caradoc’s champing of celery. He was not paying the least attention to what was said.

  Ariadne went on. “He told me a great deal of his last long wait by her bed all that night when she was dying—the last night. How he felt so crazy with grief and surprise, so unhinged that he found himself doing strange thing like making up his lips in the mirror with her lipstick. It terrified him but he felt compelled to do it. And then the lines of Heine kept going through his mind, his lips moved, he kept repeating them to himself in a whisper, over and over again, quite involuntarily. Do you know them, remember them? The Faustus ones?

  “Du hast mich beschworen aus dem Grab

  Durch deinen Zauberwillen

  Belebtest mich mit Wollustglut—

  Jetzt kannst du die Glut nicht stillen.

  Press deinen Mund an meinen Mund;

  Der Menschen Odem ist göttlich!

  Ich trinke deine Seele aus‚

  Die Toten sind unersättlich.

  You conjured me from my grave

  By your bewitching will‚

  Revived me for this passionate love,

  A passion that you’ll never still.

  Press your cold mouth on my cold mouth;

  Man’s breath’s by the Gods created.

  I drink your essence, I drink up your soul‚

  Fo
r the dead can never be sated.”

  A silence fell once more, in which the tenebrous and perverted verses of the returned Helen talking to her Faust echoed on impressively in the mind, vibrated on the heart; lighting up with their fitful shadow play the figure of Julian crouched there batlike in a clinic chair, watching a fly moving upon a dead eyeball. A picture to inspire both pity and despair. Ariadne went on in a low voice: “It was clear that only some sort of vampire would do for him—nothing less.”

  Benedicta pressed her hands to her cheeks and said: “I know, Ariadne. I know only too well. But he has had reason enough to become what he is; I tell myself always that it should still be possible to love him despite it all. But I don’t know whether I can myself any more. I don’t know whether I can. And who else will? It’s all so unlucky, so meaningless.”

  A draught blew in from a window and the candles wagged and danced on the long refectory table; we were quite startled, as if in some intangible way it was the breath of Julian which had entered the room, attracted perhaps by the verses or by the mention of his name. “An unquiet ghost” she said in Greek, and shivering drew her shawl about her shoulders. The impression of some such silent visitation was slightly heightened when, in a little while, the telephone began to peal in the depths of the house, insistent as a child calling. Ariadne went out into the hall to answer it while we took our cigars and coffee back to the warm firelight in the outer room. We sat down, each absorbed in the thoughts set in motion by the verses of Heine and the mood they evoked. Presently Hippolyta came back and said: “The firm is calling you from London; they’ve traced you here. Shall I say you are out or in bed?”