The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children

by Connell, Brendan

  Eriphyle came to plead for her father. She offered ransom, not of mere money, but of whole islands and districts rich and fertile, but cruel Oroetes, drunk with fleeting power and advised to ruthless acts by Maeandrius, would not listen. In front of her he had Polycrates’ intestines torn out and burned before the man’s eyes; and she screamed in horror while her father was dumbfounded by agony, his soul, that self-moving number, seeping into the underworld. Oroetes had the young woman seized, personally robbed her of her virginity, then prostituted her in the public roads; and later, when she had been steeped in humiliation, he had her tortured, slivers of glass thrust under the nails of her fingers, and then put to death in a horrible way. The thighbones of both father and daughter he had made into handles for his cutlery, but the rest were pounded in a mortar together with their dried flesh, and this was distributed to the Samian mills where it was mixed in with the flour, so the population was made to eat it in their loaves of wheat.

  After the death of Polycrates, Maeandrius became tyrant. At first he advertised himself as a liberator of the people and claimed to support an isonomous form of government. He had jars of wine opened in the streets and festoons of flowers placed over the gateways of the city; then built an altar to Zeus, Defender of Freedom, of whom he claimed himself to be the ambassador-priest; and at the Heraion he offered up all the sumptuous furniture of Polycrates’ palace. However, he soon revealed his true character, refused to renounce the power he had gained and began to oppress the islanders, proscribing those citizens who had previously been most prominent at court, putting them to death in ignominious ways, quartering Telesarchus, impaling Polydor. He railed against Polycrates, soiled his memory with foul words, but neither he nor his words pleased the Samians who remembered their former ruler with fondness, because he had enriched them, and brought great things and glory to the island.

  And so it was that when the Persians, with an army led by Otanes, arrived and attacked Samos, hardly a single one of the citizens, dispirited as they were and hating Maeandrius, would take up arms in its defence. . . . . . . And the Persians committed many outrages, looted and then fired the Heraion, slaughtered great numbers . . . . . . defeated Maeandrius, who escaped with much treasure [to wander Greece with his impoverished name], replaced him on the throne with Syloson; and while that brother of the dead Polycrates feasted himself on endored heads of kids and salted hearts of ibex, while he communicated obscenities in languid tones to Pison, the temples fell into disrepair; the island became depopulated through his mismanagement; so the saying: “By the resolve of Syloson there is plenty of room.”

  Collapsing Claude

  I.

  The sun had already gone down; the lake was a dark, glassy sheet; the branches of the tree by which he stood dripped down into the water and a few pieces of driftwood and trash floated near the bank. Claude was still; he inhaled the breath of the flowers in the gardens behind him; watched the lights appear on the opposite shore; and things sank into night. He lit a cigarette and walked along the path, with the lake to his right. Twelve years of his life of twenty-nine he had spent endeavouring to put himself in certain situations; behind closed doors; in scented or filthy chambers; to experience the snorting adventures of a hog. He worked in a bank, and though not rich, certainly made a decent living.

  He walked slowly, erect, stiffly. A nebulous patch, an obvious quantity of female, rose up from a park bench to one side. He stopped. The creature moved on in front of him. Claude proceeded, automatically to tail, now truly savouring that flavour of smoke in which he bathed his tongue. The serpent looked back (only the slightest exposure of facial flesh); then turned, some scarf over head; throat and mouth sheltered, shadow of trees and black blankness of night.

  “Are you following me?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause.

  “Who are you?”

  “A man named Claude.”

  Another pause.

  “OK then. . . . A woman named Mirta.”

  “Do we need to know anything else?”

  “Negative.”

  II.

  And black turns piquant, red, that to the yolk-coloured light of a little bedside lamp. He made an involuntary movement back, in surprise; shuddered; his feet touched the floor.

  Her breasts were distorted and flagging mounds of flesh; her skin-tone an overfed pink, like that of a sow. A hunched up beast reminiscent of an overgrown worm. With eyes that flashed hunger she scanned him, parted lips and laughed, revealing a wide pit of a mouth, spitting out coarse and guttural accents of amusement. And then she stopped; showed a tongue, like a piece of raw liver; rubbed one cheek against one of her shoulders.

  “Do you like what you see?” she asked.

  “You are disgusting,” Claude replied; securing the buckle of his belt.

  III.

  He had spent a good portion of the afternoon at the Caffé Federale on the Piazza Riforma; a tall beer was in front of him, a cigarette sat perched in the ashtray, a slender wisp of smoke curling from it. Many beautiful women walked by, lithe and fashionable blondes from Germany, dark, full-breasted beauties from Italy, petite and full-lipped lispers of France, and other packages of flesh mortal.

  But while his eyes saw, it was not of the beauties he thought. His mind was continually pulled back to the night previous, to the repulsive creature he had encountered, who had dealt with him with such unparalleled skill.

  Her little apartment, he could find his way there.

  IV.

