The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  The journey had been tiring; everyone had been grumpy, out of sorts, in some way or another. Vibart buried himself in his papers, was off-hand with me and non-committal. I had the feeling that he was angry with himself for confessing as much as he had to me on the day before—I know not why. Caradoc too was in a scolding mood, and only the promise of a glass of authentic raki or mastika seemed to give him a hope. I think in a way all our thoughts had begun to turn one way, to quest out towards that long bare headland where, among the jumble of forts and kiosks and shattered palaces—the fabled Avalon of old Merlin’s dream—somewhere out there Jocas, the brother, was waiting for us. I suppose that Benedicta must have read my thoughts for she said softly, echoing in a strange way the recent thoughts of Ariadne: “We tend to forget it, but people do have this awful tendency to die.”

  “Come. Come” said Caradoc peevishly. “You will never console me in this way. Cut out all this nonsense.”

  It was natural that in this developing gloom, this heavy preoccupation with what waited for us, I should take refuge in Baum: for he had business of his own, he was not heading for Avalon as the rest of us were. The town itself was his objective. Yet even he was depressed in a smaller way, though of course his behaviour was exemplary. I was soon to learn the reason. It was our good friend Banubula who was causing him anguish. “You see,” he said “I am disquieted because the Count has begun to hunger for the power to initiate. So long as he was quietly working for the firm his role was a fulfilling and useful one. But now … you see Mr. Marchant has played this dirty trick on him and he has taken it seriously. And the awful thing is that it has become serious. The thing is launched. You must never joke in the hearing of the firm, Mr. Felix, because the firm takes everything deadly seriously.”

  “What dirty joke, Baum?”

  “Fresh sperm” said Baum moodily, poking his ear with a long spatulate fingernail, as if to clear it. “Fresh sperm!”

  “What is that all about?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Mr. Marchant was very drunk and he said that the latest findings of the chemical section showed quite clearly that the only really nourishing skin-tonic for women was fresh male sperm. This is all very well, Mr. Felix, but he went on to add that there was really nothing to stop the firm marketing the stuff if only it could be collected on a large enough scale; and of course if one paid for it well enough one would be able to get as much as one wanted from private producers—just like any other commodity in our modern civilisation. From donor to factory, at controlled temperatures, presented (according to Mr. Marchant) hardly more complicated a problem than picking lavender and taking it to the perfumery. This was very wicked of him; he should have known how gullible the Count is. But he should also have known that the firm takes everything very seriously indeed. Just what Mr. Marchant envisaged I have no idea—I suspect he had none himself when he made the joke; it was simply to tease his friend. On the face of it the idea is mad—thousands upon thousands of people making this sort of contribution to a factory which fills up phials with it and markets the product. On the other hand, as Marchant said, conserved sperm was already used in artificial insemination, why not in skin-food? I was of course horrified when Count Banubula told me this; but what is worse the whole thing was set out as a memorandum and discussed by the chemistry board, and passed. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard. Not only that, a subsidiary called Lovecraft Products had been set up, and a subscription list for willing donors has been opened. Moreover it shows every sign of sweeping the continent. Can you imagine it, hundreds of thousands of males all over the world selling their … product? And yet the chemical group say that they can sort and grade it, keep it in a temperate emulsion form, and distribute it to all who seek beauty through skin-tonics. I must admit I was sharp with the Count when I saw what had happened. But he produced a number of disingenuous arguments in which is immediately recognised the drunken hand of Mr. Marchant. Why, he said, was it any worse than the sale of Chinese or Malayan hair by the women of underprivileged nations? Why should the overprivileged nations be denied the right to part with their surplus—assuming it was a surplus? At any rate, whatever my own reservations, the scheme has gone ahead so fast that I fear it will get out of hand; so many donors have joined that new factories have been opened and the whole project has had to be twice re-financed by the Germans and Americans. Meanwhile, too, all the letterpress and the advertising devised by the Count and Lord Lambitus I find distasteful to a degree. Look.”

  He whipped out his briefcase and groped about in it, to extract at last a thick batch of letterpress which bore the unmistakable imprint of Banubula’s innocent genius. I was surprised that Marchant was the author of the jest which the firm had so swiftly turned to profit. It was the sort of thing Caradoc might have done, but not Marchant. Yet here it was.

