Ancient Evenings

by Norman Mailer

  “They spoke to me of shame,” I said, and thought of my mother and Menenhetet in their embrace on the roof garden. I must have sent my thoughts to her for the blood came to my mother’s cheeks and she was angry.

  “Do not speak of shame,” she said, “after you have embarrassed me with the Pharaoh.” I felt a flare of the fury with which she had picked me up and taken me from the room. “I do not think you will become a Pharaoh, for the same reason that the dog made you cry. You have the courage of a dog.”

  We spoke often to each other in this manner—one cruelty to pay for another. I enjoyed such contests. I was better at them than Hathfertiti.

  “Oh,” I said, “I did not cry for lack of courage but for simple misery that my father commands no respect. If, as you say, he is my father.”

  She slapped my face. Furious tears rolled down my cheeks. They must have cut into her sight like a hard stone scratching a softer one, for the flat look in her eyes, dull as black rock when she was angry, now cracked, and I saw the same sorrow in her that I had known when looking into the eyes of the dog. Something of the unspoken misery of my mother’s life was in her expression. “Why,” I asked, “did you not become the first wife of the Pharaoh?”

  Again she did not answer me. Instead, she said, “I married your father because he was my half brother,” and that was a useless reply considering how a good number of royal marriages (if not to speak of half the marriages of the poor) were between brother and sister, or half brother with half sister. It was not an answer at all. But I was still able to see in my mother’s mind how my father looked when he was young, and to my surprise he was strong in face and even a little crude—not crude, yet young and smug and cruel in a way that many women might like. Today, he was different. His face was pinched. The air that came into his nostrils was finer but meaner than when he was young—only seven or eight years ago!—and I wondered if such a change was connected to the whispered hints with which I had lived for years while present at many an angry silence between my mother, my father, and my great-grandfather. Some discomfort often passed between them as if all were suffering the same indigestible meal. Afterward, coaxing my mother to tell me more, bullying her thoughts and pursuing them, I was finally informed of the family shame: The daughter of Menenhetet, my mother’s own mother, Ast-en-Ra, had been married to a legitimate younger brother of Ramses III, but after this Prince’s death and my mother’s birth (in the same month) Ast-en-Ra next married a very wealthy man who came from a peasant family in the worst quarter of Memphi. As a boy, he had worked as a cleaner of latrines. That was the shame. He soon rose so high as to become a brothel-keeper (for by his reputation in bed he was near to the God Geb!) and on these profits succeeded in making a fortune. My grandmother, Ast-en-Ra, had married him, I was told, to avenge herself on Menenhetet, who treated her as his mistress from the time she was twelve, but ignored her once she married the Prince. In retaliation—so my mother insisted—Ast-en-Ra chose the man whose success would offend my great-grandfather most. Menenhetet only spoke of this second husband as Fekh-futi. It was our commonest expression for Shit-Collector, and my mother giggled as she told me, “Oh, Menenhetet was so jealous. He hated to hear that his daughter had married the most fabulous lover in Memphi. That’s why he detested your father from the day he was born.”

  “Did you?”

  “No, I liked him. He was my little brother and I adored him.” A memory leaped from her head most naturally into mine and so I knew that she had seduced my father when he was six and she was eight. But, as if aware again of this power in me to visit the thoughts of others, my mother now closed her mind—I could almost see it close—and for all I knew had no further thoughts at all, certainly none I could pursue.

  Yet this clear picture I had of the naked child who would become my mother holding the naked body of the child who was not yet my father pressed against the memory of my mother and Menenhetet last night, and I knew for the first time why we speak of two houses of the mind. But such a thought was too large for my head, and I soon gave it up and felt a sweet relaxation, a nicety of pleasure in my limbs, as though something valuable had eluded me but would yet come back. It was then I knew that I wanted to rest among these painted walls where the breath of evening was forever the color of rose in the expectant air.

  “Shall we go back now?” asked my mother.

