The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  It seemed to me perfectly logical and I accepted the proposition, sealing the pact there and then with kisses that grew ever more breathless, refining themselves, exploding like oxygen bubbles in the blood. It was like that, the sun shone, the water drummed: everything had become explicit. We sank, deeper than pain, into this profound nescience. And here again (as always when we made physical love) her teeth were drawn back in a kind of agony under her lips, and she said: “O help me, please help me, you must help me.” An awkward Galahad was born. I vowed to help her—how I did not know. And mentally I replied—as I have continued to reply ever since—“Of course, my darling, of course: but against what, against whom?” There was never any answer to my question, only the pain swelling up between us; she pressed ever harder upon me as if to blot it out, as if to still the ache of some great bruise. Thus our sensuality was touched by a kind of unconscious cruelty—kisses inflicting pain, I mean, rather than pleasure. It was all very well the “Help me”: but afterwards she lay like the ghost of rigor mortis itself, her lips blue, her heart beating so that she could hardly breathe. But at last her eyes unclouded by the invading terror. Sex cleared the brain, if only for an instant. She ached in my mind like a choice abstraction.

  A flock of ignorant chattering birds, perhaps starlings, crossed our middle vision and settled in a cloud in a nearby tree. Benedicta foraged for the little carbine which they had left behind with the horses and began shooting at them. She shot in a brilliant unpremeditated way, like a woman making up her face, and with an unerring exactitude. The birds began to fall on the ground like over-ripe fruit. She emptied the magazine before throwing the hot gun down on the sleeping bag. How easily she could fill me with disgust. It was beautiful, the polarity. Then she went and lay face down by the spring, almost touching the foaming tumbling cataract with her lips. It seemed to me then, smoking and watching her, that she was something the heart must desire and I grew afraid of the depth of my feelings. I had never before actually feared to be parted from a woman; the novelty was overwhelming. Tomorrow I must leave for Pera, I decided; if only to get away from this suffocating network of ambiguities. After all, with her wealth etc. etc. I could hardly keep her as a mistress…. The ideas rose in clouds like sparrows to a gunshot. But even before they had fallen back into place she was saying: “I feel this is decisive—that you’ll never leave me. I have never felt that before.” She always said this: she felt men expected it. All introspection now seemed little more than a fruitless mental debauchery. I closed up my mind and searched ever more frantically for that tame and now touchingly tremulous mouth. We fitted into each other like Japanese razors.

  I had collected a couple of huge leeches which had settled on the back of my thigh; by the time I felt the slight discomfort their bites caused, they were already gorged with my blood and fit to burst. Benedicta found a salt cellar in the basket and dosed them until they spewed out the blood they had sucked and fell writhing into the dust. She seemed to like this. I went to wash in the spring. It was her turn now to sit and watch me which she did with a discomforting intentness.

  Then she nodded to herself and came to sit beside me to dangle her long legs over the marble parapet. With a long stealthy look about her—as if to make sure that there were no interlopers about in the wood to oversee her—she bent down towards her right foot. I had already noticed that the small toe was bound up with a piece of surgical tape, perhaps to protect a scratch. It was this tape that she now stripped with a small slick gesture, holding out the foot for my inspection. The last toe was double! They were both perfectly formed in their twinship, but joined together. She watched me watching her with her head on one side. “Does it disgust you?” she said. It did, but I said that it did not; I bent to kiss it. Moreover I understood why she kept it bound away, out of sight of the superstitious inhabitants of the place—for it was a clear mark of witch-craft in popular oriental belief. The vestigial toe, known to the medievals as “the devil’s teat”. She flexed her feet, stretched, and then wandered away to sit under a tree with an air of morose intentness. “What are you thinking, Benedicta?” Her grave, unwavering abstraction melted; she put a stalk of grass between her teeth and said: “I was wondering what they will think when they know. But what can they do, after all?”

  “Who?”

  “Julian, Jocas, the firm; when they know what I have decided. About you, I mean.”

  “Has this anything to do with them?” She looked surprised at the question and turned her head away to frown at the darkening sealine. “Besides,” I went on “just what have you decided?”

  But to this her only answer was to beckon me down among the blankets where we lay luxuriously cradled between snore and wake. For much of the night we talked quietly between snatches of sleep. She spoke about a youth spent in Polis—but haphazardly, at a venture. And from these imprecise snatches of dialogue a sort of picture emerged of a childhood full of loneliness like my own, but spent in the sunken gardens of the Seraglio, in the glittering emptiness of the harem with its shallow female sensualities. In the summer heats of the old capital she had learned everything there was to be known about the sexual appetites before she reached puberty. Learned and forgotten. Perhaps this was why for her there clung about the act of lovemaking a hollow, disabused quality? I don’t know. She behaved as if her feelings, her private mind, were enclosed in the frailest of eggshells easily smashed by an indiscreet question. I asked her, for example, if her father was still alive; the idle question made her stiff with anxiety. She sat upright like a frightened hare and admonished me savagely for breaking the rule she had made. I must ask Jocas, she said. I had quite a task in calming her.

