The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  Mind you, only once did she dare to say that she loved him to his face, only once. His look of horror and fury was quite indescribable. He struck her across the face with a book, without contempt yet deliberately. “Hush” he said on a deep resonant note. “Hush, my darling.” He was trying to say that it was not love, it was possession, and that her use of the word diminished the truth of the sentiment. Sentiment? No, that is not the word. She endured every kind of physical and sexual humiliation at his hands with the deepest joy, the profoundest pleasure. Julian was born never to weep. It was Jocas who took the scissors and embedded them in the wall of the cellars with their handles protruding. It had been decided that Julian was to go away, to be educated separately; partly it was the strain of the internal hatred between them all that decided the matter. But it was also dictated by the future needs of the firm, the firm that was going to be; for Merlin’s quiet calculations were all bearing fruit slowly. His subtleties put many a fruitful project in his way: as when Abdul Hamid had given a concession for the purchase and sale of tobacco en régie to a company unwise enough to order Austrian cigarette paper stamped with the Sultan’s tougra or monogram. Nobody would have noticed this except a man like Merlin. Was the sultan, he asked, content to have his effigy spat upon daily by tens of thousands of cigarette-smokers in the kingdom? It was the same with the postage stamps which bore the monster’s head. Were these also to be spittled over by scribes? Within a short space of time he secured both concessions for himself, for the firm.

  A kiss is always the same kiss, though the recipient may change from time to time; her kisses were the only thing which had remained young still about her, fresh as spring violets. So many of our gestures are not prompted by psychological impulse but are purely hieratic—a whole wardrobe of prehistoric responses to forgotten situations. (The sex of the embryo is decided at coition; but five whole weeks evolve before the little bud declares itself as vagina or penis.) Io had suffered from a small and useful abnormality in being temporarily sterile: the closure of the lumen of the Fallopian tubes by scar tissue resulting from an early gonorrhoeal infection….

  Much of this I could not stand, could not bear hearing, bear knowing. I took refuge in the frivolity of my illness—purely in order to alarm her, to see if she cared. Master Charlock has been naughty this week; he has thrown his porringer on the floor, beat upon the table with his spoon, spilt his soup, roared like a bull, wet his trousers…. Inventeur, Inventaire, Eventreur …. I lie just looking at her, so far from the invincible happiness of possession; all this dirt, all these contaminated circumstances turned my love to vomit for a while. But this will not last; something which will prove to be stronger than the sum of these experiences will forge itself—is already rearing its flat head like a king cobra. If the sex thing remains the way it is I will not falter again.

  But even as I lie thinking this, looking into her eyes, the other half of my mind is following her out across the Cilician plains where once she used to be sent to hunt the harmless quail with the women of the little court. They alight in great flocks during the spring when the sesame crop is ripening—from far off they seem to be one huge moving carpet of birds, running along the ground like mice, with a subdued chirping. The women hunt the little creatures with a light net and an aba, a strange prehistoric contrivance shaped like a shield, or one side of a huge box-kite; a skeleton of sticks covered in black cotton, but pierced with eyelets. Wearing this over their heads they advance in open order, staring through these huge eyes at the quail, which begin by running away: but soon appear to become mesmerised. They sit down and stare at the advancing shapes, allow themselves passively to be scooped up in the nets and transferred to the wicker hampers. Turning her mouth inwards upon mine I think of Dr. Lebedeff and his délires archaïques. Turkish delight, onanism in mirrors.

  “It was not only Julian’s life which was aberrant,” she says clearly, trying to get it all off her chest, “it was the place, too. My father had me sexually broken, as we say in Turkish, by his slaves.” Inexpressibly painful to her to retrace her steps over this poisoned ground, yet necessary. There in the night of Turkey I saw Julian as more of a goblin than a youth. The dust-devils racing across the plains, some spinning clockwise some counterclockwise. “You can see from the way they fold their cloaks which are female and which male” say the peasants. In those days to bring rain two men used to flog each other until the blood poured down their backs and the heavens melted. (They pissed on Merlin’s eagle-wounds to disinfect them properly before dressing them.)

