Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  They’re in the form of letters?

  Good, on this we’re quite agreed, but to whom?

  To their … lovers?

  Yes Isabel, some might say that. And number 15 is purportedly written by? Come now, quickly—

  Sappho.

  Ah, a little hush stills the room. At last we’ve everyone’s attention. Sappho … apparently the learned woman isn’t such a novelty after all, Tomasina. But what do we really know about Sappho? Antonia?

  That she was a teacher of women.

  So they say. Good, what else—Belilla?

  That she was a—

  She was called the Tenth Muse.

  Belilla thanks you, Antonia. And how many Muses were there supposed to be?

  [in unison]

  Nine!!!

  How lovely!—our own chorus.

  But Sor Juana, they call you that.

  Really Isabel? [mock coquette] Then it seems they’ll call anyone that these days. But Ovid puts her in a whole regiment of heroines—alongside … anyone?

  Ariadne?—

  Phaedra—

  Helen!–

  Stop, please—

  Hypermnestra!—

  Medea!—

  Stop, señoritas, no need for all of them!—thank you. Now, what is Ovid up to? Heroines, he calls them—his gallery of adulteresses, parricides, Amazons. And how does a flesh and blood woman end up in such a collection? The Greeks called Sappho the Poetess in the same way they honoured Homer as the Poet. Yet Ovid has her heaving great sighs over a boatman named?

  Phaon—

  A boy.

  Why yes, Belilla.

  Young enough to be her son.

  Ah the ups and downs of motherhood—ask Procne, ask Iocaste. Ask the sisters Ariadne and Phaedra—indeed, half Ovid’s heroines have taken a rather disastrous fall. How curious, and how precarious for Sappho. Ovid puts her on a cliff ledge, spurned, her wondrous poetic voice stopped, mimicked now by a plangent echo. Antonia, will you read for us? You know the place.

  I come upon the forest that offered us many times

  the bed we lay upon, and whose abundant boughs covered us in darkness.

  But I do not find the master, the forest’s lord, and mine. The place

  is only impoverished earth; his presence was the grace that endowed it.

  I recognized the grass, pressed down, of the familiar hollow

  our bodies made in the blades on the green remembered bank.

  I lay down and touched the place, the part in which you lay.

  The earth that once delighted me was thirsty and drank in my tears.

  Even the branches have cast off their leaves; they seem to mourn;

  the birds are quiet; none make their dear lament.

  Only the nightingale, only Philomel, whose terrible grief took vengeance

  most terrible against her husband, laments for Itys …

  Once again—Philomel?

  Procne’s sister.

  And what happened to Procne? Hurry now.

  Her husband cut out her tongue and locked her away and said she was dead so he could marry Philomel.

  Such a mouthful!—thank you, Antonia. And his son, Itys?

  The sisters killed him. To take revenge.

  And then?

  Secretly they chopped him into pieces and fed Tereus his own son’s flesh.

  Tantalizing tale. I commend you all. You’ve learned Ovid’s old stories well. Even Tomasina is despite herself nearly a classical sage. So … Ovid, whatever is he up to? In the passage you just heard, what associations is he creating for his Sappho? Is she Philomela or Procne, or both? Ovid’s Sappho is driven to the brink by the love of Phaon, a common boatman—her forest lord and master is little more than a boy, as Belilla has pointed out. Ovid has the greatest lyric poet of antiquity call this young sailor her ‘genius,’ her voice—and who can doubt this is how Ovid sees himself? So now who has cut out Sappho’s tongue, so to speak.

  Phaon?

  Ovid?

  Sor Juana, why is he so cruel to her?

  Yes and yes, and I’ve asked myself this, too, María. And yet there are touches of sympathy that puzzle me. Earlier he has her shrieking in grief, at times invoking her love for her pirate brother, but also the love of a mother for a murdered son. Let’s come back to your question in a minute—may we, dear? ’Tonia, just a few more lines.

  The nightingale sings of Itys, her abandonment is Sappho’s song:

  Only that; all else is as silent as the dead of night.