  At dawn, or just after, we heard the purring of the ship and saw the long white furrow lengthening towards the harbour. She bound up her toe in haste. It was time to gather up our gear and leave. Benedicta was sunk in deep thought as the horses negotiated the shallow slopes of the hill. At last she said: “When are you going to sign those contracts?” I had completely forgotten their existence, and the question startled me. “I hadn’t really decided to in my own mind. Why, do you want me to?” She considered me gravely from under frowning brows. “It is strange that you should doubt us” she said. “But I don’t,” I protested “my hesitation hasn’t been due to doubts about the validity of the contracts, no. They are overgenerous if it comes to that. No, it was something else. You see, it isn’t easy because I am in love with you.” She raised her quirt and struck me across the wrist. “Reflect,” she said “reflect.”

  “I’ll see” I said. She looked at me curiously but said no more. The ride back was smooth and uneventful. Jocas was waiting for me with a hospitably decorated table; but Benedicta disappeared, after saying that she would lunch in the harem. I tried to visualise it—a sort of glass and pink satin bonbonnière looking out over the calm straits, the light filtered by the intricately carved wooden screens; to this I added some cage birds singing away in melancholy fashion and a few old deaf women, all clad in black, and a few wearing clumsy and ill-chosen frocks from Paris and London. Lots of gold-leaf and mirrors. There would be a horn gramophone with a pile of outdated waltzes and other jazz, and bundles of old picture papers…. I wondered how near the mark this was. There did not, for example, appear to be a book anywhere. “You are wrong” said Jocas sharply. “She has a very smartly decorated suite of rooms, satin and gold mouldings; brilliant chandeliers, and electric pianola, two black cats, and a bookcase full of beautifully bound books by Loti and company.”

  “Thank you” I said ironically, and he made a mock bow.

  “At your service” he said. “We are not all equally gifted alas. I should have been a fortune teller in the bazaars I suppose. That’s what my brother Chewlian says. I was very backward as a boy; even now, do you know, I read and write with difficulty. I have to pretend that I have mislaid my glasses. It has hampered me very much. It kept me a trader whereas Chewlian is truly a merchant prince. I stayed here, but he went on to brillian
t studies. He found a patron, one of the monks who ran the orphanage found him a rich man to stake his education. But I was always ill, always wet my bed until my twentieth year. Had no head and no taste for paper. Only in middle age did I calm down, when Merlin found us.”

  “But you were orphans?”

  “Yes.”

  “And brothers—how would you know?”

  “It’s only presumption, partly a joke; we shared the same doorstep on the same evening. What more is a brother? I love Chewlian and he loves me.”

  “I think I shall go back to Pera this evening.”

  “Yes, why not?” he said equably, pressing my arm. He was a most lovable man. “You will see nothing of Benedicta for at least two days now. She has a treatment. But she will get in touch with you if she wants. I think she has to go back to Zürich this coming week.”

  I found the idea curiously chilling. “She didn’t say anything?” I asked, in spite of myself.

  “I am not Benedicta’s keeper” he said frowning, in a chewing way.

  This line of conversation seemed to come up against a brick wall; I felt that perhaps I had unwittingly offended him and strove to be a trifle more conciliatory as I went on. “Tomorrow I’ll have a last session with Vibart and decide about the contracts. I will certainly sign for the little ear device—which I call a ‘dolly’. About the more general terms of association I’ll have to see.”

  “I know the cause of your hesitation” he said, and burst suddenly into a peal of clear laughter. “It is perfectly justified. Once when I mentioned something I saw from your expression that you were surprised: because it meant that someone had been through the papers you had left behind in Athens. The new device for electric Braille remember?”

  He was dead right. I looked at his jutting nose and laughing eyes. “You thought it was us, didn’t you? Well, it wasn’t. It was Graphos, one of his hirelings who went through your stuff; what they expected to find I don’t know. But they photographed everything—all the parts in shorthand and the mathematical materials. Now, when I asked Graphos for details about you after this first idea came along, he was able to supply quite a number of them—things you are working on. I saw at once that we needed you as much as you need us. We can shorten your labours by years if we give you the right equipment, by years. How, for example, can you work on the firefly and the glow-worm without a chemist, indeed a big laboratory to help? We have such a place—Lunn Pharmaceuticals belongs to us. Do you see?”

  “The firefly produces light without heat” I had written once, unwisely. “Note. If we could find just how chemically we would be on to a new light source perhaps.” But of course he was right, one could hardly conduct this kind of experiment from Number Seven. Jocas was watching me intently, still smiling. He said “The trembler fuse, the iodine and sodium bath experiment—how will you ever do it?” All of a sudden the lust for this vocation—of tampering with the universe and trying to short-circuit its behaviour—grew up in me and seized me by the throat. I drank my wine off at a thrust and sat bemused, staring through him. O God! There was also the danger that they might sow these idle speculations broadcast behind my back, that other talents with bigger means might scoop me. I was ashamed of the idea, but there it was! Pure science! Where does the animal come in? “Also a passage where you ask why bats can navigate in the dark and not blind men in the light, eh?”

