Athena (20 page)

And that night I had the strangest dream, I remember it. You were in it. We were walking together through narrow, winding passageways open to the sky. It was our quarter, or an oneiric version of it – changed and yet the same – but also it was an open-air academy of some sort, a place of scholarship and arcane ritual: there was a hint of the Orient or of Arabia. No one was about save us. It was evening, overcast and darkly luminous, the sky low and smooth and flocculent above our heads. I was baffled but you knew our purpose there, I could feel you shivering with eagerness, your arm linked tightly in mine. We did not speak but you kept smiling into my face in that way you had, lips compressed and eyes shining with a kind of spiteful glee. We came to a pair of ornate doors, temple doors, they seemed, made of many intricately arranged interlocking blocks of polished wood through the interstices of which somehow a pallid daylight gleamed out from within. With a hieratic
gesture and yet irreverently smiling and winking at me over your shoulder you reached up to the two wooden handles that were set very high, above our heads, and drew the doors open. Beyond was a narrow chamber, no more than another passageway, really, with a window at the end of it in which nothing was to be seen except a grey and glowing blankness that was a part of the sky or perhaps a clouded sea. Jumbled in this room and so numerous we hardly had space to make our way between them were what at first I took to be quarter-life-sized human figurines in contorted and fantastical shapes and poses, formed it seemed from a porous grey clay and stained with mildew or a very fine-textured lichen. As I walked here and there carefully amongst them, however, I discovered that they were alive, or animate, at least, in some not quite human way. They began to make small, sinuous stirrings, like things deep in the sea stirred by a once-in-a-century underwater current. One of them, a boy-shaped homunculus with a narrow, handsome head, perched on a high pedestal, smiled at me – I could see cracks forming in the mildew or lichen around his lips – smiled as if he knew me, or in some way recognised me, and, trying to speak but making only a mute mumbling, pointed eagerly past my shoulder. It was you he was showing me, standing with your strange smile in the midst of this magicked place. You. You.

6.
Revenge of Diana
1642
J. van Hollbein (1595-1678)

Oil on canvas, 40 × 17½ in. (101.5 × 44.5 cm.)

The title, which is van Hollbein’s own, will puzzle those unfamiliar with the story of Actaeon’s ill-fortune in pausing to spy upon the goddess Diana at her bath, for which piece of mortal effrontery he was changed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. Van Hollbein himself was no scholar, despite the many classical references which appear in his work; like his great contemporary, Claude Lorrain, he came from a humble background, being the son of a corn-chandler from the town of Culemborg near Utrecht, and was largely ignorant of Latin and therefore had no direct access to the Virgilian world the poise and serene radiance of which he chose to ape in the work of his mature years. In this painting, the scene with which we are presented depicts the moment when Actaeon surprises the naked goddess (and, so it would seem from his expression, himself also), and therefore the action proper is yet to come; however, despite the limitations of his technique, the painter manages by a number of deft touches subtly to suggest the drama that will follow. Actaeon’s stance, bent from the waist with arms lifted, has the tension and awkwardness of an animal rearing on its hind legs, while in the furrowing
of his brow, where the drops of transfiguring water flung by the goddess still glisten, we seem to detect the incipient form of the antlers that presently will sprout there; and, of course, the dappled tunic that is draped about his thighs and chest and thrown over his left shoulder is obviously made of deerskin. Meanwhile the hounds milling at his heels are gazing up at their master in puzzlement and fierce interest, as if they have caught from him an unfamiliar, gamey scent. In the figure of Diana, too, turned half away and glaring askance at the gaping youth, we divine something of the violence that will ensue. How well the artist has caught the divine woman in her moment of confusion, at once strong and vulnerable, athletic and shapely, poised and uncertain. She looks a little like you: those odd-shaped breasts, that slender neck, the downturned mouth. But then, they all look like you; I paint you over them, like a boy scrawling his fantasies on the smirking model in an advertising hoarding. She is attended by a single nymph, who stands knee-deep in the shallows of the pool with the goddess’s chiton and girdle folded over her arm and holding in her other hand, with curious negligence, Diana’s unstrung bow. She maintains an odd, statuesque stillness, this figure, wide-eyed and impassive, her gaze fixed halfway between the goddess and the youth, as if she had been struck into immobility in the act of turning to look for the cause of Diana’s startlement and dismay. Lowering over the entire scene and dwarfing the sylvan glade and the figures caught in their fateful moment are the wooded valley walls of Gargaphia, hazed and etherial in the golden light of afternoon and yet fraught with menace and foreboding. The temple built into the rocks on the right is unreal in its pale perfection and seems to gaze with stony sadness upon the scene that is being enacted under its walls. It is this stillness and silence, this standing aghast, as we might term it, before the horror that
is to come, that informs the painting and makes it peculiarly and perhaps unpleasantly compelling. Just so the world must have looked at me and waited when

