Where Three Roads Meet

by Salley Vickers

  And when I came to, there was no light at all. Nor did I ever see the light of day, nor any light of this world, again. From that day, I was, as you see me now, Dr Freud, blind.

  9

  20 Maresfield Gardens, 4 October 1938

  — My friend, I’m uncommonly glad to see you. The rat trap is more than usually rusty today. I’ve been pondering the story of your traumatic encounter. We are two old crocks, you and I. Lear and Gloucester on the heath. “I see it feelingly” poor blind Gloucester says. You, too, my friend. I hazard you see the world better than if you had eyes.

  — I was considering your plight too, Doctor, as I walked here. Talking has been your life. You must miss it sorely. What god did you cross, I wonder?

  — I’ve crossed plenty of mortals who saw themselves as gods, but sadly I can’t blame any divinity for my malaise. Unless there’s a deity of Havana cigars. There should be one. They’re quite divine.

  — It’s a comfort to me, Doctor, that you’re familiar with suffering, not merely through your service to others’ misfortune.

  — I am glad it’s at least of some service to you!

  — Suffering has its value. You’ll have some inkling of how it was for me, that time when your pet goddess took my sight. It was a long while before I accepted that it would never return.

  — The Light That Failed.

  — It certainly did.

  — I was thinking of another man who had to make do in the dark. Tell me, what happened next?

  — When I came to, hours after I had ventured up to the Castalian spring, my eyes were bandaged in dock leaves. I was lying, I learned, in the house of the doctor priest, Endeocles, who confided, “Tiresias, I must tell you, in my view it is unlikely your sight will recover”.

  And when I asked, “How did I get here?” he told me, in his mild emotionless voice, that I had been found at the edge of Athena’s sanctuary barely breathing. He wasn’t an inquisitive man and he never asked what exactly had occurred.

  Others were less tactful. The chief priest interrogated me with the ruthless disregard for my state that his position allowed. He was without a splinter of divinity in his being and the panthers of Dionysos couldn’t drag from me any hint of my extraordinary experience. In the end, getting nothing more than a bare apology, he determined to make a moral example of me and put my injury down to retribution for disobedience.

  Which in a sense it was. It was years before I learned to see that it might be a blessing in disguise.

  — A useful bit of sublimation.

  — Maybe. But not at the time. I lay, for hours uncounted, desperately trying to find a way through this new lightless territory. Who was going to believe that a humble Theban boy had witnessed the goddess Athena at her bath? And what good would it do for them to know? Besides, I nursed a hope that if I kept it to myself, my Lord Apollo might restore my sight. He was the god of reversals.

  — What did you do?

  — Doctor, what could I do? Where could I go, a blind man of no use to anyone other than through my questionable art? The only soul I ever told of my awful encounter was the Pythia. She said no more than, “Tiri, you are wise to keep this dark”. But I was glad to have told her. I imagine this is why people come to consult you. To be known by at least one other.

  — Ah but…

  — …at the same time, people want as passionately not to be known, you were going to say?

  — The conflict between the two impulses is an abiding one. It may be our most fundamental dilemma. Go on.

  — I stayed on at Delphi. It was not a glamorous life. Most of the questions posed were so crude or so banal that no god, let alone the fastidious Apollo, could ever have been bothered with them and it was left to the likes of me to conjure up an adequate response. And if, by chance, a real question was posed, where I was bound to put the Pythian inspiration into words, or found myself uttering the divine pronouncement myself, it was no better. You, of all people, Doctor, will be aware how differently words fall on different ears.

  — Of course the interpretation is everything.

  — So it followed that events fell out differently too, according to who was listening and how they heard. Or chose to hear. It was no accident that the Pythia sat on a three-legged stool to utter the divine pronouncements. Because what I saw and heard, in my vision of what the future held in its juggling hands, was not one outcome, but two or three possibilities, or roads, any of which a man might travel down. I sense you are tired. Shall I stop?

  — You are acute. But I only closed my eyes to hear you better.

  — Indeed. Lacking one sense the others quicken. So, time passed; sometimes swiftly, sometimes haltingly. The Pythia and I grew closer. The god spoke directly through me more frequently and as high priests came and went, and my own authority grew, a blind eye was increasingly turned to my visits to her house. I even passed a night there once – don’t go leaping to conclusions, Dr Freud! I fell sick with a fever and the Pythia took me into her bed and bathed my hot skin throughout the night, and gave me water on a cloth teat because I was too weak to drink from a cup. I sucked it in her arms like a baby.

  And then one day I encountered her in a terrible taking, which was not in itself so unusual, for by this time her mind had begun to roam.

  — Did they retire, your Pythias?

  — In my day, they worked till the breath left them but sometimes ill health prevented their serving a life term. It was an arduous calling, fatiguing for body and spirit: years of service to any divinity exacts a price. My Pythia had begun to ramble and sometimes mutter to herself. Increasingly, she heard voices outside the prophetic trance. She had become fearful: afraid of bathing naked in the holy spring, seeming to dread the water on her skin. Sometimes on the day of the prophecy I would find her lying face down on the earth under the sacred laurel, weeping.