  There is a shining spring there, its water clearer than any glass …

  Is there not something very strange happening here? Who is the abandoned nightingale singing for Itys?

  Philomel.

  But Philomel killed Itys.

  As you say, Isabel. And how touching it is, how tender—to hear the lament of the murderer ‘abandoned’ by her victim’s demise. And if Philomel sings for Itys and Sappho sings Philomel’s song, for whom does she sing?

  Phaon?

  Ándele, Belilla.

  And so does Ovid’s Sappho grieve for a lover or a son—or are we to suspect he is both? And has he abandoned Sappho or instead been devoured by her? So many precipitous conclusions Ovid leads us to. But wait, how thoughtless of us—we’ve left Sappho at the edge of a cliff! Where again?

  Cape Leucas.

  And why was it called the white rock of Leucas?

  Because it was white?

  [laughter]

  But why not, Isabel? We won’t let these Spites make fun of you—in my dreams those cliffs are white. But there’s more, too. Who was Leucothea?

  The White Goddess.

  Excellent. And what happened to her? Anyone …?

  She threw herself into the sea.

  Goodness, why?

  She was …

  You can say it, María. It’s ancient history now.

  Violated. By her sons.

  And there is yet another unfortunate who threw herself from the white cliffs of Leucas—yes, ’Tonia?

  Queen Artemise.

  Who was …?

  Commander of the Persian armies.

  A military fiasco, I imagine.16

  No.

  Not love again.

  She’d fallen in love with her own son.

  Not so unlike the Sphynx’s priestess—

  Like Iocaste!

  Iocaste exactly, María. And the mother of Oedipus. Now, Menander tells us that at the top of that white rock stood also a temple dedicated to Apollo Leukatas, and that each year—or in time of plague—a criminal was hurled down to ward off evil, an outcast hurled into the sea to purge the unclean. Some might call it a whitewash. A detail survives: to the scapegoat’s shoulders, wings were strapped.

  Like Icarus.

  Quite possibly, María, on a hot and sunny day…. Curiously enough, Apollo’s cliffside shrine was also once thought to offer relief from the pangs of love. Aphrodite herself came to visit it, driven to grief over the young Adonis—and what happened to him?

  He was gored.

  Yes, to death, by Apollo, in the guise of …?

  A boar!

  Why María—it seems you too are becoming a scholar. And yet I remember someone coming to my cell just last week, lamenting with a great shedding of tears how hopeless she was. Now she’s positively beaming. Not so hopeless after all, it seems. And now to the rest of us it should be clear the Hellenes’ use of irony didn’t begin with Ovid or even Homer. What final irony did the Greeks reserve for the goddess of love? Antonia?

  She threw herself into the sea.

  Yet another leap from the cliffs of Leucas into the foaming surf. Aphrodite—of sea spume born, into spume returned.

  But what does it all mean?

  What indeed, Belilla. Is this the meting of poetic justice, do you think, or the judging of poets? Wait, though, not all the evidence has been weighed. As always, there’s another version: It’s said that on the way to the island of Leucas, Aphrodite, though grief-
stricken, nevertheless managed to fall for a new lover—dextrous girl. Now, guess what his name was. No one …? Antonia.

  Phaon.

  The same Phaon?

  Depends whom you ask, Belilla. ’Tonia, give us the story, please.

  They met on a boat.

  Do tell, a shipboard romance.

  Phaon was the boatman, but very old. Out of pity Aphrodite changed him into a beautiful boy.

  Out of pity, you say. What then?

  She fell in love.

  Ay pobrecita, to tumble head over heels for one’s own creation.

  So Ovid is saying Aphrodite’s really Sappho?

  Well, Belilla, it’s a theory at least.

  What else could it mean?

  That Sappho’s Aphrodite?

  Please, Juana.

  All right, what’s your question—whether it’s plausible that a poet might fall in love with her own creation? Or, maybe you’re asking if when any of us falls in love it is with our own creation.

  Be serious!