  Nor was it hard to see and to sympathise with poor Baum’s misgivings, for he was in the advertising and promotion department, charged to dish out all these pamphlets and advertisements to a weary world. They were designed both to attract new donors (“Why not give your all for Lovecraft and be in the swim? You can make a fortune if you work at it. Study our bonus scheme. Moreover it’s work you can do at home in your own time. Why not have fun with the firm? Take life in hand and double your income” etc. etc.); and also to appeal to a gullible beautician’s market (“The safest natural skin-food, so kind to the thirsty pores”) … but why go on? I could see that Banubula’s literary side had been quite carried away by the whole scheme.

  Baum had been scanning my face as I read in order to gloat sympathetically on my expressions of horror. “You see?” he said, as I handed back all the gaudy letterpress. I did. “Moreover” he went on “I have been sent out here to try to sound out the Turks, to get them interested in the scheme as possible donors. Of course everything has its market value, Mr. Felix—I would be the first to admit that. But there are dangers here, we might make a mistake. The Turks are Moslems and deeply religious—suppose we started a holy war without meaning to, eh? I prefer simpler, more material ideas; I like to know where I stand. Now when Lord Lambitus proposed marketing whips in gold lamé I saw the possibilities instantly. But this could prove to be … well, grotesque! I am supposed to meet the religious leaders tomorrow to outline the scheme. I am much afraid of what might happen. How, for example, will all this stuff translate into Turkish, eh? One doesn’t know. I don’t want to die with a spear through me just for encouraging Turks to … well, market their product through Merlin’s. Yet on the other hand it’s my duty to obey orders.” He sighed heavily. I wondered whether he was wearing a bullet-proof waistcoat.

  There was no time, however, for long-drawn-out commiserations for by now the officials had come aboard, clucking like hens, and stamped our passports. Long strings of coloured lights had demarcated the outlines of the bay; the nether sky was still molten but cooling fast, like the steel lid of a furnace. Out of the nearby darkness a large white pinnace whiffled once, and then, at a signal from a man in uniform, began to sidle towards us sideways—like a smart cat.

  Our belongings sorted and our various destinations decided upon, we crawled aboard her—Benedicta, Caradoc and I. The others had other duties and would spend the damp Turkish night in the magnolia-scented gloom of the Pera. But Vibart? “I thought you were coming with us?” But he had made one of those inexplicable volte-face. “So did I” he said. “And now suddenly I’m not. I’m not even sure I shall come and see Jocas—I don’t seem to need to any more. It came over me just as we hit the water.” He looked suddenly elated, his smile had grown younger, more self-confident. “I shall walk about Polis tonight and think myself over” he said, and with a brief nod joined the others in the pilot’s launch. I was curious enough to want to question him further, but Benedicta pulled softly at my sleeve and I desisted.

  The wind was fresh as we came out of the sea, but the sturdy little pinnace rode sharp at fifteen knots. In the comfortable little cabin with its smart leather-uphols
tered seats we found a small insect-like man dressed in white who turned out to be the doctor who was looking after Jocas. He spoke only French, and he smoked very slowly and thoughtfully as he spoke. He held the white bone cigarette holder in a tiny clawlike hand which suggested that of a mantis. But what he had to say to us disabused us immediately of any notions we might have had about astrology and destiny and suchlike. Unless of course the progress chart could accurately trace the course of a long-drawn out metastasis. It was our old friend, the contemporary scourge. On the other hand he said: “He is weak, but in very good courage, in spite of knowing the truth. But the place is in an awful mess and needs clearing out. He has got rid of many of the servants and has more or less moved in with his birds. C’est gênant from the medical point of view—washing him and so on.” We were silent now for the rest of the journey. B. looked at her fingers. Caradoc contented himself with a heavy sigh from time to time. The little doctor sat watching us and smoking and reflecting. The journey seemed to last an age. But finally our nose sank into still water, we throttled down and softly ebbed along a dark landing stage where a figure from the past—the old eunuch of my first visit—stood holding a lantern high above his head and giving the Islamic greeting to the darkness. Mouth, forehead and shoulder, mouth, forehead and shoulder. But even when we stepped ashore he gave no intimate signs of recognition—perhaps because Benedicta had her head done up in a scarf. He did not at any rate recognise me. We huddled ashore in the humid darkness to the slapping and slobbering of water along the wooden piers. A sense of desolation invaded me, I do not know exactly why. One felt that everything here had run down, gone to seed—but how one could feel such a thing when one was surrounded by darkness I really cannot imagine. Perhaps the little doctor’s few brief words had prepared us for such a thing. At any rate, leaving our baggage we followed the majordomo with his hissing white light, the doctor leading us. The paths had been marked out with little kerosene lamps which faltered here and there in the wind; but they gave hardly any light, and were simply markers upon which to orient ourselves. Uprooted trees and creepers and bushes lay about beside the path, and once a couple of starved-looking mongrels emerged from the dark to sniff at us and retire. I thought of the fine pack of hunting dogs with their lustrous fur which had been Jocas’ pride in the old days; they would have simply wolfed mongrels like these, or driven them into the sea.

