The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  A stone washed white and smooth by the river, a bird perched singing in a transient scatter of pink almond-blossom, the smell of wood-smoke in autumn, the winds that thunder down like great winged beasts from the mountains—each of these has a share in the divine. I remember Tildes once saying that the mind of the world is god, that all things have an inner soul, that spirits are everywhere. I think I knew this before I had words to express it. Nature moves towards epiphanies: behind the pattern of honeycomb or frost-flower, revelation waits.

  When Pittacus had gone, my mother’s mood changed again. She was warm and affectionate towards my father for the rest of the day, touching him (a thing she never ordinarily did in public) and relaxing into a shared intimacy which I found so odd as to be a little ominous. Looking back, it is easy—too easy, perhaps—to find an explanation for her behaviour. Pittacus can only have come to sound out my father as a possible supporter against Melanchros in Mytilene; and my father had agreed—or had been talked into agreeing, which could be regarded as the same thing.

  Since the only possible way of removing Melanchros was by a carefully-planned armed attack, my father now counted, in my mother’s eyes, as a man of action by anticipation, a conspirator in embryo. Perhaps this is unduly cynical of me: but it remains a fact that, a month later, my mother became pregnant for the fourth time, having previously—in her usual forthright manner—announced that she had better things to do with the rest of her active life than bear more useless children.

  This morning, miraculously, summer returned, with clear sides and only the faintest sketching of clouds out over the Aegean. I could not bear to stay indoors, and walked up across the headland alone: in this mood I did not want even Praxinoa with me. Life is so unbearably short; we hover momentarily in its radiance like a mayfly, or the bubbles of some mountain stream. The sun lay warm on the scattered grey stones beside my path; there was a smell of thyme in the air, and on a distant hillside the rusty sheep moved with quiet contentment, jingling their bells. I wanted to stamp every detail on my memory—the white frill of foam round the rocks below me; the startled, questioning eye of a hare as it rose from its form at my approach and went scampering up into the pine-woods; the brown, bellying sail of a merchant-man, labouring south-west to Chios; the chick-peas blowing golden along the shore. For the first time in over a month I felt the small, intense excitement of a new poem shaping itself.

  But the mood could not be sustained and evaporated with the writing of the poem—which proved a pale ghost only of the experience I had hoped to catch. Now I sit by lamp-light, hidden, secretive, feeding on memories, the shutters drawn to behind me. I walk by the mind’s deep green pools softly, and far below the great fish stir, moving in slow gyrations surfacewards. As they rise I feel fear. I have always lived so intensely in the present, and now my yesterdays are coming back to torment me, with their evanescent heartbreaks and illusory delights. I cannot call up the past, because it has never died: it lives with me, silent, stalking unobtrusively behind my shadow, biding its moment. Which, at last, has come.

  When I returned from my walk there was a sealed package waiting for me on my writing-desk. By the blobbed, botched waxing, and the deep impression of the big signet ring, I knew it must be from Charaxus. I opened it up. It contained the cancelled mortgage deed to my property, a bundle of receipts from the various merchants and shop-keepers to whom I was in debt, and a small linen bag—also sealed—neatly packed with fifty mint-new silver staters. There was also a brief covering note which read: “I hope the agreed enclosures are to your satisfaction. C.” Nothing else. I looked through the receipts: he had not missed a single debt. My practical, efficient, intolerable brother. What summer madness, I wonder, suddenly blew him, of all people, into that exotic Egyptian harbour? Was it the same wind I knew too well, the wind from a clear sky, burning, burning, was it the same for him? Could he feel what I feel? That toad-face, that gross white body. The laughter of Aphrodite.

  The messenger came on a windy morning in early spring, the blown almond-blossom scattering under his horse’s hooves; and my father was up and away, grim-faced, silent, his sword and armour safely stowed on a pack-horse, gone almost before he could say good-bye. Silence descended on the house: his absence was everywhere. Charaxus and Eurygyus played quietly; even my mother, now heavily pregnant, seemed somehow less vital. It was almost as though she were afraid. The house brooded, waiting, desperate for news.

