The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Now” said Marchant “try her for kisses, Felix, just in case she ever needs one, or feels that way. Eh?” He gave her a scientific kiss on the lips and pronounced himself satisfied by their marvellous springiness, better than the real thing. “And the mucus imitation is wonderful—like fresh dew. And look!” Iolanthe sighed and pouted like a child in her sleep, seeking another kiss. Adorable! “Your turn” he said, so I tried her out. “I say, this is wildly exciting” I said. “It’s so damned … well!” Marchant burst out laughing. “Art imitating nature” he said. “But what about this?—come over here. I just geared up Adam’s penis yesterday for a simulated orgasm. Man, it’s perfect. Shades of my prep school!” On another table he uncovered, with a proprietorial air, the thigh and pelvis arrangement of the male dummy. “Now watch” he said and began to rub the penis, which rose strongly, darkening as it became tumescent, to discharge its mock-semen. “Talk about Ejax” said Marchant in high delight, wiping his hands on a towel. “Once again, it’s a much heavier orgasm than Dad was ever able to manage. We could perhaps rent him out, Felix, and make a little dough. Why shouldn’t somebody love him a little, bring a little light into his male life, eh? He should have as much chance as you or I?” Gutta-percha, plastic, rubber, nylon ….

  “And to have done away with those two time-wasting and boring activities, eating and excreting, surely they will be grateful to us for having done it.” I scratched my head. “Suppose she becomes too inhibited by half—I mean what does she do at mealtimes?” Marchant replied tartly: “Exactly what any other actress does—takes out a cigarette and says, ‘Darling, I think I’ll just have a glass of water.’ She will go through all the motions without actually eating. She is not forbidden tobacco, by the way. My dear chap, she is fully fashioned this girl. Easy to be with, easy to love….” He was humming again, in high good humour. What a strange thing the human body is—I was feeling that warm hand with its lazy fingers moving slightly under mine. Strange foliage of toes and fingers, elaborate patterning of muscle, striped and streaky.

  So the great work moved slowly forward towards launching day; it was arranged that Iolanthe should imagine herself to be waking in hospital after an operation, recovering from the anaesthetic. Once dressed she would be moved into a small villa which had been furnished for her with her own possessions—Julian had acquired them all, furs, and ballgowns, and shoes and wigs. In other words, to give her reaction-index and memory a chance to function normally, we would provide ideal test-conditions in ideal surroundings. All around her would be the familiar furniture of her “real” life—her books and folios of film photos, her cherished watercolours by famous artists (careful investment: all film stars buy Braque)…. There would, then, on the purely superficial plane, be very little to distinguish between Iolanthe dead and Iolanthe living. Except of course…. The dummy would be living the “real” life of the screen goddess.

  But if we were working, so was Julian in his tortuous way; he had returned from his gambling bender both poorer and richer—for the fever had left him abruptly as it so often did for months at a time. It was like an underground river this illness, appearing and disappearing, now above ground now below—never constant. But he spent long evenings now in the little projection theatre he had built for himself, playing through the films of Iolanthe in a quiet deliberate muse; beside him sat Rackstraw mumbling and nodding with flickering attention, and on the other side the strange graven image which was Mrs. Henniker. There they sat, the three of them, fixed by the silver dazzle into silhouettes of hungry attention. Mrs. Henniker was going to take up her old post as companion-secretary to Iolanthe as soon as she “awoke”. As for Rackstraw, there was little enough to be squeezed out of him. At times he seemed to have glimmers of recognition, but then his attention would slip, and he would mumble incoherently before subsiding into sleep, the softly nodding drowse of old age. Yet in some way, and for some particular purpose, Julian held this little group together for a whole winter—though really I could not understand for what reason. At least, Henniker had a role to play, but what about Rackstraw? Julian must clearly have had something fairly clear in mind which prompted these sudden periods of self-dedication to what might have seemed a futile activity. There was also in the case of Julian a curious intermittent play, an alternating current, so to say, between intellectual boldness and cowardice. Perhaps the word is too strong—but when you think that the Iolanthe we were building was his particular obsession: why did he never come and see her? He used on the contrary to ring up Marchant and myself and discuss the various stages of our work with a kind of voluptuary’s nostalgia. But when I said: “Why not come and see tomorrow what you think of her?” he replied at once. “No, Felix. Not until she is word-perfect, until she is complete.” I sensed a tremor of something like fear in the words; but of course it was always accompanied by that wonderful self-deprecating charm. “You see I have never met her, I shall have to be introduced.”

