Jocasta: Wife and Mother

by Brian Aldiss

  Antigone’s temper flared. ‘All right, Uncle. Tell us what remains if we abandon the gods.’

  He laughed without humour, spreading his arms. ‘Why, we are without our chains! We humans become human! We make our own decisions. Henceforth, all our considerations are based upon the firm rock of the human ego.’

  He folded his arms, bellowing for a slave to produce more orange juice. His manner suggested a man very content with having made a definitive statement. But Antigone would not permit him to gain the last word in the argument. Sulkily, she muttered, ‘I would say rather, the soggy marshes of the human ego.’

  As she spoke, she sighted a bedraggled female figure struggling along the Corinth road, her head hanging, her steps slow and weary. ‘And there’s a prime example of those soggy marshes!’ Antigone said. ‘Without the gods, humankind is too weak to stand alone.’

  A brief while later, the figure drew near enough for Antigone to recognise in the wayfarer her mother Jocasta. She excused herself to her uncle and aunt, running downstairs and out from the building.

  ‘You see how you upset her, with all your grand talk,’ Eurydice said to Creon. ‘The young hate profundity – the life of the mind begins only with your first grey hair. Besides, you should not speak as you do about the gods, or the Kindly Ones will be visiting us next.’

  ‘Let the demons come!’ said Creon, shaking his fist. He had no way of knowing how soon his invitation would be accepted.

  ‘Mother!’ exclaimed Antigone. Running to Jocasta, she caught her about the waist. ‘What are you doing? Where have you been? Are you all right?’

  ‘Have you ever been kissed by a fish?’ Jocasta laughed wildly.

  She wrapped an arm about her daughter and kissed her forehead. ‘I am perfectly fine, you goose! Just a little tired – emotionally exhausted, I should say. Come back to the palace with me, there’s a darling. Papa needs you. So do I.’

  ‘What’s happened to your poor cheek?’

  ‘Oh, nothing! I fell asleep on a bank and hit myself on a stone.’

  ‘Are you sure of that? You are walking so wearily.’

  ‘Just be a darling and accompany me back to the palace.’

  ‘I can’t stand all the commotion, the misery.’

  ‘It’s your duty, dear. You must come back, please! Your father misses you.’

  ‘Don’t mention Father to me!’

  Not for the first time, Antigone found her mother’s reassurances unconvincing. Now, in the way Jocasta walked and held herself, the daughter saw further cause for concern. Not knowing what to say, she kept her little pink tongue silent in her head, like an untolled bell.

  She permitted her mother to take her hand and lead her down the street, intricate with shadows, towards the palace, although she felt herself too adult for such intimacies in public.

  ‘I can’t think you greatly enjoy staying with Creon. He’s become such an old pontificator. Words are the false coinage he throws about.’

  ‘Eurydice is sweet. She’s nice to me. And Haemon’s all right. Of course, he’s immature.’

  ‘Haemon’s a month older than you. Let’s get back to the palace. I must have a bath – I ache with dirt. Please be kind to your father, dearest.’

  They were nearing the palace, and already close enough to see a rabble gathering outside its front gates. At the sight, Jocasta slowed her pace, before leading Antigone down a side alley, to the wasteland behind, where tethered goats nibbled, and so to the gate at the back of the palace grounds, where a sentry let them in.

  Antigone released her hand from her mother’s grasp.

  ‘I heard the Kindly Ones called.’

  Jocasta gave her daughter a haggard glance. ‘We don’t talk about them.’

  As she spoke, a figure clad in black, straggling scarves behind her, came rushing from the palace. Her arms were raised before her as if she was about to fall. She shrieked as she came.

  ‘Hezikiee! Be calm, be calm!’ said Jocasta, half-laughing as her maid approached. The old woman fell before her and clasped her mistress’s knees.

  ‘Where have you been?’ cried Hezikiee. ‘I was so worried.’

  Jocasta had to help the fat old woman to her feet. ‘I am perfectly all right, perfectly sane, Hezikiee.’

  ‘But you could be dead, dear mistress.’ She rolled her rheumy old eyes.

  ‘As you see, I’m very much alive.’

  ‘The evidence of my eyes I doubt! I feared you had been killed.’

  ‘No, no, I was only kissed by a fish.’

