The Revolt of Aphrodite (72 page)

“In the old days,” he said “at the very beginning when the firm was a small thing, a [he inserted the Greek word for a newly born infant] … in those days every one of our transactions had to be done on trust, on an exchange of salt mostly. Arabia and so on. People could
not
write,
Felix. All was human memory. Even quite late our whole accounting was with the oldfashioned abacus which you still see in Greek grocery shops today. The only factor that made for our security was mutual trust. When I thought about freedom and remembered the old days I thought very heavily—
elephant-heavily
—around this quite small but precise condition. All our money was deployed around the sea of the east, and while here and there was some little scraps of paper signed with thumbs, the most was in risk of trust. We had to
believe
in such a thing as an exchange of salt with a sheik. It was the only strong thing, the only plank. Now then all this paper came, all this contract business came. The whole firm became so big, so complicated. The salt had lost its savour, doesn’t it say somewhere in the Bible? I thought. I thought. When Julian told me that the whole of the contracts of the firm had been photographed on film and that one little house held them all I had an extraordinary idea … I thought one night very late, while I was talking to myself. I thought: suppose we destroyed all contracts—the whole of the written thing. What would happen?”

He looked terribly excited, swallowed twice heavily, and then joined his hands on his breast. I suddenly felt myself face to face with one of those tremendously simple, but at the same time critical, veins of thought which belonged to what Marchant and I (in the case of Iolanthe) had labelled the contingency vector; it was the “supposing scale” and I imagine it represented in rough mechanical terms that sector of the human consciousness where the full horror of the idea of freewill comes to be understood or felt. It is this
terrifying
idea which causes people to throw themselves off cliffs (just to see what will happen): or to play Russian roulette with a pistol they just happened to find on a shelf…. If is the key of If. And then I thought of the little library which housed the total contractual commitments of the firm on microfilm. There had been a good deal of newspaper ballyhoo when Merlin’s went on to microfilm; its contract department had by then grown to the size of the Bodleian. Now all the paper had gone. A special little funerary monument—not by Caradoc this time—had been erected to house the film in a London suburb. An ungainly little building, something between a Roman villa and the old Euston station. I recalled Caradoc’s fury at this awkward neo-Egyptian monster of a creation with it four stout elephant columns. Above it was a small flat where the egregious Shadbolt lived (the same old chap who had drawn up Benedicta’s marriage contract with me). He was now Registrar of Contracts. Well, it was not unlike a small and hideous crematorium. But I
interrupted
this train of thought to concentrate rather more deeply on what Jocas was trying to tell me. “What would happen?” he
repeated
again, dramatically, but in a lower register. “Either the whole thing, the whole construction would dissolve.” He threw his eyes back into his skull, showing the whites, which is the Turkish way of illustrating total catastrophe. “Or else …
nothing
at all. Without the bonds of the paper and the signatures
trust
might come back, the idea of obligation to one’s word, one’s spoken bond, one’s salt.” I realised that I was in the presence of a great, but completely insane idealist. Trust indeed! But he went on headlong.

“Now I am so happy to know that you will try this freedom
yourself
—you will do this thing when once you are the head of the firm. Zeno has seen it all very clearly. He sees you give a last supper with twelve people in the big house. That same night you will completely burn every contract and announce it to the world. Very exciting. It will be a big fire. One old man will be burnt in it. But it will be the crown of your career. Only what happens after, if the firm continues or if it dissolves, Zeno cannot see clearly and he is too honest to pretend all this.”

He gave a little chuckle and added, “Of course Julian doesn’t believe in these nonsenses, perhaps you don’t either. But she does,
Benedicta does. She has lived long enough in Turkey to know how sometimes strange things are real.”

“Who is Zeno?” I asked purely to avoid taking up a definitive position vis-à-vis all these shadowy postulates. It seemed that he was an old Greek clerk who worked in the counting house in the city; subject to visions. Genus epileptoid, I had no doubt. It was as if the great aborted dream of Byzance lived on in the weaker psychic specimens of Polis, troubling their sleep with its tenebrous floating visions of a future which chance had aborted. I suddenly seemed to hear the disagreeable yelping of the barking dervishes ringing in my ears; how they flopped about the floor of the mosque yelping and foaming just like the schizos in the Paulhaus. Or else fell about like toads, beating up the dust and screaming. It was all part and parcel of the same type of phenomenon I have no doubt.

Beside the bed lay a stout oldfashioned family Bible encrusted with coloured wax from the candles. From between its leaves Jocas
produced
a small piece of paper written over in a very fine Greek hand; there was a drawing of a table-plan. From the red thumbprint (the attested signature with date) I recognised it as a witnessed prophecy—the sort of thing that idiots and hysterical soothsayers produce on saints’ days. But the writing was crafty and very beautiful, the hand of an educated man. I took it and put it away to study at leisure—cursing the infernal rustiness of my Greek. “He does not know the people,” said Jocas “but he described them and I put the name in with a pencil. You shall see. Anyway.” He made a vague gesture and sank back, drooping a little from fatigue at last. I wondered whether we should leave him.