  “You go,” I told her. “I would like to sleep in this room where you played when you were young.” Events that never happened in my sight stirred about me, as if memories like birds from far away could light in your own nest. I thought of the wonder of Eyaseyab’s lips on Sweet Finger, and clouds of honeyed feeling rose from me again.

  “All right,” my mother said, “I will leave you here. But you must not stray. I will be with the Pharaoh and your great-grandfather in the place where you saw too much in the eye of the dog.” She shivered at the recollection. “So soon as you are tired of being alone, I want you to sit with us and give attention to what He says in His audiences. Many problems of government are considered there.” She sighed. “He listens to the most tedious difficulties and sometimes solves them, although He is not, dear man, a practical heart.” I noticed she spoke as if she were married to Him on this day at least, and remembered her saying to my great-grandfather, “What if only one of us comes back with what we want?” Now she smiled at me as she went out, a dazzling smile to leave me full of the most generous warmth, and I was alone then, and comfortable, and lay on that couch whose ivory legs were like the limb and hoof of an ox, while the rose-colored lights of evening never moved through all of the afternoon. After a while I was not asleep but afloat in the place where one is so close to sleep that the two houses of the mind become like two boats that slip away from one another across the waters. I felt then how much of my existence might not be my own but still I felt no woe, no sense certainly that I was in any way not a true child of six, yes, I felt this with such confidence that I was happy and fell asleep. Or, let me say, I ceased to know where I wandered. My ships drifted away from one another and I lay there in the long false evening of that painted room.

  FIVE

  I Awoke in a stillness so profound that I could picture the birds on the marble steps of the landing before Two-Gates, and could even feel one colored feather twitching delicately over another across all the distance of the three great courtyards that separated me from the river. I began then to have the most unusual experience although it was without peril and came as no surprise to me. It was just that—my mother having told me not to stray—I was nonetheless able to go off like two people in separate directions. My mind most certainly was now inclined on the one hand to leave the Palace altogether and follow our boatman, Bone-Smasher, as he went drinking through the marketplace of Memphi, yet by the other hand, I also sat in attendance on the Pharaoh and listened to how He disposed of the problems of government. Meanwhile, my body never moved. I obeyed my mother and did not stir from the couch. It was just that in a bewilderment of senses sweet as the pleasure older people must take in wine, so did I go off into the mind of the boatman we called Set-Qesu, and he was living in all the fury of his name, its sound on the ear just like its meaning. We called him Bone-Smasher but that was polite; his true name was Ass-Bone, a bugger of such dimensions, said the other boatmen, that Set-Qesu could pulverize the bone in your back.

  I do not know why I followed, but I lived nearer to him than if I sat by his side, and felt as if I knew his thoughts, not intimately—I did not hear words go through his head, and maybe few words did—but I could feel the anger in his chest, raw as the lungs of a lion, and his sour stomach was souring mine. I felt as if I had been rolled up in a rug full of old spit and old retchings while red ants explored my skin, but that could have been the shock I suffered at daring to venture so close. What I felt next was fatigue, a bitter ache in every nerve I knew, more painful and certainly heavier than any tiredness I had known before, and I heard Bone-Smasher growl to the people drinking near him,
“Had us up for the night fixing his boat, then pulling on the oars today.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said a man waving a jug of perfumed beer, the smell at once sour, bitter, and much too sweet from the perfume. “You drifted down the river today.”

  “You don’t drift, man, not in his boat. Every curl in the current is a peril.”

  “Just drifting,” said the man with the perfumed beer.

  “Keep your rotten eye out of my face,” Bone-Smasher told him. The man talking, big as Bone-Smasher, had only one eye and it was full of pus and inflamed. But looking around the bar, even in the dim light of this dirty beer-house where there were no windows and the only opening was the door, I could count the faces and most were blind in an eye, maybe it was fifteen out of twenty. I did not know if I had ever seen so many before. Among our servants, and certainly among the servants of the Pharaoh, a half-blind man or woman was kept only if they were old and trusted—who wanted to look upon a wrinkled eye-socket every day? Whereas, here, I felt as if all our desert sand and all the dung of our animals, not to speak of the terrible glare of the sunlight, had been rubbing on the lids of our people from the hour they were born. I looked with discomfort at a drunk who had fallen on his face and was lying in a corner of this bar, his forehead ground into all the old filth of bread crust, onion rottings, spilled beer, spilled wine, sputum, puke, and even a little mud where a puddle of beer had softened the dirt floor—deep in the litter of that corner, the drunk snored.