  ‘Oh, to be kissed by a fish! What terrible times we live! Such a bad omen. It means drowning!’ In her concern, Hezikiee placed a motherly hand on the queen’s arm, only to remove it almost at once, in case it offended.

  ‘No, no, I am far from drowned, Hezikiee,’ Jocasta said – yet feeling herself drowned. ‘Here I am, beached on this far too dry land …’

  ‘Not yet you are drowned but maybe tomorrow or tomorrow …’

  ‘These fears are foolish, my dear Hezikiee. Go and fill me a perfumed bath, with oils and balms to the very brim, so that when I step in it may overflow.’

  ‘You’ll drown! For sure you’ll drown! The water will rise against you.’

  Antigone had had enough of this. ‘Be silent, you silly old crone! Go at once and do my mother’s bidding. Prepare her bath.’

  ‘But the kiss of the fish, the kiss—’

  ‘Prepare her bath! Or your head will be severed from your body.’

  Hezikiee spread her hands, asking of her mistress why the young were always so cruel.

  The queen, looking imperious, answered her. ‘The needs of the young are urgent. In their ignorance they wish to be older, like us. No one can understand why. Go at once, as Antigone says!’

  Looking sullen, Hezikiee, turning, said, ‘I kiss the fatal ground you walk upon, my lovely mistress …’

  Silence filled the palace, as if the long veils of evening had a calming effect on its overwrought occupants. No growling came from the griffins, no crowing from the Sphinx. Only the birds could be heard, tittering mindlessly on the roof tiles.

  Jocasta lay naked in her bath while Hezikiee and a lesser handmaid poured scented water over her. The waters of the bath, just as Jocasta had anticipated, spilled upon the patterned floor tiles and ran towards the door.

  ‘Oh, you’ve grown such a beautiful body,’ said Hezikiee suddenly, as if the words burst unbidden from her lips. ‘These breasts! With what nipples! Those long legs of yours! That gorgeous pink little lar! What a shame that men should be allowed to touch those places.’

  ‘They are designed for men,’ murmured Jocasta languidly. ‘Would these delicious parts of me have meaning without men?’

  ‘Old before your time men will make you. That’s my fear …’

  ‘Do shut up, old darling …’

  When she had been dried, and Hezikiee had rubbed her gently with a cloth in all her most tender parts, Jocasta threw on a light gown and went to stroll in the garden, now couched in the dusk marking the hour between day and night. She was lured to this sequestered spot by the song of a nightingale, at once thrilling and tragic.

  Flowers that espoused night were perfuming the paths. Wherever Jocasta walked, treading lightly, the scents rose to her nostrils. Those scents attracted a number of moths, whose wings formed a dry little music as they fluttered by her ear. She brushed them idly away with one hand.

  She sat on a bench and ate a small bunch of grapes. The gathering night became black and blue until all Thrace was one glorious bruise.

  A dim light glowed in one of the palace windows. It was the rear window of Antigone’s room. From it floated Antigone’s voice, lifted in song. Although Jocasta knew the song, and the loneliness it contained, she listened intently, as her daughter’s plaintive voice gave it fresh meaning.

  Antigone’s song drifted away into silence, as if it had never been sung, never been heard, never drifted on an evening breeze.

  Almost at the
full, a moon disentangled itself from behind a line of young acacias to soar upwards to the darker sky, there to sail supreme through the Thracian night. Jocasta regarded the moon with new interest. She had not previously in her life considered it a solid distant body. Perhaps it might be possible to live there, safe from the problems of the world.

  Idly, she wondered how one might set about measuring the distance to the moon. If she met with Aristarchus again, she would enquire how it could be done. Though there was a question as to whether she would understand the method, were it to be explained to her.

  Not as much as a zephyr stirred the warm bowl of air contained within the garden’s ancient walls; only in the zephyrs of Jocasta’s thought was there turbulence.

  Loitering at the southern boundary, she came suddenly on a piece of sculpture she had never previously noted. It moved. She gave a small gasp.

  ‘Jocasta, my love! Fear not!’

  A gentle hand was laid on her naked arm. Still she retreated a pace.

  ‘Oedipus – what are you doing here?’

