Secret Dreams (12 page)

Enough! Time enough for that!

Yes, time enough for the rest, to see everything that needed seeing — her sickness, her cure, his betrayal — to know everything worth knowing.

They found him alone in the tower room. He had built his house when his mother died, stone by stone, until it rose to a tower where he could sit. Oh, the workmen had done the actual masonry, but he had directed the building. The circular ground floor had windows at all points of the compass,- a dug-out stone hearth in the center, with a smoke hole,- and bunks fitted into the curved walls. No electric. No gas. And, connected by a narrow stair, a comfortable crows nest that rose up higher than the rest — an aerie where he could riddle with the stars like an ancient sorcerer of old.

He had built the place because he liked to dream and had filled it with papers and books and paintings on the walls. They found their old colleague alone, spinning riddles for his own amusement. Dozens of volumes were strewn about his desk and on the floor by his chair. Broken pencils lay where he had discarded them after snapping their points in a fury of writing. A Montblanc fountain pen left on a lined pad, put down in the middle of a word and not picked up again for months. The half-written word was “Götterdämmerung,” that is, Twilight of the Gods. But the train of thought on the half-scrawled pad was long since lost.

There were books on alchemy written by wise men of the tenth century and books on Lenin the Antichrist written by cranks in the twentieth century. There were issues of
Life
and
National Geographic
and an issue of
Time
with Hitler on the cover as Man of the Year. There was the latest issue of
Vo0e en français
, cracked open to a feature in which a feathery scribbler fluttered on about Philippe de Somebody's “horned-breast-cup velvet backless ball gown, which produced an aggressive
femme fatale très moderne.”
And he had torn an article from an American cooking magazine on the making of ancient Mediterranean warriors' wine, entitled “The Drunkards of Troy.” But peeking out from under this recipe was yesterday's obituary from the
London Times:

Herr Doktor had stopped reading right there and let the obituary become slowly engulfed under other papers he was considering. He called the process “layering” and thought it a legitimate method of letting his subconscious decide what to bring to the surface. Or bury, for that matter. Freud's obituary had reminded him of a passage in a long-lost book. He suspected it tucked under a stack of tomes devoted to 600 B.C. black Attic vase painting.

No, no, no! Not a book,- an
article
on the myth of Oedipus by that half-cuckoo historian Graves. Near his feet lay a few books by the same fellow, crammed with torn slips of paper marking sections that intrigued him. He found what he was looking for. Several typewritten pages, now crumpled. A scholar friend had sent him the text of a lecture the historian had planned to give. But the event had been canceled and the text never published. A fragment of Graves's strange lecture ran thus:

THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

He stopped reading, suddenly remembering that the very name Sphinx
meant
“Throttler.” But without trying to recall how he knew this fact, he went back to the passage:

He stopped reading again. Invented by whom? To explain a supposed sacred icon picture —- what icon picture? On a plate, a vase, a cup, a tomb? Mr. Graves never said where the picture might be found. The thought of a massive search bored him. It meant going through the whole picture catalog of the British Museum and possibly half the Greek National Museum as well. Should he write Graves a letter and ask him point-blank? Where was that rascal hiding? Majorca some-place …

That was the thing about Freud he always admired. The old Faker never failed to give his sources. And any idiot could look them up if he wished. But not the clever Mr. Graves,- no, Mr. Graves had seen it somewhere and you damned well better take his word for it.

The passage went on:

He loved that last bit. What a clever retort to the old Faker, shattering his all-inclusive theory of sexuality. Ah, Mr. Graves, hiding on your Spanish isle, making provocative remarks. While singing songs of the dead ones — Plutarch, Apollodorus, Asius — making his own translations of all the lurid tales of rape and cannibalism and the bloody incest of the gods. Look anywhere on the Mediterranean: moon goddess cults flourished on every coast and in the woody depths of every mountain grove. Where June weddings saw a young man marry a Lady of the Fields, where the villagers knocked off a useless old man and planted him in the ground to seed the crops, or sent his smoke up to heaven in a cloud to lure the vital summer rains…. The human-god ritual of birth and death stretched back into the past like a well-trodden path, dwindling to the barest foot track, ending at last around a fire in the wilderness, where men in skins stared up at the moon and carved round, fat stones in worship of the dark. Small, round, eyeless things with heavy breasts and a ripe pregnant belly. Archaeologists found them everywhere neolithic man made his campsites, in and around the lands of the Mother Sea — found them in the tens of thousands. Venus stones they called them … though Aphrodite and Roman Venus were but her great-great-granddaughters. Long before the King of the Jews, a little pregnant wench was God.

