The Revolt of Aphrodite (8 page)

I perked up. “Can you imagine a worse fate for a politician raised in a tradition of public rhetoric? No wonder he’s finished.”

“Did you say
deaf
?”
I said.

“Deaf!” I had become very fond of the word and repeated it softly to myself. It had become a very beautiful word to me.

“And I have to sermonise on the Mount” repeated Caradoc with
disgust. “Something to give ears to the deaf, something full of
arse-felt
greetings and blubberly love. I ask you. As if it could avert the worst.”

“What worst?” I asked; it seemed to me that for days now I had done nothing but ask questions to which nobody could or would provide an answer. Caradoc shook himself and said: “How should I know? I am only an architect.”

Lights were coming down the road. It was Hippolyta’s car. We signalled and galloped towards it.

* * * * *

S
omewhere here the continuity becomes impacted again, or
dispersed
. “I was the fruit of a mixed mirage” said Caradoc, dining Chez Vivi with a group of money-loving boors with polish. Laughing until his buttonhole tumbled into his wineglass. “We must work for the greatest happiness of the highest few.” I had by then confided my orient pearls to the care of Hippolyta for Graphos. A queer sort of prosopography reigns over this section of time. Arriving too early, for example, I waited in the rosegarden while she saw Graphos to his car. I had only seen his picture in the paper, or seen him sitting in the back of a silver car, waving to crowds. I had missed the club foot; now as they came down the path arm in arm I heard the shuffling syncopated walk, and I realised that he had greater burdens to carry than merely his increasing deafness. His silver hair and narrow wood-beetle’s head with those melancholy incurious eyes—they were set off by the silver ties he wore, imported from Germany. Somewhere in spite of the cunning he gave off
all the lethargy of riches. I came upon exactly the quality of the infatuation he had engendered in an ancient Greek poem about a male lover.

Insight is definitely a handicap when it comes to loving. (His rival shot him stone dead with a longbow.) On the lavatory wall someone had marked the three stages of man after the classical formula.

“The danger for Graphos is that he has begun to think of himself in the third person singular” she said sadly, but much later. All this data vibrates on now across the screens of the ordering condensers in Abel, to emerge at the requisite angle of inclination.

Nor was my experiment with Caradoc’s voice less successful; amongst the confusion and general blurr of conversation there was a brief passage extolling the charms of Fatma to which she listened with considerable amusement, and which I found centuries later among my baggage and fed to A. “She may not be a goddess to
everyone
” he begins a trifle defensively “though her lineaments reveal an ancient heritage. An early victim of ritual infibulation was she. Later Albanian doctors sewed up the hymen with number twelve pack thread so that she might contract an honourable union. No wonder her husband jumped off a cliff after so long and arduous a
honeymoon
. In their professional excitement the doctors had by mistake used the strings of a guitar. She gave out whole arpeggios like a musical box when she opened her legs. Her husband, once recovered, sent her back to her parents with a hole bored in her frock to show that she was no virgin. Litigation over the affair is doubtless still going on. But meanwhile what was Fatma to do? She took the priapic road like so many others. She walked in peace and brightness holding the leather phallus, the sacred
olisbos
in the processions of Mrs. Henniker. Nor must we forget that these parts were
aidoion
to the Greeks, ‘inspiring holy awe’. There is no special word for chastity in ancient Greek. It was the Church Fathers who, being troubled and a trifle perverted, invented
agneia.
But bless you, Fatma does not know that, to this very day. When she dies her likeness will be in
all the taverns, her tomb at the Nube covered with votive laurels; she will have earned the
noblissima
meretrix
of future ages. Biology will have to be nudged to make room for Fatma.”

