There were women, of course, the long-limbed daughters of sailors whose speech was so guttural I could not make heads or tails of it. The richer sort came in from time to time, but most of them kept to their villas or their yachts, and though a few cast their eye in my direction, they had the look of those married to powerful men. I didn’t have the stomach to play that particular game, not on foreign soil.
It is surprising, then, that I did not notice Pelagia earlier. She was a frequent visitor to the museum. My colleagues seemed to treat her with the same sort of aversion they showed me despite her obviously local breeding. True, there was a plainness to her expression, her lips neither too rounded nor quite angular, her eyes verging on colourlessness yet not extraordinarily pale, her skin fine, taut, but lacking lustre, her other parts pleasing in proportion and symmetry without offering inspiration—architecturally satisfying; it made me want to place her in a store room somewhere.
My intentions were largely ignoble, and when she proved susceptible to my basic advances—she would speak to me, or allow me to speak to her in any case—things progressed along a fairly predictable line. She refused a private meeting for several weeks, but I persisted, retreated, showed attention when she visited and then rebuffed her when my presence became expected. After one such absence of several days, I made my play, told her I wanted to practice my Greek, or some such, perhaps I asked her about the history of the island and when she responded with enthusiasm, I pushed forward. We met at a taverna near the harbour where the lanterns of the boats reflected shards of light on the waves; all else was darkness around us, pure and impenetrable. She had dressed simply, no ornamentation, but her black hair was bound into a series of sleek, artfully rendered spirals—some effort at least had been taken for the occasion.
We spoke for some time upon the pretense I had offered, and her speech was mellifluous, her engagement genuine. There was a bright spot of colour high in her cheeks, and it charmed me, though I confess that I followed little of what she said. To hear her speak was enough to enchant; understanding would have only spoiled my mood, tempered her innocence with an edge of unfashionable intellect. I ignored her, mostly, and I think she liked it. Most women do. But as night progressed, she grew bolder. At one point, she seized upon my hand and said, for the first time, in English: “Are you sophisticated?”
“What do you mean exactly?” I asked her, a little bit uncertain of the change in pace.
“Are you—charming?”
“Some have called me that,” I allowed. Her English was good, better than I would have expected.
“You look nervous.”
“Do I?” I realized I was. The night was warm, stifling. I was wearing a suit and dark jacket, but I could feel the wet splotches beneath my arms beginning to annex territory.
“You sweat.”
“A natural effect of the sun,” I muttered. And then, making an effort: “and—your beauty?”
“Was that charming?” Coquettish now.
“You must be the judge of that.”
There was silence for a moment, as she looked at me, at first contemplatively. Her adequately shaped eyebrows arched slightly. I was no sailor, but even I could sense a change in the weather.
“Do you have a woman at home? A wife, perhaps? A—how do you say—girlfriend? Are you engaged?”
Her eyes were lively. I thought she might be laughing at me, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I have always had a damnable time with the Greeks in situations like this.
I made a gambit. “An arranged marriage.”
“How barbaric.” Her face fell. Had I overplayed? “It must make you very sad.”
“Disconsolate.” I made an attempt to touch her, but she moved away.
Then: “Shall I seduce you? Would you like that? Would it make you happy?”
She smiled like a sphinx.
So did I.
#
We made love in my ramshackle two-story. The wind moaned hideously, and when a brief shower burst out of the sky, we could see rain dripping from the ceiling into pots she laid out to catch it. The bed, however, was warm. I found I was inspired to poetical epithets myself as it creaked dangerously beneath us. The springs thrummed like a lyre.
She was still plain, unsheathed, but her plainness I had begun to find beautiful. Galen, I’d read, had discovered the perfect proportion from finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpal, and the wrist, and of all these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the arm, and so on. I explored her dimensions.
“What are you doing?” she asked me.
“An experiment.”
“Stop it. I am not a—specimen.” Was that the word she used? “Not for you. Close your eyes now. Do it all by touch.”
But when I did as she asked, the darkness made a cradle for my brain, and all that spilled forth were images of her: angles and lines uncurling themselves, fixing new positions, shredding the patterns I had learned so well and making something new, provocative, startling. Her body was both hard and delicate, muscled, brightly burnished by the sun. She moved as languorously as oil, and I found myself thinking of something I had read once: “That is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce: wonderment and delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight.” I had never been moved by sentiment before, but now I began to shake violently, gripping her shoulder until I printed the shape of my finger upon her and she covered my hand in her own.
“There,” she said, “you have been seduced. How does it feel?”
“Wonderful,” I gasped, but there was a squirming, nasty sensation in the pit of my stomach. I cried out, and she kissed me, and then it was wonderful, and then it was awful again.“Sleep now,” she commanded, and just as instantly, the anguish left me. I curled up beside her, my forehead pressed against the sweet-smelling flesh of her shoulder. In the morning, she would be gone. Regret was an early riser, and it chased most women out the door before I had found my shirt. And so certainty returned. I was still myself, nothing had been lost, nothing abandoned.
#
But I was not at ease that night.
