The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  “No. No, I suppose not.” All my mother’s drive and energy seemed suddenly to have deserted her. “The children—I must wake the children—” She picked up a lamp and went out, moving like a sleepwalker

  Antimenidas said: “Lady Helen, what will you do?”

  “I shall stay here, naturally.”

  “Ah. Your position is—safeguarded.”

  “It is also uncompromised, I would remind you.” Her topaz eyes gleamed: there was anger behind the amusement.

  “I see,” said Antimenidas.

  “I thought you would. I don’t share your weakness for lost causes, I’m afraid.”

  An hour later I was jolting along in a crowded, uncomfortable carriage, staring at the moonlit waters of the. Gulf and the mountains rising dark behind them. A solitary night-fisher, defying the moon, made a pin-point of light far out towards the further shore. The spring air was heavy with the scent of flowering gorse. I yawned, conscious always of Praxinoa’s solid, reassuring presence beside me, with Larichus asleep in her arms. Opposite me my mother dozed and muttered; Charaxus blew his nose—he had one of his thick colds again—and hunched into the corner like a small, distempered owl.

  This is happening to me, I thought, still not really believing it. I’m going into exile, running away like a thief in the night. Then suddenly, it occurred to me that, far from feeling any distress, I was really rather excited. After all, it wasn’t as though we were leaving the island: you could hardly call it exile at all. It’ll certainly make a change, I told myself. And there aren’t many girls of fifteen who can say they’re political exiles.

  The carriage rattled on through the night. Presently I, too, fell asleep, my head on Praxinoa’s shoulder. I was still unconscious when we reached our destination.

  VII

  Every year the sea eats a little further into Pyrrha. Its advance is slow, barely perceptible: then one day a lonely cottage crumbles into the water; masonry cracks, slides, vanishes; or the pilot, stepping ashore from his skiff, sees five steps only on the green-stained water-stairs where there were six before. The small, crisp waves of the Gulf lick inexorably at dykes and harbour-works, undermine slipway, embankment, or black, corroded jetty. In the couch-grass above the foreshore salt glistens; scoured grey pebbles are cast up among the poppies and charlock; as the outer defences are washed away, the roots of the dwarf-pines clutch further into nothingness, bone-white, gnarled, helpless, like the hands of ancient beggars outstretched in supplication, expecting nothing but indifference or a curt refusal.

  One day, perhaps, Pyrrha will go back to the sea altogether. One day the small carrion fish of the Gulf will nose among these pillared colonnades, and obscene polyps crouch, palpitating, where now I see, as I write these words, worn marble flags strewn with rough white sheepskins, an iron-bound Cretan sea-chest, a table set for chess, the big, watchful hunting-dog curled up by the hearthstone, one eye on the glow from the iron fire-basket. Or perhaps—who knows Poseidon’s inscrutable mind?—the advance may be halted before then, and the Gulf’s senseless appetite turn elsewhere.

  I have come back here from Mytilene on a sudden impulse, not knowing what I sought, afraid what I might find. I have brought nothing with me but a bundle of old memories, two long-dead years’ fast-fading hopes and regrets. Engulfing time eats at my past as inexorably—and as indifferently—as the salt tide that thrusts inch by inch into the heart of Pyrrha. The ink is illegible in places already, the edges of the paper have begun to turn brown and crumble. New faces, other houses, the stare of alien curiosity or half-recognition. The smell of seine and tar, small fish gleaming silvery-blue, like tempered steel, in their wet wicker baskets, empty shells scattered over the cobbles.

  I did not even tell Ismene and Agesilaïdas that I was coming: what could I have said in a letter? Besides, to sit at home—home?— and wait for an answer would have been unbearable. Between decision and action took an hour, no more. (I paused at the shrine of Aphrodite, licked finger and thumb, firmly snuffed every candle. The last one, with a hiss and a crackle, burnt my skin: a small raised blister on the ball of my thumb presses against the pen as I write.) The carriage rattled over stone and pot-hole as it had done that moonlit night thirty-five years ago: and how much wisdom had I gathered? Every turn in the road was familiar. I felt, suddenly and for a brief moment, as though time were eclipsed and I a girl again, excited, fearful, inexperienced, riding into my unknowable future. Which is for once only and cannot be recalled.

