The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  After a long interior struggle Mark once more delivered himself of his half-choked affirmation. “Good,” said Julian “and you know how to do it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Uncle Julian.”

  “And you will help us, won’t you? We cannot afford to lose that machine by some clumsy accident.”

  “There’s a switch” said Mark haltingly. “I was shown it.”

  Julian heaved a great sigh of relief. “Then that settles it” he said. “You will do it for us, won’t you? You see, Professor Marchant and I want to have a look at the machine. It’s a very beautiful and original work—the best thing Felix ever did. The firm can’t afford to lose it. If you would do that this morning, I could come down this week with him and we could put it into motion.”

  A long, deafening silence fell. Mark stared at the spirals of smoke curving upwards towards the dirty ceiling.

  “Very well, Uncle Julian. I’ll do it now, if you wish.”

  “That’s my boy” said Julian with relief. “That’s a good boy.”

  “Can I go now?” said Mark.

  “Of course you may.”

  “Goodbye, Uncle Julian.”

  “Goodbye, Mark, and thank you very much.”

  * * * * *

  Benedicta was still convalescent, still only half up, half out of bed. She was forbidden to move about too much in case the palpitations set in again. Nash sat by the bed full of hopeful optimism. “You are very much better” he said, and reached for his small prescription pad and fountain pen. “We’ll have you up and about in a day or two.” She watched him carefully as he wrote with small feathery strokes of his pen. Her pale long face was set in a helmet of unkempt blonde hair. She was dressed in greensleeves fashion—a vague smock-gown with a gold rope sash round her slender waist: the attire of a Victorian poetess, one would have said. A small heart-shaped watch ticked on her breast, attached by a brooch in the form of an octopus. She half reclined, surrendering her pulse to Nash, brooding heavily the while.

  “Marchant rang me up” she said abstractedly. “About all the tapes by Felix which they found on the beach with his clothes. He has been through them very carefully. The last one is a bit of a puzzle though. He says that there is something recorded which one could take for the sound of oars, a squeaky rowlock. But it’s all very hazy. Do you think that Felix is really …?”

  “We can’t think anything” said Nash hastily. “I was discussing it with Julian today. “We must wait. We have all the time in the world now, all the time in the world.”

  But it was when the dark shade of Julian stood before her, gazing at her from the foot of the bed, that Benedicta recovered some of her wonted animation of look; her eyes stared into his with a sweet burning intensity. His mere presence seemed to ignite her, to return her to the order of coherent things; her indisposition slid from her like a mummy-wrapping. “Julian” she said, and her voice took on a thrilling resonance.

  “Mark is going to cooperate” he said in his lazy musing way.

  “And that is one point we have cleared. Now then, for the rest, Benedicta: Nash and I both feel that as you have made such a splendid recovery we must take advantage of it. I have spoken to Jocas and he is quite on our side. You must have a decent rest. Go to Polis for a while and leave us to settle up all the details at this end. Will you?”

  “If you wish” she said. “If you wish, Julian.”

  He rested his elbows on the end of the bed and looked down abstractedly at her pale beautiful face. “You could also be useful to us if you wish” he went on slowly. “There is a young German baron, a botanist, travelling about in Turkey with his yacht. He has found a flower which he says could give us something like perfect insect control in a natural way … I won’t bore you with the details. But the firm must try and secure him. You could take the provisional contracts with you when you go, so that Jocas can get to work persuading him. He seems rather doubtful about joining.”

  “Of course I will” she said with a curious furtive, wolfish look, beginning to bite her nails as she listened.

  “But there’s no hurry” said Julian. “We have all the time in the world, all the time in the world.”

  The sound of a distant report, muffled by the heavy walls of the building, was barely loud enough to pierce the hard integument of Julian’s abstraction or of hers. She still stared at him with admiration and pity, and he gazed down at her as he had always done—his eyes full of an impenetrable sadness. It was left to Nash to sit up in his chair and say: “Surely that was a shot?”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  By intention this is the first deck of a double-decker novel. Here and there in the text attentive readers may discern the odd echo from The Alexandria Quartet and even from The Black Book; this is intentional.

  NUNQUAM

  à Claude Vincendon

  I

  Aut Tunc, aut Nunquam,

  “It was then or never….”

  Petronius

  The Satyricon

  Asleep or awake—what difference? Or rather, if there were a difference how would you recognise it? And if it were a recognisable difference would there be anything or anyone to care if you did or not—some angel with a lily-gilding whisper to say: “Well done.”? Ay, there’s the rub.

  My head aches, it isn’t only the wound—that is on the mend.

  “Guilty in what you didn’t know, what you hoped to escape merely by averting your face.” Ah!