  “Not all our eunuchs were artificially formed. There were some villages on the high plateau which specialised in producing strange but natural androgynes with an empty scrotum like a tobacco pouch; they were bald usually and had high scolding voices.” Fragments of other lore have got themselves mixed up with the transcription somewhere here. (A skeleton whitewashed and painted the colour of blood, to present its re-emergence in the world. Or a phrase underlined by Julian in a book, “Il faut annoncer un autre homme possible”; you will see from this how deeply he was concerned with his own soul, and for the fate of man. It is not possible to consider him simply as an unprincipled libertine, or an alchemist who went mad under the strain of too much knowledge. No. His concern was with virtue, with truth. Otherwise why should he have said that the most devastating criticism ever made of a human being was in the Republic where the phrase occurs: “Now he was one of those who came from heaven and in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered state, but his virtue was a matter of habit only and he had no philosophy”? I do not really know him as yet; perhaps I will never know him now.)

  Autumn is well on the way with its moist colouring, its rotting avenues of leaves; but these wards are quite seasonless. Blood-orange moons over the Alps. But I am miles away still in the heart of Turkey with Benedicta. There is still so much to comprehend. They have changed my nurse for a great big sad dun-coloured creature with eyes like conjugal raisins. In the dangerous wards they are playing backgammon with little moans of surprise; men and women like outmoded, damaged pieces of furniture. “Smoking spunk!” cries Rackstraw with peevish vexation. “What has the dooced boots done with my suèdes?” There is no answer to the question. Then at times a touching half-comprehension of his situation comes upon him—in the mirror on the white wall he will talk to himself thus: “Ah, my lifelong friend, I have led you up to this point, past so many deceits, so many suicides. And you are still there. Now what? Something the blood deposits as it moves about like an old snake. But the reticence of these ghosts is amazing. Io! Io!” He listens with his head on one side, then turns away, shaking his head and whispering: “I was sent here because I loved too much. It was out of proportion. I had to pay for it with all this boredom.” Drawing in breath on the windowpane with a long yellow finger he will suddenly change mood and subject and exclaim: “Has anyone seen Johnson lately? I wonder where he’s gone. I last heard he’d been locked up in Virginia Water for making love to a tree.”

  Where indeed was Johnson and why did he write so infrequently? “They may have moved him from Leatherhead to Virginia Water. He has had a great crisis of belief, Johnson. They are studying his case with care; it is not like me, I am simply here to rest on my laurels.” Rackstraw scratches an ear.

  “Pthotquyck” he says suddenly, brightly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Pthotquyck. It’s the Finnish for mushroom.”

  “I see.”

  “The dooced things get into everything.”

  From various sources I have managed to piece together the story of his friend Johnson, the great lover. Yes, they are holding him at Virginia Water, in the grip of his fearful but poetical Yggdrasil complex, or so I suppose they must call it. “Things have closed in very much down here,” he writes. “The people are kind but not very understanding. Out in the park there are some lovely trees, and next week when I have my first walk I will try and have a couple. Elms!” It was as simple as that—suddenly in the f
ull flower of his sexual maturity Johnson found he loved trees. Other men have had to make do with goats or women or the Dalmatian Cavalry, but Johnson found them all pale into insignificance beside these long-legged green things which were everywhere: he saw them as green consenting adults with diminished responsibility, loitering all round him with intent. They beckoned to him, urged him to come on over; they could hardly do otherwise, for a tree has not much conversation. Perhaps it was due to his long and severe training for the Ministry which had all but tamed him. However it may be, long-suffering policemen on the prowl for more unsavoury misdemeanours used to chase the skinny figure round and round Hyde Park. Johnson showed a surprising turn of speed, running distractedly here and there like a cabbage white, doing up his trousers fervently as he ran.