  Bueno, Belilla, me esfuerzo. ‘Phaon’—tell me what that means and I’ll give you a serious reply. Guesses? Anyone …?

  Is it like ‘Phaedra’…?

  Or ‘Phaëthon’?

  And just when I was congratulating myself for not being able to teach you Greek—yes, Antonia, a little like Phaedra and yes Belilla, like Phaëthon.‘Bright,’ like the moon, and bright like the sun. So were the lovers Sappho and Phaon, or Aphrodite and Phoebus Apollo, or perhaps earliest of all, the rise and fall of the moon and the sun?

  You promised.

  Here it is then, my most serious answer, Belilla. Not a little violence has begun with a myth deliberately passed off as a substitute for history. In which case we might wonder if perhaps posterity’s war on Sappho begins here, with her myth. But we might also ask ourselves if there is not an equal violence waiting to be unleashed if we mistake what history brings us for the more complex truths myth helps animate—as the sap does the tree. To those who would ignore this, the living forest of myth becomes invisible even as the tree of truth desiccates and hardens. And in the heat of battle we might even succumb, ourselves, to fashioning spears and arrow shafts from its boughs. In Sappho’s case the battle is brought by those who would confuse Sappho with …?

  Her poetry?

  Yes, María. We could study for a lifetime the tales the name Sappho has been tarred with, but I would not add another feather’s weight to the speculations clinging to her life.

  So Ovid just made it all up.

  But Belilla, why should we expect art to be so simple—so much simpler than our own lives? Yours or mine, much less Ovid’s. As a man condemned to exile maybe Ovid was more concerned with preparing his own leap into legend. So perhaps it’s wisest to leave the myth of Sappho where Ovid leaves it: poised on a great rock standing like a portal, a white veil between this world and the next, an angry sea reverberating up the sheer cliffs of Leucas like the steel of Damascus dashed upon shields … Here we stop for today.

  Maybe he made Sappho up too.

  We’ll take up some of these threads again next time.

  But what about Sappho? Her poems—her voice, her loves.

  Next week, the letter of Paris—who none too wisely preferred Aphrodite to Athena, beauty to wisdom—

  And your poems to Sappho, Sor Juana—what about those?

  [Antonia, furious] How could you possibly know about that Belilla? Are you listening at our door? Do you have any idea how much danger—?

  What about you, Antonia? You’re like a pet! A fat, spoiled house cat. Not six months here and you walk around like Juana’s your property! ‘Sor Juana says this. Sor Juana’s writing that….’

  Juana, I’ve never said a word! [near tears] Not one word.

  Everyone? Would you let me have a word with Belilla alone? See you all next week. Antonia, you too please …?

  †‘Heroines’

  †fountain basins / water tanks

  CASTALIA

  [11th day of September 1688]

  la excma. señora María Luisa Manrique de Lara y

  Gonzaga Condesa de Paredes, Marquesa de la Laguna,

  Madrid, España

  Lysis,

  A second letter—so quickly. (I have your letters of the 1st and now the 13th of July.) As Antonia placed the envelope in my hands I knew it couldn’t be the answer to my last to you, which will be weeks reaching you—crossing uncounted mountain passes, one Atlantic and all the vicissitudes of storm and tide and fog and faulty charts that this implies. And then besides, two sets of censors, one on each side—as if from Veracruz to Cadiz they faced across a functionary’s desk, to make the sea of faith for censors but a pond.

  And yet even knowing all of this, when I saw how slender your letter I could not help feeling some careless phrase of mine had angered you. In this frame of mind (askew) I read and read once more the opening line.

  Send me a title, Juanita. Our daughter needs a name.

  How have you managed it so quickly? Licences from the Holy Office, thirty letters of support from theologians. Thirty!—have you so much as unpacked your travelling cases?

  You say the printers have started? A title then, a title … to do with the Muses? but no, one hears far too much talk of Muses over here. Wait.

