The Revolt of Aphrodite (18 page)

I had been somewhat doubtful about the quality of my recording, but here again luck held. It was pronounced clear. Jocas listened with intense concentration, smoking a cigar, head down; but after the fourth repetition he said with a sigh of relief: “It was not Mahmud was it?” Sacrapant shook his head joyfully. “Then we will not have to act for the time being” said Jocas. “Good. Good.”

The conversation shifted crabwise to other and more impersonal matters which did not concern me, and I turned my attention adrift, not surprised that it wandered off in the direction of Benedicta, recalling all the minutae of her behaviour and appearance as if to find in each fragment a specimen of the sick beauty which had once
become
her master. I excused myself early that night, as we were due to set off before dawn, and made my way back to my waterside bungalow. I took off all my clothes and went over my body point by point, holding up the light in the mirror the better to study it. I did not know why I was doing this—nor did I ask myself any questions. But afterwards I sat down in despair on the bed and said aloud: “Is this what it is like?” What was I talking about? I don’t know. I found my beauty unconvincing I suppose! Moreover to add to this feeling of horrible dispersion and inadequacy there came its twin—the
conviction
that I had made a choice that was as bad as it was irrevocable! But, O dear, how clearly I saw that face! Nevertheless the realisation must have cleared the air, so to speak, for that night I slept the
dreamless
sleep of early childhood. Iolanthe must have been dreaming about me.

As for Benedicta herself I must confess that I had seen her before,
in a manner of speaking. The gesture with which Iolanthe sank down upon the carpet and drew forth the greasy little pack of
playing-cards
always heralded a prolonged scrutiny of the auspices, an evaluation of her future and mine; she kept them separate even then, out of who knows what sad tact? And, youthful and self-sufficient boor that I was, I hardly noticed the crestfallen tones in which she might say: “Our story is coming to an end for many years. Soon I shall go from you, and the other will come, the widow. She will be sadder than I, much sadder. I see many doors around her, and all of them closed.” I yawn, of course, in the manner of one who has known (as Caradoc would say)
“des
femmes
de
toutes
les
caté-
gorilles
”.
We scientific chaps cannot countenance divination by aces and spades. “My story is one of riches, riches, but much
dissatisfaction
, much unhappiness. Then look, we meet again in another country—but it will be too late to start again. Meanwhile the widow will hold you. She is fair. You will recognise her by her right foot—something is wrong with it.”

“A cripple? Does she limp?”

“No. I see her dancing with you, beautifully.”

Regarding with distaste the hot and crumpled sheets upon which Iolanthe gazed with such tenderness. Now when I think of it I go all-overish. All this for me was mere pleasure which never exploded into insight, couldn’t disturb the egocentric flow of my hugged imaginings. The arts of introspection nourished on a junior loneliness and too much bloody education. Sentient beings for me were still almost convincing dummies, that was all. Am I typical then? A thousand little acts of attachment passed over me unnoticed. Well, later memory takes them and turns them into spears. One cries out in one’s sleep, one curses. Like, I mean, taking the spectacles off my sunburnt nose as one lifts the lid from a jar of olives—to kiss me. Made foolish by too much knowledge I did not see her then as she was, namely in her natural state; I only began to “see” her when she had created her artificial self, the actress. Then she hit me between the eyes. But then one can’t start loving retroactively—or can one? Too little, Felix, and then too late. Matter of fact or fact of matter? With Benedicta I chewed off my own tail in a cloud of unknowing. For better or for hearse. But wait. It was not all so vague, for she had
deep and pitiful experiences to chew upon, and was gifted with a strange aberrant insight, as when she was describing early sexual experiences once and came out with: “If you push passion to
extremes
you are bound to tumble into mere mysticism.” What a strange use of the word “mere”! But wait a minute.

It was well before dawn when I woke with a jolt to find Jocas standing over me, jack-booted and spurred, holding a lighted candle and grinning like a dog. “Sea fog” he said oracularly, and I heard the engines of the pinnace warming up, ticking over, in the obscurity below. Over his arm he carried a miscellaneous collection of clothes and boots—gear more suitable for a day of riding than the suit I had brought with me. I foraged about amongst it all and equipped myself with a good pair of boots, ill-fitting riding-breeches, an empty bandolier and such other sundries as seemed to me to be to the
purpose
. Then before climbing down the hill to the boat he poured us each a small cup of scalding sage-tea backed by a sip of gasping mastika. So we careened out of harbour into an olive drab mist which coiled around us, condensing upon hair and eyebrows. The dispirited dogs drowsed and yawned among the tarpaulins. “She went over early with the old falconers,” said Jocas “and we’ll meet later today. Hullo! What’s that?”