  He wakes, then, this manifestation of myself so vaguely realised that it is hard to believe in him: he wakes in a room whose spare anonymity suggests one of the better-class hotels; no feudal furniture, no curtains smelling of tobacco or cats. Yet the towels in the bathroom are only stencilled over with a capital “p”. The Bible beside the bed is chained to the wall with a slender brass chain; owing to some typographical mishap it is quite illegible, the ink has run. Only the title-page can be made out. Well, where am I, then? In what city, what country? It will come back, it always does; but in waking up thus he navigates a long moment of confusion during which he tries to establish himself in the so-called reality which depends, like a poor relation, on memory. The radio is of unknown provenance; it plays light music so characterless that it might be coming from anywhere at all. But where? He cannot tell for the life of him—note the expression: for the life of him! His few clothes have no tabs of identity, and indeed some have no buttons. Ah, that strikes a vague chord! There is a small green diary by the bed, perhaps that might afford a clue? It has the other one’s name in it. Felix Ch. But the book seems very much out of date—surely the Coronation was years ago? It seems, too, full of improbable Latin-American itineraries; moreover in the middle a whole span of months is missing, has been torn out. Gone! Vanished months, vanished days—perhaps these are the very days he is living through now? A man with no shadow, a clock with no face. Something about Greece and Turkey? Had he ever been to Turkey? Perhaps it was the other one. That blow on the head had occluded his vision: the darkness turned violet sometimes and was apt to dance about in his skull. (How she trembled in bed, this astonishing revivalist of a dead love.) But of course he had!

  April to October, but where were those vanished weeks, and where was he? I would give anything to know. It doesn’t look like spring at all events; from the window the snow meadows tilt away towards tall white-capped mountains; a foreground of pearling sleet upon window sills of warped and painted wood. Some sort of institution, then? (Dactyl, you are rusty and need taking down.) Nothing of all this did you notice until the image in the mirror one day burst into tears. Well, keep on trying. No luck with the soft descriptive music. I must have had a meal for the remains lie there, but they are quite unidentifiable. Last night’s dinner? I turn over the remains with my fork. Brains of a hall-porter cooked in Javel, one hundred francs? I press the bell for the maid but nobody comes. Then at last I cry out as I catch sight of the little Judas in the door. The pain of regained identity. Ahhhh! It opens for a second and then slowly closes
. This is no hotel. Doctor! Mother! Nurse! Urine!

  Someone starts banging, fitfully, on a wall nearby and screaming in a frothy way; thud upon the padded wall, and again thud: and the peculiar reverberation of a rubber chamber-pot upon the floor. I know it now, and the other knows it too—we slide into one identity once more, as slick as smoke. But he feels desperately feverish and he takes my pulse, and his sweat smells of almonds. O all this is quite perfect! Hamlet is himself again. Fragments of forgotten conversations, the whole damned stock-pot of my life memories has come back to me; and with it the new, the surprising turn of events which has given me the illusion of recovering Benedicta (Hippolyta saying: “How sick one is of les petites savoirs sexuelles”).

  I can see no reason why all this should have happened to me, but it has; they go on, these harpies both male and female, tearing their black hearts out. “I received nothing but kindness from him (her) and repaid it with double-dealing though meanwhile unwaveringly loving (her-him). Staunch inside, infirm without, lonely, inconstant, and mad about one woman (man).” These raids on each other’s narcissism. And yet, if what she tells me is true? It would be going back to the beginning, to pick up that lost stitch again; going back to the point where the paths diverged. Hark, someone is calling my name—yes, it is my name. Lying beside her I used to reproach myself by saying: “You were supposed to know everything; you arrived equipped to know all, like every human being. But a progressive distortion set in, your visions withered slowly like ageing flowers.” Why did they, why have they?

  She says that now she is allowed to visit me because neither is observably mad; we are simply mentally mauled by sedatives. “And you, as usual, are pretending.” But then if I like to be mad it is my own affair—doctors are scared of schizophrenes because they can read minds, they can plot and plan. They pretend to pretend. Ah, but I care for nothing anymore. Quick, let us make love before another human being is born. More and more people, Benedicta, the world is overflowing; but the quality is going down correspondingly. There is no point in just people—nothing multiplied by nothing is still nothing. Kiss. Eyes of Mark, beautiful grey eyes of your dead son; I hardly dare call him mine as yet. (And what if you are lying to me, that is the question?)

  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

  Bless the bed that I lie on,

  Ano-Sado-Polymorph

  Bless the pillow I slide off,

  Giving Sascher-Masch the slip

  With his twice-confounded whip.

  Let them take me from behind,

  But not too very sudden, mind.

  Polymorphouse and perverse,

  Revelling in the primal curse.

  Serenity, Senility. Serendipity … ah my friend, what are you saying?

  * * * * *

  * * *

  Of course I am on my guard, watching her like a hawk. A hawk, forsooth? She will feed me on the fragments of field-mice still warm, broken up tenderly bit by bit in those slender fingers. She will teach me to stoop. Of course a lot of this material is dactylised, belonging to lost epochs; they have recovered my little machines for me and returned them to me (give the baby his rattle now!). I recover bits here and there which in the past Abel might well have appreciated. Turn them this way and that, they smell of truth—however provisional it is; as when raising those deep blue, very slightly unfocused eyes she said: “But the sexual act is by its very nature private, even if it takes place on the pavement during the rush hour.” When I ask why I have been brought here she adds, on an imperious note: “To begin again, to recover the lost ground. There is much that will be explained to you—a lot by me. For God’s sake trust me this time.” It is as enigmatic as her way of saying “Help me” in the past. Must I resume the long paperchase once more, Benedicta?

