Cretan Teat

by Brian Aldiss

  Sam sighed and took a gulp from his coffee cup. Then he spoke impatiently.

  ‘You may argue that. But it’s going to upset a lot of readers. It’s just pornography. It’s not everyone who finds this habit of yours enjoyable. Good old straight intercourse is certainly good enough for me.’

  ‘Ah yes, “If it was good enough for my father, then it’s good enough for me”, eh, Sam? No – muff-diving, as our American friends tend to call it, has long been a sophisticated pleasure. How it thrills your partner! And the joy of having those trembling white thighs embrace your cheeks! Why, there’s – ’

  Sam was half-heaving himself from his chair. ‘Steady, old boy, that’s enough. I’ve heard enough. Your jacket’s steaming! You’ll catch fire!’

  I subsided. ‘Catch cold, more like. It’s such hell getting here.’

  ‘Well, simply hire a cab… No problem… You hire a cab.’ He spoke in a soothing voice, as to a juvenile, bound to irritate, spacing his words – you pause hire pause a pause cab.

  ‘All I’m saying is that muff-diving is one more colour on the palette and palate of love. One has to add that not all snatches invite visual or glossal enjoyment. They vary in looks and tastes.’ I was vexed with myself for using the term ‘snatch’; it was not a word I usually employed. I sighed heavily. ‘Also, the face is important. A beautiful face implies… Well, you imagine there’s a – well, a correlation…’

  Sam was becoming more gloomy as I spoke. He adjusted his tie, using the action as an excuse for shaking his head.

  ‘I mean, if you take Hedy Lamarr…’ But I dared not blunder on to the end of the sentence. It struck me, perhaps belatedly, that neither of us was greatly enjoying the conversation.

  I became afraid he might bring up the absurd paedophile charge next.

  Sam now looked as if professionally involved in a Gloom Promotion Campaign. He squared up my pages by holding them upright and banging the lower edges against his desk top; after which, he laid them aside with a moue of distaste.

  ‘I suppose this teat-sucking is all part of this sucking obsession of yours,’ he said – I thought in a rubbishy way.

  Trying to make light of it, I replied that muff-diving was less an obsession than a question of taste; or a matter of last resort. However old and incapable one grew, one still had a tongue in one’s head.

  Apparently he had not heard. ‘All right. I take your argument, but it’s not a good idea to air your obsessions in public.’

  ‘You mean like Joyce did? And Hemingway? And Kafka? And – ’

  ‘I mean that, in your case, I don’t think it works at all well.’

  We sat looking at each other, like picnickers staring out from under umbrellas at heavy rain. Perhaps he feared that I might feel he was a dull fellow when it came to sex – as indeed I did. Jerking suddenly into an assumed gaiety, he said, ‘Heard a good joke going the rounds the other day – kind of thing you might enjoy. About how you should seduce a member of the opposite sex. If you’re a man, you’ve got to be sincere, worship the dear creature, buy her clothes, send her flowers and a naughty novel – not too naughty! – take her to expensive restaurants, and so forth. Then she may yield. Whereas…’ He paused, his heavy face imitating a smile. ‘Whereas, if you’re a woman, all you have to do is turn up naked with a bottle of Scotch under your arm.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I roared. I had used that joke myself, several years before, in The Banners of Barabas. It had not been very funny then, but I had had the good taste to use vodka.

  Solemnity was quickly restored. Sam laid a hand, as if in paternal blessing, on my pages of typescript. ‘But we are going to have to pass on this one, old boy… Sorry. I have discussed it with my co-editor. Try something else for a change. We are currently planning a new series of guide books. The Large Little Guides. You wouldn’t like to do one on Crete, would you?’

  ‘Instead?’

  He nodded. ‘Instead.’

  Vasari’s doomy words about the painter Perugino came to mind: ‘With the terror of poverty constantly preying on his mind, he undertook, in order to earn money, such work as he would probably not have looked at, had he had the means to live.’

  Saying I would think about it, I returned to the outside world and the persistent rain. The tabloid collapsed soggily about my head.

