Finally, he said to me: “It’s necessary that we belong to one another, Naïs. There is no point in wanting to go against destiny, for what must happen always happens.” And after a pause: “Come and join me at dusk tomorrow at the baths of Thrasyllus. I’ll wait for you there.”
I separated from him emotional and radiant. I savored the generous pulsations of my heart. A vague spirit of delight and triumph flattered me and lightened me.
Until tomorrow...
XIV
I prepared myself at the hour of the triumphant sun, and I put a little acanthus juice on my face, even thought Polemon detested make-up, so pale with impatience and emotion did I seem when I looked at myself in my mirror.
Before crossing the threshold I made a vow to consecrate my new robe and all my golden pins to Venus if my day concluded happily.
I found Polemon emerging from the baths of Thrasyllus. He was clad in a somber and simple tunic but a strange fire was still burning in his visage. He appeared to me to be mysterious and powerful, like the statues by Harpocrates that command silence and invite meditation.
Scarcely had he seen me than he ran to press my arms in his hands. He looked me in the eyes, softly, and then said: “Would you like to spend a few hours in my house, Naïs? It is in supplication now that I ask you that, for I desire you.”
“Yes, Polemon, I would like that. My desires are knotted narrowly with yours.”
We went along the street of the Tripods slowly. We were walking silently, and it was thus that we arrived before the Satyr that rises up in front of the temple, smiling and hairy, on its bronze pedestal.
“It’s affirmed,” Polemon told me, “that Phryne, invited to choose among the works of her lover Praxiteles, and desiring to know which one was the best, imagined announcing abruptly to the artist one day that his studio had caught fire. ‘As long as my Amour and my Satyr are spared!’ Praxiteles replied, thus distinguishing, particularly, this excellent bronze.”
“Indeed,” I said, “this Satyr appears a living and active apparition. His posture seems to be that of someone reposing, and yet one might think that he is quivering with life and ready to bound.”
“He is the ultimate god,” Polemon went on, “the primordial breath that already fecundated things well before Olympus was populated by the generation of younger gods. Dispenser of joy and plenitude, he is the great ancestor, the original womb of creation. He incites and gives birth not only to love and hatred, but the forces and the saps that equilibrate the universe and cause it to advance and progress. We can, therefore, worship this original god, Naïs, in order for him to provide us in return with ardor and exaltation.”
Meanwhile, we went past the chryselephantine statue of Alcmene, and Polemon soon introduced me into his house.
It was very simple, but entirely made of marble. A little garden of roses and jasmines in flower enlaced it in its iridescence and varied splendors.
“This house, which I bought with what remains of my paternal fortune, was never to shelter a woman,” Polemon told me. “You are the first to enter it, Naïs, and in violation of my oath. But I can’t feel the slightest regret for that. Since the other day, I have recognized the vanity of all efforts, and I laugh bitterly in seeing how taut and fragile by virtue was, ready to desert at the first assault.”
We sat down at the entrance, near the sacrificial stone. Polemon looked at me passionately for a moment, and the sight of me seemed to draw him into long meditation.
Finally, he said, as if speaking to himself: “Inexpressible charms of desire, how powerfully you weave the veil of illusion that must cover us! The mortal and consequently imperfect image of the woman we desire is completed and perfected so delightfully within us, extracts so many new attractions in our thought, is saturated so abundantly therein with seduction that it becomes invincible and incomparable, and attains the ideal images of divinity. How will we ever be able to liberate ourselves from the trap that we create with our own substance?”
Finally, turning to me, he said: “It would be difficult for me to describe to you, Naïs, what a prosperous and miraculous florescence the seeds of desire have produced that your body and attitudes have sown within me. If I put so much vehemence into refusing you, it was because I feared the powerful poison of your caresses and the force with which they operated within me.
“What shook me above all, and conquered me, was the precise vision of the sensualities that you could provoke. I divined, I knew, with a sure science, that scarcely would I have touched you than our souls would have mingled and confounded. My being would create new sensualities in order better to enlace you and seize you carnally.