  “Hush,” I said “I’m thinking.” I was, I was furiously thinking of Benedicta, sitting here trapped between conflicting hesitations.

  Jocas said softly: “I do not see that the matter of Benedicta alters anything.” He was doing his mental lip-reading act again. Here he was wrong; she hung above all these abstractions and ambiguities, like a wraith, an ignis fatuus. That long cobra face seemed to symbolise everything that this vast organisation of talents stood for. I was looking fame and fortune in the eyes, and the eyes were adding the promise of love to these other riches. “Yes” I said at last, surprised to find how very hoarse my voice sounded. “Yes, I am a fool. I must sign on.”

  In retrospect this epoch, these scenes, astonished me very much when I recalled them; I mean after everything went to wrack, the period of illnesses and confusion, the period of intemperate recriminations, quarrels, fugues. Once, when she was hovering on the outside edges of logic I even heard her say: “I only really loved you when I thought you were determined to be free from the firm. It seemed to promise me my own freedom. But afterwards I saw that you were just like everyone else.” Then in my fury I shouted back. “But you made me sign on, Benedicta. It was you who insisted, remember?” She nodded her furious head and answered: “Yes. I had to. But you could have stuck to your guns and that would have altered everything. For us both.”

  “Then why, knowing this, did you insist on having the child? There was no need, was there?”

  “There were several reasons. Partly because Julian said so, Nash said so, it was a question of cure as well. Then also the question of succession, inheritance. Then me. All those miscarriages were a challenge I had to face. Above all I wanted a Merlin of my own, of my very own.” She paused and gazed about her as if to identify a small sound, audible only to her inner ear. “You see,” she added tonelessly “hardly anyone saw my father in the flesh—though everyone saw Julian at some time or another. Then the firm—O Felix, Benedicta is only a woman, she has always tried to be just.” Nearly sobbing.

  “You talk about yourself as if you were a product.”

  “I am. I am.” That was the tu quoque!

  Then later when I was speaking to her about love she could say with burning indignation: “But love is a reality not a recipe.” As if in offering her mine under any other guise I had tricked her. Woman!

  But all this lay far in the future on that day when Jocas walked down to the landing stage beside me with his choppy deliberate tread. “You will go back to Athens and wait” he said and his tone was one of delighted relief. He embraced me warmly and added “Benedicta will come to you very soon. You may find her the key to everything. Sacrapant will deal with all the contractual details. I myself am going to the islands for a week. Felix!”

  “Yes, Jocas?”

  “You are going to be very happy.”

  But I felt bemused still and shaken by my own decision. Sacrapant gazed at me with lachrymose tenderness; it seemed that he too knew, without being told, that I had agreed to sign, but tact held him silent. We roared away across the opalescent water towards the dim horizon where the city lay half asleep, embedded in time as in a quagmire—the Orient Venice snoring its life away.

  Vibart was at his habitual desk, only today he was blowing an egg to add to his collection. He had pierced the blue crown with a needle and was blowing with soft absorption into the tiny hole; from the opposite hole the yolk was being gradually expelled to fall with a plop into his waste-paper basket. “There” he said with relief, placing the tiny object in a velvet hollow among others like it. He closed the casket reverently and joined his fingers together as he gazed at me. The contracts lay on the corner of the desk among his papers. Without saying anything I picked up the pen from its slab of marble and signed in all the required places. “Well” he said in great good humour “I should bloody well think so. Fame and fortune, my boy, and all for the price of a signature. The luck some people have.” I sat, staring into the middle distance, still confused and somehow fearfully sad. Somehow he must have felt it (he was a discerning young man under his flippant exterior) for his tone changed to one of quickening sympathy; the drink he poured out with which to celebrate the event was a stiff one, and I needed it, or felt I did. Though why?

  I seemed to hear the voice of Sacrapant saying: “The firm is wonderful, Mr. Charlock, sir. When I could not find anyone for my wife’s womb the firm found me someone.”

  The telephone rang squeakily. “It’s for you” said Vibart. I recognised the voice of Jocas, distant and crackly. “Felix I forgot. I have a message for you to give your friend Koepgen in Athens. He i
s your friend, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “I don’t personally. But when you see him will you tell him that we have located the ikon he has been hunting for?”

  “The ikon?”

  “Yes. We know the monastery now.”

  “I’ll make a note of it.”

  “Thank you very much Felix.”

  I drew a deep breath and said: “Jocas, I have just signed the articles of association.”

  “I knew it” he said. “I felt it. I was sure.”

  Vibart sat sipping his drink and staring at me. “I think” he said “you need cheering up. I shall invite you to dine with me and hear all the details of my literary career. It’s really moving forward. And by the way, I have found a good French tavern. You know the French will eat anything and everything? If the sky rained corpses’ legs they would become cannibals without a second thought. Moreover it would be doubly enjoyable because it was all free. Will you?”

  “Very well. But I must first take these down to the firm and draw some money.”