The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  “But you were lovers.”

  “Always. Even afterwards. We found ways.”

  But I was mentally adding in the data derived from the steel cabinets—or as much of it as I had had time to read. It was not hard to picture them there, the two children, in some deserted corner of the dusty palace among the tarnished mirrors with their chipped gilt frames. The swarthy intent face of Julian, his eyes blazing with almost manic concentration, his lips drawn back from white teeth. Each held a heavy silver candlestick with a full branch of rosy lighted candles. They confronted each other thus, naked, like contestants in some hieratic combat, or like oriental dancers. Perhaps too among the wheeling shadows of the high rooms and curling staircases they must have seemed to anyone who saw them (Merlin himself did once) like gorgeous plumed birds treading out an elaborate mating-dance with all its intricate figures. So they shook the burning wax over one another, thrust and riposte, hissing at its hot tang; they were drenched as if with molten spray. What else was there left to do? They had learned and unlearned everything before puberty—disordering their psyches, forcing them on before they were ripe. Will those who do this not prejudice their sexual and affective adult life: live forever in fantasy acts of sexual excess? Never get free?

  Well, who am I to say that? But I could see deeper now into the pattern of their lives which had become so very much a reflection of Turkey—the miasma of old Turkey with its frigid cruelties, its priapic conspiracies. This fitted in well with the small ferocious Calvinist soul of Merlin, bursting at its seams with guilty sadistic impulses. (And him with all the quiet diligence and the family grace of feature!) Here at least he was at home. One saw him during those long winter evenings sitting over his books with some green-turbaned teacher drinking in the charm of the language with all its gobbling sententiousness, its lack of relative pronouns and subordinate clauses. Sitting with the amber mouthpiece of a narguileh in his hand allowing one half of his mind to play with the idea of its cost—silver-hilted amber; (worth perhaps two hundred English pounds?)

  Or else up on the bronze foothills (they all shot like angels) following the cautious dogs—himself not the less cautious between the accompanying guns. They walked in an arrowhead formation so that Jocas and Julian and the girl were a trifle ahead of him. Up here, though, in the exultation of the open life of the steppe they were almost united in spirit, almost at one with each other. Disarmed around a campfire at evening they would listen smiling to the ululations of tribal singers, stirred into an exultant tenderness by the magnificence of the night sky and the hills. From this part of their lives single incidents stood out for ever in her memory clear and burnished. Like when the little man was walking alone along an escarpment and was pounced upon by a pair of golden eagles. He must have been near their nest, for they fell whistling out of the sky upon him, wing-span and claws powerful enough to have carried off a full-grown sheep. He heard the whistle and the swish of the huge wings just in time; he had glimpsed their shadows as he ducked. The others rushed to help him—he was defending himself with the unloaded gun, beating the eagles off; but by the time they arrived one of the birds lay breathless on the rock at his feet and the other had gone. He was panting, his rifle was twisted, the stock was cracked. He took a cudgel from a Turk and beat the quivering eagle to death with white face, his teeth showing in a grin. He had deep wounds in his back, his shirt was torn to rags. Then he sat down on a rock and buried his white face in trembling hands. Watching him she understood why she could never bring herself to call him “Father”; he was quite simply terrifying. Julian says laconically: “I can see their nest” and taking a shot gun blazes away at it until it disintegrates. If she closed her eyes and held her breath she could feel the weight of Julian’s mind resting upon hers. It was something more than the drugs; he held her by the scruff of the mind so you might say. “He performed an elaborate series of psychic and physical experiments on me—of course in the Levant there is nothing very uncommon or shocking about it.” When the telephone came into fashion she learned to ring him up and recite a string of soft cajoling obscenities until…. “Of course you can love somebody like that,” says Benedicta with her eyes closed, resting her forehead on the cold rail of the bedpost. “Nobody has got more than one way, his own, of showing his love. Too bad if it’s uncommon or perverted or what-not. Or perhaps Julian would say ‘too good’. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy being owned by him, engulfed by him—utterly swallowed. In another perverse way it is such a relief to surrender the will utterly. Julian turned me into a sleepwalker for his experiments. He led me up to the point of being able to kill.” The white face with the closed eyes looked like some remote statue forgotten in a museum. A long time like that in a fierce muse of concentration, still as a burning-glass.