When she urged me to beat her I should have known the game was up, or at least that it soon would be. After such knowledge, and so on. There are moments – yes, yes, despite anything I may have said in the past, there are moments when a note sounds such as never has been heard before, dark, serious, undeniable, a strand added to the great chord. That was the note I heard the day she clutched my wrist and whispered,
‘Hit me, hit me like you hit her
.’ I stopped at once what I was doing and hung above her, ears pricked and snout aquiver, like an animal caught on open ground. Her head was lifted from the pillow and her eyes were filmy and not quite focused. Sweat glistened in the hollow of her throat. A vast, steel-blue cloud was sneaking out of the frame of the window and the rooftops shone. At just that moment, with what seemed bathetic discontinuity, I realised what the smell was that I had caught in the basement that first day when she brought me there. My heart now seemed to have developed a limp. In a frightened rush I asked her what she meant and she gave her head a quick, impatient shake and closed her eyes and took a deep breath and pressed herself to me and sighed. I can still feel the exact texture of
her skin against mine, taut and slightly clammy and somehow both chill and hot at the same time.

In the closing days of November a false spring blossomed. (That’s it, talk about the weather.) Bulbs recklessly sprouted in the parks and birds tried out uncertain warblings and people wearing half-smiles walked about dazedly in the steady, thin sunshine. Even A. and I were enticed outdoors. I see us in those narrow streets, a pair of children out of a fairy-tale, wandering through the gingerbread village unaware of the ogres in their towers spying on us. (One of us, certainly, was unaware.) We sat in dank public houses and behind the steamed-up windows of greasy cafés. A. held on tightly to my arm, trembling with what seemed a sort of hazy happiness. I was happy, too. Yes, I will not equivocate or qualify. I was happy. How hard it is to say such a simple thing. Happiness for me now is synonymous with boredom, if that is the word for that languorous, floating sense of detachment that would come over me as I strolled with her through the streets or sat in some fake old-fashioned pub listening to her stories of herself and her invented lives.

It was she who first spotted Barbarossa. He was living in a cardboard box in the doorway of a cutler’s shop in Fawn Street, a fat, ginger-bearded fellow in a knitted tricolour cap, that must have been left over from some football match, and an old brown coat tied about the middle with a bit of rope. We studied his habits. By day he would store his box down a lane beside the knife shop and pack up his stuff in plastic bags and set off on his rounds. Amongst the gear he carried with him was a mysterious contraption, a loose bundle of socketed metal pipes of varying thicknesses, like the dismantled parts of a racing bicycle or a chimney sweep’s brushes, which he guarded with especial circumspection. Rack our brains though we might we could not think what use the thing could be to him, and though we came up with some ingenious possibilities we rejected them all. Obviously
it was precious, though, and despite the considerable transportation problems it posed for him he lugged it everywhere, with the care and reverence of a court official bearing the fasces in solemn procession. His belongings were too much for him to carry all together and so he had devised a remarkable method of conveyance. He would take the pipes and three of his six or seven bulging plastic bags and shuffle forward hurriedly for fifteen yards or so and set down the bags in a doorway or propped against a drainpipe; then, still carrying the precious pipes, he would retrace his steps and fetch the remaining bags and bring them forward and set them down along with the others. There would follow then a brief respite, during which he would check the plastic bags for wear and tear, or rearrange the bundle of pipes, or just stand gazing off, thinking who knows what thoughts, combing stubby fingers through his tangled beard, before setting off again. Of all our derelicts – by the end we had assembled a fine collection of them, wriggling on their pins – Barbarossa was A.’s favourite. She declared she would have liked to have had him for a dad. I make no comment.

One afternoon we found ourselves, I don’t know how, in a little square or courtyard somewhere near the cathedral – we could see the bell-tower above us, massive, crazy and unreal – and when we stopped and looked about, something took hold in me, a feeling of unfocused dread, as if without knowing it we had crossed invisible barriers into a forbidden zone. The day was grey and still. A few last leaves tinkled on the soot-black boughs of a spindly, theatrical-looking tree standing in a wire cage. There was no one about but us. Windows in the backs of tall houses looked down on us blankly. I had the sense of some vast presence, vigilant and malign. I wanted to leave, to get away from that place, but A. absently detached her arm from mine and stepped away from me and stood in silence, almost smiling, with her face lifted, listening, somehow, and waiting. Thus the daughter
of Minos must have stood at the mouth of the maze, feeling the presence of her terrible brother and smelling the stink of blood and dung. (But if I am Theseus, how is it that I am the one who is left weeping on this desolate shore?) Nothing happened, though, and no one came, and presently she let me take her hand and lead her away, like a sleepwalker. Someday I must see if I can pick up the thread and follow it into the heart of that labyrinth again.