  It was four days before word finally came from Mytilene. Melanchros had fallen, the Council of Nobles was restored, freedom and justice reigned once more, the messenger told my mother, gabbling the phrases off as though he had learnt them by heart, his nervous, side-slipping expression very much at odds with his words. Melanchros himself was dead. His deputy-governor, Myrsilus, together with some two dozen of his more influential supporters, had been deported to the mainland. Pittacus, by unanimous election, was now a member of the Council—

  He broke off at this point: my mother’s expression, in certain moods, was enough to freeze a professional speech-maker just before his grand peroration. I was standing close beside her in the courtyard, clinging in sudden fear to her skirt, and I felt her consciously steel herself as she said: “And my husband?”

  The messenger blinked and cleared his throat. He had a thin, goatish beard and an over-prominent nose. “Your husband, my lady, conducted himself with most conspicuous gallantry. It was by his hand that the tyrant was slain. Unfortunately—”

  “Yes?” said my mother. The monosyllable fell into the silence like a stone.

  “Unfortunately, before help could reach him, he was cut down himself. He died a hero’s death, my lady.”

  “Yes,” said my mother again, in the same flat, toneless voice.

  “Is there anything I can—?”

  “No. Wait. Yes, there is. You can take a message to Pittacus, son of Hyrrhas. Tell him that when his duties in Council permit, I should be grateful for a written account of how my husband met his death.”

  Their eyes met.

  “Very well, my lady.” He cleared his throat again, and added: ‘The body will be escorted to Eresus with full military honours for burial—”

  “As soon as the situation in the city permits. Correct?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  My mother let out a long breath. “Co to the kitchens,” she said. ‘They will give you a meal, and see to your horse.” Then she took my hand and went inside, without a backward glance. Not then, nor at the funeral, nor ever (to my knowledge) did she give any open signs of grief.

  Years afterwards, during our exile at Pyrrha, I asked Antimenidas just how my father had died. He looked at me thoughtfully, black eyes searching mine. He said, weighing his words: “Your father wanted to die.”

  “How can you say that? How dare you say that?”

  He shrugged, his long, craggy, prematurely lined face full of weary compassion.

  “Melanchros had to be killed. There was no other way. Lop off the head of a tyranny, and the body withers.” He was silent for a moment, staring into the flames of the great log fire: winter in Pyrrha can be deadly cold, and that year snow lay thick on the ground. “But Melanchros was well guarded. We couldn’t risk a pitched battle, there weren’t enough of us. One man must do it, we decided—”

  “My father.”

  “Yes, your father.” Antimenidas looked up at me sharply. “You think it was all arranged, don’t you? That Pittacus chose him for the job, long before?”

  I said: “Whoever did it was certain to be killed. He had no chance. No chance at all.”

  “Just so.”

  There was another silence.

  “Pittacus told me my father volunteered,” I said.

  “He not only volunteered; he insisted. I have never in my life seen any man so bent on glorious self-destruction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He smiled bitterly. “Look,” he said, “there were at least two excellent reasons why your father was so anx
ious to put himself out of the way. One of them was no secret: he’d so mismanaged his patrimony he was virtually bankrupt.”

  “Yes. But—”

  “Curious, wasn’t it, the way your mother let things get into such a state? No one could accuse her of being impractical.”

  “No.”

  “The role of heroic political widowhood suits her rather well, wouldn’t you say? And of course, there’s the state pension.”

  I said, with real bitterness: ‘We still had to sell the house at Eresus.”

  “Ah. So that’s what was bothering you. Everyone has their own private selfishness, if you look hard enough for it. But really, my dear, life in Mytilene has transformed you: you ought to be grateful. Think what a dull provincial butterfly you might have become out in the back of beyond.”