  Was this before or after? Ah, dactyl answer me. No, I do not care. It suffices that it should form part of the central pattern. While Merlin prospered and bought ruined palaces and cypress-groves the children loved and despaired away their youth in sunken gardens guarded by a retinue of impersonal servants, governesses, retainers. Jocas was born to the chase and was always glad to escape to the Asiatic side with his hunting birds and his kites. Julian the tranquil, thoughtful, the vicious, was never without a book, and was already the master of several languages. Yet withal he had in him some of the heavy-souled impersonality of the sleepy Ottoman world where the humid heat lay upon the nerves with the weight of lead. Julian and his sister! Later they were to be separated and his personal hold over her suffered a metamorphosis—he held her through the firm and the needs of the firm, no longer through the body and the personal will. That was how she became the near-witch Benedicta. But during this early time he taught her to fence; naked again, they faced each other on the stone flags and the room rang to the dry clicking of buttoned foils. Then lying in the great bedroom with its mirror ceiling, in each other’s arms, as if at the bottom of the ocean they made love, watching each other watch each other. He was soon to meet his peculiar medieval fate—the fate of Abelard; for Merlin knew all. Somewhere inside himself Julian was not really surprised when they all walked in holding candles—Merlin himself dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown and soft Turkish slippers with pointed toes. Julian closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, until they touched his shoulder and led him away. Benedicta slept on, slept on. The tall bald eunuch held the long-shanked dressmaker’s scissors reverently, like an instrument of sacrifice, which indeed they were. Also the sterilised needle and the thread to baste the wound and stitch the empty pouch up like a gigot. It was not pain that turned Julian into a raging maniac, it was quite simply the indignity. When she told me this I could see suddenly the whole pattern of things lit up by the phosphorescent white light of his anger, translated out of impotence. No, the cruellest thing about impotence is that it is fundamentally a comic predicament. His father had not only punished him but had mocked him as well. A phrase creeps back to mind from some other forgotten context. “They were bound by a complicity of desire and purpose far stronger even than love, perhaps even independent of death.” I hardly dare to touch her, to put my hand upon her shoulder when she looks like this. The closed eyes stare on and on into the centre of memory. “All this I will have to be punished for some day I suppose” she said between her teeth. “I was afraid you would find it endearing—another delightful feminine weakness to add to your collection.” I had already begun to undress. I said, “I am not going to indulge your sense of guilt any more.” I told her to take off her ski pants and sweater and climb in beside me. The sense of familiarity combined with the sense of novelty—new lives for old: a new version of an old model: new wine in old brothels: it held me spellbound. Nor were her kisses any longer contaminated by nervous preoccupations—the stream was flowing clear, undammed at last. “Tell me how you killed him, the husband.” Between quickly drawn breaths she said: “Now?” “Yes, Benedicta, now.” While she spoke I was making love to her, I was happy.

  They had been mounted, had ridden far a
cross the fields and valleys to a marsh where he had been promised game to hunt. By the side of a long narrow causeway ran a group of abandoned clay-cuttings with a rivulet flowing. Beneath the causeway was quicksand, or rather a quagmire. Urging her horse with her spurs she found it no hard matter to press his mount towards the end and softly push it over. He landed in a huge sucking surprised calm, almost disposed to laugh, looking up at her from under the brim of his soft straw hat. The sandy moustache. Two realisations gradually welled up simultaneously in his fuddled mind: namely, he was slowly settling in the black viscous mud, and that she had become suddenly motionless, her eyes staring down at him with an almost expressionless curiosity. But the horse knew and sent forth an almost human wail as it flailed with its legs to free them from the soft imprisonment, the anaconda coils of the mud. Appalling sounds of the sucking farting mud. As for the man he watched himself, so to speak, reflected in the pupil of that blue scientific eye, watched himself sinking down and away, out of time and mind: out of her life and out of his. Surprise held him silent. Only his youthful handsome face, now pale with sweat, held an expression of pained pleading. The treachery was so unexpected: it seemed that he had to revise the whole of their past life, their past relationship in the light of it. It was not only his past which swam before his astonished eyes but his future. He whispered “help” from a parched throat, but his lips barely framed the word. The moustache! But she only sat down upon the parapet, turning her mount loose, and watched the experiment with a holy concentration, forcing herself to memorise the whole thing unflinchingly so that she might recount it to Julian when the time came, when she would have to.