  The air of desuetude must have been largely imagined, then, for we could take in few details until we reached the cypress glades with their kiosks. The eunuch was talking now to the doctor, with a soft high clucking voice; it appeared that a once elaborate electrical lighting scheme which illuminated everything, had recently foundered owing to a faulty generator, and that nobody had bothered to have it repaired. He wagged his huge bald head in resigned disapproval. “You will see” said the doctor.

  There was more light in the two villas with their cracked windows and starred mirrors—but the smell of kerosene was everywhere. The flagged floors were full of chicken bones and unswept feathers. We were asked if we would eat first—indeed in the old salon a table had been clumsily laid with a dirty tablecloth (of the finest Irish linen), several branches of dribbling candles and a solitary bunch of dusty artificial grapes in a cracked plate of alabaster. Here the stink of the birds warred with the kerosene. The walls showed cracks. The door jambs heaved and creaked—the sea salt had been at them. There was a swallow’s nest in one corner of the room.

  But it was to Jocas that we were going, and he had apparently moved out lock, stock and barrel into the old shot tower—on the eastern ramparts of what had once been a fort with a high keep overlooking the gulf. Here in the old days he had spent his time delecting in a huge marine telescope pitched on a low tripod. Sitting in a deck chair, pausing only to eat an olive from time to time, Jocas could follow the whole movement of the shipping in the gulf below. But to gain access to this martello one had to walk along a crazy broken parapet built along the sea-face of the headland; a ruined staircase which Benedicta as a girl had come to know as “The Battlements of Elsinore”.

  On this stone ramp we embarked in single file. I could hear the squinch of my rubber soles on the stone. Hereabouts too an occasional lemon-yellow lizard darted for cover—they are always first to emerge with the spring sunlight. But the climb was steep. Smell of thyme. So at last we crossed a walled courtyard, skirting an uncoped well disguised by tall thistles, and then climbed on to a balcony and opened a huge door.

  It couldn’t have been much smaller than a good-sized parish church, the room in which Jocas had taken up residence; but the height of it was such that the upper shadows pressed upon the lighted areas like a whole sky of darkness. One expected to see stars upon that black damascened darkness. For the rest it was a robbers’ cave from some old fairy tale. A huge fire of thorns blazed in one corner. Branches of candles and small oil lamps picked out and punctuated the foreground where the figures of men and boys worked and moved. Wait. We stood upon the threshold and gazed into this cave with its dark flapping shadows, expectantly, hesitantly. We had come at an inconvenient moment. An enormous Victorian hip bath was being filled with steaming water by a small boy while two other shapes were carrying a shrunken form from the bed towards it—the figure you’d say of a large white frog, legs spread apart. The bed itself was enormous and hung about with a dark red velvet baldaquin whose ropes bore the unmistakable signs, even in that erratic light, of greasy hands. The curtains were drawn back. Jocas therefore advanced towards us, carried by four arms, helpless as a child, but cheerfully smiling; the smiling languor of the small infant longing for the surcease of hot water. It had a powerful resonance this sudden glimpse—like some sombre oil painting of the Spanish school. Moreover there was enough light here on the ground to take in the dirty deal tables, the flagged floor covered in droppings of bats and birds, the smashed windows.