  She fried sausages and served them with a cheap Barbera. He watched her as she ate, stuffed the great gash in her face, guzzled glasses of the purple liquid, a few drops running from her lips like drops of blood. And then she would grab his head between her hands, a foul gust of air issuing from her mouth as she pressed it to his, sinking a thick and hot muscle down his own eager throat.

  He was intoxicated by this horrible being; thrilled when she snatched and dragged him down to the unswept terra cotta floor, undulated her coils and let him roll on her belly, sink in the suet of her body; when he felt her dull teeth sink into the sinews of his neck.

  She would murmur unheard of obscenities; and her avid words exhilarated Claude like a most pleasant electrical shock; his jaw would tremble, a thick and solitary tear, like hot wax, slip from one eye. Every evening spent with her aged him a year; small folds and lines appeared in the skin around his two eyes, which themselves had taken on the dull lustre of that black mineral called coal, decomposed bodies of prehistoric beasts and plants. His pectorals, which had been firm as iron, began to sag and take on the appearance of unattractive female breasts, and when he shaved, he now always seemed to miss a spot here or there so he was never without a little stray bit of beard sprouting from some angle of his chin.

  “Move in with me; I will treat you well, buy you nice silk nighties!”

  “You already supply me with enough see-through things.”

  V.

  The offer of his own perverse heart on a salver constructed from his own suffused pelvic bones mere refreshment for her so fierce even often cruel with the flat of hand juggling of sharp and blunt words and curses and then letting him kiss her dewlaps as a thick semi-fluid substance oozed from her mouth. Distracted, restless during each day, he only wishing to spill himself into the night glory of letting her gnaw the lips from his face.

  “No, don’t come tonight. I have to go to Torino.”

  “Torino?”

  What did she have to do in Torino?

  He spent a nearly sleepless night perspiring solitary beneath his sheets. The next day, Sunday, he smoked countless cigarettes, toured the bars, sampled all the second-rate wines the city had to offer, seeing in the depth of each glass the burning labbra of Mirta; and he craved to feel the air of her flaring nostrils, hot as a desert wind, against his stomach and thighs.

  Darkness; and standing beneath her window; but if she were there, in bed, there would probably be no light anyhow. He listened attentively, thinki
ng he might hear some voice, or groan, from the story above him, through the glass or thick walls. There was a car engine in the distance; it faded; then silence. So he walked away, wandered along streets, the Corso Elvezia, the Via Serafino Balestra, then found himself circling, back around to the Via Luigi Lavizzari, spying on her dwelling. He stood in an alcove, for several hours, and then finally, around four in the morning, made his way home, exhausted, thoroughly depressed.

  The next day at work his face was pale and his eyes looked like raw sores. For lunch he had four rolls of shredded tobacco enclosed in thin paper and ignited and then, after work, drank several purple glasses followed by a grappino. He knew very well that Mirta was far from being honourable; she would not hesitate to lie, to him or anyone else; in his guts he felt that she had never gone out of town, but simply wanted to get rid of him; to have her pleasures in some other way. He slunk out onto the street; it was summer and still light; warm, and he wished for the sky to be black.

  VI.

  He stood again beneath her window and listened attentively to the ringing in his own ears; then crossed the street and took up his position in the alcove. He chewed on his bottom lip and then his tongue. The distant church bells sounded the hours, first three, then four, then five, then six.

  “What’s the use,” he told himself morosely.

  A hulkingly masculine figure came out the door and proceeded to walk down the street; the gait of an ape, a large and tailless monkey, with tight jeans and absurdly broad shoulders. Claude followed him. The man turned the corner and so did Claude. Then they were eye to eye. The man was there opening the door of a car.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m Claude.”

  “So what? Do you think you deserve some kind of prize for it? Do I owe you money?”

  “Mirta. . . . She’s my girl.”

  The man laughed. “Get away from me or I’ll break your nose,” he said.

  Claude hit him on the side of the head with his open hand. Then Claude was on the ground. The man sunk his huge fist into Claude’s face; the latter’s nose seemed to explode, turn into a mass of red jelly. And he felt the man’s fist several more times, and the man’s boot as well.

  VII.

  After making his way to the hospital, where he received numerous stitches, he returned home, lay on the couch and cried. The woman-hunter in him, the man who sought out the beds of the females of the species for mere sport, seemed to be dying a tragic death; the body of Claude was now animated by a variety of weak and needy soul, a soul that cried out for Mirta’s stroke and affection, squealed to be treated to her coarse favours, ridden by her lard and grotesque self; and, exhausted from sleepless nights and unnatural emotional tension, he slept, dreamt of her as a great hippopotamus, her huge butt-like breasts spangled with a thousand greasy nipples and, crawling out from betwixt her gargantuan thighs, a multitude of beasts; a writhing viper of three heads; a slippery shark snapping at the air with blood-drenched fangs; a creature half scorpion and half man; a four-winged demon of storms who breathed hurricanes and pissed tidal waves; a dragon with the front feet of a cat and, for hind feet, the claws of a bird and a body shining with lubriciously wet scales; and others of complex and difficult to describe anatomy, some with huge proboscises, others with giant, flailing ears.

  VIII.