  He kicked at the fire with his heavy, booted foot: a glowing log tumbled sideways, and a shower of sparks fanned up from the iron basket. Outside, in the kitchen, my mother was remonstrating with our new slave-girl as though she were a fractious horse. (Normally this drove scullery-maids sulky-mad, but in the present case it worked rather well: we had got the poor creature cheap because she was a semi-imbecile and roughly on a horse’s level of intelligence.) Antimenidas and I exchanged glances.

  I said: “My father was a brave man, and I loved him more than I can say.”

  “Oh Sappho, you’re so obtuse when you want to be. I’m sorry for your father. I really am. He was a decent, harmless, civilized idealist: all he asked for was to be left alone to work things out in peace. But your mother was determined he had to be a death-or-glory hero—she saw herself playing Andromache to his Hector, I fancy: there’s a strong romantic streak under that tough exterior. Don’t look so shocked; you’d have been just as bad if he’d lived.”

  “I?”

  “Yes indeed: you were all set to treat him as Zeus and Apollo rolled into one, a golden god on Olympus: how can any man live up to such expectations? Your father killed himself, quite literally, to be what his family wanted.”

  “I think this conversation has gone quite far enough, Antimenidas.”

  He rose to his feet and wrapped the great sheepskin about his shoulders: there was something fierce, almost alien about him, the fur cap, the leggings, the studded sword-belt

  “I never contradict a lady; much less a lady-poet.” He grinned.

  “If it’s stopped snowing I shall cut down a small tree to work up an appetite for dinner. If there is any dinner. By now my brother will have drunk what’s left of the wine, let the fire go out, and written three verses of an exquisitely dismal poem on the miseries of exile.”

  I laughed despite myself.

  “Ah,” said Antimenidas, with his hand on the door, “that’s more like it. This curious illusion you have that you’re a delicate, sensitive creature too refined for the rough-and-tumble of ordinary life. You’re tougher than any of us, really, Sappho: it’s never once occurred to you that you can’t, in the long run, get exactly what you want. You’re a ravening harpy, and I’m sorry for any man who’s fool enough to marry you.”

  Then he was gone, in a whirl of snow and a sudden blast of chill air. I huddled closer to the fire, hands clasped round my knees, seeing the pictures form and dissolve, red to grey ash, among the calcined logs.

  But for me that first shock of aching loss was an end as well as a beginning. Something died in me, a slow glaucous mist descended and thickened over my mind’s most private places. When my mother told me we would have to sell our house, and move to Mytilene, and live with Uncle Eurygyus and Aunt Helen, I accepted the news as I would have accepted any other brute convulsion of the established order: nothing was safe or solid now, the foundations could crack at any time, the world was a paper lantern, perilously alight.

  The slow, sensuous beauty of that dreadful spring mocked me night and day: the nightingale pouring out its liquid passion in the great pine-tree, the late-flowering jonquils and anemones on the hillside, the rich smell of the gorse in bloom, yellow as scrambled eggs, up the gorge where the spring river tumbled seawards. I leaned over the well and saw nothing but emptiness: dank, flat water, clinging weeds. The headland at sunset crouched with its paws in the water, a mountain lion, jaws bloodied after the kill. Some part of me was physically numbed, incapable of sensation or response.

  So, one bright morning, with tiny white clouds scudding away to the south over Chios, we went aboard a big coastal merchant-man and left Eresus behind us for ever. There was a choppy sea running: the vessel dipped and rolled, tackle creaking, the wind thunderous in its great patched sail. I leant over the side as we beat eastward along the coast, and looked back, beyond our wake, to the high white citadel, the red tumbled roofs, the fields of spring barley, the dusty road with its scatter of tree-grown estates—all familiar as my own body, the only map I had ever learnt. My eyes dazzled as I looked, and there was a salty taste on my lips: though whether from tears, or flying spray, or both, I never knew.