  Our natural instinct at this unwitting intrusion was to draw back in some confusion, but the white figure waved at us with cheerful languor and cried: “At last you come. Very good.” His tone, his mien, transformed the tableau suddenly into something different, say a friendly rag in a boys’ dormitory, something which might end in a pillow fight. But he was shrunken and much withered, had lost the sturdiness of his buttocks and thighs. Yet his face was still agleam with intelligence and the little gold caps on his canines glittered as he smiled upon us. “Don’t go” he said. “I will soon be washed.” The two expressionless figures carrying this pale frog deposed their burden with slow carefulness in the tub. Jocas sighed to feel the water rise up round his waist. He leaned his head back against the high rim of the bath and then extended a pale hand for us to touch. There was a kind of lucid and rather moving simplicity about the gesture; his helplessness was as disarming as his smile.

  His magnificent head of hair, now plentifully touched with white, was combed loosely back; it fell in a straight shock almost to his shoulders. Benedicta knelt down to kiss his cheek and then turned aside to order the rumpled bed while Caradoc and I stood looking down at him. His servants sponged him softly and rhythmically. “Well this is a fine business” said Caradoc harshly, disguising his affection and concern in a habitual gruffness. The doctor made some professional movements among the bottles and pans which were laid out on one of the long white tables in the corner. What a jumble of spoons and forks, of half-eaten dishes, and broken fragments of meat for the birds. The birds! They would account for that heavy rotting fragrance in the vaulted air of the room. They were ranged like trophies along the end wall, the darkest corner of the room, all but invisible, but one could hear the tinkle of their bells as they stirred and sighed. His belongings stood about in isolation, as if they had lost context. It was a trifle surrealist, the old horn gramophone with its records (Jocas loved military marches and had quite a collection). There was a tall cupboard whose doors hung open. A few articles of attire were hanging up in it; but for the most part his belongings occupied the other wall, and were hung on nai
ls. A fez, a deerstalker, binoculars. An old-fashioned typewriter lay on the floor beside a flowered chamber-pot. Thigh boots. Two gaunt armchairs, of the style called Voltaire, stood beside the bed with a strip of tattered carpeting between them. Everything looked quite haphazard, the result of a series of hasty afterthoughts.

  But now they were finished with him and carefully lifted him from the bath. He let them with the same air of weary innocence, smiling, but delightfully unashamed of his nakedness. They laid him out upon one of the white deal tables to dry him—and I was reminded at once of the white “cooling-tables” of the embalmers. He hissed in with pleasure at the harsh touch of the towels and in a whisper urged the men to curry him harder and yet harder, like a horse; until at last his pale flesh took on the faintest warmth of tone. Then they produced an old-fashioned night-shirt and slipped it over his head. Now it was the doctor’s turn; first an enema and then various injections. The little man whistled softly, abstractedly as he worked on his patient. Jocas had a whole lot of new and very beautiful expressions on his face—a whole new repertoire it seemed born of the illness, no doubt, and all the considerations which it raised. Had he thought very much about death, I wondered?

  But once in bed lying back like an emperor under a Byzantine covering, pressed into puffed pillows, he became suddenly completely himself. I mean one would not have thought him ill at all. He held Benedicta’s hand in his own confiding childlike grip and spoke in a new calm voice, smiling. “I wanted just to take leave” he said, and I realised that he was planning to die in the time-honoured, traditional eastern fashion. Here death itself had a ceremonial value and form; in the East there always seemed to be time to gather all one’s relations together and take a formal leave of them. To distribute alms to the poor and order the family estate. We used to die like that once in England, a hundred or so years ago. Now somehow people are rushed into the ground unceremoniously, like criminals thrown into quicklime. Jocas was doing it in the old style. I caught sight of his scarlet slippers (les babouches); there was an ink-spot on one. Under the bed, as if hastily thrust aside there was a bit of railway line and a model train lying on its side. In the far corner under the window stood a huge and beautifully coloured box-kite with a long tail. Of course! One could lie in bed and fly a kite through the window.