  Knowing that the man was there, holding tight to her wads of flesh, made him want her all the more; desire to sniff even the stench of their love making.

  “Oh, you are back,” she said, opening the door. She was wearing a transparent night-gown made out of some kind of synthetic material. It was not one of the garments he had bought her, but something cheaper, utterly whorish. “Your face does not look good. Not such a pretty boy anymore are you?”

  “Is he here?”

  “Egon? No, he is back in Berlin now.”

  “But . . .”

  “Shut up and come in. I know you have been craving me.”

  He entered and kissed her neck.

  “I found a new place to live, a villa, and I want you and Egon to both be my roommates.”

  “You want us all to move in together?”

  “I have to get out of here dammit!” she cried peevishly. “The neighbours . . . they won’t stop complaining about the noise we make. . . . Merde! Do you think I should have to put up with that?”

  “But all of us together,” Claude said sullenly.

  “Well, if you don’t want to join us!”

  “This new place, how much is the rent?”

  “Four-thousand francs a month. Your share is twenty-five hundred.”

  “But four-thousand divided by . . .” The words died on his lips.

  Mirta gave him an ominous look. “I don’t need to hear any complaints from you, boy. If you don’t like the arrangements you can just piss off.” And then she softened, her mood changed, she smirked. “Of course I only wanted to do it for you. . . . You had been complaining because I did not move in with you. . . . And then in the evening I might cook some nice meals for the three of us. . . . Raclette. . . . Lovely roast rabbit. . . . Lean flesh of ass.”

  IX.

  The place was giant, old and dirty, though grand in an infernal sort of way. Claude went from threshold to threshold, room to room, his voice echoing through the corridors and down the vast staircase. He cleaned, expended money on furniture and painted the walls himself, while Egon sat back, drank beer and grunted out instructions in German. He talked about football matches and told of how he had once killed a man in Hamburg by hitting him over the head with a cinder-block. Then Mirta would come in, exuding an odour of rancid grease, wearing tight leather trousers that emphasised her disgusting bulk; she would slide her tongue down Egon’s throat and then approach Claude, slap his flanks, pull his head down to her bosom while she loaded him with gross epithets.

  She was a demon who could crush men with her enormous volume, destroy them with her sexual favours, a weapon was her very loins. Even when she was not physically there, he still felt some mass of congealed air around him; and prayed, on knees, with forehead glued to the ground, that he might hear her climactic bellow.

  When he came home from work he was made to wear a cowbell about his neck and crawl around the house naked; the sound always alerted Mirta when he was near. Once, only once, he had the audacity to stuff the bell with hygienic tissue, but he was discovered and Egon beat him with a curtain rod. The hot meals he had been promised, the raclette, the roast rabbit, never appeared; instead, like a dog he was fed food from a can. She dressed him up like a clown, made him perform tricks like a trained seal. His dignity was flayed; at work he stooped like a hunchback and his colleagues avoided him; the boss had already reprimanded him twice for his slovenly appearance and distracted air; he was sure to be terminated before long.

  And then summer ended and it was fall.

  Rains came, day after day, and washed away the sides of hills, whole houses, parts of small villages. The lake ran over and threw its garbage and driftwood up over the embankments. Claude, during his lunch break, walked along the shore, through the park where he had first met her and then along the Viale Carlo Cattaneo. At the Viale Cassarate he stood on the bridge and stared down into the water. It was chocolate-brown and violent. It threw up liquid arms and dripping hands that seemed to grab, to want to pull him down, along, under. A whole tree drifted by. And he leaned over, tempted, and sacrificed several tears to the raging demon, which were mixed, broken into a trillion fragments, and thrown into the lake beyond.

  He walked into the church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, sat down and wept. His bleary eyes looked up at the fresco there, that done by Bernardino Luini, of Christ Jesus crucified, but the work, the bright colours, the images of thieves, the sponge full of vinegar upraised on a reed, only made him feel more desperate.

  X.

  Egon, in the form of a great ox, suckled at her breast; he wore a crown plumed with ostrich feathers and on his back the skin of a panther. Claude saw her
coupling with centaurs, fat-haunched satyrs, a minotaur; wallowing in pools of pus, her indecent body riveted by the lusts of countless beasts and devils. He woke up and walked to her room. Egon was there, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, his back, chest and legs were covered with thick black hair, like that of a wild animal. She lay twisted on the floor, the victim, of herself, of some brutal and perverted episode she had shared with the man. He turned, stared at Claude with dull, bloodshot eyes and Claude, frightened, slammed the door shut and then ran out onto the street screaming for the police like a woman.

  XI.

  Later, after Egon had been extradited back to Germany and sent to prison, Claude would take the train, visit him, bring cartons of cigarettes, offerings of wool socks, and beg to hear about her.

  “She was a hellhole,” Egon would say, staring through the Plexiglas barrier with stupid eyes. “A damn hellhole . . . always got my chicken roasted.”

  And then Claude, stuttering out his words, asked for specifics; he wanted that imprisoned golem to speak of every oily detail, of Mirta and her games.

  XII.