But the rest scattered with the talk as gun-shy birds will at a
clapping
of hands. Something vague remains which might be guessed to concern the Piraeus brothel where many of the names live on from the catalogues of Athenaeus—like Damasandra which means, “the man-crusher”: and the little thin ones, all skin and bone and saucer eyes, are still “anchovies”. Superimposed somewhere in all this Iolanthe’s just-as-ancient moral world out of Greek time. Skins plastered with white lead to hide the chancres, jowls stained with mulberry juice, blown hair powdering to grey, underside of olives in wind but not half as venerable. The Lydians spayed their women and did their flogging to the sound of a flute. Depilatories of pitch-plaster battling desperately against the approach of old age…. The
appropriate
sounds of the fountain whispering and of a leather-covered bottle being decanted. Then amidst yawns C’s declamation of a poem called The Origen of Species

Somewhere, too, room must be made for the scattered utterances of Koepgen—his notebooks were always to hand, not a drop was spilt. Records from some Plaka evening under a vine-tent, mewed at by mandolines. “First pick your wine: then bleed into it preciously, drop by drop, the living semen of the resin. Then pour out and drink to complete the ikonography of a mind at odds with itself here below the lid of sky. The differences can be reconciled for a while by these humble tin jars.” Singing has blurred the rest of it, but here and there, like the glint of mica in stone, the ear catches a solidified echo. “Have you noticed that at the moment of death a man breathes in through both nostrils?”

These simple indices of acute anxiety, racing pulse, incontinence, motor incoordination (wine jar spilt, flowers scattered, vase broken) involve the loss of reflexes acquired within the first year of infant life.
Iolanthe cannot be to blame. She sleeps like a mouse-widow with her hair in her mouth, black fingernails extended on the pillow like grotesque fingerprints. Bodies smelling hot and rank.

Somewhere here also, among the shattered fragments recovered from old recordings, Abel has the germ plasm of Hippolyta’s voice, vivacious and halting, running on like a brook in a dry river-bed. The black of that perfumed hair when set seems to be charcoal, carved and buffed—or a Chinese ink which holds its sheen even in darkness. She walks naked, unselfconscious, to the balcony to find the car keys, and when he has driven off without a backward glance she goes
barefoot
down the garden path to the small Byzantine chapel at the end to consult the hovering Draconian eyes of the ikons, the reproachful smile of St. Barbara. Here to light the lamps and mutter the
traditional
prayers.

It never ceases to amaze me that throughout all this period,
unknown
to me, Benedicta was approaching; she was sliding down the mighty Danube whose feeble headspring crawls out of a small
opening
in the courtyard of some German castle. Lulled by the voices of the Nibelungs she sees great castles in ruins brooding on their own reflections in the running water. Trees arch over Durnstein: then Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and down through the Iron Gates to scout the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria in a Rumanian packet slim as a cigarette; and so down the Bosphorus to where the crooked
calligraphy
of mosques and spires waited for her in Polis. And for Charlock.

The journey had been arranged for her by the firm; young widows must do their forgetting somehow.

Little eddies of thyme and rosemary lay about in parcels among the columns; one walked into them. There was no breeze. The sun had completed its impressive weight-lifting act and plunged into the darkness. Violet the Saronic Gulf, topaz Hymettus, lilac bronze the marbles. The oncoming night was freshening towards the dews of midnight and after. Here we were assembled, some two hundred people, at the northern end of the Parthenon.
Tenue
de
ville,
dark suits, cocktail dresses. It seemed a fairly representative lecture
audience
—members of the Academy and the Temple of Science,
professors
and other riff-raff of this order. In this cool stable air everyone
was relaxed and informal, indeed mildly gay. Except Hippolyta, who was in a high state of nerves, eating valerian cachets one after another to calm herself. On the top plinth, among the columns, stood a
lectern
with a lamp. It was from here that Caradoc was supposed to be lecturing. The general disposition of the chairs for the audience was pleasantly informal. They were dotted about in groups among the shattered rubble. Everything promised—or so I thought. Doubtless the site itself was responsible for these feelings for who can see the blasted Parthenon at dusk without wanting to put his arms round it? Moreover in this honeyed oncoming of night with its promise of a late moonrise, an occasional firefly triggering on the slopes below, the owls calling?