  “Drifting,” said the man with the pus-filled eye, “is drifting.”

  “Open your mouth again,” Bone-Smasher told him, “and I’ll stick my thumb in your other eye.” I was close enough to live in the pleasure of his thoughts, and his fatigue was gone. He was breathing in all the enjoyment of a rage that filled his head with a red light. The red rim of the eye before him turned pale, then red as blood, and the other man’s skin went from dark to the pale-white of a fish’s belly, then as dark again as the purple of Bone-Smasher’s rage (for it was not the colors of the man’s skin which were changing but the sights in Bone-Smasher’s head). He was looking at the other drunk’s lips—so soon as they said one more word, Bone-Smasher would be on him. He could feel how his thumb would gouge the eye. It would pop in its socket like the pulp of a peach squeezed through its skin.

  The girl who brought the drinks was standing before him, however. “Oh, let it be a good day, Set-Qesu,” she said. “Drink until you are happy.”

  “Bring me eighteen cups of wine,” he said, and smiled, and I could feel his drunkenness—I knew the dizziness passing over my head was the power of drunkenness for I had tasted wine, and it made me drunk, though not like this; the walls of the barroom were ready to fall on him should he stand up. To his surprise more than mine, he looked at the barmaid, and said, “Your dress is a beautiful white. How do you keep it so clean?”

  “By staying out of reach of people with dirty hands,” she cried out and skipped away.

  “Come back,” he bawled. “I want the wine from Mareotis.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “And a loaf of your filthy bread.”

  I had a glimpse then of the simple white dress being pulled from her body, saw his big hands in the cheeks of her buttocks and pulling them apart, saw her body wide open like a carcass in a butcher shop, except she was neither wounded nor bleeding, only twisting her limbs with his, and pleasure on her face. Then he was sitting on her head with his breechclout off, a club of a phallus between his legs, and with it he beat on her breasts. I knew it was only something to see within his head, for the girl had gone to the long table where the jars of wine were kept, and was now bringing one back, a flat loaf of bread under her arm. “This is the wine from Buto,” she said.

  “The wine from Buto stinks,” he said.

  He did not sit down. Still swaying, so that I could have been perched like a mouse on the back of his neck—yes I saw these events with all the wonder of a mouse—I also saw the walls swaying. Taking the wine she brought, he pulled a stopper of hard wax out of the jug, poured wine into his cup, swallowed it, poured another. The drink went down with the taste of blood.

  “It smells in here,” he said.

  “Pay me, Set,” she murmured, “and the air outside will feel good.”

  “It’s hot outside and stinks in here.” He was furious, but had forgotten why. From his breechclout, from a fold in the hairy skin of his testicles, his fingers running under the cloth and over his short hairs just long enough for the girl’s mouth to quiver (he did not know, nor did I, whether her lips trembled or he only thought they moved at the feel of his finger on himself) he brought out from that fold of his flesh one of his copper coins, in weight a quarter of an utnu, heavier than both of my testicles together, and waved it under her nose with a gesture he might have borrowed from his Lord, Menenhetet, so resourceful was its mixture of contempt at the reek of this bar, and pride in the luxury of the manner by which he had plucked it forth. “I’ll marry you someday,” said Bone-Smasher and began to roll toward the door, the brown earth of the floor equal to the dark-brown of the Nile in late afternoon. Feeling the floor flow toward him like a slow-moving stream, he had a great need to pass water himself, and the size of that desire left me and Sweet Finger obliged to share the pressure on his scrotum and it hurt me more than a door closing on my foot. I wondered that he did not roar. He turned around, however, wheeling as ponderously as a barge coming about in the river, and went up to the drunk with one red eye.

