The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  There was silence. “I saw Graphos today” she said, a sudden expression of sadness clouding her face. Presumably she was referring to the politician? I said nothing, nor did they. In the moment of embarrassment that followed we heard the noise of the car drawing up, and the figure of Caradoc emerged among the oleanders—the stubby frame hunched up with a defiant and slightly tipsy-looking mien; he carried a much-darned Scotch plaid over his arm, and in his hand a leather-covered flask from which he drew encouragement as he advanced. No greetings followed, much to my surprise; Hippolyta just lay, the Count just stared. Staring keenly, menacingly under shaggy white eyebrows, the architectural mage advanced, his deep voice munching out segments of air with a kind of half-coherent zeal. At first blush he seemed far too sure of himself, and then as he came closer the impression changed to one of almost infantile shyness. He spread his arms and uttered a single phrase in the accents of a Welsh bard: “What it is to work for these beneficed Pharisees!” Giving a harsh bark of a laugh full of ruefulness he sat down by the pond, turning the bottle over thoughtfully in his fingers before pushing it into the pocket of his cape. A heavy air of constraint fell over the company and I realised that it was caused by my presence; they could not speak freely before me. I unshackled my machine and excused myself. But through the window of the ramshackle lavatory on the ground floor I heard, or seemed to hear, Hippolyta give a low cry and exclaim: “O Caradoc, the Parthenon! Only Graphos can fight it.” Caradoc gave an incredulous roar in the accents of the Grand Cham. “They told me nothing, they never do. Simply to come at once and bring Pulley for costings. I was hoping to build Jocas a seraglio. But this…. No, I won’t believe it.”

  “Yes. Yes.” Like the cry of a sea-bird. That was all. By the time I returned the whole picture had changed; the constraint had vanished. They had exchanged whatever they had needed to, and though there were still tears in the eyes of Hippolyta she was laughing heartily at something the Cham had said. Moreover his assistant Pulley had now joined the company—a lank north-country youth of yellowish cast, with huge hands and teeth. He said little. But he yawned from time to time like an eclipse of the sun.

  A dinner table had been set out among the oleanders on a nearby terrace; the still air hardly trembled the candles in their silver sockets. Wine soon oiled the hinges of the talk. The Cham, after a short period of reservation, frankly gave me his hand.

  “Charlton, you said?”

  “Charlock.”

  “Well, Charlton, here’s my hand.”

  Then he turned in business-like fashion and began to mash up his food with vigour, talking in loud and confident tones as he did so. No reference was made to my function, and I made none, treading warily; but towards the middle of the meal Hippolyta made a gesture inviting me to record, and I obeyed unobtrusively, while Caradoc continued with a grumbling one-cylinder monologue. He was in a curious mood it seemed, uncertain whether to allow the wine to make him gay or whether to become testy and morose; presumably he was still troubled by whatever she had told him, for he suddenly said, in an aside: “Of course I shall never cease to be grateful to the firm—how could one not be? It has allowed me to build all its cathedrals, so to speak. But one can build cathedrals without being a religious man? Anyway I don’t propose to be upset until I know for certain what is in Jocas’ mind.” Then, as if to pursue the metaphor he turned to me and said: “I’m talking about Merlins, my boy. Easy to join but hard to leave. Nevertheless there comes a day….” He sighed heavily and took Hippolyta’s hand. “Now” he said “we must make a real effort to enjoy ourselves tonight. No good can come of worrying. I propose to lead an expedition to the Nube, and I invite the lot of you as my guests. By the navel-string of the Risen Lord we shall have a marvellous time. Eh? Do you know the Nube, Charlton?”

  “The Blue Danube? By repute.”

  “It is a home from home for us, eh Pulley?”

  He consulted the circle of candle-lit faces as he barked out the phrase. There seemed little enough response aroused by this proposition. He was pained. As for the Blue Danube, it enjoyed a mild repute among frequenters of houses of ill fame. Its name, in frosted bulbs, had been changed for it by wind and weather; the letters had either fallen out of their frames or gone dead. All that remained for the wayfarer to read against the night sky now was the legend The Nube, ancing, aberet. “I should like to come” said I, and received a friendly thump from the Cham. He was delighted to receive support from some quarter. His good humour returned. “It is run by an adorable personage, daughter of a Russian Grand Duke, and sometime wife to a British Vice-Consul, most aptly so entitled, and she calls herself Mrs. Henniker.” Hippolyta smiled and said: “All Athens knows her.” Caradoc nodded. “And with justice; she has the cleanest girls in Attica; moreover there is one Turk called Fatma.” He embraced a large segment of air to suggest her dimensions. “A heroine is Fatma.”