The channel even at this early hour was full of ships labouring cautiously down towards the Horn, their bells clanging out warnings, soft wet lips of fog-horns, etc. In smaller craft the lookout banged upon a saucepan and shouted from time to time to mark position. As we had to cut directly through the middle of this traffic to reach the Asiatic side the operations of the pinnace were delicate in the
extreme
, although we were equipped with engines of great power and a fog-horn whose melancholy resonance was enough to set the dogs ululating. Jocas smoked a short pipe and waited patiently as his pilot trod cautiously among the indistinct shapes and sounds on this dark waterway. This funeral pace was imposed on us for nearly an hour and then, in the most dramatic fashion, the fog was peeled aside by a scurry of wind and we were in the full light of an early sunrise riding down along the low purple headlands of the nether shore where our drumming wake rippled down upon sleeping villages to set the coloured boats bobbing at deserted landing-stages. Everything was
still sticky with fogdamp and Jocas would not let the guns out of their cases until the sun was fully up. The dogs were rubbed down with straw. We drank black coffee in tin mugs and watched the chromatic scale of yellow Byzantine light loop up the eastern end of the sky—until it ran over and raced everywhere, spilling among the shady blue valleys, and touching in the vague outlines of the foothills. Sunrise. Carob, sweet chestnut, oak—and plaintive small owls calling.

We were running along the low toothy headlands of the coast now, in view of the country which we were to hunt. Clumps of swaying bamboos marked the points where shallow streams had nosed their way down into the bight. The land soothed itself away to the girdle of foothills, the shallow intervening valleys wearing their scrub and green screes bravely, pin-pointing here and there a cypress plume or a regiment of olives; but for the most part dwarf oak, juniper, myrtle and arbutus—the classical combination so easily negotiable (so it seems) until one tries to follow a gun-dog into the impenetrable jungle of interlocking roots and thorns. Jocas swept the land with a powerful glass, grunting with satisfaction; then he handed it to me, pointing out here and there a shattered fragment of an abandoned temple, or a cluster of pruned stone where a seamark had been allowed to dribble into a heap of rubble under the rubbing water. But away to the north his blunt finger directed me to a small landing-stage, a tiny harbour carved in shale, where the horses awaited us. Then, moving away to the right over the green land he indicated a tall hillock, with a fine tall stand of oak-trees where, in the shadow, one saw the movement and glitter of what seemed to be an encampment. “Benedicta is up there” he said. “She will have the birds. We won’t use the guns today unless … I suppose a boar might be tempting. But they are not very numerous now.”

We were met by a little group of horsemen whose repellent
ugliness
and strange attire suggested to the mind the inhabitants of remotest Tartary. They were clad in greasy duffle, with jackboots of soft leather crudely sewn. Their rifles were antiques,
muzzle-loaders
. Their little round hats with the shallow brim emphasised the almond-shaped eyes. They greeted Jocas with an awkward
curtness
which suggested not so much discourtesy as the shy manners of remote mountaineers. There wasn’t a smile between the lot of them.

We mounted and set off across the fields feeling the sun hot upon our backs. I had not ridden for a long time—not indeed since a bit of mild hacking at university—and felt very much of a novice. Jocas rode sturdily but without elegance: indeed he sat like a sack of meal. But his huge hands and his grip on the reins suggested that a
troublesome
horse would receive no quarter from him.