The old feeling of terror returned: I dreamed the roof of my house had turned to shoddy glass, and above the nigrescent dome of space enclosed me. Beyond it stood a crowd of darkening shades, stripped and fleshless, their bodies glistening with rot, studded with stars, a hideous empty eye and all else collapsed and sunken. And yet, despite their freakishness, there was something familiar about them, the barest hint of memory. My body was brittle upon awakening. I was afraid I must have cried out in my sleep. I was afraid she might have left me.
But when I turned, Pelagia was still there, undisturbed. She had thrust an arm carelessly over her face to shut out the light, and so the dawn’s glow fell unevenly upon all of her body except her eyes. I watched how it lit up the various sections of her, as if she was formed from the stone of different quarries. Had I ever looked at a woman in the morning sun? I could not recall. Rain plinked into the copper pots she had placed around the bedroom. It reminded me of the arrangement of pithoi in the cave I had excavated. Unnerved, I nudged her carefully.
“Darling.” I wondered what the Greek called their lovers.
She arose gradually, first her fingers fluttered, then her toes.
I was at a loss for what to say next. Ought I to be warm? Friendly? Consoling?
“I sleep late in the morning,” she said at last.
This felt like some form of sharing—important, a building block. It was intimate knowledge, different than what we had shared the night before. Previously I had avoided this, but I found myself curious, desirous, eager to share. That phrase—“I sleep late in the morning,” was infinitely precious. It demanded reciprocation. If I did not, she would be lost forever.
“Sometimes—” I started, “—I have night terrors.”
“It is not so strange,” she said. “The darkness holds much. It is—how do you say?—a cauldron? No—” she frowned “—this is too much for
cooking. More like—” she made a gesture with her hands. I had learned many words for the shapes of pots, but I could not make out what she meant. “It pours itself out.” She had a peculiar way of talking. The sort of poetry only foreigners can make out of the English language. I wanted more. I was suddenly thirsty for her words. How had I ignored her so blithely? How had I not hung on every word, engraved it upon the tablet of my soul?
“Tell me again what you told me last night.”
Pelagia was naked and gleaming. I was entranced by the movement of her hips as she leaned over to collect the spilling pots, the arc of her buttocks, the dimple at the small of her back as shallow as a kylix.
“I spoke to you of my father,” she told me. “I want you to meet him.” Her eyes were bright and innocent.
Nothing spoils so quickly as love.
#
Fathers and their daughters.
A man could write a book on the subject, and every page would be tragedy. Think of Oenomaus hearing his daughter’s suitor was bound to slay him. Think of Antigone and her pater, blind now, stumbling toward his own death, and her by him always, the cursed child of his incest. I had made a habit of avoiding fathers, my own whenever possible, and certainly those of any of my acquaintances.
But some duties cannot be easily ignored. I had taken her, and she had stayed—not to mention that I was still in the first flush of what might be called love. It is as Homer himself claimed: love is magic to make the sanest man go mad.
As it turned out, they shared a dwelling in the upper reaches of the harbour. Both the house and her father were ancient. He was dressed in a robe of some sort, wool perhaps, but his body shook beneath it anyway. He had the look of an ancient king, too long-lived, strength fled, empire in ruins, left alone in the wilderness to be fed by birds or pulled apart by animals.
The house smelled faintly of licorice, and dust hung in the air like incense. Pelagia poured coffee for us—stuff thick enough I could have painted with it had I wanted to. The old man did not touch his, seemed barely to recognize her.
“Papa,” she said in Greek, “this is the one I have told you about.”
“Hrrm?” he mumbled.
“He has come to the museum.”
A light came into him at that, almost physical so profound were the effects. I could see clearly that he was mad, or something like it, perhaps only old. I had seen professors like this before. The shears of Atropos dull in the face of tenure.
“Please,” Pelagia said to me, pleading, “speak to him. Let him see what kind of a man you are.” This had the predictable effect of stalling my tongue completely.
She stared at the two of us, one mad, one mute, and finally said, “Tell him what you know of beauty.”
A harder question this, but some part of my Cambridge education sparked; I was used to being questioned in this way at least, inward examination being something avoided at all costs amongst those of privilege.
And so I spoke of beauty: I did not flatter, you understand, for I understood naturally she did not mean herself, but beauty beyond the particular. I spoke of its proportions, its limits—I spoke as Galen had spoken, I parroted Plato and Plotinus and all the others—I told them it represented a moral imperative. As I said these things, as I mimicked and recited, as if to an examiner, I felt something unspooling inside myself; the intimacy of his daughter had touched me profoundly. It was like a drug, and I began to speak more honestly than I knew.
What was beauty to me? I had never told another living soul. It was…too truthful. Too revealing. I would have been scorned at Cambridge for the callowness of what I said; it lacked art, sophistication, restraint. It was too him I spoke now. Beauty justified all else in my life—wealth, privilege, intellect, ambition, these were meaningless. I had seen it as a child—the hidden face of humanity, all things crawling toward the grave—and yet something might be salvaged. Perfection was a ward, a salve, a shield.