  All this was becoming less and less esoteric. Caradoc dished us all a stoup of red Nemean and cajoled us with prophecy. “You will see,” he said “Graphos will get in and save our bacon.” She smiled, yes, but sadly; shaking her head doubtfully. “I’ll give you the big car” she said. “But I won’t come. In case he phones or comes to see me. But I expect you’ll find all your friends at the Nube, including Sipple. He knows you are arriving today.” Caradoc registered approval, commended the cheese he was cutting up (“This Camembert has lain a long time, not in Abraham’s bosom but in the hairy armpit of the Grand Turk himself”) and added, with his mouth full: “Give me Sipple the clown any day.” Pulley explained that Sipple was an “undesirable”.

  “But irresistible, my favourite numéro” insisted the Cham. “A man of parts.”

  “Second-hand parts” said Pulley. He seemed from his facial expressions to live in a state of furious though repressed disapproval. Caradoc, by now distinctly mellow, turned aside in disgust and confided some thoughts of the first magnitude, so to speak, to the mild and tentative Count, who had registered an expression of pained alarm at the mention of a house of ill fame. It was clear that he would not be joining us in this bacchanal. Caradoc, feeling perhaps an unexpressed reservation, tried to cajole him with high thinking to concede some virtue to low living. This sort of stuff. “The Nube is the perfect place for self-examination, better than a church. Why not, after all? The nearest vicarious approach to death is by the orgasm which produces its temporary simulacrum.” (“Ow!” exclaimed Hippolyta with superstitious disgust.) The Cham warmed to the pulpit, his tone now tinged distinctly with Welsh tabernacle. “That is why it has been surrounded with prayer, poetry, propitiation, tabu. The Greeks saw a clear relationship and in their wisdom compounded temple and brothel. We haven’t the imagination. Fools! The priest has tried to harness its power, dynamo fashion, to make more braindust. A foul repression is written all over our mugs. Look at him, him, her. Look at me! In the East we are told he has managed to crack the mould and liberate the statue of the silver man. But in the West our methods have failed—the silly reticule of the human brain can only generate a sterile flight of symbols and concepts which have given us certain insecure powers over matter but none over ourselves.”

  Pulley began to express his disapproval of all this bardic verbosity by beating himself about the chest and biceps and making animal noises and monkey faces. This delighted the Cham, who now stood up and in the pleading accents of a Welsh preacher admonished and cajoled him. “Now which is wiser, Pulley my dear fellow: to wear all nature like a suit of clothes, or to rape and tame it?”

  Pulley gave a thin yowl and said: “Pack it up Carry, like a good fellow. I’ve had nothing but this all day in the plane.” He turned to us for support. “Can you bear it when the bloody Druid comes out in him?”

  “Of course they can” said Caradoc majestically, still poised for flight. “Only just” said Hippolyta.

  “It gives me the bloody shivers” said Pulley.

  “Very well.” Caradoc sat down unsteadily. “Very well you Philistine. Very
well.” He took my hand and began to recite.

  If a monumental mason

  Carved a monumental turd

  As a symbol of humanity at prayer,

  We could cast it as a bronze

  And distribute it to dons

  As an article of college table-ware

  He was sufficiently pleased with the response to threaten us with a ballad beginning:

  How nugatory and how glum

  The endomorphs of scholarship

  Like hippos on a sinking ship

  Stay bum to silly bum.

  But he could push the matter no further, and submitted to Hippolyta’s amused disapproval with mock contrition. She had kicked off her sandals and was smoking a Turkish cigarette in a black bone holder. Caradoc helped himself to a rose from the bowl on the table. “The moon is late tonight” he observed with petulance. He had been watching the little dab of whiteness on the horizon which marked its point of emergence. He had been here before, then? Supposedly.

  The night had been still down in this garden with its unhovering candles, its slow-moving warm currents of scent. Now came a small gust which blew out the light and left us in half-darkness.

  “A fitting end to our dinner” said Caradoc. “And a sign that we should be about our business. How shall we arrange matters?”

  Hippolyta was staying; Banubula elected to be dropped off in Athens, “if we could face the detour”. That left the three of us. I left my sacred boxes in a safe place against a future return and joined them. Pulley had taken the wheel of the car, sitting beside the chauffeur whose air of misgiving showed that he knew he was in for a long night’s work. “Drive carefully” cried our hostess from the gate.