  — Dementia?

  — Something had frayed in her, to be sure. Whatever the reasons, one late autumn day I was up in the pinewoods, thinking no particular thoughts, when I heard a crashing through the undergrowth and a voice wildly calling. It was the first day of the winter season – Apollo had departed – so, strictly speaking, the Pythia was off duty. But it appears she had wandered up to the temple regardless, and there she had met a man from Corinth urgently seeking an answer to a question.

  It took me a while to get out of her that she had pronounced a savage sentence on this precipitate Corinthian, which had left her full of anxious dismay. He had come out of season, ignoring the proper procedures, to seek counsel from the oracle and she had turned him away with his question unanswered – as was her right, for during the winter Apollo’s voice was silent and the Pythia retired to rest. The dark god Dionysos, whose grave lay at the temple’s heart, had alternative methods of divination.

  My Pythia had apparently let fly fearful curses and imprecations and pronounced an unholy fate for this fellow and now she was overcome with grave foreboding. I escorted her, shaking like a winter leaf, back to her house and put her to bed, where once so tenderly, when I shook with fever, she had laid me. And then I went in search of the Corinthian.

  And that was the last of my Pythia. That night the immortals took her. The next morning, when I learned she had left me for good, I went up to the pinewoods, lay on the cold ground and howled like a child. And when I had finished weeping I simply lay there, my face wet with tears, wondering what I was to do without my only friend.

  And then, all of a sudden, there was a tickling in my ear. I lay still, apprehensive but unafraid. After a while there was a dry slither across my face and a small soft tongue was licking the other ear. Then a flash down my left arm, and it was gone.

  Above my head a bird started up, a wheatear, the birds who in my mind were the first tenants of the shrine. As I listened, something moved, as if a tiny portal had swung open in my ear and I understood its song: Tiresias, grieve no more. From this day the deathless ones will speak to you in the song of birds.

  And th
ere and then, taking nothing with me but my dogwood stick, I left the sanctuary for good.

  — And the man from Corinth whom the Pythia cursed? You found him?

  — I found him. But not at Delphi.

  10

  20 Maresfield Gardens, 15 October 1938

  — Good Lord! I had begun to despair of you. I thought you had flown off with your blessed birds.

  — It’s not time for me to migrate yet, Doctor. There was a thrush singing when I stopped by the bridge this morning. They are constant birds, thrushes. You can always tell one. They repeat themselves.

  — The repetition compulsion? No, no, my little joke (please make yourself at home in my chair); birds are happily free of our compulsive tendencies. I’ve become quite an ornithologist in your absence. I looked up your goldfinch. Interesting iconography. Apparently it’s a symbol of Jesus Christ.

  — The man who died and returned to life, like the Lord Dionysos?

  — I dare say that’s where the Christians got the idea, but maybe best not to tell them that. They like to believe they’re unique. The red head allegedly derives from the blood on the crown of thorns, which the bird was supposed daringly to have fed from. It’s a striking-looking bird.

  — You know, Doctor, when I left Delphi I had it in my mind that I had been granted permission to spend the rest of my days listening to the divine song of birds. It’s an irony, because it was a bird, of a sort, that I found on my return to Thebes. The confounding sphinx. It was my Lord Apollo’s humour, you see, to let me off one hook only to hang me on another.

  — I have a sphinx behind you there in my cabinet. She’s quite a favourite of mine. I should have hated her to fall into the philistine corporal’s greedy little hands.

  — You couldn’t have got this abomination into any cabinet, Doctor. She would have eaten your corporal for a snack.

  — Pity she isn’t around.

  — Oh, she will be, in her way. Dear gods, this one was a monster. She crouched motionless, ever-waiting on a conical hill to the west of Thebes, casting a cold shadow over the whole city. Part bird, part lion, part serpent, part woman: a hideous hybrid. Where she came from has always been a puzzlement. Did she fly, with her vile clanging wings, from that other Thebes in Egypt? I never asked her. I steered clear of the creature, though I could have solved her riddle in a trice.

  — Most could, I’d have thought.

  — But it would have taken nerve. Confronted with that baleful smile and those cruel talons and that vicious tail, travellers who passed her, waiting so implacably, were petrified into speechlessness. Why, you may ask, did I not send her packing if it wasn’t the case she had that effect on me?

  — And why didn’t you?

  — I had no wish to continue as any kind of authority to cloth-eared humankind. I’d had enough of peddling wisdom. And with the loss of my Pythia I’d had my fill of mortal company. All I wanted, Doctor, was a quiet life.

  — An impossibility, surely, until there’s no life, quiet or otherwise.

  — As you say. But as you are aware, Dr Freud, humankind will dream. And when I arrived back in Thebes there was scarcely another topic of conversation but the sphinx. The monster possessed people. She so occupied their minds that she stifled their usual curiosity and the news that King Laios had set off for Delphi and had never returned leaked out only slowly. It has crossed my mind since that had I not, on departing Delphi, taken the Daulis road – wishing to bid it goodbye – the king and I might have met for a second time at that fateful crossroads. And who knows if a third presence there might not have averted tragedy.