Benedicta seemed disposed to stay awhile as yet, and he for his part seemed to derive comfort from the touch of her hand on his. But Caradoc provided a slight diversion by picking up a lantern and saying that he must attend to the calls of nature; and I took the chance of joining him to get a breath of air. We climbed out upon the unwalled shelf, the balcony above the sea, and made our slow way along the paths which led to the headland of which Jocas had spoken. A cloudy sky obscured the nascent moonlight; far below us the ocean gulped. Somewhere in the obscurity below us ships moved, their lights glimmering frail as fireflies. But clouds were rolling in
slowly towards the shore and a heavy dew had fallen. At last we came out upon the site of this proposed building—perhaps it was an old threshing-floor, built up belvedere-like over the sea. Despite the general darkness one could feel the dominance of the position, could divine the splendour of the surrounding views in fine weather. But Caradoc was morose; he set down the lantern to attend to his business, and then came and sat beside me on a boulder, shaking his head and growling a bit. “What is it?” I said. “Don’t you think you can do it? I said this to annoy him, and the remark was quite successful. “Do it?” he snarled. “Of course I can do it. That’s not what’s worrying me. The problem is Jocas. He has got ancient Greece on the brain, and has been pining for the bloody Parthenon for half a lifetime now—he will never pass my drawings; not of the sort of thing I have in mind. Not in a month of Sundays. He does not realise the first thing about building; his idea would be something between a cassata ice cream and a Georgian rotunda. He doesn’t realise that a real piece of building must be responsive to the emanations of the ground upon which it stands. To a certain extent the available materials create limitations and point out clues. In the Celebes, for example, bamboo, fern, leaves, lianas, they all dictate the weight and form of the construction—but they also echo the soul-form of the man who
inhabits
them. For those islanders the notion of life and death are dream-like, unsubstantial, poetical; their culture is born in a
butterfly’s
soul. Just as Tokio is all mouse-culture, a mouse-capital. We must build with this sense of congruence to place. The Parthenon would be a joke propped up here on this Turkish headland. Why? Because the soul-form of the Greeks was different, their
metaphysical
attitude to things was sensual, relatively indifferent to death and time. And their sense of plastic was really related to plane surfaces decorated on the flat, not to volume. All their stuff is radiantly human because the scale is small, nothing larger than life size. Their sunny philosophy domesticated not only life, but also death, one has the feeling that even the huge Gods were home-made,
perhaps
formed by the hands of children in a cookery class. No morality either to shock and frighten. Innocence, a gem-like trance. All the ominous or minatory elements in their history were imported from death-saturated lands like Egypt, like this here bloody Turkey?” He
flashed me a glance of righteous indignation from under his shaggy prophetic brows. “Just sit here and listen to Turkey, listen to what it says” he went on. “It’s a heavy death-propelled wavelength, the daze of some old alligator slumbering in the mud. It has all the solemnity the heavy somnolence of Egypt, the one country above all which specialised in death; if Turkey ever showed flower in a cultural way it will echo Egypt, not Greece. That is why all this embalming business of Goytz is a stroke of genius. Some cultures are so death-weighted that they store up their dead, they are
ancestor
-obsessed like the Chinese.
That
is the call-sign of this gloomy old land. Consequently if one tunes in and tries to set it to an
architecture
one is almost driven to echo the grave ponderous style of an Egypt; the bright blue and white of Greece would never work. But how to tell Jocas that?”

I changed the conversation abruptly. “That well over there” I said gravely. (I was surprised to find myself a trifle drunk.) “That well already houses the genius of your mausoleum. Jocas has imported a snow white python from the island of Crete; and he has planted an almond tree for it to climb. Prophecies will spring from this tomb, Caradoc.” I invented all this of course in order to scare him. I knew he was particularly frightened of snakes. It had the desired effect. He secured his lantern and said irritably, “Why didn’t you say so before? We might have sat on the damn thing.”

When we got back to the house it was to find most of the lights turned low and Jocas asleep with a smile on his face; Benedicta had disappeared. The attendant drowsed on his upright chair. We made our uneven way back to the villa where we had been allocated rooms. Caradoc holding his lantern high examined the cracked plaster cherubs, the broken marble fireplaces, the litter on the dirty flags, with a sustained curiosity. I found a candlestick and lit it. Benedicta had been given a room to herself on the balcony side of the house. I had been allocated a sort of uncomfortable box-room. Though I was weary I found it difficult to sleep, I suppose because of the atrocious but heady black wine we had been sluicing. So I wrote a little letter to Benedicta—something to read when she woke up alone in bed. “Dear Benedicta, the whole point—why will you never grasp it? The whole point is that time gives birth to space. but space gives
death to time. (The ancient liver mantic was an attempt to read
forward
into time—and it might have worked for them.) That is the only reason for my loving you—because you simply cannot grasp the meaning of causality in the new terms. I would add an equation or two but I am rather drunk and the light is bad. So I will content myself by warning you gravely about the perils of such homely ignorance. It saps the will and rots the cortex. Squinch. Felix.” I suppose it lacked warmth; and it certainly wasn’t what I intended to say when I took out my pencil. I pondered, and at last traced the missing component. My postscript read: “I would be quite willing to dismantle and abolish Iolanthe if you asked me to do so.”