Below the battlements glowed the magic display of precious stones which is Athens at night: a spilled jewel-casket. The shaven hills like penitents bowed around us and domed the whole in watchful silence. Yes, but what of the lecturer?

“I haven’t been able to reach him all day. He’s been out with Sipple, drinking very heavily. They were seen on bicycles at Phaleron this afternoon, very unsteady. I’ve hunted everywhere. If he doesn’t come in another five minutes I shall have to call the whole thing off. Imagine how delighted the women will be to see me humiliated like this.” I took her arm and tried to calm her. But she was trembling with anxiety and fury combined. It was true that a slight restlessness had begun to make itself felt in the audience. Conversation had begun to dwindle, become more desultory. The women had taken stock of each other’s clothes and were becoming bored. “Give him time” I said for the fourth time. People had started to cough and cross their legs.

At this moment a vague shape emerged from among the distant columns and began to move towards us with a slow, curmudgeonly tread. At first it was a mere shadowy sketch of a man but gradually it began to take on shape as it approached. It held what appeared to be a bottle in its left hand. Head bent, it appeared to be sunk in the deepest meditation as it advanced with this lagging unsteady gait. “It’s Caradoc” she hissed with a mixture of elation, terror and doubt. The figure stopped short and gazed at us all with amazement, as if seeing us all for the first time, and quite unexpectedly. “He’s drunk”
she added with disgust gripping my arm. “O God! And he has
forgotten
all about the lecture.”

Indeed it was easy to read all this into the expressions which played about those noble if somewhat dispersed features. It was the face of a man who asks himself desperately what the devil he is supposed to be doing in such a place, at such a time. He gazed at the lectern with a slowly maturing astonishment, and then at the assembly grouped before him. “Well I’m damned” he said audibly. At this moment the despairing Hippolyta saved the day by starting to applaud. Everyone took up and echoed the clapping and the ripple of sound seemed to stir some deep chord in the remoter recesses of the lecturer’s memory. He frowned and sucked his teeth as he explored these fugitive memories, sorting them hazily into groups. The quixotic clapping swelled, and its implications began slowly to dawn on him. It was for him, all this! Yes, after all there was some little matter of a lecture. A broad smile illumined those heroic features. “The lecture, of course” he said, with evident relief, and set his bottle down on the plinth
beside
him—slowly, but without an over-elaborate display of
unsteadiness
. It was impossible to judge whether he looked as drunk to the rest of the audience as he did to us. They did not perhaps know him well enough to detect more than a desirable flamboyance of attitude—the nonchalance of a great foreign savant. Moreover his tangled mane of hair and his rumpled clothes seemed oddly in keeping with the place. He had appeared like some sage or prophet from among the columns—bearing perhaps an oracle? A ripple of interest went through us all. The Greeks, with their highly tuned sense of dramatic oratory, must have believed this to be a calculated entry suitable to a man about to discourse on this most enigmatic of ancient monuments. But it was all very well for him to remember the lecture at this late date—it must have been gnawing at the fringes of his subconscious all day: but if he had prepared nothing? Hippolyta trembled like a leaf. Our hands locked in sympathetic alarm we watched him take a few steps forward and grip the lectern forcibly, like a dentist about to pluck out a molar. He gazed around in leonine fashion under frowning eyebrows. Then he curtly raised his hand and the clapping ebbed away into silence.

“All day,” he said on a hoarse and delphic note “I have been
locked in meditation, wondering what I was going to tell you tonight about this.” He waved an arm towards the columns behind. Hippo sighed with growing relief. “At least he is not completely out.” Quite the contrary. His speech was thick but audible and unslurred. He was making a rapid recovery, hand over fist. “Wondering” he went on in the same rasping tone “how much I would
dare
to reveal of what I know.”