“I conserved ineradicably your voluptuous attitude at the moment when, seeking to retain me when I was about to leave your house, you leaned forward, keeping your eyes avidly fixed on mine. I sensed that you were omnipotent in that instant, as powerful as the wave that overwhelms a ship, as the night that overcomes the mountain, as all invincible and occult forces.
“Such was my ardor to enclose you in my arms, and such also was my fear and disarray and sensing myself vanquished and subjugated by a woman, that I began to have ambiguous, delightful and terrible visions in which amour as mingled with death. Since that moment, you have not ceased to haunt my imagination. I rediscover you in all the spectacles that nature offers me.
“Yesterday morning, on the rocks of Piraeus, before the even respiration of the sea, I thought of the powerful elevation of bodies that sensuality agitates. Later, mounted on a Thessalian horse and riding through the countryside of Colonna, I mingled your image with the intoxication and vertigo of speed, with all the vital tumult that we experience in devouring distance. I wanted to have you there, clinging, confounded with me by the sharp anguish of a kiss, and to drink your breath, on the charger carried away by its bounds, leaps and shivers, to vary and diversify our enjoyment, associating it with all the caprices of its fervor and impetuosity.
“But I renounce, O Naïs, recounting you my obsessions. Know that I was completely yours from the moment that I drew away from your house. All my past life was engulfed in eternal forgetfulness. From then on, my existence had no goal but seeing you again and realizing the dreams and images that my desire suggested to me. Now, once again, such a mysterious attraction impels me toward you that I dread taking you in my arms. I fear the imminent hour of our union, for I believe that the joy that I shall experience therein will be mortal, ill-adapted to human nature and equivalent to death.”
I did not reply to Polemon. The flame of words and the vehemence of images had gained me entirely. I did not reply to him; I drew him toward me and we went into the doma.
I shall never forget that simple and spacious place, filled with the religious horror of a sanctuary. No furniture, no ornament, except for a tiger-skin extended on the floor and strewn with rose petals. A large inclined mirror reflected the bare room and gave it a blue-tinted profundity. And all of that vacillated, darkened and was veiled, for a milky vapor of incense created a perfumed mist, separated things as if by vague shrouds, and incessantly made and unmade the forms and the lines.
Without saying anything more to me, Polemon drew me to the couch.
His ardor was silent. Until then I had seen him measured and calm. Now he was transformed and transfigured. All of his concentration, one might have thought, was mutated into a muted and valorous potency, which kneaded my body easily, as a sculptor molds social and malleable clay.
And as his amour had also communicated to me an unknown sensation, never experienced before, something more than mad joy, a sort of Dionysiac fury, I began to compete with him, to give him kiss for kiss, caress for caress. I sought him out and then I fled; I covered his head with my hair, his mouth with my lips, and his body with my agitated flesh.
The mirror repeated our beautiful dementia, the stubborn and somber fervor that made is resemble two sublime workmen occupied in digging I know not what immense tomb in order to bury themselves therein.
/> A time equal to eternity went by during our intercourse. I could not measure it. But I know that we forced the common limits and terrestrial conditions of sensuality. I felt like a skylark penetrated by sunlight. My eyes filled now with myriads of sparks, and in the magical stream of light images of my childhood passed back and forth, all the sweet moments of my life. Then, little by little, I believe that my thought faded away, that my senses retreated, that I was devoid of memory, devoid of past and future, light flotsam agitating in a lactescent sea strewn with roses.
When I recovered consciousness we were separated. Leaning over me, Polemon was caressing my inanimate head.
“You see, Naïs,” he said, “that there is such scant difference between amour and death.”
Then: “Your eyelids are covered with shadow, Naïs, and your pupils enormously dilated.”
Going to the mirror, he covered it.
“Let the illusion end,” he said.
I felt pure and clear, as if pleasure and its sweetness had remade a virginal innocence.
“I believe, Polemon,” I said, “that you have stamped me with an indelible mark. My body has forgotten what it was before knowing you.”