  “You don’t drift down the great river,” he said, and belching up a bile of spiced beer, palm brandy, and the last belts of the wine of Buto, added, “There are currents that turn in a circle and holes to suck you in.” He was about to add that there were rocks you could not see when the water was high so you had to remember where they were or they’d stove you in, but the drunk with his lonely eye merely beamed and gave a foolish look, and waved his forefinger. “You drift,” he said as if the profundity of every wise thought was here.

  Bone-Smasher pulled his cloth to the side and disgorged urine all over the man. Laughter went through the bar until Bone-Smasher was done. The drunk merely collected humiliation, then simpered, sat down and began to sleep. Bone-Smasher turned. He was happy for a moment. The loaf of bread under his arm, he started for the door. No one said a word until he was almost clear, but the smell of his urine followed him strong as the hot water of a horse on straw. A babble began in the depth of the bar as he went out and built in its bravery as it passed by all the poor tradespeople and apprentices and workmen until they were throwing half-eaten onions at him and crusts of bread (but from a distance) and he staggered into the street with the majestic balance of his heavily stupefied head going around the thought of returning to knock a head or two together. The last words he heard through the door were the clear threat of someone saying, “Your Lord Menenhetet will hear of this.” Then he was alone on the street (and only myself to follow his breathing) and his lungs were gasping in as much strain as if he had been pulling on the oars for hours, breathing in fear and some ecstasy of the fear itself. Menenhetet had had him whipped near to death on one occasion and the sensations were the most unforgettable of his life, and, aware once more of himself on the street, children hooting at him, men and women giving him a good space, only one young fellow big as himself, standing in the middle of the dark and narrow street with the walls four stories high, he and the other approaching slowly—they would have to fight if they touched—that confidence turning to caution as they came near each other’s rage. They passed, both men shamed by the failure to touch. Set, feeling tired, sat down in a small plaza by a shaduf where women were gathering water with their pails, and reached into his loaf of bread, broke out three fingers’ worth, began to chew.

  My mother always told me I had a mouth of little pearls, and it is certain I never tasted bread like this. It felt as rough on the tongue as bran, and before he had taken three bites, his jaws ground down on a whole grain the siz
e of a pea and it chipped his tooth, or what was left of the stump of that tooth, cracking it hard enough to drive a spear through his drunkenness. He cried out from the sudden pains in his mouth, for they went reverberating back through all the years his teeth had been broken down by grit and pebbles and sand and whole grain and flakes of stone from the grinding wheel. He saw his mother working into flour a fistful of wheat she had scattered on a hollowed-out slab outside the door of the house where he grew up, and maybe it was the smell of the bread he held to his nose now, the same sour urine in the pores of the bread, but he was back in the work of his childhood getting all the dung, manure, paste and shit of all the donkeys, chickens, goats, cows, dogs and sheep, all of that old pungence lived in his nose, balls and turds and flops for his mother to shape into bricks and dry in the sun. That was the stuff with which they baked the bread when they could not find wood, and there was never enough wood. By the smell of the stuff he now ate, his nose must be traveling through the anus of a goat, and he whimpered again from the throbbing in his newly cracked stump of a tooth, the whimpering as agreeable to him as the ebbing of a wound on its way to heal, and he stood up smiling or glaring (as the mood took him) at whichever woman happened to be passing through this little square, her eggs and live chickens for sale, one girl with a goose flapping under her arm, another woman with a ream of linen she had woven, the color so white it blazed the sun back into his eyes, and he had a long stumbling recovery as he bounced on his feet from step to step down a road that led to the great square of the market, the sun overhead as cruel as a body sleeping next to him with baleful breath. He traveled with his eyes closed, and the sun’s rays searing the red irritated rim of his eyes. There were some who said all the Gods could live in one God, and He was the Sun. If this was true, then He was angry now.