  III

  I suppose I have closer ties with Mytilene than with any other place known to me—closer, certainly, and more plangent than the world-out-of-time memories I preserve from my Sicilian exile, closer even than the special nostalgia which Eresus can still arouse in me when I think back to my earliest childhood. After all, it is in Mytilene that the greater part of my life has been spent: first in the great square grey house on the citadel (once my uncle’s property, now occupied—though his right of tenure seems dubious, to say the least of it—by my brother Charaxus); and afterwards here, outside the city, in the old, comfortable, converted farmhouse which Cercylas bought me as a wedding-present, and where these words are being written.

  I know the city’s moods and seasons, its old landed families (arrogant, charming, eccentric, drunken, or merely dull), its ambitious middle-class merchants, its peacocking women, and its predatory toughs. I know its scandals, its festivals, its moments of splendid and irresponsible gaiety; its elegiac autumns, and its lyric springs, when flowers and young girls blossom with the same frail, transient, heart-wringing beauty. There is a quality of tight-knit excitement about it I have never experienced anywhere else: one finds a bright edge to one’s relationships here, each day holds promise of immense discoveries. Everything is clear, new, fresh-coloured. Words explode like seed-pods, scattering life. Winter brings exhilaration and self-knowledge, summer is tremulous with unanticipated desires. Memory stirs in a pattern of sunlight.

  Writing these words, I see how little the years have changed me. As I pause, pen in hand, and stare out towards the blue coastline of Ionia, I am a girl of fourteen again: very nervous and defensive (which for me means aggressive) because I have just been introduced to a young man of decidedly dubious reputation. I have known about him for several years, but this is the first time we have been allowed to meet. The room is crowded: one of my mother’s social gatherings, with discreet political undertones.

  The young man is, I find, a problem. He has obviously taken a little more wine than is good for him, though not enough to make him a public nuisance. He has cold, amused grey eyes which give the impression of seeing right through me. He is also quite frighteningly hairy, bearded to the points of his cheek-bones, the backs of his hands bristling like a boar’s hide. He has already made an impressive reputation as a poet (which is the main reason why I am anxious to meet him), and is notorious for other less respectable pursuits, which my mother thinks I am too young to be told about. (I am not—though I remain blissfully ignorant of their implications.)

  There is one story, however, which everyone knows about him, and which produces an interesting variety of reactions according to the age, sex, class and moral outlook of the individual concerned. During the campaign in the Troad, two or three years previously, the young man—his name is Alcaeus, and he comes from an old and much respected aristocratic family—ran away in battle. Not content with that, he wrote a comic quatrain about his disgraceful behaviour to a friend in Mytilene, telling how he had throw
n away his shield and the Athenians had hung it up in their temple as a trophy, but, praise be, he was still alive and unharmed. When he came home he seemed quite unembarrassed by the whole episode.

  He has a light, drawling, rather metallic voice: drink does not slur it. He looks me up and down in a subtly objectionable way, as though undressing me without desire.

  “Your mother”—I hear the intonations so clearly it is almost as though he were in the room beside me as I write—“your mother has been giving me a very detailed account of your precocious, rare, and inimitable poetic talent”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” I feel my cheeks burn, knowing what this means, hating my mother, hating myself for hating her, hating this steely and objectionable young man for being in a position to patronize me.

  “Please don’t apologize. It was quite fascinating.”

  I blush and stammer “I’ve w-wanted to meet you for a very long time.” Idiot platitudes. Oh, go away. Please. You make me so miserable.

  “Well,” he says, smiling, “how pleasant to be sought after. If only for one’s scandal-value.”

  Surprising myself, I blurt out: “You don’t like me, do your

  He considers, head tilted. “No. Not much.”

  “Why?”

  Again the hesitation. “Perhaps our temperaments are too alike.”

  I suspect him of teasing me, and at once move in to the attack.

  “Did you really run away?”

  “I was waiting for you to ask that. Yes, of course I did.”