But the old man turned away from me, crying, “No!”—and then again, “no! This is not beauty. Beauty is strangeness. It is not form but—” I saw a wild light in his eyes. He clutched at my hand, and pulled me along behind him with a hectic strength. This madness—I did not understand it—unless—had our tryst been discovered? Had Pelagia given me up? After all, I had deflowered her with all the vigour and abruptness of a set of garden shears. Perhaps, I thought, he intended to slay me—or worse, he would force me to marry. I tried to shake the him free, but his nails, thick and yellow as wax, had dug into my flesh.
The room beyond was badly lit, a hermit’s cave, and about it were cast thousands of sketches. I recognized some of them: a bronze statue of Hera, imperious, sharp-breasted, with her faced caved in as if from a heavy blow; another recovered from a shipwreck with frilled, green growths pocking the skin; a third disfigured, attenuated by the heat of some vast conflagration. I knew these objects. We all knew them. They represented the pinnacle of that ancient civilization, their greatest achievements. All of them broken, bruised, disfigured.
And all of them…beautiful, taunting and inexplicable. It took my breath away. When the old man released his grip, I did not run. I could not. This was not a punishment, as I had feared, but something else: an education. I began to study the sketches more closely, fear dispelled, caught up only in the excitement of my intellect.
“Beauty is strangeness,” he had said, and, yes, I believed him. Strangeness. That was what I saw. I traced the patterns: sketches of shards, reconstructions, but mad things filled with fanciful extensions, boneless limbs that stretched and circled, perverse bodies. Like nothing I had ever seen—and yet—like all that I had ever seen. I recognized the crow-footed hand making its way sideways across the skin of the page. Sometimes it was huddled. Other times it broke and ran, sprawled, stuttered, stilled.
I turned to the old man. Those bleak, staring eyes, I knew what they had seen: winged women and sphinxes, the curve of a falling blade, blood on the tiles, the pillars cracked, the colonnades fallen, and everywhere that sickening tension, the shadow falling between those vivid, discordant lines. “I know you,” I tried to tell him, but that was not what I meant: I meant, I know what you have seen, I know what you have tried to show me, but it is broken, it is wrong…
“Good,” he said in his throaty Greek. “I know you too.” And it was clear to me that was not what he meant either: he meant, I know you are broken, I know you search for beauty but you cannot hold it in your hands for too long without destroying it, you are an idealist and you are wrecked. “It will be easier this way.”
“What shall?” I demanded.
“You have been set a task of reconstruction?” he asked me. I scowled: nothing irks the old guard so much as their apparent heirs. But he waved his hand to dispel my doubts. “Of course, you have. An Englishman, no less! They would not choose another Greek, could not, who would touch the thing?”
“I am not so credulous as you would have me.”
“Yes! Credulous—this is the very nature of the thing, belief.” He plucked a page from the table. “What you see here—the ancient ones, theoi, masters of the market, the feast and the banquet, the altar and the tomb; they are the first forms; the unmoved movers.”
“Figments,” I told him. “Desire and terror pressed into the image of man—an abstraction of the chaotic, forced to serve the whim of philosophers and priests.”
“And yet,” he said, staring at me very closely.
I flinched. “And yet.”
“They were beautiful once, but age has wrecked them. And there is something—here.” He tapped at a hastily scrawled image, the barest of outlines of a robed figure, two unseeing eyes, over-large. They stared out of the centre of the head, terrible. Hungry. “The perfection of art was the perfection of these figures. But they have been bent out of shape: the ocean devours the smoothness of their flesh, the grave eats its protector, fires rage and beauty sloughs off its skin. These…representations, they are as the hand is to the arm, the finger to the knuck
le. The canker spreads, and the rot has set in unto the very root of the form. The pattern is corruptible!”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I tried to tell him, but I could not wrench my eyes from the paper he held. I remembered the fragments of bronze, and the patterns at which they hinted. Something beautiful or something monstrous. I knew what it should have been: a maiden straight-backed and glorious, the tilt of her chin, an imperious eye…but that was not how I saw it. I saw as he saw it, filtered through shadow and strangeness. It was as if my soul was at war with my intellect, and yet I knew if I had ever seen truly, it was in that moment.
“You know,” he said, “I see that you know.”
“It is a simply drawing,” I insisted, “nothing more.”
“It is truth.”
“That is not how the artist shaped it. You know that, you must know that.”
“The artist is dead! It is how the figure goes now,” he snapped. “You have seen the stars, yes? Their figures? Yes, of course you have—the theoi, they watch us from the vault of heaven, their bodies twisted and deformed by what we have done to them. We have consigned them to rot and ruin. They cannot free themselves from those shapes we have created for them, for they are mould and wax both, the stone and the chisel!”
“You are too far gone,” I told him, turning away. “This is madness, what would you have me do?”
“They wish to be seen as they are. Let the mould be broken, let the stone turn to dust!”
“I cannot,” I cried. “Papadiliou will not have it!”
“You see as no one else does!” The old man’s grin was mesmerizing. I felt myself coming under his power. The room was warm and dusty, the air dense, unbreathable. The figures around me seemed to shift and move as if the pages were stirred by some unknown breath, and, indeed, in that moment it felt the air began to chill as it did when a vast cloud interposed itself between the sun and the earth.
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