  As for Io, she was getting so real as almost to be a pet. Machinery has this peculiar tug on the crude affections of the human race; why eke do men christen their cars and sailing-boats? I must confess that the first time we hooked up the memory-reproduction complex I had the most extraordinary thrill, almost sexual, in hearing that marvellous rather husky voice saying (as if she had a hangover): “And I told Henniker it wouldn’t do, it simply wouldn’t do; Felix, love is all in compartments, otherwise it wouldn’t be a universal disease. It’s silly that we only have one word for it. And the ones we have are very inadequate to deal with its variety—like esteem, affection, tenderness, sympathy. It isn’t classified as yet in any language.” I sat down with a bump on my chair and Marchant thrust a glistening sweaty face up against mine, exulting: “Do you think one could improve on her? Now tell me honestly.” I could only shake my head wonderingly. It really was quite devastating the extent of the dummy’s habituation to the ordinary terms of what we might call the human condition—if you can just simply imagine an object called “self” operating with a frame of memory, habit, impulse, inhibition and so on. It looked as if in another month or so she might be safely placed in the orbit of an ordinary life—held in harness as all of us are, purely by the routines of the daily round. Feeding on the rarefied air of inner space, correcting by willpower the gravitational pull of the passions—which to so many modern scientists seem little better than a bundle of assorted death-wishes. But of course inevitably the unlegislated-for quality made its appearance—for an example, we hadn’t really thought of “charm” as an ingredient when we specified her; but her charm was devastating—and surely it is the one thing you would expect her makers to remember from the original actress? So that, on the one hand, while we really knew all about her, she continued to surprise us during the long period which passed between her being in pieces, and being united. The day I mean when she woke up completely, yawned, knuckled her eyes and said: “Where am I? What time is it?” And then as she gradually took in her surroundings and the men in white coats around her, added: “Is it all right—that old appendix?”

  At the moment she was still a set of intermittent responses; her eyes were in, but had to be left a week or more to “set” properly so that she might use them. So that she still slept all day, and still kept her eyes closed when she spoke, the sound welling sleepily out of that beautifully formed humorous mouth. We had even forgotten (how is this possible: please tell me?), we had forgotten that she would know all about us, even our names. Or let me put it this way: we knew with one part of our minds, but not with such conviction that it didn’t give us a tremendous start to hear her use them. It was even stranger when, fetching back a memory from the very beginning of our Athens days, she spoke to me in Greek. “They say I shall never have a child, but I am glad. Would you like to have a child, Felix?” And it was here that my memory was faulty while her artificial one worked perfectly; I had forgotten what my answer was on that particular occasion. She was full of small surprises like these. But we still had to sel
ect a date for an awakening.

  IV

  Perhaps the most cogent reason for our habit of walking down the corridor into the embalming studio was that we wished to compare what we were building with what they were preserving with such care. There was not much trade in their business—somehow embalming had not really caught on, even among publishers. Nevertheless that mere trickle of corpses provided Cyrus P. Goytz with a theatre of operations in which he could train staff. He was an endearing man with a face like a spade and a swarthy skin which occasionally flushed in a dull way when a pupil made a mistake. He was clad in black to lecture, which he did with his hands clasped in front of his stomach. A big smooth minatory-looking man, dressed in such heavy materials that he looked not unlike one of his own products—drained of all blood, like a kosher dish, and not as if he had just been warmly sacrificed on the altars of gluttony. He wore a very obviously short-cut wig which gave his face a curious expression of transience—again like his subjects, who apparently began to melt after about a month. But he was a pet Goytz, the soul of patience, and (so they said) the best embalmer in the universe. On New Year’s Eve, at staff parties, he had been known to take out a glass eye and show it to everyone on the palm of his hand. In the evenings he played the violin to timid little Mrs. Goytz (who looked like a taxi-dermic waterfowl) in a semi-detached at Sidcup. He was spearheading the firm’s embalming attack on the Middle East.

