by Roman Payne
1 LES FILLES DE JOIE: (Fr) Literally: ‘Girls of joy’ (Prostitutes).
2SMOKING MIXTURE: Although the narrator never specified the contents of this ‘smoking mixture,’ some sources claim that while Saul was in Calais, he regularly smoked a
“No thank you,” I waved my hand, “I gave that up long ago. But I will toast the cognac with pleasure…
“À votre santé1!”
“Santé!”
And so we sipped the beautiful liquor while Saul settled into his chair with his pipe and glass, and began to tell the fabulous story which I recount to you now, word for word as he told it to me that day in Calais, with not a single syllable left out, nor changed. Here is what he said…
blend of opium mixed with smoking agents, while others claim he mixed tobacco with hashish; still most sources suggest it was simply pure, honest tobacco that was being smoked. [Editor]
1 À VOTRE SANTÉ: (Fr, formal/polite-tense [vous]) “To your health!”
Chapter Seven
Saul tells his own story…
I am Saul, the son of Solarus. My mother was the niece of the Christian king of Tripoli. My father grew up at court in close proximity to the king, but his forbidden relations with my mother brought a death sentence upon him. He was forced to commit suicide—obliged, like Socrates, to drink hemlock. My mother meanwhile, pregnant with me, escaped into exile. She relinquished her wealth at court to raise me herself, living by her own hands as well as the generosity of an old peasant couple, far from the city in a small fishing village on the sunny coast of Libya. I grew up there, tall and strong, with a vigorous spirit; I reached the age of manhood with a good constitution and a curious mind.
Biding my time in travel and adventure, for these were the ways I knew to fill the heart with joy, there came a day when the call to adventure—that mysterious call that arrives to certain young people—beckoned me to set out on a journey to Europe.
Now please understand… I am going to tell you this story as I felt it at the time... If I offend you with mention of past vices—although I do not believe that I could offend you—please realize that these were past vices; vices that belonged to a spirited creature who had to go through many troubles to become the man he is today. Back in those days I loved too many things in abundance. Women, wine, and opium were the delicacies I devoured in large quantities, for with them, I did not feel like a mortal man, but like a god. Fortunately, since then my manhood has matured. I have tamed those old appetites. Perhaps I could almost even be called “virtuous”? Well!, you will be the judge of that from my tale…
Yes, today I am faithful to one woman. She is my morning, she is my evening; we have a love that blooms over and again, more beautifully each time than the last. You will see that we are not lovers like others, for whom love is both a punishment and a gift… Our love has never punished, only rewarded. Such love therein lies the eudaimonic life1. But when our story begins, I hadn’t known anyone like her. I was just a reckless adventurer. “Pleasure!”—that was my only concern as I embarked on this voyage to Europe several years ago. Then I met the woman of my heart… true, she was then young as a girl, though she was wiser than all women of age who have never ventured out into the world on their own. As a child, my love carried a roadmap in her hand the way other girls her age carried handkerchiefs. And so she knew the way, and it is thanks to her guidance that I became a man. And it is thanks to her that I am alive today to narrate this tale. But let me begin at the beginning…
1 EUDAIMONIC LIFE: (Ancient Greek) εὐδαιμονία: “The flourishing life” is perhaps the best translation. In the works of Aristotle, eudaimonia is considered the highest human good and the aim of practical philosophy.
It was in the 3—th year of my stay on this, our fruitful earth, while traveling through Cataluña on my way north to a country whereto Fortune would never bring me, that I met a brave, young orphan girl who was like me, a wanderer. With her enchanting songs, her rare beauty, and clever tricks, this wild “wanderess” ensnared my soul like a gypsy-thief, and led me foolish and blind to where you find me now. The first time I saw her, fires were alight. It was a spicy night in Barcelona. The air was fragrant and free. But my adventures began shortly before that. Here is how…
It was the new moon, the night was pitch black. My clothes were dirty from sleeping in a ditch since the inn near the boat docks was closed when I arrived too late at night. I had some money in my pocket: two hundred silver piastres, a few pieces of gold, as well as some banknotes. I’d been acting like a rascal for a period of time but I blamed it on the season.
I had crossed the Mediterranean on a boat, from Egypt to Crete; and from Crete I sailed to the Greek island of Hydra on the invitation of an old and rich export-merchant who asked me to be his guest at his home. And having arrived and dined at his house with him and his young daughter, as well as the ugly man his daughter was engaged to marry, I inquired about the quaint little island where I had come to find myself. Later, after dinner, while wandering alone up the long road that wound high over the sheer rocky cliffs, with the Aegean Sea on one side and the lonely whitewashed houses where mules were roped-up on the other, I spied a plump pigeon on the dusty road happily munching a piece of cord. I thought how even he was free to take flight and sail away. He could fly to Athens, or farther yet—whereas I was bound to this barren island, and no boats in the harbor were scheduled to sail that night.