  Archie Langstreet had finished his frugal breakfast. He hunched himself over a serious article in a serious paper, headed ‘THE AGONY OF SAINT ANNA’. The claim of the article was that the great majority of those who’d visited the shrine in the previous year had been women. When interviewed, many women saw Anna as an image of neglected motherhood; this was Anna’s compelling power – an older woman maintaining her family over two generations without acknowledgement. ‘She is a symbol of women’s strength in sustaining the human race,’ claimed a woman from Chicago, Ill. ‘She’s the lady who saved Jesus for the benefit of the human race,’ claimed a lady from Paris, France. ‘I love her more than the Blessed Virgin Mary,’ said a teenager from Neustadt, Germany.

  ‘Despite indications that the entire Agia Anna project is going pear-shaped – costing Archibald Langstreet most of his many millions,’ concluded the article, ‘it obviously affords consolation to millions of women.’

  Perhaps it afforded some consolation to Langstreet as well.

  He sat in his suite at his table, resting his chin in his hand and staring out of the window. A cup of coffee cooled by his elbow. He was, at this early hour, in his shirtsleeves.

  Beyond the window, a man was working on a wooden platform, applying rendering to the facade of the still unfinished hotel. He was now working at the second floor, where Langstreet had his suite of rooms, the ground and first floors being as yet incomplete.

  The workman was of middle age. His clothes appeared at least as old as he. The lower part of his lined face was concealed by a beard and moustache. The hair of his head sprouted from beneath his cap like a small shelf, shielding his eyebrows. His tightly-closed lips held a dead cigarette end firmly in position. The business of rendering covered him with white, so that he looked ancient enough to have emerged from a recent ice age.

  He worked steadily, occasionally pausing to remove the dead cigarette from his mouth and spit.

  Langstreet felt contempt as well as admiration for this man. Contempt because (as far as he knew) this man had never tried to better himself, being resigned to remaining a labourer; admiration because the man worked so doggedly, almost without pause.

  Whatever virtues the labourer possessed, his intellect had been stunted, his perspectives narrowed, by poverty. It was against such injustices that Langstreet imagined himself to be working – and on behalf of this ordinary man.

  He had studied the man so long that he almost convinced himself he had seen him before; had he perhaps been one of the gang holding Cliff to ransom, and now at last in gainful employment?

  Even as this notion crossed his mind, Langstreet dismissed it as a foolish fancy, drained his coffee cup, and rose to get on with his business of the morning.

  The elevator was austere; dull metal doors flanked by metal panels. He admired it. The cage rose silently from its repose. The doors opened. He entered. When he pressed a button, the cage began its descent. Through the small window and the elevator entrance, where doors had yet to be installed, he saw the thrilling barrens of the first floor, as yet undecorated except by entanglements of cable hanging from the ceiling or snaking across the floor. Men were at work, glimpsed in frozen attitudes as the cage passed on down to the ground floor.

  Here, Langstreet, ignoring groups of chattering tourists, went to the rear of the building. He entered the office, where secretaries were already at work. He greeted them absently. It was his hotel. He kept himself remote. Marigolds in a jug had been set on his desk. He moved them away, to a side shelf. The Formica shelves above, below, reflected their gold – but he had turned away.

  His secretary had already opened up the computer. He scanned the emails. There was a
n explanation and an apology for delay from the Swiss company which made the elevators. The doors for the first and third floors would be delivered within ten days. A British firm acknowledged the acceptance of their estimate for bulletproof glass. Kathi sent a message saying, ‘Hello, are you okay? Would love to hear from you.’ He set it aside, sighing.

  It was necessary to respond to the Historical Monuments department in Bonn. The department complained that the German war memorial, honouring the dead of both Greece and Germany, was being broken up. Langstreet replied that cruelty needed no monument. Torture, he wrote, was still in use by sixty different regimes over the globe. No one greatly minded. No one greatly minded the misery of poverty. He minded. The monument had served its purpose. The site was required for further development, and for the improvement of local living standards.