  For several orgiastic weeks he led them a dance, and perhaps they would never have caught him had not the indignant prostitutes organised an ambush for this harmless satyr. He was distracting trade they said, while some people were even complaining that the trees were getting bent, several of them. This was pure jealousy of course. So Johnson, priest and dendrophile, was committed to the doctors for attention. And now Rackstraw is here, brooding on the destiny of his friend. He sighs and says: “And Iolanthe—I wonder if you ever heard of her? She was famous in her day, I made her famous. I wrote them all except one—the one about the lovers in Athens. Films. The whole thing came from her diaries, she wouldn’t let me change a word of the dialogue. The young man had died or gone away, I don’t know. But she could never see it without weeping. It used to upset me. O I wonder what’s happened to Johnson. Pthotquyck!”

  The woods are full of them, the wards are full of them! Yet they contrive in their disjointed fashion to present a composite picture of a way of life, a homogeneous society almost—even the most alienated. They smell each other’s aberrations as dogs smell each other’s tail-odours. Even the hauntingly beautiful Venetia, the little girl with two cunts, who has specialised in a crooning echolalia which Rackstraw listens to with delectation—as if to the song of some rare bird.

  “Who are you?”

  “Who.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Are you.”

  “Are you Venetia Mann?”

  “Mann.”

  “Are you?”

  “Are you.”

  Rackstraw shakes his head and gives a mirthless laugh. “Priceless” he says. “Priceless.”

  Ah, but one day we will be restored to the body of the real world—O world of Anabaptists, tax-dodgers and hierophants, O world of mentholised concubines! Yes, my darling wife, with your bright eyes and snowburnt face, we shall leave this place one day, arm in arm. A new life will begin, dining off smoked foreskin in Claridge’s, on partridges in Putney. We will leave Rackstraw to play chess with the deaf mute. And Felix will go back to the firm with the same engaging adolescent manner which seems to say: please be nice to me, I have only been educated up to the anal stage. Back to London, back to the vox pop of the banjo-group, back to the young with their unpsychoanalysed hair. Kiss me Benedicta.

  But pouring out a drink with shaking hand she says:

  “Julian has said that he wants to see us together.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m beginning to feel afraid again.”

  “The very word is like a knell.”

  “He says everything is different now.”

  “It had better be.”

  Not tonight, though; tonight we are alone, just the two of us, compounding fortune with all her little treacheries. You will tell me once more, lying half asleep, about the locusts—of how the early winds brought them sailing over Anatolia, darkening the light of the sun. How the hunters would see them first, being the longest-sighted: and give tongue. Whistles and gunshots and the winking of heliographs from the ruined watch-towers of the coast. Away across the bronzy stubble and the mauve limestone ranges the marauders came in innocent-looking puffs, coming nearer and nearer until the cauldron overflowered and they were on you. Clouds at first soft, evanescent, tempted to disperse: but no, instead they gathered weight and density, formed into the wings of giant bats, spread out to swallow the pure sky.

  The camp went grimly frantic with preparations: as if for an arctic blizzard, for the horny coarse-bodied little insects penetrate everywhere, everything, ubiquitous as smoke or dust itself. Heads wrapped in cloth or duffel, wrists fastened, legs sheathed in puttees or leggings. Then the long wait to determine if the cloud was preceded by an advance guard of wingless green young ones, pouring along the ground with incredible speed, turning the fields to a rippling torrent of scaly green.

  Pits were dug, long barriers of tin or wood scooped the advance guard (as far as was possible) into them where kerosene fires smoked and flapped. On they came pouring themselves unhesitatingly into the pits, piling upon the bodies of their burning fellows, until there were tons of them ablaze. The stench deafened creation. But the fliers approached with that ominous deep crackle—first from far away like thorns under a pot: then nearer, more deafening, like a forest fire, the noise of their shearing jaws. The illusion of fire was also given by the speed with which they stripped the forest of every green leaf, hanging in long strings like bees swarming. Shrubs keeled over with the weight of their bodies. The horses kicked and shied at their horny touch; and however many precautions one took one always felt the creatures crawling up one’s legs or arms, scratching the bare skin, tickling. In a twinkling the whole visible world was stripped of life, bald as a skull. A winter forest as nude as Xmas under the burning sun. A very particular and utterly silent silence followed such attacks for weeks on end: that and the stench of charred bodies burning like straw.