I wandered back to the house and could hear my host talking loudly with his daughter’s pock-marked fiancé in the dining-room. They were busy smoking after-dinner cigars and clinking their glasses of digestifs. I passed to the kitchen and found his daughter wearing a short sleeping-robe, reaching for something on a high-up shelf. I came behind her and pressed my hand to her bare calf and felt that her skin was burning hot. The sensation of her skin made me forget all about her husband-to-be who was coughing in the other room while her father was telling him a story in an overloud voice. I lifted the light fabric of the daughter’s sleeping-robe and put my hand under the steamy mound of her groin, and I could feel moist liquid dropping from the hairy mound like steam that shoots out of the spout of a piping-hot wine keg.
“Let’s go into the spice-room,” she suggested, urging me to take her by the waist.
Amid barrels of saffron and white pepper, I nestled with my host’s young daughter and pulled her happy buttocks over me and drifted in and out of her moist groin—my throbbing sex rocking languidly inside her own sex like a docked skiff that rocks languidly against the piers lapping the salty waters in the dark night. When she came, she uttered a little screech and I could see the whites of her eyes disappearing in her head in the dim light of the spice-room; and a few minutes later, I was alone in the upstairs room securing my valises to travel on in the morning.
While I tried to sleep that night, still excited from my sexual adventure, the source of my pleasure snuck in to kiss me good night, and I once again cupped her smoldering sex in my large hand and she uttered a pleasurable screech.
I don’t know how it happened, whether a servant betrayed us, or if the tearful girl confessed all after the lunacy and passion of night had left her, but I didn’t meet with happy-breakfast the next morning, neither welcome words-upon-parting. The father and his future son-in-law somehow discovered that I had had intercourse with the girl of the house in the spice-room the night before, and it being rather impossible to marry a girl off in that part of the country without her being a virgin, the men decided to hunt me down and, quote, “lop off my head,” unquote. (I learned this from the driver who took me down to the pier.) I bribed the driver well so he wouldn’t betray me to the merchant or to the girl’s ugly fiancé, and a few minutes later I was alone and free, sailing from Hydra to the mainland of Greece. My valises were safe by my side and I marveled at my luck for having escaped from that island without losing either property or obtaining bodily injury. Success!, I cheered—for I had both health and possession, along with the blessèd memo
ry of the merchant’s young daughter to make me smile and look forward to glorious nights to come— for when you see the first sprouts, I think you know the grain that follows. My luck in the past was always good. True, there was no ligne de chance1 on my left hand, but I didn’t believe that that mattered.
After arriving in Piraeus, I traveled up to Athens; then into the country of Albania, meeting no hardship, and took the boat from Vlorë to the sunny shores of Italy.
I soon arrived in the town of M****, and found lodging and explained the business of my filthy appearance to the innkeeper. I gave her a large tip to show her I wasn’t some vagabond without money and she gave my bundle of dirty clothes to the blind washerwoman to be cleaned. After eating a meal of cold eggs, I stretched out naked on the bed in the room I’d let. My eyes drifted from the ceiling to the window. Beyond the window stood a pleasant courtyard square, adorned in the center with a fountain. The courtyard wasn’t large, but the walls on either side were tall and they both had arched doorways that led away into the common streets of the town. In the back was a portico supported by stone pillars. The courtyard seemed rather ornate considering the humble, almost plain, character of the town surrounding it; the bubbling fountain beneath my window seemed to me rather peaceful and overall I liked the room and the inn, although the meal was bad.
Lying naked on the bed, I chewed a piece of leather for want of something to put in my mouth; all the while I thumbed through the only book I had in my possession. It was a copy of The Odyssey in Greek. I was having the damnedest time deciphering the Greek. I’d had a perfectly good French translation of The Odyssey when I was in Alexandria, but I traded it for this Greek copy while on the ship crossing the sea because it was to be an even trade—book for book—and it seemed to me that I was getting the more ‘authentic’ item in the bargain.
1 LIGNE DE CHANCE: (Fr) Luck line
I slept all evening and only awoke when the innkeeper brought the dinner. The meal was a bland stew gratiné with cabbage. I didn’t complain about the cooking, but asked that she knock next time before entering, as I had been asleep naked on the bed, and my sex grew hard when I awoke—as naturally happens to men when roused from sleep; but she informed me that such things didn’t bother her—she grew up in a house with eight brothers; and, anyway, her curious years were, quote, “driedup,” as she put it, and the handsome sight of a nude man stirred her heart no more than the sight of two dogs playing in the yard. This bit of news didn’t interest me, and I begged she leave me alone after dressing the table and setting the stew down along with a half-liter of red wine. I read from Homer all evening— keeping to the passages I knew by heart to relieve me of having to know each word of the Greek—and when night came, I saw the full moon rising outside the window: a magnificent silver disc hovering in the black abyss of sky. I thought of a vision I’d seen recently before in which the ocean at night had been as black and as deep as that eternal night’s sky, and I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I’d seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one’s eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. ‘This may be my last moon,’ I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey.