  But this was not all; it was really his homely philosophy which gave us so much pleasure; he was so full of a benign desire to spread light and goodwill, dispel the clouds of gloom—or whatever misgivings his students might have about an avocation so, well … unusual. “Contrary to what many might assume,” he might say, taking up his penguin-like stance with hands joined in front “a corpse can prove a friendly, even a companionable thing—while it is relatively fresh, I mean.” This sort of thing Marchant used to treasure, and whisper it into Iolanthe’s ear as we knelt beside her, working on the eyes. The embalmers, by the way, worked to music—mostly the strains of In a Monastery Garden played in a reverent sort of way by a Palm Court Orchestra. Goytz kept it low so that the sound of his voice was not drowned as he instructed his students in the use of the trocar or the siphon pump which drained the bodies on the slabs. He was such a kindly man that he could even pretend to take a mild teasing from Marchant—as when the latter suggested that the appropriate motto for his little parlour should be “The More the Messier or the Nausea the Better”.

  His specimens, though, had rather a different feeling about them; they were vulnerable, you see, the decay could be contained but only for a while. They had not that noble abstract quality of Iolanthe, lying there asleep under her silk sheet. You could smash her, but she wouldn’t rot away, or melt under the coating of resin poured over her in her coffin—I am thinking of Egyptian kings and queens. All this of course Goytz knew and perhaps at times he smelt a little condescension in our tones, in our way of questioning him about his work. At any rate he once or twice uttered a phrase about our work which might have seemed barbed—as when he said: “And when she wakes up and asks you imploringly: ‘Is there any hope for a little happiness for me?’ what will you reply?” Marchant chuckled. “Nothing, of course; for she knows the answer, just like every human being knows the answer to the questions he or she poses. The question contains the answer in capsule form.”

  Mr. Goytz smiled briefly and said: “You see I have no such problem with my children; they have entered into the Great Silence, borne on the wings of their nearest and dearest. For them there are no problems. But for us, of course, they are numerous; we must dress them as if for a fancy-dress ball. And darned quick. Come in by the way, we have a few most unusual specimens this week.” He turned on his heel and led us through a curtain into the main studio where three or four corpses were laid out on trestles—the “cooling-boards” where they are trimmed and coiffed before the make-up goes on. All but one were covered, or half covered, in sheets so that there was a superficial resemblance to the other studio across the way where we ourselves worked. But the resemblance was a very superficial one; and ended when we saw the venous system being pumped out into a bucket. The pump hissed, the pink blood tinkled. (Rather like having the oil changed on your car I suppose.) A young man devoutly pumped and pumped. The body was much mutilated by a street accident, and a second youth kept the wounds free with a sponge. Goytz touched the cheeks with a quick white hand, as if to judge their springiness, and seemed satisfied with the rate of progress. He consulted a watch. “You got an hour I guess” he told his acolytes who did not so much as look up from their work. They had expressionless faces and square Jewish heads. Goytz inspected with some care the bucket which was half-full of the pumped blood of the subject and said, in his lecture-room voice: “One of the characteristic features of carbon monoxide poisoning is the bright cherry-red colour of the blood, and a greatly delayed coagulation time. One must not, of course, confuse it with the similar blood-coloration in drowned subjects.”