  Ismene said: “We knew you would come one day, my dear. We were waiting for you.”

  Time is gentle with me here. I sit for hours browsing through old letters and diaries (so fragile, so tangential these records of my kingfisher days: how recapture the colour, the sunlight?), my mind running undisturbed down those private summer paths that have for so long been closed to me. Sometimes I walk, hour after hour, among the hills, cloak snapping in a high autumn wind, past parched cornstubble or high, wild outcrops of liver-coloured rock where kite and buzzard circle, waiting for a death. So much has changed: the town seems smaller, grey and shrunken, as though it had foreknowledge of its own ultimate destruction.

  But some things have not changed, and these I experience with a transfiguring recognition, a sense of incredulous wonder and gratitude. They are my touchstones to the past, my proofs against all the demons of illusive doubt. One day—hardly knowing where I went, letting my feet guide me—I walked across the bridge and up the immemorial road that follows the coast northward to Mesa: the wide estuary with its salt-flats, the golden patchwork of corn-land beyond, the poised and meditative herons, the shy wild horses, the solitude.

  No one remembers when Mesa itself was abandoned. Its houses have crumbled and collapsed till their stones are barely distinguishable from the grey rocks on the hillside. All that remains today is the great white temple of Aphrodite, alone in that vast expanse, with its walled precinct and soft-robed priestesses. No one, again, knows how old the temple is; but its columns are of wood, black and cracked with age, bound round in many places with thick iron hoops. There is a sacred image of the Goddess which none but the high priest may see: it is kept veiled all the year round, and lamps burn before it in the sanctuary. Naturally, it gives rise to rumours. It fell from heaven. It was fashioned by Hephaestus for the illegitimate son of Orestes who supposedly colonized Lesbos.

  Alcaeus had his own, highly characteristic, version of the secret: according to him, the statue was so gross, so ludicrously ugly, that to display it in public would bring the Goddess’s cult into unseemly disrepute.

  As I walked along the spur-road between estuary and temple, wrapped in the loud silence of wind and sky, time fled back: once more I heard—so clearly that he might, in physical truth, have been there beside me—that young, metallic, cruelly gay voice dissect my butterfly world with razorish malice. Too easy for me, wounded by his barbs—and flushed by my first public recognition and triumph— to convince myself he spoke merely out of envious pique: it was only later that I came to recognize the despair, the cankering self-hatred that fed his destructive aggressiveness.

  In the temple precinct the air was warm and still: the walls seemed to hold a lingering summer heat, windless, soporific. I sat down on the old stone bench beneath the plane-tree: nothing had changed. Crystal-clear, the spring still welled up in its worn stone basin, and chattered away down the same tiled runnel through the apple-orchard. (Did the local farmers still pay tithes for irrigation-rights? It seemed unlikely that Aphrodite—or her priestesses—would forgo so easy and profitable a source of income.) In the pines and cypresses of the sacred grove innumerable doves called: the pomegranates were noisily alive with sparrows. Outside, scarcely a hint of green on the hillsides: the ground was parched, brown, barren. But here, in this holy enclosure, the traveller or worshipper would find soft green turf, watered daily, protected from the sun’s fiercest rays, a quiet oasis of peace.

  I sat there meditating for several hours. No one disturbed me. Yet
now I felt, in some indefinable fashion, alien, an intruder. A faint breeze stirred the branches overhead: the rustling leaves had a soothing, hypnotic quality about them. On a small altar by the spring incensed oil burnt in one flickering lamp: its smell—so evocative so pervasive—permeated the heavy autumn air. The doves, Aphrodite’s doves, cooed as senselessly as any stupid woman brought face to face with the man she adores; the water chattered down its runnel with the dreadful insistence of a village gossip.

  I slept there for a little; then, slowly, I made my way back to the coast road. I went down into the rippling shallows of the estuary, and bathed my face and arms and feet in salt water. The afternoon sun was still bright, and presently I could feel a thin, delicate rime of salt on my cheeks. Two wild black stallions fled as I approached; far out in the Gulf I could see the triangular brown snippet of a fishing-boat’s sail. I was alone, utterly alone; and now, for the first lime, I began to perceive the true depth and extent of my solitude.