  Next, Langstreet saw various dignitaries and property owners who voiced complaints of one kind or another. The most vocal was a man who lived by the church. He was suffering from the ‘curse of foreign backpackers and New Age hippies’, as he called them, who had filled the empty space behind his garden with their tawdry encampments. One young ruffian had actually climbed the fence and relieved himself in the complainant’s garden. The music and noise of the backpackers was a constant source of misery; so much so that his wife was on the point of a breakdown.

  Langstreet was calm and professional. He expressed sympathy, hoping for better times, explaining that all these troubles were merely the growing pains of Kyriotisa’s return to its ancient prosperity.

  He instructed his secretary on various items and then turned to the phone. After an hour of calls, he switched the phone off and went outside, into the dusty sunlight.

  Looking up, he saw the renderer suspended high above on his platform, still spraying rendering on the concrete façade of the building.

  Kyriotisa was wakening to a new place in the world. Despite the newly functioning coach station further down the road, coaches choked the street, many of them drawn up on the pavement, outside bars and an old hotel – practically a doss house, in Langstreet’s opinion. In the dull, grey thoroughfare, the coaches bulged with colour – violet, purple, light blue, dark blue, crimson. Most of them bore German or Austrian registration plates.

  It had already been decided by the local council that a road bypassing the main street of Kyriotisa should be built. EU money had been sought for this project. Distant roars indicated that work had already begun: the initial business of filling in an entire valley, obliterating what was green under what was a tumbled grey, with rubble and hardcore, to make a level foundation for the new road. Six dump trucks, fat as dung beetles, freshly shipped from Piraeus, laboured on the job in clouds of dull yellow dust. Gears ground, whistles blew, as the great task was co-ordinated.

  A man came up and greeted Langstreet. He was the newly appointed chief of police for Kyriotisa, now that it had acquired fresh importance. At his invitation, Langstreet stepped into his open-top vehicle and they drove no more than a hundred and fifty metres to the site of the German war memorial.

  Here was more activity. The sprawling monument was being broken up, on the grounds that its reminder of the past was no longer necessary; as the more distant past, represented by Agia Anna, came into popularity, so the more recent past was rendered unnecessary, obtrusive. Besides, the memorial upset the new breed of German and Austrian tourists. There had been complaints. In place of this unfashionable and depressing object – occupying a ‘prime site’ – another hotel would grow, The Concord Hotel.

  A line of young trees was being planted. They had been prematurely delivered, so they had to be dug in promptly; but the construction machinery would make short work of them. Standing to one side, slightly away from the cranes, bulldozers and lorries, a group of protesters stood with their placards. ‘WHAT IS PASSED SHOULD NOT BE WIPED AWAY’, said one placard. The protesters fell silent when they saw the police chief draw up.

  ‘Let them protest,’ he said as an aside to Langstreet. ‘They do no harm.’

  ‘They have a point.’

  ‘We don’t need that point. We need prosperity.’ As they prowled round the front of the site, he said, ‘You have no regret that your father’s name is swept away?’

  ‘None.’

  There was so much marble dust in the air that they did not stay.

  It was an ordinary scene of destruction. Neither Langstreet nor the police chief felt any strain as they went about what had already become their usual business. But behind the mundane, the extraordinary was raging to escape.

  Chapter Eight

  In such ways as these, Langstreet’s days were passed. He had no more time to focus his attention on matters other than those involving the adoration of the Agia Anna ikon, than had the workman beyond his hotel window the ability to reflect on anything except his daily labour.

  In March of that year, 1,245 foreign visitors came to Kyriotisa to see the ikon, exhibited in state in its new chapel. In April, the figure rose to 3,200. And in May the figure was 7,735, straining Kyriotisa’s facilities and Hania’s capacities to the limit. This last figure included many Greeks, who came from as far afield as Thessaloniki to see the ikon of Agia Anna.

  Relating these events, I attempt a degree of realism. I realise this means the detailing of matters some might find sordid, but I swear by the self-exhortation Degas wrote in his notebooks: ‘Do every kind of worn objects… Corsets which have just been taken off… Series on journeyman bakers, seen in the cellar itself or through the air vents from the street…’ Such is the nature of the empirical investigation of human reality, no great and noble thing.