“I have given you my life and, for your art, you have revealed your intimate virtues to me. Your beauty and my strength know one another, are allied. Henceforth and until the end of time, somewhere, there will be our united shadow, our paired image. Sensuality has infinite echoes in time. It alone dominates immortality.
And as I left in order to go back to my house: “While I was in your arms, Naïs, I believed that the primordial attraction that had reassembled and harmonized the atoms to form my consciousness had vanished and that I was scattered in space. Now it appears to me that I am slowly being reborn, and that every wayward element is coming to resume its place. How great it is, the force of amour! There is more of the divine contained in a kiss than on the Acropolis and the temple of Eleusis combined.”
As he left me on the threshold of my house, he brushed my cheek with his lips, and that caress was as immaterial as the touch of a wing.
“Until tomorrow,” I said to him, “isn’t it?”
He looked at me with a suddenly-altered gaze, which came, one might have thought, from the depths of his thought.
“It’s frightening to talk about tomorrow, Naïs. Tomorrow is the somber prey, the obscure possession of the jealous gods.”
“But can we live henceforth without one another, Polemon?”
“Leave destiny the care of uniting us. It’s will is always accomplished, in spite of our words.”
“Then: “Until tomorrow, perhaps,” he acquiesced.
Then I saw a nocturnal bird deploying large frightened wings and flying toward the sky to my left. And I remembered that the world shelters hostile forces, and that happiness is a fleeting shadow...
XV
Sleep was approaching and I already found myself in the indecisive felicity that precedes the extinction of consciousness when someone knocked on my door.
I had promised myself that no lover would have access to my house that evening. I aspired to collect myself in the memory of Polemon’s caresses. In any case, my body was exhausted, bruised by the ardent enterprises of amour. I therefore pretended not to hear it and tried to fall asleep; but the door was shaken again and a voice that was neither rude not drunken called me by name:
“Naïs! Naïs!”
I got up, half by will and half by force, and demanded to know who was knocking at such an hour.
“Me, Stagonium.”
I opened up slowly, without desire, for Stagonium was still late nights and futile distractions. But the poor child came in, pale and distraught.
“Will you allow me to share your bed, Naïs?” she said. “It’s because I’m dying of fatigue. I don’t know where to take refuge tonight, and I’m fearful that the watch, finding me alone in the street, might mistreat me.”
“Why, then, are you out of your bed and far from your sister Anthis? If you were at some dinner with your flute, why didn’t you wait until morning to leave? Unless some lover...”
“Oh, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you my strange adventure in a little while. But permit me first to lie down beside you.”
“Lie down, lie down, Stagonium. Only refrain from embracing me, and even from touching me, for my body is weighing me down and my sensibility is capsized, so any caress would awaken torments in me.”
She stretched out lightly in the bed, and when she had recovered her breath she told me her story.
“I was getting ready to accompany Anthis, who had to go to the house of Cocalus. Perhaps you know him, the fishmonger who is scornful of clients and who scarcely mutters fragments of words, saying ‘bot’ for turbot and ‘dine’ for sardine. If you reproach him for selling dear, he replies to you that the fish are not for your teeth, and if you remark that his gudgeon have rotting phosphorescent eyes he tells you that it’s your nose that has infected the fish. But he’s made a fortune in that thieving métier and now he gives dinners and ostentatiously offers bronze bowls to his guests in which to wash their hands.”
“And you’ve been in Cocalus’ house?”
“No, Naïs, I didn’t go, for at the last minute Tychon, the young chiliarch, the one who followed the Poliorcetes to the land of the Nabataeans, informed me that he had returned and wanted to spend the night with me. I’ve known him for a long time and we slept in the same bed for a month in the time when Demetrius the Phalerian still governed the city. Tychon’s youthful face and his manners have always pleased me, with the consequence that the spur of desire pierced me at the thought of finding myself in his arms again.