  There is a spring on Mount Parnassus, sacred once to Ares. It lies a little north and east of Delphi. But that was Ares’ day, and then there was a nymph and then it was Apollo’s time to shine. Castalia. (Pagan, and chaste, Castalia.) To escape Apollo’s attentions she plunged from a cliff to a spring far below, a small spring at the bottom of a deep rock basin. Here in the tale, the spring transforms into a source of inspiration, to both Apollo and the Muses, who were for this reason called (if rarely) the Castalides. All this is quite fine, and the idea of our Castalia as the Muses’ muse quite gratifying, but what amuses me not a little is a glimpse of Apollo’s ‘inspiration’ as his quarry launches herself from the heights and dissolves into a shower of silver.

  So, yes, ‘Castalia,’ but what? Fuente de Castalia? Manantial Castálida? Salto de las Castálides?—Chubasco, Aguacero, Chaparrón, Diluvio—Haz Castálida? I am at a loss. May I surrender the decision to your most exquisite discretion? Hazme este favorcote?

  Of a sudden, nervousness consumes me. Nymph. What sort of nymph—naiad, dryad, nereid, hamadryad—which? This is not some backwater we are publishing in, this is Madrid. Some wag is sure to suggest our collection’s namesake was instead a rash Oread† who sank to the bottom like a stone. Or like a certain ill-considered tome …

  Ah what a pendulum of anxieties I am become. Anxious first not to get my hopes too high that it might be published, next, feeling just as fearful that it will be. Fearful of there, dreadful of here—the very image of Castalia as she leaps. So for our title, we could not have chosen better. But as for the other … I know I have not answered you. You have hinted that the printers, who are holding the first signature till you hear from me, would have room in it to print my Letras a Safo.† How it thrills me to know you have not forgotten them. If I say ‘not yet,’ will I break your heart?

  I lack the courage still. I am afraid to break this truce. Núñez has kept to his word, and for these last seven years I have not heard a word of his against me. You will lose patience with me for being cowardly. And yet in these quiet if not peaceful years I have been able to work, much bad, some good—but some of that work we are publishing now. If honesty forces me to concede it is not yet my great work, modesty does not stop me thinking that in First Dream, at least, I have given something of my measure. There is not a poem quite like it in our language.17 (You have said precisely that of Las letras a Safo, I know.)

  But if the Inquisition here can ban Montalbán’s albeit terrible play (seen throughout Spain without pleasure perhaps, but also without censure) for the blasphemy of having a character pray God hasten the course of the sun, then the holy officers would not hesitate to ban our Castalia for a dalliance with Sappho. And
even in the unlikely event that their decision be overturned someday by the Holy Office in Madrid, it could take years. I do not know whom it would bring more pleasure to see our collection seized and held till then—Father Núñez or Fray Dorantes. Both consulted on the Montalbán case. For Núñez, any brief pleasure he took would surely have been in banning a play by the author of The Nun-Ensign—an old favourite of mine. Dorantes was, meanwhile, the more vociferous in his ruling and would take pleasure now in seeing Núñez chastened for his past association with me or for any lack of zeal in condemning our collection as soon as it appears.

  Already, then, it takes all the courage I can summon to have you publish, along with so many love poems, Martyr of the Sacrament and The Divine Narcissus, knowing as I do how angrily Núñez views these. Sappho’s hour for the stage is not yet nigh. Infinitely worse than the frustration of holding back this one suite a little while longer is the pain of imagining the whole collection seized.

  Can you forgive me, then, if I send you another rarity in its place?—to fill the signature, and if you approve it and accept it as a portrait, might you let it open the collection …?

  The other night well past Matins, after reading your letter for the dozenth time, the verses I enclose came all in the most marvellous flood. I pray you read them as token of my love and gratitude, a tribute in seventeen quatrains. Sálazar has written something using this structure of dactyls, but I have strengthened it and even bettered it, I think, after a practice poem or two. Even after these, if someone had offered as a wager that a poem of sixty-eight lines each beginning in a dactyl† could come out any better than the beating of a beggar’s drum to the thin jingling of his purse, I would not have taken it—would fain have taken the purse.