The Revolt of Aphrodite (21 page)

“Of course.” He did so at once and at some length. She watched me curiously, surprised by my lack of animation. I suppose I looked guilty. I tried to explain. “You see, Vibart, in a sort of way I am in the same boat as you. I didn’t want to be just an artificer, I wanted to go for abstractions: use the calculus as a springboard. Like you, I have not got the talent. I shall be forced to confine myself to tinkering with nuts and bolts instead of dealing with poetic abstractions, new universes. And I did
so
want to be the age’s little Copernicus. Hence the apathy you criticise. I am the wrong kind of scientist. I shall have to be content to try and do something about the faulty five senses in this smaller way.”

He reeled off, in quotation: “An eagle for sight, a hart for hearing, a spider for touch, an ape for taste, and a dog for smell.”

“I would have liked to achieve in my line whatever would
correspond
to a work of art—which my friend Koepgen has defined as an act of disciplined insubordination. But if one isn’t up to it?” My God, we were getting drunk.

“Oh dear,” said his wife “here I am surrounded by failures.” But she was grateful for this self-identification with her husband’s private myth.

Vibart was put into a very good humour now, and decided that all further self-recrimination should cease until he had reached the coffee. The food, he said, was too good to poison, and besides the only metaphysical problem for the gourmet was: is there a life beyond the gravy?

A freak thunderstorm had sprung up and rain was needling the tragic arcades; we sat long over our brandies, waiting for it to stop, and once more the consuming restlessness beset me. My
wrist-watch
purred on in tireless itching iteration and I found myself wondering about Benedicta and the new equivocal pattern of
relationships
which she alone could disentangle and sort out. Time is the only thing that doesn’t wear out. “I think I shall probably leave for
Athens tomorrow” I said, since Vibart was planning a picnic for the week-end and I had suddenly tired of him. The rain was thinning off now, and a fresh wind was flapping at the awnings of the cafés. By luck we found a cab to take us back to Pera, where I dropped off at my hotel. Here all my doubts were resolved for on the mantelpiece of my room I found a single joss stick burning in a vase and a visiting card of Jocas’ with a few words written on it in that curiously
shapeless
and hesitant hand which I was to come to know so well—Benedicta’s. She was coming to visit me on the morrow at noon. All at once—like the wind dispersing storm cloud at a single puff—I felt the whole weight of my preoccupations lift and disperse. I fell asleep almost at once, but it was to dream elaborate and intricate dreams, worthy of Vibart, about the long life-lines of the firm which
channelled
all the riches of the Orient into the huge granaries over which Jocas presided—furs and skins and poppy, caviar and salt and wax, amber, precious stones, porcelain and glass: dreams of such fervent inaccuracy that even while I dreamed them I was forced to correct the picture, to bring it up to date with less romantic commodities like pit-props from Slovenia, oil and wheat from Russia, bauxite and tin and coal. And somewhere in the middle of this meretricious romancing I saw the pale face of Benedicta staring down at me as if from a lofty window: and I woke with a start with a question on my lips, namely, “You must be sure that her riches play no part in any decision you make.” But riches cannot be side-stepped; they mark one like a hare-lip. I studied her handwriting with misgiving. A graphologist would have hinted at glandular imbalances. But I loved her, I loved her, I loved her.

Then in the morning, following out in some obscure fashion the train of thought which had dribbled through my sleep, I went out to the fashionable Pera shopping area with the scientific intention of spending a very large sum of money: in order to see exactly how it felt. I thought I might buy a sporting gun or a wrist-watch or a fountain pen of abhorrent splendour. Accustomed to live meagrely if decently, to find myself frequently short, not of necessities, but of luxuries, I wanted to taste the sensation of pouring out some of my own fairly earned gold over some merchant’s counter. But my desire for these unnecessary objects ebbed away as soon as I sighted
them. What the devil would I do with a gun? Hippolyta would always lend me one. A wrist-watch? I should forget to take it off when I swam. A pen? No sooner bought than lost. In desultory fashion I mooned about the souk, allowing myself to be plucked and cajoled and lectured by the swarthies. I did not know enough then about precious stones. (Now of course my artificial diamonds flourish all over the globe.) Nor perfumes. But finally, with
Benedicta
in mind I allowed myself to be tempted by a small and lovely carpet—an authentic Shiraz according to the label. With this rolled up under my arm I walked back to the hotel in time to see a flock of hamalis—the grotesque cow-like public porters of the capital—carrying a string of black suitcases and hat-boxes all marked with the gold monogram I was to come to know so well. But she was already there, dressed like a fashion-plate, sitting upon the terrace with her gloved hands in her lap. Gloves! Her large fine straw hat cast dancing freckles of amber light over her features.

She was staring at her gloves and her lips were moving as if in prayer or in a secret conversation with her own mind. Everything seemed to warn me, but I walked up to take her hands—remove them from her field of vision, claim them and with them her
attention
. She responded, when I uttered her name with a glance full of abstraction—as if she were seeing me for the first time. “Everyone is agreed” she said softly—the most desolating words that a man in love can hear. “But everyone, without exception, even Julian. They are all on our side.” She trembled a little when we embraced; slender and pliant, and fragrant with a scent I could not identify. “I want you to say my name; to hear how it sounds: I haven’t paid attention before.” I repeated her name twice. She sighed and said “Yes, it is just as I thought.” It was as if something had been put to the proof. I sat beside her and unrolled my gift. “I brought you a small Shiraz” I said proud of my acquisition, only to be dashed by her smile as she said: “It’s Afghan. You’ve been cheated.” She laughed and clapped her hands as if at an excellent jest.

All my gear had been moved from my room into a very large suite on the second floor; it mingled oddly with her collection of shining suitcases. A Turkish maid was busy hanging up her dresses. A lunch table had been laid upon the balcony. She stood with her probationary
eyes narrowed critically as she surveyed the room with its huge
four-poster
and velvet baldaquin. Then she turned suddenly to me and said: “I can only stay three days this time. Then I must go north. But I will come to you in Athens or in London later. Yes?”

“Very well.”

Three nights, three days of calendar time; to the bemused (and it
was
reciprocal) it could have been three centuries, so marvellously did the spilled seconds transform my view both of her and her melancholy city of historic afterthoughts: it had become a sort of extension of her childhood and its memories, a coherent demesne. All the stagnant beauties, its repellent corners of dirt and disease, the marsh gas thrown off by the rotting corpse of Byzantium—they all coalesced into a significant shape. She walked about it with the
unconscious
assurance of long familiarity. It was a wicked place to fall in love with a woman, an unmanning place: or was this simply Benedicta, and the obstinate alarm bell sounding in the back of my mind, muffled by the sweet minaret-calls, the sage boom of sirens from the Horn? Let us say that I saw her reflections in it—imprint of the imago which underlay the kisses which were not blithe and free, as they should have been, but concentrated, perverse, bewitching. The central enigma hasn’t changed from that day to this; I could have seen her even then, if I had tried, as someone born to be loved yet doomed to die, in solitude like a masterless animal. Yet how lucky I was myself—for I was able to surrender—and this gave me the illusion that I could however briefly cross the distance that she put between us. The victories of applied science! I gave her everything that I had learned from Iolanthe! For one moment had the
conviction
that I had stopped the great moving staircase of the heart! I stubbornly averted my face from the notion that in all this first
encounter
what I really saw was the first sketch, so to speak, of a more massive alienation. Did I? I don’t know. Anyway, making love with a sort of breathless resignation—or else desperately, like someone trying to pull an arrow from the flesh before the poison has time to spread. And she knew ways to excite, the praying mantis, like “tie up my wrists” or less judiciously “O it is too big, I shall split.” Incitements to the furies let loose in men when they love an aggressive woman. To couple so perfectly and yet be denied any sort of
initiation! Kisses were warnings I did not recognise; but the feeling of finality was delicious, vertiginous—things could not have fallen out otherwise could they? Gentlemen of the jury, we should tackle reality in a slightly joky way, otherwise we miss its point. It isn’t solemn at all, it’s
playing
! It’s all very well telling poor Felix that now; he too is wise after the event. Suppose we could make the electric chair into a romantic symbol? If you section the olfactory gland of the rabbit you condemn it to impotence; snick off the salamander’s head while it is coupling, and it feels nothing; caught in the divine rhythm it continues as if nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing has? Benedicta! Rapidly cooling worlds, we lie asleep in each other’s arms. The mysteries do not matter. I come upon her sitting on the balcony in flood of tears. “Why, Benedicta?” She doesn’t know, staring up at me with tear-laden lashes, tears running down her long subtle nose. “I don’t know.” Yet ten minutes later laughing heartily at the antics of a monkey on a barrel-organ.

Well then, as I say, her city began to borrow some of her colours; our excursions and promenades became the unfamiliar delight, and she knew corners and nooks which escaped the industry or perhaps taste of other guides like Sacrapant or Vibart. It is not possible for me now to think of Polis again without seeing Benedicta’s face
superposed
upon whatever it is—mosque, graveyard, tilting forest of shipping in the Golden Horn. She owns it as Io owns Athens. There were puzzles, of course, and singularities: I remember that
wherever
we went we found someone to receive us—someone waiting outside a mosque with the keys for example. The difficulty of gaining entry to the smaller mosques, the difficulty of tracing the guardian with the keys, is too famous an aspect of Polis to need elaboration; every visitor has complained of it. Yet wherever this fateful couple went—and so often on foot—the guardian was there waiting. Had she warned him, or caused him to be warned, I asked? “No, it is just that we are lucky, simply that.”

Then again, with the same equivocal air—an expression of pride and sorrow almost—she led
me through the beautiful cemetery at Eyub, among the marble incantations with their tell-tale-turbans and flower-knots. We came to one grave set in a small grilled
enclosure
of its own. I could not read the flowing Arabic inscription, of
course; but below it, in small Roman letters, I saw the name Benedicta Merlin. There was no date. “Who is it—your mother?” I asked; but she only turned away abruptly, picking a stalk of green with which to tease her lips as she walked down the hill. “Benedicta, please tell me.” She stared at me intently, and then once more turned away and resumed her slow progress among the graves. It was useless to press her. At the edge of the cemetery she turned and embraced me, pressing me to her with a strange sort of fury, as if to extirpate some unhallowed memory of the past. But no words, do you see? And then with a soft kind intensity she took out her
handkerchief
to rub the lipstick marks from my mouth. Never, it seemed, had anyone looked at me with so much overflowing love, vulnerable tenderness; what did it matter that she should have her secrets? The stern mask of the priestess had slipped. Briefly I saw a woman.

So the time passed, dense with the special fulfilments of physical possession; I averted my mind from the prospect of her vanishing back into Europe—dragged by the slow Orient Express through the great walls of the city towards Zürich. Then in the middle of
everything
—or rather at the end, for it was the last evening—came the most singular event of all: the death of Sacrapant. It was so sudden and so unexpected that it deafened the mind—though afterwards of course it was explained satisfactorily. Events of this kind are always clothed in a factitious causality when we see them in retrospect. Was it, though?

Sunset is the finest hour; with the city nimbling softly away
towards
darkness while the sun fights its lion-battle against the skyline driving the dense mists higher and higher into brief priceless colours and shapes. To sit in the darkening garden of the hotel quietly
drinking
an aperitif and waiting for the blind muezzin to climb into his perch among the buildings and send out his owl-cry to the faithful—this was the best way to spend this hour, watching the lights
beginning
to twinkle over by Taxim, and the shipping rustle and moo on the darkening water.

This particular eloquent evening we were very silent; the express left just before midnight, her packing was done. We sat there between two worlds, neither cast down nor elated: existing in a curious
abstraction
of certainty about the future. One side of the mind turned
towards that quiet call which must soon come from the mosque—the old blind face of a bird uttering the quiet nasal cawing of the Ebed. And I saw in the gathering dusk a slim figure in white limping among the distant trees; it walked with just a trace of unsteadiness but with resolution as if towards a predetermined destination. I recognised my friend, though I did not comment on the fact; so, I think, did she, following the direction of my gaze. There would have been nothing unusual about that; but then to my surprise I saw him pause, squint upwards into the sky, and enter the circular staircase of the mosque. But now his pace had changed; he walked slowly, wearily, as if bowed under a great weight. I saw him appear at the little
window-slit
halfway up and could not resist a puzzled gasp. “What the devil, it’s old Sacrapant….” She looked at her watch and at the sky.