“I went out late and headed for his house, dreaming of enviable rejoicing. But I found him changed, sporting a large beard and an arrogantly turned-up moustache. He’s become a true military man. His bedroom, once perfumed, smells of leather and horses. He brought back bizarre weapons from his voyage—assegais brisling with human teeth, grotesque clubs, nailed and voluminous, and long silvered bows—which dishonor the walls and make them grimace. He even possesses the cadaver of a Nabataean warrior conserved in salt, and those black remains cast fear and an exhalation of death through the house.
“It was with a chill in my heart that I observed those changes.
“Tychon, who had a friend with him, barely saluted me and said: ‘We were talking, dear Stagonium, about the last expedition in the land of the barbarians and the splendid fortune of our arms. My friend Geryon wanted to remember the great deeds that I accomplished personally in fighting against the Nabataeans. There’s no need to interrupt him. Continue your story, Geryon. Stagonium wishes me well and it will be a pleasure for her to learn about my glory.’
“‘So,’ Geryon then continued in a yelping Stentorian voice, ‘in an arid country where water was lacking and the food supplies had run out. We were gnawing the wood of our bucklers, and putting arrows in our mouths from time to time to stave off thirst.’
“‘That’s true!’ Tychon exclaimed.
“‘Certainly it’s true,’ Geryon went on. ‘One day, then, we saw a multitude of camels advancing toward us. We scarcely had time to pick up our lances before the battle commenced. Tychon distinguished himself first by killing a Nabataean chief with a single blow. He struck him so vehemently that in trying to withdraw his lance thereafter he lifted both the savage and the camel off the ground, which the weapon had transpierced and spitted.’
“‘That’s true!’ said Tychon, again.
“‘Of course it’s true,’ Geryon went on, ‘but that was only the beginning, for scarcely had the melee warmed up than Tychon saw seven warriors surrounding him, trying to assail him with their javelins. But then he gets down from his horse in order to be freer in his movements, confronts the enemies resolutely and commences making use of his sword like a club. But describe the carnage yourself, dear Tychon...’
“‘I had felled one of the seven by splitting his head with my right hand, while I d
isemboweled a second with my left, who feel heavily, gasping. Two others were petrified, and fled. And enveloping the three that remained with my arm, I swung my word, and with a masterstroke I split and separated their miserable heads!’
“‘How the blood flowed!’ said Geryon.
“‘That’s true,’ repeated Tychon, ‘the blood flowed. I remember having to change my tunic when I returned to the camp.’
“‘You certainly haven’t forgotten, Tychon, that the chief was one-eyed, and that at a distance of thirty cubits you plucked out the remaining eye with a skillfully thrown javelin. It was blind that he plunged into death.’
“‘They bleed, these barbarians, they bleed like cattle!’”
“I stood there trembling, frozen by horror. The house exhaled a nitrous and pestilential odor. The salted Nabataean seemed to be stirring, and I saw his intrepid killers dripping with black blood.
“‘Bloodthirsty man!’ I finally cried, addressing myself to Tychon. ‘How can you embrace a woman after so many crimes, murders and decapitations? For all the gold in the world I would not let myself go into your arms. I’m still too young to soil myself next to a homicide!’
“Tychon was visibly nonplussed. ‘I’ll give you a mina, Stagonium,’ he replied, ‘and in amour you’ll see that I’m as gentle as a lamb.’
“‘No, my chiliarch, you have too much blood on your face for me to support your grim proximity.’
“‘It’s in the land of the Nabataeans that I cried out these exploits, Stagonium, and we’re in Athens.’
“But I was completely gripped by repulsion and fear. I therefore wrapped myself in my mantle and went to the door. ‘I’m terrified for having crossed the threshold of your house, O Tychon, and I believe I see the room filling up with the shades of the warriors you’ve decapitated.’
‘Why are you so fearful, Stagonium?’
‘Do you take me for Clytemnestra, Medea or one of the Lemniades? Not a single drop of blood remains in my veins after that evocation of slaughter. I’m not even sure of being alive myself, and that you’ve spared me. It’s necessary not to think of seeing me again, Tychon. It’s more fitting that you continue your hecatombs rather than thinking of amour.’
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