  How long had it been since I drove up to Three Winds, that blue and never-to-be-forgotten day? The shady orchard, Mica bent over her brushes and colours, Atthis a child swinging high among the appleboughs— Oh, Atthis, I would have stopped time for you if I could. For you; for me. I loved you once, Atthis, long ago: you seemed to me a small, awkward child.

  Ismene is over sixty now, and Agesilaïdas in his mid-seventies. Both have the same coarse, plentiful white hair, springing away from the forehead in a high crescent; both are walnut-brown from the outdoor life of garden and field and orchard. They might well be brother and sister. When Phanias died—so soon after the birth of their late, much-longed-for son—it seemed as though Ismene would be a widow for ever, struggling soberly against odds to preserve Three Winds intact. But five years later, to everyone’s amazement, she married Agesilaïdas .

  It seemed, at the time, a most improbable choice. Agesilaïdas was a bachelor of forty-seven, a pleasant, cultured dilettante with an adequate— but by no means large—private income. He had a small town house in Mytilene and owned property in and around Pyrrha, where his family had lived for generations. Like many aristocratic lovers of the arts, he had a marked predilection for good-looking or talented boys. He was more unusual, perhaps, in always treating his favourites with intelligence, kindness, and unswerving generosity, so that they remained his friends long after any physical liaison between them had ended. His interest in their welfare extended to their wives and children; he was always ready to hear their problems, lend them money (which he could ill afford to spare) or put in a word on their behalf with some influential friend.

  He did not, on the whole, frequent the same circles as Phanias, which made his subsequent marriage to Ismene all the more puzzling. From time to time—like most reasonably well-connected citizens—he would be a guest at Three Winds, but his true social interests, as one might expect, lay elsewhere. He cultivated the brilliant—writers, artists, rising politicians—or the merely beautiful. He was not ambitious for power himself, but every successful or aspiring statesman seemed to. be his friend. (He had, for instance, an unexpectedly close relationship with Pittacus.) Of course, he knew Alcaeus very well indeed. It was he who, with characteristic generosity, put a house at our disposal in Pyrrha when we were banished from Mytilene and in countless unobtrusive ways helped to make those years of exile more tolerable. Agesilaïdas was the centre, the knot binding us all together; so much so, indeed, that when I heard the news of his marriage to Ismene (I was still in Sicily at the time) I felt, oddly, that I knew him much better than she did.

  What impelled her to marry him? I am still not certain. Perhaps she craved security, kindness, comfort, but felt incapable of ever again giving herself emotionally to a man. Perhaps she knew that Agesilaïdas would never make demands upon her that she was unable or unwilling to fulfil. I could think of no other reason, at the time; and yet I have to admit that, as marriages go, this one must be counted a notable success. It may be that Agesilaïdas, too, had his reasons—and these not merely, as gossip said, a desire to lay hands upon Three Winds. He was, after all, nearly fifty: he must have been beginning, like many people in his position, to feel the wintry nip of age and loneliness.

  Now, twenty-five years afterwards, he and Ismene are in perfect accord: they sense each other’s moods almost before their own, and the love between them is warm, enduring, tangible. They make a room brighter simply by being there.

  So we watch each other in the evening lamp-light, sitting late, the three of us, over a bowl of good Saurian wine, treading cautiously through our tangled memories. There is so much that cannot be spoken, even today.

  Agesilaïdas picks a fig from the dish in front of him, peels it reflectively. “I remember the morning you and your mother first got here, Sappho. You were all tousled with sleep, like a very small bird. And rather cross.”

  “I must have been a terrible nuisance.”

  He smiles. “Do you know, my dear, you still haven’t quite lost that habit of apologizing for yourself? How strange. And rather touching.”

  Ismene says: “It might have been yesterday. You’ve changed so little.”

  She means it. Ismene, you’re so good, so generous. Why can’t you hate me a little? You should hate me.

  I laugh. “Lamp-light has always been kind to me.”