  So it was that in May, Langstreet, returning to his hotel one Tuesday at noon, found an ambulance and a mob blocking the entrance. He pushed his way through and in an authoritative manner demanded to know what was happening. It was clear enough (though that did not stop a sycophantic youth explaining everything to the great man). The workman employed on rendering the hotel façade – the workman whom Langstreet had studied with interest – had fallen with his platform and was lying dead on the pavement below. His broken body was being stowed away in the ambulance. As well as the shattered wooden platform, chunks of the concrete façade lay about the blooded ground.

  ‘Careless fools!’ exclaimed Langstreet, pushing his way into the hotel, where he had a small bottle of gaseous mineral water, taramasalata and toast, and a cup of coffee for lunch.

  An email was delivered to his table. Kathi said she had not heard from him for some while. She worried about his health. She was going to fly over and see how he was. He pushed the note irritably to one side.

  While he went about his ordinary business, the police held an enquiry into the cause of the death of the renderer. The construction company were charged with carelessness and negligence with regard to safety precautions. This was denied; the company claimed that the mobile platform from which the man worked was in no way at fault. The concrete facing on the crest of the hotel had crumbled and, in falling, had struck the platform, sending it and the worker crashing to the ground.

  The construction company withdrew its labour until the matter was settled and the charge against them was dropped. They demanded compensation. The Japanese architect and two materials chemists arrived from Tokyo to defend the formula used for their concrete. They had won the contract only because their methods were believed (by the Greeks) to be more efficient than local contractors. They attempted to prove that their concrete would stay durable for a century and more. Samples of the fallen concrete were despatched back to Tokyo for analysis. Meanwhile, more concrete fell from the hotel’s façade.

  The hotel was closed for safety reasons. Langstreet continued to remain in his suite, even after the staff, all but a caretaker, had left.

  Work on other constructions was halted.

  The foundations of the Concord Hotel lay neglected, and filled with mud.

  The bypass remained unfinished. Its attendant vehicles stood rusting, thei
r gasoline siphoned off.

  Kyriotisa lay open to the sun like a broken egg.

  After many delays, the Japanese chemists reported that the blame for the deterioration of their concrete lay not with their formula but with the Greek workers on the building site. Although portable toilets – the ubiquitous Portaloos – had been provided, many workers had not bothered to use them, since the conveniences stood some distance away, on available ground. Instead, they had urinated into the cement mixers. Thus the concrete had been spoiled.

  The local workers’ union sued for malignant misrepresentation.

  By June, the numbers of foreign visitors to the Kyriotisa shrine had fallen to just under two thousand. Many of those were journalists.

  ‘WIND AND PISS: THE ANNA STORY!’ was the headline in one German report.

  One day before dawn, Archie Langstreet roused from sleep and smelt smoke. He padded to the apartment door and opened it. The upper hallway beyond was fuming. He heard a crackle of flame from below.

  Calmly, he went to the phone and called the Hania fire brigade. Then he dipped a handkerchief under the bathroom tap, tied it round his face to cover nose and mouth, and retreated down the emergency stairs. The rear quarters of the hotel were alight. Langstreet stood helpless in his pyjamas in the cold dawn, looking on. The fire did not take, and was almost out when a fire engine arrived.

  He insisted on entering the smouldering building with the fire chief. He found in the basement that the sprinkler system had never been connected to the water supply. Meanwhile, on the floor above, the fire chief was examining evidence for arson.

  Langstreet went to the door in the back alley where Mr and Mrs Tsouderakis lived. Manolis let him in, invited him to sit on a kitchen chair, and gave him a Carter cigarette and a cup of coffee.

  Mrs Tsouderakis came and smiled her bountiful smile at him, spreading wide her arms as if to express her dismay at the fire.

  Langstreet did not complain. He sucked deeply on the cigarette and asked Tsouderakis if he would rent him a room for a few days.