An uneasy night of shallow dreams, bird noises, howling of dogs; but then I dozed off and slept quite a way into the morning. It was a dark and gloomy day with huge shaggy clouds hanging motionless over everything; the gulf was the colour of gunmetal. Beside my bed I found the response to my letter of the night before. “It’s my job now to see that you do what you feel you must. Anything else would be fatal to both of us. I must say you are an awful fool, which is
consoling
in a hopeless sort of way. Meet me at Eyub at four.”

I was startled to find that it was already ten o’clock; she had taken the launch into Polis, in order to spend the day wandering about its streets and mosques. Meanwhile the returning boat brought the little doctor with it. Jocas was wide awake and alert in his birdlike way. “She wants you to meet her in Polis” he said. I said I knew. From the only bathroom came the sound of prodigious swishing—as if a herd of elephants were hosing each other down. “It is Caradoc taking a bath” said Jocas solemnly, and then added (for all the world as if he had mind-read the whole of our conversation of last night): “I have told him that I do not wish to see any plans. He is free to design what he pleases. He has the money and the site. I will trust him to make a most characteristic thing for the family.” I whistled with surprise and pleasure. Presently Caradoc, hale and ruddy after his ablutions, emerged from the depths. He was looking happy for a change, indeed radiant. “Did you hear?” he boomed. “Jocas is going to trust me all the way.” This seemed to call for a celebration and despite the earliness of the hour and the slight trace of hangover I coyly accepted a glass of fiery
raki.

I left the company gathered about the huge bed and (grateful for an old umbrella I had brought) found my way down through the gardens to where the white launch lay at the landing stage, waiting with steam up to take me into town. The sea was black and calm, luminous and bituminous all at once; we rustled across it at full speed. I studied with interest (perhaps amusement, so foolish am I) the prophecy of Zeno and the elaborate table-plan he had drawn for this classical last supper of mine. What the devil was it all about? It reminded me a little of the Banubula Tune talisman—twelve places of which three were empty. But the pencilled names were those of my friends—Vibart, Pulley, Marchant, Banubula, Nash, etc. etc. There were empty places, too, at this table and I wondered a little about them. It seemed that neither Julian nor Jocas was to be of the party; and perhaps one of the missing places might belong to Iolanthe? I don’t know. It was all pretty vague as these things so often are; and of course there was no precise date for the thing—there never is! However I felt charitably disposed towards occultism on Tuesdays, and I pocketed it with a sigh, and turned to regale myself with the black water and the livid marks we were making in it. And the sombre city came up like a long succession of “states”: I am groping for the image of an etching evolving through a number of different stages, slowly as the elaborations of detail are multiplied. I wondered what Benedicta might be doing; I closed my eyes and tried to imagine where she was—perhaps sitting on a block of masonry by her mother’s grave in Eyub or else (more likely) sitting in the little garden by the mosque where Sacrapant fell, drinking a benedictine and smoking a gold-tipped cigarette. There was time to kill. In this gloomy sodden-looking weather I found my way across the arcades of the grand bazaar to the little restaurant where once (how many centuries ago?) I had dined with Vibart and his wife, and listened to his histrionic dissertations on good books and bad. Pia, I had almost forgotten how she looked; I had a recollection of brilliant eyes, watchful, amused. For the life of me I could not associate her with Jocas—but there it was. And following out this train of thought I bumped into Vibart himself just as he was about to seat himself at a table. “Join me” he said, and all of sudden it was a new version of my old friend which presented itself to my vision; no more was he
morose and cast down. He radiated rather a recovered composure, a temperamental calm. He saw me looking at him and smiled. “It’s come out, the equation” he said at last, turning his handsome smiling head sideways to examine himself in the mirror. “I spent all last night walking about until I found the missing collar-stud. I’ve solved it, man. It’s the smallest thing imaginable but it has been teasing my reason for so long now that it was a great relief to catch it by the tail. I was right to do it for myself and not ask poor Jocas foolish questions. It has to do with the quality of my loving, the subtle thing that didn’t click between Pia and me. It came from the fact that I loved her not as a man loves a a woman, but as a woman loves a man. In a subtle sort of way my attitude qualified my
masculinity
in the exchange. I wonder if you see? It is so clear to me. I’d turned the flow of affect or whatever upside down; and she was too much a woman to love except as a woman. It’s such a relief, I feel like singing.”