  So he settled slowly as the westering sun itself was settling beyond the hills. They stared at each other in bitter silence, almost oblivious of the death-struggles of the horse which blew its muddy bubbles and groaned and rolled its eyes as it slowly heaved its way downwards, suffocating. The mud sounded jocose. Soon he was there buried to the breastbone like some unfinished statue of an equestrian knight. “So that’s it” he said, with a wondering croak. “So that’s it, Benedicta.”

  “That’s it, my darling.”

  She lit a cigarette with steady fingers and smoked it fast with shallow inspirations, never taking her eyes off his. But now it was horrible, he had begun to sob; the harsh sniffs broke down the features of his face into all the planes of childhood. He was getting younger as he died, was becoming a child again. And this was hard. A hopeless sympathy welled up in her, battling against the deadly concentration. It was becoming harder to watch with all the promised detachment. He was panting, head on one side, his mouth open. His hands were still free, but his elbows were becoming slowly imprisoned. There might still have been time to throw him a rope and pass it round a tree? She fought the thought, holding it at bay as she watched. It wasn’t the fear of death so much, she thought, as the ignominy of her betrayal—that was what lay behind the tears of this adolescent, this infant in the straw hat. But in a little while he decided to spare her feelings, his tears ceased to flow; a lamblike resignation came over his face, for now he knew he was beyond hope. Quickly she cut a slip of reed, cleft it and passed down the lighted cigarette so that he might take a puff. But he brushed it away and with a small sigh turned his face inwards upon himself and floated thickly down in slow motion, with little shudders and no more sound—not even a reproach, a curse, a cry for help. Not a bubble. It was so quickly over. She watched and went on watching until only the hat still floated on the quag. She could hardly tear herself away from the spot now. Muttering to herself, she felt all at once as if she were in a high fever; a fiery exultation possessed her. She had shown herself worthy of Julian. She managed to secure the straw hat—she would carry it back to him like someone carrying the severed head of a criminal. The valley was silent, oppressively silent. She tried to sing as she went, but it only made the silent dusk more eerie. Once or twice she thought she heard the sound of horses’ hooves behind her; and she wheeled about to see if there was anyone following—but there was nobody to be seen.

  There! Easy to recount, to bring to memory, hard to assimilate. It still stuck in her throat like a bundle of bloody rags she could not swallow.

  “And it’s no good saying I am sorry; yes, I am, of course. But what really ails me is the wound to my self-esteem, to find myself, my wonderful unique beautiful self guilty of so petty a betrayal. You see what a trap the ego sets you?” She raised a white fist and drummed softly on my breastbone, and then sinking down she fell, mouth to mouth in a suffocating parody of sadness which swallowed itself in the new unhindered sexual paroxysms. “But by far the most absurd and humiliating thing that happened to me was to fall in love with you at first sight. It was unbearable, such a blow to my self-esteem, such a danger to my freedom. And also to you—you were in such danger for such a long time. Poor fool, you wouldn’t have believed it; how could I tell you? I did not believe it myself. All that comedy of errors with the little clerk, remember? He was supposed to kill you in the cisterns. Poor man! First your hesitation about signing, then this poor foolish clerk being told to do away with you—he was unfitted for such a task, even though his own life depended upon it. All that excursion you found so funny was a sort of dress rehearsal for the job Sacrapant had been set. Mercifully you hesitated about signing, and this gave me a chance to reach Julian. I persuaded him to countermand the order. ‘Leave him to me’ I said. ‘I will suck him dry. He has lots to offer us as yet. If necessary I will marry him, Julian, until we can dispose of him.’ But in all the delay of sign and countersign the suspense became too much for poor Sacrapant, he knew he could never do it, that his time was up.”