  She says: “Do you still have Mica’s portrait?”

  “Of course. Phanias was right: I did grow into it.”

  There is a tiny, edged silence.

  Agesilaïdas says: “When did you last see Mica?”

  “I don’t know—two, three months ago, perhaps.”

  Ismene says: “How is she, Sappho?”

  “She’s very well.”

  Rich, popular, successful: a fashionable society hostess, the Lady Mnasidica. Whose name is never abbreviated. Who has given up portrait-painting.

  Ismene says: “She must be so busy these days-”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, marrying Melanippus made a great difference.”

  Agesilaïdas says quickly (as though knowing how impossible I find it to answer this question—it is a question, of course—with any degree of honesty): “I don’t suppose, from all one hears, that Melanippus sees quite as much of Alcaeus as he did once.”

  Dangerous ground here. I say, picking my words, making a half-joke of it: “Alcaeus has become—something of a recluse. But then, so have I.”

  They exchange quick glances. What do they know? What are they thinking?

  “Melanippus, Alcaeus—they were so close once.” Agesilaïdas shakes his head sadly. It is hard, even now, for him to admit that personal relationships, once established, can ever reach a final breaking-point.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “That old scandal, that poem about throwing away his shield—he wrote it for Melanippus. He thought it might—amuse him. And you see, he loved Melanippus. Melanippus could make his cowardice— bearable.”

  “What—?”

  “Does that surprise you? Did you never realize how bitterly ashamed Alcaeus was of his action? So much so that he had to crucify himself publicly with a bad joke?”

  Agesilaïdas ’ voice falters. To my astonishment, I see his eyes are bright with tears. Ismene quietly takes his hand.

  Something—guilt, perhaps—impels me to say: “I’m sorry. I wish I could help Alcaeus myself. The Gods know he needs friends now, if ever. But there are—” the words stick in my throat.

  “Personal reasons?”

  “Yes.” I take a deep breath. “Personal reasons.” Those cruel, unforgettable words, like an incantation, drum through my brain: Alcaeus must be laughing to hear them sung in the waterfront taverns, they are his last and best revenge on me. I a woman ripe for pity, I whom every ill has seized on—They have sung my songs, too, before now; I can expect no mercy. I know—who better?—just how cruel men can be. Grievous trouble comes upon me, in my fearful heart the belling— cruel, too cruel—of the stag brings lust and madness. Charges all the mor
e excoriating because true. I have lost my sense of humour and my dignity together. By the wiles of Aphrodite came my ruin—

  Ismene says: “Were you always enemies? I can’t remember a time when the two of you weren’t bickering and slandering each other. And yet I once thought—”

  “We enjoyed quarrelling, in some curious way,” I say quickly. “But we were close, you know. I can’t explain this very well—”

  (A fragment of long-forgotten conversation floats into my mind: “You don’t like me, do you?” “No, not much.” “Why?” “Perhaps our temperaments are too alike.”)

  “It doesn’t matter, my dear,” Ismene says. “We understand.”

  The intolerable weight of her compassion. The careful way they both avoid asking me questions that might probe or hurt—what has happened between me and Cleïs, what my immediate plans are, how much truth there is in all the rumours they have heard. The future stretches away in front of me, bleak, grey, purposeless. Sleep is the one panacea.

  But sleep will not come. I lie and toss restlessly, my mind gnawing at the past like a caged rat. The close air stifles me, the bedclothes chafe my limbs, though autumn is well advanced. I get up and fling the shutters wide. Moonlight streams in, the scent of basil, the cry of a hunting owl. Why did I throw away the nepenthe Alcaeus brought me from Egypt? Fear? Pride? It would be more than welcome now. What was it bound the two of us together in that endless, half-mocking enmity? How deep was the mask?

  Was: I am thinking of him in the past, as though he were already dead. What Agesilaïdas told me shocks me more than I care to admit. Perhaps, if I am honest, what I find most disconcerting is my own lack of insight. If I failed to discern that crippling shame, if I took the irony and sophistication at their face-value, then how deeply mistaken, in essentials, may my judgment of him have been? And if I am to revise my judgment of him, must I not thereby also condemn myself?