  Then camps were broken up, ranks redressed; but exhaustedly, listlessly. Yet there had been no danger. Only it was as if they themselves had been stripped of everything except their eyeballs. In one of the khans a circling vulture dropped a woman’s hand into the camp. Well and so back like ants to the skylines, to where the blue gulf carved and recarved itself, smoothing away towards the fitful city.

  * * * * *

  Deep sleep was good again though the research ferrets of the unconscious still sniffed around the motives and actions of my silent companion. The past isn’t retrievable is it?—too many burnt-out bulbs. Try, Felix, only try!

  Now this morning an unexpected envelope with a London post-mark—this from Vibart; not a real letter, he explains, but a few pages torn from his desk pad. “I should really have come to see you, Felix, but I’m superstitious about bins. Always have been. Suppose you were glassy, eh? Ugh! Even a real letter might be wasted, then. But a few pages from my desk pad will give you news of me, broadening the old mind as we used to say.

  “Tell me

  What strange irrelevance

  Dogs the lives of elephants

  With trunk before

  And tail behind,

  With ears of such vast elegance

  How they control the state

  Of such a massive gait

  And still be reasonable and kind

  Though almost all behind?

  “item

  “It’s awkward, isn’t it, when the flippant, the effortlessly inconsequent, becomes a tic. We have come a long way together haven’t we old man? Without being very much together either; from time to time, like model railways our paths cross at a critical junction. Ting-a-ling!

  “item

  “Cogent Memo in Julian’s own hand. (He has begun to write very big and sprawly now.) ‘From a publishing point of view the only irresistible themes are Quests, Confessions, and Puzzles in that order. Let Vibart govern his judgement by this unshakable truth.’ An odd tone to take with me, isn’t it? What about all those poems which give us prestige—poems written with a stomach pump? Koepgen’s new volume for example. It’s all very well for him, Julian, just off to New York again with his star-spangled manner.

  “item

  “Felix, I am making a very great deal of money. Yesterday
my ideal novel came in. It begins ‘Smith was a nice big man in good health; but because he had been told as a child that his balls would fly off if he laughed too heartily his face always wore a strange twisted expression. He lived in dreadful anticipation until one day the worst happened … (now read on).’ I have had to refuse it for other reasons.

  “item

  “One lives and learns. F.V. the novelist tells me that ‘one should know as little as possible about one’s characters. The more detail you give the more they sink back into the undifferentiated mass. All you need is one cardinal aspect for each one—a ruling bent, in fact the person’s “signature” in the heraldic sense: hunchback moneylender, myopic scholar, deist king. The rest is padding.’ And I suppose that the proof of the padding is in the publishing?

  “item

  “Felix, I’m miserable, how are you? How would F.V. novelise us? I wonder if we might presume ourselves to live in one of his fictions? If only you knew, if only he knew. Pia! The last letters! It is unfair. I can’t bring myself to throw them away: yet what purpose would they serve if I kept them? They are fading anyway. Time is very generous in some ways. ‘Death comes always by a sort of secret intention, a compact. Like a love affair, one disposes towards it, one inclines, one intimates the secret need.’ I sometimes wish myself in the Paulhaus with you—at times I almost merit it. My dreams, you should see them! What an extraordinary fauna and flora sprouts from the infernal regions.

  “item

  “And all the time she was staring at me with those candid and unflinching eyes she knew that she was quietly and confidently betraying me all down the line. She had decided I wasn’t a man, I suppose. And with whom? Guess! Yes, with Jocas. I really can’t believe it myself as yet. The caption doesn’t fit the picture. And yet it’s all there, written out in her own fair hand. The riding lessons! Then when we had to go away they both got ill from the separation. How sordid. All those doctor’s bills. Damn.