  Caradoc sang softly to himself, beating time with a finger.

  Drinking, dicing and drabbing

  Drabbing, drinking and dice,

  You can say what you like they are nice

  You can say what you like they are nice

  Faces with nothing behind them

  Or behinds with nothing before….

  Pulley nearly ran into an unlighted cart and threw us all about widdershins. Banubula made turkey-noises. He was obviously a timorous man and was relieved to be deposited on the outskirts of the capital, pausing only to retrieve a silver-knobbed walking stick and to bow a ceremonious good-night. Then down towards the sea we turned, and now the young tardy moon was rising; it rode with us along the whole circuit of the long walls, past the rabble of dingy villas nestling in sterile palms, the beer factory, the refuse-encumbered Ilyssos. Below the Acropolis the olive groves melted away downhill towards the little railway. No horizon was ruled as yet, only a point at which stars began to prickle up out of the darkness. The last curve of the coast road sprang out like a branch in full blossom and elated by the moonlight and the silver spangles of the mild sea Pulley increased speed until we were whirling down towards Sunion—stars cool now as cress and shining waternibbled rock. Caradoc’s rose was black. The night was placid and reassuring. Caradoc had decided for the time being to stop acting the rhetorical mountebank; the lightly varnished night-sky was a narcotic. In an absent-minded fashion he tried to catch a moonbeam in his cupped hand.

  Nor was it long before we swerved off the pitted macadam of the main road on to hard dune: thence on to flaky sand dunes, to bump and skitter and slide into the rotting garden of the Nube and come to rest hull down under a single balcony where the one and only Mrs. Henniker awaited us in the attitude of a gaunt Juliet in retirement. The electric sign throbbed weakly: though for reasons of economy or aesthetics the current had never been taken inside where the lighting was by paraffin lamp or candle. Caradoc announced our arrival and at once Mrs. Henniker bobbed out of sight, only to reappear a minute later at the front door, arms extended in welcome. The long horse face with its patchy pink skin inspired confidence. She exhaled rectitude and forthrightness like the best sort of seaside landlady. Her tones were tart and martial, her back as straight as a ramrod. She was at once fearful and endearing. Behind her one could sense the long and thankless lifetime spent in putting up with the lopped-off capacities of her typical clients. (“The Goddess of Sex, who, like the multiplication table, repeats her demands, always trying to raise herself to a higher power, perhaps in order to precipitate a true self?” Who the devil was that? Yes, Koepgen.)

  At any rate it was to the Nube that humanity shuffled, lugging its heavy baggage—the interior pains and massive depressions. Among Mrs. Henniker’s girls they were exorcised. Not us, mind you, for we were heartwhole and in sportive mood—to judge by the tone set by Caradoc. He introduced me as Mr. Chilton and added agreeably “He is a man of the world like us.” Mrs. Henniker, who took everything with deadly seriousness, fluffed out her feathers like a bird and said, with intense feeling, “My poy. My poy”; taking as she did so, my right hand between scaly palms. It was all very formal, very graceful, very relaxed. Pulley gave a German professor’s bow.

  We entered the Nube with well-bred enthusiasm to go through the statutory ritual with the big wooden statue of the Curéd’Ars—a cordelier with an unhealthy leer. This came as rather a surprise to me. Caradoc embraced the statue warmly, addressing it as Saint Foutain. Then he indicated a slot in its shoulder large enough to admit a drachma. “Initiate yourself” he cried jovially, tendering me the coin. It tinkled into the body of the Curé and there was a whirr followed by a click. All at once a hatch in his robe flew open and he thrust out a beautifully hand-painted penis the length of a sermon. “Don’t reel, don’t recoil that way” said Caradoc reproachfully. “Put your hand on it and wish.” I obeyed, offering up a shadowy half-formulated wish, fragile yet iridescent as a soap bubble, in the general direction of the absent Io. Pulley followed suit. “He’s an infallible fellow. You only have to ask him and it comes true. He was bequeathed to the Nube by a commercial traveller in French wine, as mark of his esteem and entire satisfaction.” So, feeling suitably shriven, we advanced upon the candle-lit interior through a succession of dusty curtains; here the girls waited, yawning—about half a dozen dressed in baggy Turkish trousers and no tops. They looked nice and tame, if rugged; and dying of boredom.

  Time hung heavy, one gathered, when there were no clients in the Nube. A gramophone, yes, but the discs were few and scratched. Film magazines in plenty, but ancient. So it was that our majestic appearance on the scene evoked a burst of energy and merriment that was spontaneous and unfeigned.