Often in the middle of these outings we would turn without a word and hurry back to the room, swinging along together like a couple in a three-legged race, and there throw off our clothes and fall on the couch as if to devour each other. I hit her, of course; not hard, but hard enough, as we had known I would, eventually. At first she lay silent under these tender beatings, her face buried in the pillow, writhing slowly with her limbs flung out. Afterwards she would have me fetch her the hand-mirror from my work-table so that she could examine her shoulders and hips and the backs of her flanks, touching the bruises that in an hour would have turned from pink to muddy mauve, and running a fingertip along the flame-coloured weals that my belt had left on her. At those times I never knew what she was thinking. (Did I ever?) Perhaps she was not thinking anything at all.

And I, what did I think, what feel? At first bemusement, hesitancy and a sort of frightful exultation at being allowed such licence. I was like the volunteer blinking in the spotlight with the magician’s gold watch and mallet in his hands; what if I broke something (‘
Go ahead, hit it!’
) and the trick did not work and it stayed broken? From some things there is no going back – who should know that better than I? So I slapped at her gingerly, teeth bared wincingly and my heart in my mouth, until she became exasperated and thrust her rump at me impatiently like an urgent cat. I grew bolder; I remember the first time I drew a gasp from her. I saw myself towering over her like a maddened monster out of Goya,
hirsute and bloody and irresistible, Morrow the Merciless. It was ridiculous, of course, and yet not ridiculous at all. I was monster and at the same time man. She would thrash under my blows with her face screwed up and fiercely biting her own arm and I would not stop, no, I would not stop. And all the time something was falling away from me, the accretion of years, flakes of it shaking free and falling with each stylised blow that I struck. Afterwards I kissed the marks the tethers had left on her wrists and ankles and wrapped her gently in the old grey rug and sat on the floor with my head close to hers and watched over her while she lay with her eyes closed, sleeping sometimes, her breath on my cheek, her hand twitching in mine like something dying. How wan and used and lost she looked after these bouts of passion and pain, with her matted eyelashes and her damp hair smeared on her forehead and her poor lips bruised and swollen, a pale, glistening new creature I hardly recognised, as if she had just broken open the chrysalis and were resting a moment before the ordeal of unfolding herself into this new life I had given her. I? Yes: I. Who else was there, to make her come alive?

The whip was our sin, our secret. We never spoke of it, never mentioned it at all, for that would have been to tamper with the magic. And it was magic, more wand than whip, working transfigurations of the flesh. She did not look at me when I was wielding it, but shut her eyes and rolled her head from side to side, slack-mouthed in ecstasy like Bernini’s St Theresa, or stared off steadily into the plush torture chamber of her fantasies. She was a devotee of pain; nothing was as real to her as suffering. She had a photograph, torn from some book, that she kept in her purse and showed me one day, taken by a French anthropologist sometime at the turn of the century, of a criminal being put to death by the ordeal of a thousand cuts in a public square in Peking. The poor wretch, barefoot, in skullcap and black pyjama
pants, was lashed to a stake in the midst of a mildly curious crowd who seemed merely to have paused for a moment in passing to have a look at this free treat before going on about their busy business. There were two executioners, wiry little fellows with pigtails, also in black, also wearing skullcaps. They must have been taking the job in turns, for one of them was having a stretch, with a hand pressed to the small of his back, while his fellow was leaning forward cutting a good-sized gouge into the flesh of the condemned man’s left side just under the ribcage with a small, curved knife. The whole scene had a mundane if slightly festive, milling look to it, as if it were a minor holiday and the execution a familiar and not very interesting part of the day’s entertainments. What was most striking was the victim’s expression. His face was lifted and inclined a little to one side in an attitude at once thoughtful and passionate, the eyes cast upward so that a line of white was visible under the pupils; the tying of his hands had forced his shoulders back and his knobbled, scrawny chest stuck out. He might have been about to deliver himself of a stirring address or burst out in ecstatic song. Yes, ecstasy, that’s it, that’s what his stance suggested, the ecstasy of one lost in contemplation of a transcendent reality far more real than the one in which his sufferings were taking place. One leg of his loose trousers was hitched up where the executioner – the one with the crick in his back, no doubt – had been at work on the calf and the soft place at the back of the knee; a rivulet of black blood extended in a zigzag from his narrow, shapely foot and disappeared among the feet of the crowd.