Who was this stone mother? Did a race of men worship their women? Or women worship her alone? Did she have a name? A thousand names? Or a secret name, never to be spoken?

Perhaps they only called her
She
.

He rose from his desk and began pacing anxiously about. He felt trapped in this little room. Graves's ideas on psychology were much too pat, too clever. And when it came to his German — “the Oedipus Complex … an
instinct
common to all men” — obviously the fellow had read Freud only in translation. The old Faker never used the word “instinct” when it came to describing a process of the human mind. Instinct was too knee-jerk, too goose-step. Freud saw human affairs as affairs of the heart, impulsive, compelling, contradictory. A sick man might be driven or seduced into some strange relation with his mother, but common sense told you it wasn't instinctual, like dogs sniffing each other's rear ends. No, a mother-tongue reader knew the old Faker used the word “drive” when referring to our human foibles and compulsions — in German, a different word altogether.

And what about the aforementioned problem of sources? How much simpler if Mr. Graves had decided to include a picture of the Sphinx icon. Was he really the gentleman scholar after all? Or would a man who misconstrued the word “instinct” be “driven” to invent an icon to fit a theory? Not the first time in the history of the Sphinx that a conqueror staged the propaganda to suit his purposes. After all, hadn't the emperor Napoleon suffered defeat after defeat in Egypt, while sending back victorious dispatches to Paris? His callous artillerymen used the Great Sphinx for gunnery practice and finally dragged home a huge obelisk to commemorate his triumph! The obelisk stood to this day in the Place de la Concorde. And the Sphinx smiled across the Nile with her nose blown off. Even the mighty Bonaparte had failed to wrest the secret from her.

Only one solution remained: write Mr. Graves. If the scholar put him off, then perhaps the codger had been caught doing a little inventing. Ah, the perversity of man's suspicions against a stranger when a little thing like a penny postcard of an ancient icon was left to the imagination.

Perversity.

Had not Mr. Graves used the word himself? The Oedipus Myth perverted by an invader for his own ends … Odd choice of words.

And which was more perverted anyway, a brigand invading Thebes to kill the Moon Priestess — or sleeping with your mother? It would depend on whom you asked: the Queen of Thebes or your mother. And what about Plutarch's poor hippopotamus, who murdered his sire and forced his dam? Herr Hippo obviously suffered from the deeply repressed wishes of a latent Oedipal complex. But whether they arose from a secret hostility toward his father coupled with a perverse lust for his mother, or simply because Herr Hippo needed more wallowing room on the mudbank, no one would ever know.

Perversion.

Not an innocent word at all. Who, indeed, had more opportunities to turn things to his own uses — a confused hippopotamus or a classical scholar translating long-dead languages, which only a handful of men really knew well? Perhaps the whole thing boiled down to one's reputation — the preservation or perversion of it! For what was “reputation” anyway but a
life path
open for the world to see?

Was this, then, the riddle of the Sphinx?

What creature, being of one voice: when was it the weakest? The child or the lonely, feeble old man who walked with a cane? No, neither. It was the creature of your public face, the creature of your reputation…. What people saw of your path in life, how it bottled you and throttled you and crushed you in the end. How many men had felt the errors of their life path killing them, strangling them — and longed to see the Sphinx's smile fade? She knew, she always knew…. She knew the errors you had made.

Jung picked up his fountain pen for the first time in three months and went back to the lined writing pad with the halfwritten word “Götterdämmerung” on it. He read once more the aging words:

The pen hovered in his hand. Tor the fallen Mangod leaves monuments in the cities of his followers and hateful memories in the fields of his slaves….” He loved that last phrase. The carved neolithic stones of pregnant women were such monuments, surviving artifacts of a Götterdämmerung — but what of the memories that went with them? The memories were gone. The mouth-to-ear chain of storytelling long broken, garbled, confused. A charred jawbone in the dead ashes of time. With no one left to remember the stone woman's tales. How had she died? The same way the Sphinx died. When a Mangod unraveled her riddle. Long ago some Mangod had divined the secrets of the stones, only to replace them with mute silence. If her original secrets had remained unfound, she would have continued as a god. When had men decided to cast their stony mothers down to hell? How could women have let them do it? Ah, but women were always letting men get away with things…. With half a smile on his face, that he might finally write something worthwhile, he set pen to paper: