The Revolt of Aphrodite (47 page)

Was this before or after? Ah, dactyl answer me. No, I do not care. It suffices that it should form part of the central pattern. While Merlin prospered and bought ruined palaces and cypress-groves the children loved and despaired away their youth in sunken gardens guarded by a retinue of impersonal servants, governesses, retainers. Jocas was born to the chase and was always glad to escape to the Asiatic side with his hunting birds and his kites. Julian the tranquil, thoughtful, the vicious, was never without a book, and was already the master of several languages. Yet withal he had in him some of the
heavy-souled impersonality of the sleepy Ottoman world where the humid heat lay upon the nerves with the weight of lead. Julian and his sister! Later they were to be separated and his personal hold over her suffered a metamorphosis—he held her through the firm and the needs of the firm, no longer through the body and the personal will. That was how she became the near-witch Benedicta. But during this early time he taught her to fence; naked again, they faced each other on the stone flags and the room rang to the dry clicking of buttoned foils. Then lying in the great bedroom with its mirror ceiling, in each other’s arms, as if at the bottom of the ocean they made love, watching each other watch each other. He was soon to meet his peculiar medieval fate—the fate of Abelard; for Merlin knew all. Somewhere inside himself Julian was not really surprised when they all walked in holding candles—Merlin himself dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown and soft Turkish slippers with pointed toes. Julian closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, until they touched his shoulder and led him away. Benedicta slept on, slept on. The tall bald eunuch held the long-shanked dressmaker’s scissors reverently, like an instrument of sacrifice, which indeed they were. Also the sterilised needle and the thread to baste the wound and stitch the empty pouch up like a
gigot.
It was not pain that turned Julian into a raging maniac, it was quite simply the indignity. When she told me this I could see suddenly the whole pattern of things lit up by the phosphorescent white light of his anger, translated out of impotence. No, the cruellest thing about impotence is that it is fundamentally a comic predicament. His father had not only punished him but had mocked him as well. A phrase creeps back to mind from some other forgotten context. “They were bound by a complicity of desire and purpose far stronger even than love, perhaps even independent of death.” I hardly dare to touch her, to put my hand upon her shoulder when she looks like this. The closed eyes stare on and on into the centre of memory. “All this I will have to be punished for some day I suppose” she said between her teeth. “I was afraid you would find it endearing—another delightful feminine weakness to add to your collection.” I had already begun to undress. I said, “I am not going to indulge your sense of guilt any more.” I told her to take off her ski pants and sweater and climb in beside me. The sense of familiarity
combined with the sense of novelty—new lives for old: a new version of an old model: new wine in old brothels: it held me spellbound. Nor were her kisses any longer contaminated by nervous
preoccupations
—the stream was flowing clear, undammed at last. “Tell me how you killed him, the husband.” Between quickly drawn breaths she said: “Now?” “Yes, Benedicta, now.” While she spoke I was making love to her, I was happy.

They had been mounted, had ridden far across the fields and valleys to a marsh where he had been promised game to hunt. By the side of a long narrow causeway ran a group of abandoned clay-cuttings with a rivulet flowing. Beneath the causeway was quicksand, or rather a quagmire. Urging her horse with her spurs she found it no hard matter to press his mount towards the end and softly push it over. He landed in a huge sucking surprised calm, almost disposed to laugh, looking up at her from under the brim of his soft straw hat. The sandy moustache. Two realisations gradually welled up
simultaneously
in his fuddled mind: namely, he was slowly settling in the black viscous mud, and that she had become suddenly motionless, her eyes staring down at him with an almost expressionless curiosity. But the horse knew and sent forth an almost human wail as it flailed with its legs to free them from the soft imprisonment, the anaconda coils of the mud. Appalling sounds of the sucking farting mud. As for the man he watched himself, so to speak, reflected in the pupil of that blue scientific eye, watched himself sinking down and away, out of time and mind: out of her life and out of his. Surprise held him silent. Only his youthful handsome face, now pale with sweat, held an expression of pained pleading. The treachery was so unexpected: it seemed that he had to revise the whole of their past life, their past relationship in the light of it. It was not only his past which swam before his astonished eyes but his future. He whispered “help” from a parched throat, but his lips barely framed the word. The
moustache!
But she only sat down upon the parapet, turning her mount loose, and watched the experiment with a holy concentration, forcing herself to memorise the whole thing unflinchingly so that she might recount it to Julian when the time came, when she would have to.

So he settled slowly as the westering sun itself was settling beyond the hills. They stared at each other in bitter silence, almost oblivious
of the death-struggles of the horse which blew its muddy bubbles and groaned and rolled its eyes as it slowly heaved its way
downwards,
suffocating. The mud sounded jocose. Soon he was there buried to the breastbone like some unfinished statue of an equestrian knight. “So that’s it” he said, with a wondering croak. “So that’s it, Benedicta.”

“That’s it, my darling.”

She lit a cigarette with steady fingers and smoked it fast with shallow inspirations, never taking her eyes off his. But now it was horrible, he had begun to sob; the harsh sniffs broke down the features of his face into all the planes of childhood. He was getting younger as he died, was becoming a child again. And this was hard. A hopeless sympathy welled up in her, battling against the deadly concentration. It was becoming harder to watch with all the promised detachment. He was panting, head on one side, his mouth open. His hands were still free, but his elbows were becoming slowly
imprisoned.
There might still have been time to throw him a rope and pass it round a tree? She fought the thought, holding it at bay as she watched. It wasn’t the fear of death so much, she thought, as the ignominy of her betrayal—that was what lay behind the tears of this adolescent, this infant in the straw hat. But in a little while he decided to spare her feelings, his tears ceased to flow; a lamblike resignation came over his face, for now he knew he was beyond hope. Quickly she cut a slip of reed, cleft it and passed down the lighted cigarette so that he might take a puff. But he brushed it away and with a small sigh turned his face inwards upon himself and floated thickly down in slow motion, with little shudders and no more sound—not even a reproach, a curse, a cry for help. Not a bubble. It was so quickly over. She watched and went on watching until only the hat still floated on the quag. She could hardly tear herself away from the spot now. Muttering to herself, she felt all at once as if she were in a high fever; a fiery exultation possessed her. She had shown
herself
worthy of Julian. She managed to secure the straw hat—she would carry it back to him like someone carrying the severed head of a criminal. The valley was silent, oppressively silent. She tried to sing as she went, but it only made the silent dusk more eerie. Once or twice she thought she heard the sound of horses’ hooves behind
her; and she wheeled about to see if there was anyone following—but there was nobody to be seen.

There! Easy to recount, to bring to memory, hard to assimilate. It still stuck in her throat like a bundle of bloody rags she could not swallow.

“And it’s no good saying I am sorry; yes, I am, of course. But what really ails me is the wound to my self-esteem, to find myself, my wonderful unique beautiful self guilty of so petty a betrayal. You see what a trap the ego sets you?” She raised a white fist and drummed softly on my breastbone, and then sinking down she fell, mouth to mouth in a suffocating parody of sadness which swallowed itself in the new unhindered sexual paroxysms. “But by far the most absurd and humiliating thing that happened to me was to fall in love with you at first sight. It was unbearable, such a blow to my
self-esteem,
such a danger to my freedom. And also to you—you were in such danger for such a long time. Poor fool, you wouldn’t have believed it; how could I tell you? I did not believe it myself. All that comedy of errors with the little clerk, remember? He was supposed to kill you in the cisterns. Poor man! First your hesitation about signing, then this poor foolish clerk being told to do away with you—he was unfitted for such a task, even though his own life depended upon it. All that excursion you found so funny was a sort of dress rehearsal for the job Sacrapant had been set. Mercifully you
hesitated
about signing, and this gave me a chance to reach Julian. I persuaded him to countermand the order. ‘Leave him to me’ I said. ‘I will suck him dry. He has lots to offer us as yet. If necessary I will marry him, Julian, until we can dispose of him.’ But in all the delay of sign and countersign the suspense became too much for poor Sacrapant, he knew he could never do it, that his time was up.”

“So he fell out of the sky?”

“So he fell out of the sky. Kiss me.”

“He sacrificed himself for me in a way.”

“Not really, there’s no such thing. I did.”

I began to see a little deeper into the meaning of those first
encounters,
those first brushes with the firm. They had already had a chance to see my notebooks which were from their point of view crammed with promises.

“Benedicta, darling, tell me one thing.”

But she was asleep now with her blonde head against my breast rocked by our mutual breathing as a seagull is rocked by a calm summer sea. “I see” I whispered to myself, but in fact I saw only relatively. I recalled Jocas talking about the impossibility of ever tracing the real causal relationship between an act and its reason. And in the context of beloved Sacrapant, too, I saw the little man’s pale water-rat face in the wallowing watertight of the great cisterns.

It was here in Turkey that Julian first contracted that thirst for the black sciences which has always coloured the cast of his mind; for here every form of enquiry could be pursued in absolute safety. “The idolaters of Syria and Judaea drew oracles from the heads of children which they had torn from their bodies. They dried the heads and having placed beneath the tongue a golden lamen bearing unknown ciphers they fixed them in the hollows of walls, built up a kind of false body beneath them composed of magical plants
fastened
together: they lighted a lamp under these fearful idols and proceeded with their consultation. They believed that the heads spoke … moreover it is true that blood attracts larvae. The ancients when sacrificing dug a pit which they filled with warm and smoking blood; then from the recesses of the dark night they saw the feeble and pale shadows rising up, creeping, chirping, swarming about the pit…. They kindled great fires of laurel, alder and cypress upon altars crowned with asphodel and vervain. The night seemed to grow colder …” (Julian silent in a high-backed chair with a book open on his knees). Moreover “if integrally and radically the woman leaves the passive role and enters the active, she
abdicates
her sex and becomes man, or rather, such a transformation being physically impossible, she attains affirmation by a double negation, placing herself outside both sexes like some sterile and monstrous androgyne.”

I was beginning to see him much more clearly, and in ideas like these I thought I caught a glimpse of the
alter
a
Benedicta, that lovely petrifact which destiny had transformed back into the loved original, the beloved outlaw I had almost forgotten in all this exhausting struggle. As for her mysterious and elusive lover, why should he not aspire to the mastery over age and time that Simon Magus first
achieved? “Sometimes appearing pale, withered, broken, like an old man at the point of death: at others the luminous fluid revitalised him, his eyes glittered, his skin became smooth and soft, his body upright. He could be actually seen passing from youth to
decrepitude,
childhood to age.” Nor did there seem to be any perversity in these speculations which swarmed in the young Julian’s mind; everything was tinged with the vast oriental passivity of the place. Down below the jetty at Avalon you could still see, if you dived, the weighed sacks with the heads of the women—some forty—done to death like cats by Abdul Hamid in a sudden rage of revulsion against sex. Those that did not sink at once were beaten to death with oars in the green evening; their wails were piteous to hear, the boatmen had tears running down their faces as they worked. And Hamid? Do you remember the description of Sardanapalus the great king? “He entered and saw with surprise the king with his face covered in white lead, and all bejewelled like a woman, combing out purple wool in the company of his concubines and sitting among them with blackened eyes, wearing a woman’s dress and having his beard shaved close and his skin rubbed with pumice. His eyelids too were painted….” Then the great pyre he built to end his days; several storeys high it stood: and the conflagration lasted for weeks.
Everything,
to the smallest of his belongings, went up.

Mind you, only once did she dare to say that she loved him to his face, only once. His look of horror and fury was quite indescribable. He struck her across the face with a book, without contempt yet deliberately. “Hush” he said on a deep resonant note. “Hush, my darling.” He was trying to say that it was not love, it was possession, and that her use of the word diminished the truth of the sentiment. Sentiment? No, that is not the word. She endured every kind of physical and sexual humiliation at his hands with the deepest joy, the profoundest pleasure. Julian was born never to weep. It was Jocas who took the scissors and embedded them in the wall of the cellars with their handles protruding. It had been decided that Julian was to go away, to be educated separately; partly it was the strain of the internal hatred between them all that decided the matter. But it was also dictated by the future needs of the firm, the firm that was going to be; for Merlin’s quiet calculations were all
bearing fruit slowly. His subtleties put many a fruitful project in his way: as when Abdul Hamid had given a concession for the purchase and sale of tobacco
en
régie
to a company unwise enough to order Austrian cigarette paper stamped with the Sultan’s
tougra
or
monogram.
Nobody would have noticed this except a man like Merlin. Was the sultan, he asked, content to have his effigy spat upon daily by tens of thousands of cigarette-smokers in the kingdom? It was the same with the postage stamps which bore the monster’s head. Were these also to be spittled over by scribes? Within a short space of time he secured both concessions for himself, for the firm.