  When he moved forward, the moonlight caught his face. Jocasta saw the glitter of tears on his cheeks and in his beard.

  ‘Things go badly with us, my love. I cannot be seen to weep by those I rule.’ He ran his hands down hard upon his face, emitting a sob as he did so. ‘The more I study, the more incomprehensible the world seems to be.’

  ‘Did you hear our poor daughter singing? Was not that moving?’

  Oedipus shook his head without comprehending.

  Standing back from him, she asked what it was that upset him.

  His reply came brokenly. The Sphinx was dead, his beloved Sphinx. She had seen her little newborn fledgling eaten by Phido, Semele’s griffin, and grief had overwhelmed her. She had risen on beating wings no more than a metre in the air before falling down dead, in a shower of feathers.

  Without her, he felt unmanned. He had a belief – correcting himself, he said a half-belief – that there were coded messages in his dreams, warning of trouble to come.

  ‘Why do we have to fight our way through things half-understood?’

  Had Thalia not made a prophecy, Oedipus asked Jocasta now, declaring that the death of the Sphinx would bring death to him and disaster upon the House of Oedipus?

  She responded coldly. ‘Forget about prophecy! Why do you bring these disasters on yourself, Oedipus? You try to avoid blame by saying that Semele’s Phido ate the Sphinx-chick. I was present there, remember. I saw you knock the poor little morsel towards the griffin. Of course Phido gobbled it up. It is in the nature of griffins to gobble things up. Between these four walls, the fault is yours. All the fault is yours – all, all, for everything!’

  ‘I must deny that. Why so severe, dearest Jocasta? We must try to cultivate an imaginative grasp of the entire world. All its emblems together … Perhaps we are manifestations of a deeper thing, a unifying principle. If we could see ourselves as part of that principle, in all humility …’

  His sentence trailed off, never to be completed.

  There was silence as the young night thickened between them. A stream of notes flowed again from the throat of the nightingale, less sorrowing than Antigone’s song, so that Jocasta glanced up involuntarily at the moon – was it not from that silver globe the nightingales came?

  At length, Oedipus spoke again, in a reflective voice. He made no attempt to decrease the distance between himself and Jocasta.

  ‘In my anger I struck you, and for that I am truly sorry. Truly I see by the reproach you lay on me, Jocasta, that your love for me is no more. Surely a mere blow, struck in a moment of stupid anger, cannot have such devastating effect. Your love – our love – was for me a manifestation of that deeper thing of which I spoke. If it has been withdrawn … You will understand I find that hard to bear, such is my dependence on you and your sweet approval. You are the flower and dream of my life – the balm of my troubled existence. Your rebuke goes straight to my heart.’

  These were but words, Jocasta told herself. Yet she trembled, feeling the truth behind the words. He had loved her as intensely as she had loved him.

  Were she merely the actor in a play, as she had feared, then at least it was a tragedy about a great love.

  The thought lifted her. Unfortunately, Oedipus did not stop there but, as was his usual tendency, continued to elaborate.

  ‘I have made errors before in my life, yes, as have all men. We have no chance to rehearse the parts we are bound to play. But grave indeed must be the error which loses the security and sinecure of your love. When I first saw you walking in the marketplace, those many years ago … my will seemed to leave me. I felt I could do nothing but follow you … Oh, how clearly I remember that day!’

  He gazed down at the ground, as if searching for the ashes of the day in question.

  ‘Yes, I was there, I was there, drinking wine, turning over the riddle of the Sphinx in my head, a wanderer, dirty and drab, my fate still in pursuit of me. And there you were, pristine, immaculate, walking with your nursemaid Hezikiee behind you. The way you walked, the way you held yourself. You had a pearl in your ear, and that dark glorious hair of yours was braided. I had seen no vision to compare with you … You were then a widow, although you did not know it …

  ‘And I thought … I saw that you were the one thing in the agora which could not be bought. Which was not for sale. Which had something too precious to be procured. Something that made my heart melt within me.’

  Jocasta listened now with impatience, clicking her middle finger against her thumb. She had heard this favourite reminiscence before. While perceiving his poeticising to be aimed at winning her over, she nevertheless felt herself to be partly won, and was annoyed with herself for being so susceptible to the qualities of his voice.