Around midnight, I met my neighbor in the inn. He was a skittish specimen, dwarfish and emaciated, who’d been staying there for two weeks. He also had issues with the moon—though his weren’t positive like mine. The full moon made him a basketcase, he told me. It shook his nerves and boiled his blood and he couldn’t sleep a wink during a full moon without taking drugs to calm himself down. I invited him into my room, and to make acquaintance we each drank a glass of Spanish brandy together and talked. Never had I seen a man’s eyes bulge so much as he spoke…
“That goddammed moon!” he cried, “All I do over there in that room of mine is pace the floor—all night long!”
To this, I smiled and bared my teeth.
“How does one get a good night’s sleep in this world?”
“It’s like this,” I told my neighbor, “I met this Chinaman once, and we practiced yoga together, although neither of us had been to India. He was actually from Singapore, but we all called him ‘The Chinaman.’ He had come from Asia in a train baggage car with a sack full of opium that he was going to sell in Europe for a good profit (this was the first time I ever tasted that pernicious, though unbelievably beautiful, drug). He was an adroit yogi and the two of us spent hours balancing on our heads, letting the muscles in the faces slacken, our heart-rates deepen. The Chinaman bragged that he could concentrate on whatever he wanted to such an extent, that everything else ceased to exist. You know, they say not to practice yoga much during the full moon because people get excited during the full moon and one risks going too far with the poses to the extent of injury you see…
“Anyway, to the point, this Chinaman was able to ‘forget’ the full moon. Such mind power he had, that his ‘forgetting the moon’ actually caused his eyes to not see it!—you see what I’m saying, neighbor? The Chinaman looked into the sky and saw a pit of blackness, whereas we other men on the ship—(I met him on a ship in the Mediterranean on my way to Malta)—we other men saw the moon and pointed it out to him. But he had forgotten the moon to the extent that his eyes couldn’t see it any longer. You see what I’m getting at? All you need to do, my good neighbor, is ‘forget’ the moon! Then you’ll be able to stop your pacing at night and get a good night’s sleep…”
My neighbor drooled a little, then lathered the drool on his chin with his fingertips, forming a froth, like shaving cream. “Ah!” he replied, “worth a try! You see I believe in that stuff too: yoga and mystical powers. I once knew a man who could kill himself on command. Can you believe that? Why do you laugh? Believe it! By will of his own mind, he could make his heart stop beating for good…” My neighbor poised and looked seriously at me, searching in my eyes. “You laugh!” he repeated once more… “You laugh, but he was a master at it! He could commit suicide at his own will!”
Indeed, hearty laughter streamed through my nose. “Could he do it perpetually?” I asked.
“Perpetually…?” My neighbor rubbed his waxy chin. “I mean, is he still able to do it?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Well? Then is he dead…?!”
My neighbor’s puzzled face slowly began to transform into a look of realization. “But sir,” he said, “Of course he’s dead! I mean to say… this man could kill himself on command, you see. And you don’t come back from the dead!”
The two of us found ourselves crossing to the door so I could let my visitor out. I slapped him with friendliness on the shoulder.
“No, you don’t come back from the dead,” I agreed. “Thank you for the brandy.”
The two of us had finished on friendly terms and parted company. I had no intention of meeting this character again, as I hoped to leave the inn early the next morning and travel on, and sure enough, that is what I did.
Chapter Eight
When I left the town of M****, I chartered a boat called “La Belle Étoile” piloted by an Irishman, and we rounded the Iberian Peninsula and docked in the Andalusian seaport town of Málaga. It was evening and the pier was full of arrivals. The bustle of passengers arriving from abroad with their foreign commotion and the click-clack of luggage carts met with the sound of the local Andalusian chatter coming from the smoky tabernas, the brash cries of Arab children begging for coins, the whistles of men offering their services as guides. I was thirsty for a drink of fresh water, and made my way up to a bar where bright lights showed a lot of young people hanging around to enjoy the mild night. Only the patios and bars had lights in the port city because the moon was just a tiny sliver and waning. The moon was the reason I wanted only water to drink, no wine. Being superstitious, I abstained from quantities of wine, most carnal joys and earthly delights whe
never the moon was waning or absent from the sky. I call it superstition because somewhere I’d heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoided pleasure during the waning or absent moon also out of respect for the bounty this world offered me. I profited from great harvests in life and believed in the importance of seasons… Enjoy figs and sweet tomatoes in the summer months; yet suffer a watery soup in winter. There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness, (if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time)… Finally, there are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin. For this strengthens the spine, the soul, and give dreams of courage and heroism. I believed in heroism, and still do. It is said that Alexander the Great slept with The Iliad beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s Odyssey as if it were the sweet body of a woman.
During the shrinking moon: books, scholarship, astronomy, mathematics, literature, philosophy, botany, pharmacology, chemistry, scientific inquiry, these are my occupations. When I used to live in Tripoli as a young man, my friends would come to me at night…
“Saul!” they would sing merrily, “Our festive friend! Wild and charming Saul! Ô, charismatic prince! How are you this night? Why don’t you come down with us to Pasha’s Garden? There will be music, and loose women eager to be made love to! Come on!…”