  “So he fell out of the sky?”

  “So he fell out of the sky. Kiss me.”

  “He sacrificed himself for me in a way.”

  “Not really, there’s no such thing. I did.”

  I began to see a little deeper into the meaning of those first encounters, those first brushes with the firm. They had already had a chance to see my notebooks which were from their point of view crammed with promises.

  “Benedicta, darling, tell me one thing.”

  But she was asleep now with her blonde head against my breast rocked by our mutual breathing as a seagull is rocked by a calm summer sea. “I see” I whispered to myself, but in fact I saw only relatively. I recalled Jocas talking about the impossibility of ever tracing the real causal relationship between an act and its reason. And in the context of beloved Sacrapant, too, I saw the little man’s pale water-rat face in the wallowing watertight of the great cisterns.

  It was here in Turkey that Julian first contracted that thirst for the black sciences which has always coloured the cast of his mind; for here every form of enquiry could be pursued in absolute safety. “The idolaters of Syria and Judaea drew oracles from the heads of children which they had torn from their bodies. They dried the heads and having placed beneath the tongue a golden lamen bearing unknown ciphers they fixed them in the hollows of walls, built up a kind of false body beneath them composed of magical plants fastened together: they lighted a lamp under these fearful idols and proceeded with their consultation. They believed that the heads spoke … moreover it is true that blood attracts larvae. The ancients when sacrificing dug a pit which they filled with warm and smoking blood; then from the recesses of the dark night they saw the feeble and pale shadows rising up, creeping, chirping, swarming about the pit…. They kindled great fires of laurel, alder and cypress upon altars crowned with asphodel and vervain. The night seemed to grow colder …” (Julian silent in a high-backed chair with a book open on his knees). Moreover “if integrally and radically the woman leaves the passive role and enters the active, she abdicates her sex and becomes man, or rather, such a transformation being physically impossible, she attains affirmation by a double negation, placing herself outside both sexes like some sterile and monstrous androgyne.”

  I was beginning to see him much more clearly, and in ideas like these I thou
ght I caught a glimpse of the altera Benedicta, that lovely petrifact which destiny had transformed back into the loved original, the beloved outlaw I had almost forgotten in all this exhausting struggle. As for her mysterious and elusive lover, why should he not aspire to the mastery over age and time that Simon Magus first achieved? “Sometimes appearing pale, withered, broken, like an old man at the point of death: at others the luminous fluid revitalised him, his eyes glittered, his skin became smooth and soft, his body upright. He could be actually seen passing from youth to decrepitude, childhood to age.” Nor did there seem to be any perversity in these speculations which swarmed in the young Julian’s mind; everything was tinged with the vast oriental passivity of the place. Down below the jetty at Avalon you could still see, if you dived, the weighed sacks with the heads of the women—some forty—done to death like cats by Abdul Hamid in a sudden rage of revulsion against sex. Those that did not sink at once were beaten to death with oars in the green evening; their wails were piteous to hear, the boatmen had tears running down their faces as they worked. And Hamid? Do you remember the description of Sardanapalus the great king? “He entered and saw with surprise the king with his face covered in white lead, and all bejewelled like a woman, combing out purple wool in the company of his concubines and sitting among them with blackened eyes, wearing a woman’s dress and having his beard shaved close and his skin rubbed with pumice. His eyelids too were painted….” Then the great pyre he built to end his days; several storeys high it stood: and the conflagration lasted for weeks. Everything, to the smallest of his belongings, went up.