  But wait, we were not completely alone. In one corner of the room, on a table, lay a red-headed man apparently dead, and clad in nothing but his underpants. A large and heartless-looking fellow of Celtic cast, he was still sentient for he breathed stertorously through his nose. Not dead, then. The girls giggled as they examined him like some entomological specimen, lifting an arm to let it drop plump, peering into a glazed eyeball, up his nose. “I don’t know who he is” said Mrs. Henniker in dismay. “We will have to wait until he comes round.” One of the girls explained how the eyeballs of the corpse had suddenly rolled upwards into his skull like a doll; she mimed this horribly. Caradoc approached the figure with an air of medical knowledgeableness and said: “Aha! Cheyne-Stokes respiration. My diagnosis is Merchant Navy. Have you looked in his clothes?”

  “He has none. He arrived on a bicycle with some money in his hand. Nothing but his underpants.”

  Caradoc tutted sympathetically. “You see” said Mrs. Henniker piteously “what we are up against all the time? How to run a respectable house what I mean? Tomorrow I will ring the Consul.”

  They submitted the corpse to a further series of tests, tickling its privates with a quill, smacking its cheeks, rubbing it with Cologne—but all to no purpose. Finally with a sigh they drew a bead curtain over the figure and Mrs. Henniker led us away among the further alcoves where, among the dusty divans, siphons and bottles awaited us together with plates of various comestibles. Here Caradoc was very much en pacha; Fatma had already discovered her lost love in him. I pitied and admired him, for she was
a fearsome golliwog of negroid cast, though amiable in a pockmarked way. A shelf of gold and tin teeth adorned a cheerful and matronly grin.

  The girls closed in now with chatter and laughter, piling themselves around us on the cushions like stray cats. It was all very domesticated and soothing. In the far corner Miki played a tune on a tinny piano which evoked dim and far-off things. There was no disposition to hurry, except in the case of the playful Fatma who made many a playful grab at the Cham’s cods to see, as she said, “if there was any fruit on the branches as yet”. Pulley said with an unmerited acerbity, “She’s got a hope she has”; and in truth Caradoc seemed to derive more satisfaction from conversation than anything else. The sound of his own voice filled him with a vivid auto-intoxication. “They always ask me” he said somewhat sadly “if I am not married and why and how many children and so on. I try and explain that I was never convinced about the state. But at long last I got so fed up that I began to carry around a wallet-full of children just to humour them. Look.” He tipped out of a wallet a series of grotesque pictures of nude children of various ages. “This is my youngest” he explained, holding up the most hideous. “He must be a man of forty by now; but this poor damsel won’t know any better.” Fatma crooned over the pictures. They were passed round the eager circle of baby fanciers. They had the effect of increasing enthusiasm. Eager to entertain, someone started to scratch a mandolin and croon. Others in a burst of baby-worship produced their knitting and fell to work in aid of an imaginary seventh-month foetus. Tina dabbed us all with scent from a bottle labelled Phul and exhorted us to have kephi—joy. Somewhat to my surprise Mrs. Henniker also relaxed and laid down with her head in Demetra’s lap, allowing the girl to brush her harsh hair and massage her temples. She kicked off her shoes and extending thin arms in rapturous abandonment allowed two other girls to knead and palp them slowly. A fine fat peasant girl closed in on me, polite and nonchalant. Of course in those fine free pre-salvarsan days nobody could help being slightly nagged by syphilophobia. I thought of Schopenhauer’s “Obit anus Abit onus” and sighed into my flowing bowl. As if she read my mind Mrs. Henniker opened one eye like a chameleon and said: “She is all right; we take no chances here; the safety of the client is our guarantee.” I tried to look as if I needed no such reassurance, allowing myself to be fed like a pet bird with aromatic scraps of entrail on toothpicks. “I want to see Sipple,” said Caradoc “that velvet prick in an iron mitt, that specialist in all the unwashed desires.” “Later” said Mrs. Henniker, “he always comes later”; and then as if the word had reminded her of something she consulted her watch and rose to excuse herself. “I am hiring some new girls” she explained. “The doctor is coming to examine them.” So saying she filtered through a wall of curtains and disappeared. Dispersing slowly upon our various trajectories I heard, as if in a dream, Caradoc admonishing me with: “I hope Charlton that you are not one of those Englishmen who forever dream of some sodomyprone principality with a fringe of palms where the Arabs wear nothing under their nightgowns.”