  So we moved from slab to slab while Goytz talked pleasantly and discursively about corpses and their habits, of the different ways of enbalming them through the ages, of the methods used to secure anatomical subjects for study—and a hundred other fascinating sidelights on his art, which showed us plainly that we were in the presence of a master of the trade; but more, an enthusiast. He knew all the names and dates of embalming history off by heart. And he spoke of his own particular hero, William Hunter, the Scot, with a reverence that was almost tearful. “It was this great man” he said “who not only gave the world a method of embalming which advanced the whole technique a hundredfold, but also listed the chemicals he used in so doing. He was the first to use the femoral artery as his point of penetration for his mixture of oil of turpentine, oil of lavender, rosemary and vermilion; this he allowed to diffuse through the body tissues for several hours before he started to open the cavities and remove the viscera for cleaning and soaking in essential oils and wines. These were then of course replaced and covered with preservative powders like camphor and resin and magnesium sulphate as well as potassium compounds. The powder was also packed tight in the cavities like mouth, nose, ears, anus; and finally the whole body was placed on a bed of plaster of Paris and allowed to remain there for about four years. In this way he dehydrated the subject and prevented the decomposition which comes about with bacterial growth.” All this seemed to move Goytz very much.

  “And here” he said “is an Eastern Potentate who died of an embolism on his arrival in this country as an Ambassador to your Queen. He is quite fresh and will come up very nicely indeed, yes very nicely indeed. He will give them all a thrill by his naturalness back there in Abyssinia.”

  The sheet turned back revealed a dark hairy man with enormous clenched hands which Goytz soothed out flat at once, tenderly elongating the crude fingers. He was anxious that no trace of an apparent arthritis deformans should remain when he had completed what he was pleased to call his final “composition” of the subject. I thought, as I saw him, how the fingers of our Io did not need to be kneaded into softness; her hand lay in yours like a snowflake of softness. Goytz was forced to knead and rub at his subjects, to massage them, rub them down with rollers—all to squeeze the blood out of them before he could start work on the outside. In this case the corpse was a huge dark simian brute of a man, part Negro, but whose face strongly suggested that of Jocas Pehlevi, the half-brother or whatever of Julian. Something about the swarthiness contrasting with the bright blushing warmth of the skin in which the beard grew, black as the bristles of a wart-hog. The same tips of gold in the teeth which were very slightly revealed by a retracted lip. But of course no ear-ring. The abundant hair and nails would outlast the great part of the final decay of this “potentate”. He was clad only in a blue underpant. His toenails were huge, broken, and very dirty, as if he had always shovelled coal with them. Goytz again gave the flesh of the corpse a quick almost affectionate run-over, patting it here and there with
some of the complacence of a woman rubbing cold cream into her face. In a sense I could see that his subjects had become a sort of extension of himself; it was his own flesh that he patted, smoothed, stroked, like some great painter his canvas. “He’ll be no trouble” he asserted. “We shall compose him something lovely. Eosin” he added somewhat cryptically.

  I remembered. Of course: one of the interesting properties of eosin is its capacity to fluoresce when exposed to ultra-violet light; to some extent even in bright sunlight it can do the same. But the best is when a shaded ultra-violet bulb is used—the so-called “black light”. It was the use of eosin which enabled Goytz to obtain what he called his “internal cosmetic effect”; his subjects looked lit from within, they glowed with an illusion of warmth and life. We were also taking advantage of it, but our skins were finer, more supple, and at least a thousand times more durable than his. But I could see his weakness for swarthy subjects because of this luminous dye which removed the residual greyness caused by the kosher treatment of the body, the draining out of its blood. At points then our preoccupations chimed; at others they diverged. For example he had been always far more preoccupied by the question of odour than we had been, though in an opposite sense: we had to invent smells which were indistinguishable from the real animal smells of the human body. But he had had to disguise, first of all the smell of decay, and then the smells of all the powerful agents he was using in order to preserve the illusion of life, or the quasi-life of his subject; an abbreviated life in time? No, but heavens! Surely both were dead in the technical sense? Well, Iolanthe was a little less dead because of a perfect memory which she could use: it was her radar. So that dying … was a case of loss of memory, both mental and physical? “The first thing” said Goytz with the air of a hunter giving a colleague a tip “is to select your drainage points with the full knowledge that here and there you may discover a clot or other blockage to free movement which will have to be sucked out by the trocar syringe. But it’s not very hard.