We crossed a half-dry marsh and began to climb the hill. Here the sun had started to make the wet land steam, and the rising mist swept upwards into the trees. It was through this abrupt dimming of our vision that Benedicta appeared, mounted dramatically on a bronze stallion, her yellow hair flying loose. She was a different woman from the dark girl with the heart-shaped face; this was someone imperative, assured, even perhaps cruel when one thought of the dense blue eyes under frowning brows: periwinkle-blue, large, fierce, finely formed. “You’re damned late” she said to Jocas, reining in and turning into a slow-plunging, arse-banging reorientation in order to come
alongside
us. Then still unsmiling she reached out and pressed my wrist in a gesture of greeting which was, to say the very least of it, puzzling: I could not decide if it were descended from some oriental form of greeting—or was an expression of personal intimacy. I was tempted to raise my wrist to my lips but refrained. The gesture itself may also have meant nothing; but it illuminated something for me in a flash. I understood what the meaning of my strange behaviour on the night before could be: I mean examining myself so carefully in the mirror, measuring so to speak the degree of my own narcissism in the face of this reflected man, I had been thinking of something like this: “Yes, but then we are modified effectively by the contents of our skulls, by what we think. This science nonsense has reduced your ability to affirm yourself. You would, faced by a challenge like this—I mean a girl who sets herself down in front of the target—turn the whole thing into hollow propositions which you would lodge in the conscious mind. You couldn’t just bite into her like a fresh apple. Yum, Yum. And if you did try to warm up your feelings in a more generous direction why you’d go soft, you’d go sentimental. Too much scientific thinking has poisoned feeling, has reduced your pulse-rate so to speak. What will you do if she embraces you?” Fall off my horse I suppose.

This is where the extraordinary melancholy came over me. (At this moment my heart was simmering, my blood had turned to quicksilver. I saw her then in some almost legendary form—this slender woman riding down upon us like some drunken queen of the Iceni.) It was the melancholy subject of the night before which reflected and told himself that perhaps we are forced to choose as lovemates, shipmates, playmates those that best match our inward ugliness—the sum of our own shortcomings. No, I did not know that as yet. Not then.

There was sweat upon her upper lips and temples; her cheek was red, little blonde hairs twinkled. The eyes didn’t have any particular expression—perhaps a touch of disdain. But when they turned upon mine a whole new world of feeling darkened them. Incredibly enough, I could have sworn she was in love with me. Riding like that through the mist I had a sudden feeling that I was about to faint, to fall out of my saddle into a bush. It did not last long, this vertiginous feeling, but it altered the whole scale of my sentiment. All of a sudden I was sure of something, I knew where I was; I longed to escape as a fish longs to escape from the hook. If one could apply some rational system to subjects like these how nice it would be: instead one must always talk as provisionally as possible and in terms of poetry. But damn it Charlock is a scientist—and scientists, moved by pure reason, never let themselves get into such awkward positions. Was it Koepgen who said that science was built upon defensive measurement and art upon propitiation?

“I knew you would have to come to me” she said in a low voice. A minatory note, a little too intense: I did not like it one little bit. This again did not need saying now: at the touch of her fingers on my wrist I had realised that she had been willing me to return once more in a slow curve to that point of reference in time at which our natures had ignited each other. Heavens, what a way to express it! But we
are
modified effectively by what we think. (Charlock, cool your mind with the calculus.) Benedicta waited for me to answer her—but what was I to tell her about the whole deathscapade of lovemaking? The soul of modern man is made of galvanised iron. She turned away, biting her lips. I felt sad to have to wound her by a silence and an awkwardness at a time when our feelings had defined themselves,
grouped themselves, were waiting only to be honourably avowed and recognised. Thoughts incoherent and dispersed floated through my skull as the horses undulated up the slope. I heard for example (why?) the disembodied voice of Sipple say: “Blowed if I see any culture in the Parthenon. To me it’s just a marble birdcage. They say it’s old but how is one to tell? There are no maggots in marble.” But if I could see her so clearly as she was that day I could also see, by simple extension of her look, her manner, the Benedicta who could sit for hours before a mirror with a finger to her lips, her eyes wide with fright; I could see those cupboards full of fancy-dress costumes, the masks. Puppetry! Among the cartoons of monks and demons there hung whips with knotted thongs. Yes, I saw Benedicta always elaborately gowned and cloaked, always wearing some fabulously expensive bracelet over a left-hand glove: Benedicta dressed like an Infanta to welcome me to the white walls and glassy balconies of the Sanatorium in Zürich which her father had once endowed. If I had dared then to say simply: “Benedicta I love you” it would have been like the report of a gun, the discharge of a firearm that blows the top of your skull off. The hero of the New Comedy will be the scientist in love, grappling with the androgynous shapes of his own desire. Wouldn’t you say?