  * * * * *

  I suppose that I owe my survival to the last-minute breakdown of Abel, or something of that order. I can’t believe that any other consideration would have motivated my capture. Of course nobody knows how to put it right except me and I won’t show them under duress. All this is surmise, of course; nobody has said anything. And I am shown every mark of sympathy and consideration: many of my toys have been returned to me, and a place set aside for me to work if the mood is on me. I resist these soft blandishments, of course, though it is hard in a way: time hangs heavy. I admit that I took up an offer to work on the Caradoc transcriptions, largely out of curiosity. The executors want some “order brought into them”, whatever that means. Indeed the notion itself is unwise since this type of material, by its very haphazardness, creates its own kind of order. “Attempt to capture the idea quite naked before it strays into the conceptual field like some heavyfooted cow.” Thus do I kill time till time kill me.

  And now, as I have explained, she has come back, for how long I don’t know, or for what reason; but changed, irremediably changed. Yet still the beauty of the domed egg-of-the-highmasted-schooner visage which smiles turn into a stag: still the slant calamitous eyes. Illness, imprisonment, privation—might not all this have brought us close together? I wonder. Why, she even helps me with my papers now. The boy’s death hangs over us, between us, the something unspoken that neither knows how to broach. Resilient as I am, that was a thrust right through the heart of my narcissism; and the bare fact does not yet seem to correspond to any known set of words. So I shuffle paper a bit, reflect and allow my moods to carry me where they will. As for the executors, they do not care what I do with the material provided it goes into covers and provides money for the estate. But … there are no inheritors to claim it so some committee of cranks will divert it to crank projects: old men smelling of soap and singed hair. Pelmanism for rodents, birth control for fairies … that sort of thing: everything for which Caradoc, if indeed he is dead, did not stand. (I hear those growls, I have them recorded.)

  And then, from time to time among my own ruminations float fragments which might almost seem part of another book—my own book; the idea occurs fitfully to me, has done on and off for years. But so much other stuff has to be cleared first: the shadows of so many other minds which darken these muddled texts with their medieval reflections. Abel would have been able to give them shape and position and relevance; human memory is not yet whole enough to do so. Was it, for example, of Benedicta that I once said this—or was it Iolanthe? “Perhaps it is not fair to speak abusively of her, to note that she never thought anything which she did not happen to think. No effort was involved. Shallow, unimpeded by reflection, her chatter tinkled over the shallow beds of commonplace and platitude, pouring from that trash-box of a head. But what beauty! Once in her arms I felt safe for ever, nothing could happen to me.” Prig!

  Today is cold again, a Swiss cold. It has all started to become very clear. The leaves are falling softly and being snatched away across the meadows like smoke. My God, how long must I stay here, when will I get out? And to what end if I do? My life is covered in the heavy ground-mist of an impossible past which I shall never understand. I sleepwalk from day to day now with a hangover fit for a ghost.

  As for these scribblings which emerge from my copying machines, the dactyls, these are not part of the book I was talking about, no. Would you like to know my method? It is simple. While I am writing one book, (the first part might be called Pulse Rate 103), I write another about it, then a third about it, and so on. A new logic might emerge from it, who knows? Like those monkeys in the Indian frescoes (so human, so engaging, like some English critics) who can dance only with their index fingers up each other’s behinds. This would be my way of doing things. Smell of camphor: I must not get too vivacious when Nash, the doctor, calls. I must remain as he sees me—an eternal reproach to the death-bed, the dirty linen, the urinals clearing their throats. Yet vivacity of mind is no sin, saith the Lord God.

  As far as Caradoc is concerned what ails me in gathering up this inconsequential chatter is that there are several different books which one could assemble, including some which couldn’t have been foreseen by those who knew him; i
s everyone built on this pattern?—like a club sandwich, I suppose. But here for example is a vein which would be more suitable to Koepgen—perhaps it is the part of Caradoc which is Koepgen, or vice versa. I mean alchemy, the great night express which jumps the points and hurtles out of the causal field, carrying everything with it. Alchemy with all its paradoxes—I would have logged that as Koepgen’s private territory. But no. The vein is there in Caradoc, under the fooling.

  I mean, for example: “Pour bien commencer ces études il faut d’abord supprimer toute curiosité”; the sort of paradox which is incomprehensible to those afflicted by the powers of ratiocination. Moreover this, if you please, from a man who claimed that the last words of Socrates were: “Please the Gods, may the laughter keep breaking through.” Contrast it with the fine white ribbon which runs through the lucubrations of Aristotle—the multiplication tables of thought to set against this type of pregenital jargon. (In between times I have not been idle: on the little hand lathe I have turned a fine set of skeleton keys in order to be able to explore my surroundings a bit.) Is it imperative that the tragic sense should reside after all somewhere in laughter?

  * * * * *