  — “What if?” The unanswerable question.

  — Had I left one hour sooner or later, had I taken this way rather than that, what might have changed, what might have been? And what might not have been which now is, and for all time?

  And I wonder now what conjunction it was that brought King Laios face to face with another man that day, on a narrow defile on that cleft road which runs between Delphi and Thebes? A solitary traveller, who had turned his back on Delphi, for he’d paid a visit there already and received a shocking response – one that might drive any living soul to desperate remedies. A traveller who, in the face of the dire news he had heard, might find an angry king very small fry. Indeed, might have taken solace, in the heat of his own emotion, in putting a spoke in the abusive old man’s wheels; a fact which in turn might well have enraged an already fretful Laios, destabilised by the presence in his city of a dangerous winged assassin.

  — Two male egos, both wrought to a state of mortal anxiety. A recipe for disaster.

  — And neither the sort to step aside. You can see how it might start a forest fire. And, in the aftermath, it’s credible – wouldn’t you agree? – that the victor in this stand-off might find – his blood up and raging – that a lion-bodied, sharp-taloned, brazen-winged, snake-tailed, smug-faced, ravening woman, be she ever so pitiless, might be no match for what had been aroused in him? He had passed through a river of blood that day. Why duck one challenge more? Especially such a compelling one, for remember – and how could you of all people, Doctor, forget? – at the very back of his mind a woman had something to answer for. And to solve a paltry riddle from this caricature of a female and send her shrieking headlong over a precipice might have given a further fillip to a faltering male confidence. And you see, to answer this obvious riddle took his mind from that other answer, the answer which he had so pressingly sought and which had so unnervingly been denied him. Or so he believed.

  — He’d just won a fight, too. Nothing succeeds like success.

  — For a time. And, in time, we all got to hear of the bold-tongued Corinthian who’d rid the country of the dread sphinx and, as reward, was to become king. Of course I never saw him, so I could never recognise him as the figure from my vision who had stood at that fork in the road in Phokis. Nor did I make the connection with the precipitous petitioner whose fate had frightened to death my poor Pythia. But had I been taking more notice I might have put two and two together.

  — And made three?

  — Exactly, Dr Freud! He was right in the challenge he made to me all those years later. He was often right – that, you see, was part of the tragedy – but always with the mis-timing. Where, when it was needed, he asked, was my own vaunted riddle-solving skill? Not, as his scornful meaning intended, over the sphinx’s lame puzzle; but over the far more puzzling man who had bested her. For here was a man who limped and yet never made reference to it by word or action. Nor did anyone else acknowledge this obvious defect. Indeed, he made it a point of pride to stand where, given his position, he might ordinarily have sat down. You remember how the riddle goes?

  — My reputation would be in shreds if I didn’t. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?

  — And, as you imply, Doctor, it doesn’t take an Archimedes to fathom the answer. Man crawls as a baby, walks upright in maturity and in old age creeps by with the aid of a stick. But note all the emphasis on feet. The man who came to Thebes and defeated the sphinx, and wed its queen, and commanded the city, was named Oidi-pous, which in our language, means swollen foot, or feet.

  It stands to reason then that a man with this name would have inside knowledge when it came to riddles depending on feet. Who could surpass his expertise? And yet, here was the mystery: he acted as if he were quite unaware of the meaning of his name. That, if nothing else, should have set me wondering.

  “I am Oedipus who, knowing nothing, answered the riddle of the sphinx by thought alone.” That was how he greeted me, strutting, I could sense, like a bantam cock, when at last he got wind of my presence and commanded an audience. How often since has that declaration reverberated in my mind. For it is clear to me now that he had forged his identity from the sound of his name: oida, to know, quite ignoring the obvious meaning oidi, which is to say, swollen. An alpha for an iota makes for more than a jot of change. There’s a world of difference betw
een swollen and knowing, unless you intend to imply a swollen head, which was partly, I fear, the problem.

  — The swollen foot is of course the tumescent member. It was the deviant phallic impulse he was avoiding in the misreading of his own name.

  — Call me simple-minded if you like, Dr Freud, but from my angle this was a man avoiding far more than that. He had to know, and know best, to avert a direr knowledge. Knowing best was his chief feature: he knew best about the oracle, about the sphinx, about himself – who he was, and where he came from, and what his name meant and what was to be done. He forged a security out of that name of his – a false security as it turned out; though, to be fair, it got him a long way on those shaky feet. And in a sense he was not wrong: his feet knew the answer to a riddle after all. A more disturbing one.

  — Of course, the oedema would have persisted in the mind, causing a discomfort he couldn’t finally evade.

  — But as you yourself have revealed, Dr Freud, what is known in the feet may long be ignored by the head. “Know thyself ” was the Delphic injunction. And if you don’t know your self how, in the name of all that’s sacred, can you begin to decipher an oracle’s enigma?

  11

  — Doctor?

  — I must have dropped off. What were we talking of?

  — The sphinx, among other things.

  — Ah yes. You were saying she impeded speech, rather like my own “monster”!