  ‘I perceived even then something in your condition by which I might redeem myself,’ continued Oedipus, speaking in a sort of rapture. ‘I refer not only to your beauty, but to another quality I was unable to name – an attraction I still feel.

  ‘That same night, I stood outside your portal. You did not know it. This same moon that shines on us now shone on me then. It came and it went. I remained, a beggar at your wall. Of course I never saw you.’

  He paused for thought. Jocasta stood unmoving, without utterance. There the two of them were, standing apart, drowned in the intense moonlight. She thought, All this was long ago. Why relive it? How can it help us now?

  But Oedipus continued.

  ‘What I thought, over and over – I was in a fever – was that you could be everything to me, everything! Not only lover but daughter, mother …’ He fixed his gaze on hers. ‘That you were older than I meant nothing to me. You were mature. I was immature. I saw you not only as a flawless woman but as the gateway to an entire new life. And thinking of that life – Jocasta, on a stroke, the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx came to me, when I was preoccupied with something else entirely! “What being, with only one voice, is it that goes sometimes on two feet, sometimes on four, sometimes on three, and is weakest when it has most?” I saw then that my answer must be “Man – man, crawling on all fours as a babe, going on two feet as an adult, and requiring a staff as third leg when old.”

  ‘I slept away the rest of that night, and in the pale and rosy dews of morning went to the Sphinx, who lay in wait beside the Corinth Gate. She roused up when I came near, looking her fiercest. Certainly I feared her, with her gigantic body … I told her then the answer to her riddle. So the men of the city became free of her threat, she being tamed. And so, from being an exiled Prince of Corinth, I was duly crowned King of Thebes. But it was my love of you, Jocasta, which brought all this about.’

  Although he spoke softly, and with sincerity, she had turned away from him. The light of the moon, simplifying his features, made his face appear harsh, so that she thought to herself, How we live, how we all live! What desperation there is in life … Why did I do what I did?

  ‘And now I find you walking here,
you, the dearest being, and feel myself no longer king but an abject vassal, because you have withdrawn your love. I beg you, recalling what we have been to each other, forgive my unforgivable blow, rekindle that love you once had for me.’

  In a diamond-bright tone, Jocasta told Oedipus that he had been fortunate to accost the Sphinx so early in the day. After all, many men could have grasped that prosaic level of answer to the absurd riddle. His was a dull and materialistic answer. What had happened, she asked, to this manifestation of a deeper thing, of which he spoke so glowingly? Before poetry had left the world, there had been a more interesting solution to the riddle of the Sphinx.

  ‘I know all that,’ he said sullenly. ‘You mean the solution of the old seasons. And, knowing it, how does it help me?’ He stared up at the moon, recalling the talk that had passed during his fruitless night at the shrine of Apollo. He saw only moon, and no Thalia. ‘The answer used to be Helios, the sun god. Now it’s just – Man.’

  Jocasta hung her head, feeling miserable that she no longer adulated him. She forced herself to say, in a brittle fashion, ‘And so, Oedipus, is “Man” sufficient answer, or another riddle?’

  With something of his old forcefulness, he denied her question. ‘Why ask such silly things? When you have told me you have ceased to love me, why then proceed to ask me such silly questions?’

  ‘When did I say I had ceased to love you? When did I say it? Why do you insist on it? I have said only that I would not sleep within your embrace again. Why do you always make things worse than they are?’

  ‘You confuse me.’ He staggered back a pace, as if he had received a blow to the chest. ‘How could things be worse than they are? Why, the Sphinx is dead through misadventure, and I am miserable. Her chick … well … And even now many fists are clenched at my gate, cursing my name.’

  Jocasta gave a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, things can easily become worse than they are now. Be sure of that!’

  He said resignedly, ‘Well, I see you have no patience with me. It is best to end this conversation.’

  Oedipus went away, back to the palace. She heard his voice distantly, calling for wine. Jocasta remained in the garden, motionless, almost invisible in the darkness. She thought of Oedipus with sorrow rather than anger, as a man entrapped. And there came the knowledge, wrapping her about like a damp cloak, that the best of her days were done. No more could she live within the illusion of adulation. The cold fishy kiss of reason had cured her of that. Time and the turn of circumstance had stolen away the Oedipus she had gloried in.