The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

  Silence, dispossession, plenitude. The little rooms on the first floor of the villa were spotlessly clean and bare of all ornament. Scoured wooden floors and enormous old-fashioned beds squatting like sumpter camels, with mattresses too tough to be dented by our bodies. Outside the sea sighed along the strand. “Some magi among the barbarians seeing Harpalus despondent persuaded him that he could lure the spirit of Pythonice back from the Underworld. In vain, despite the voice which issued from the bronze bay-tree.” She came from no island but from the mulberry-starred plateaus where the Vardar flows, and where the women have voices of steel wire. The fish-markets of Salonika had been her only school. Pitiful black eyes of a mooncalf adorned this kindly personage. Her freshly washed hair, though coarse, was delicious as mint. But then ideas turn sideways in their sleep, seduced by the lush combing of waves upon sand, and one turns with them, sliding towards the self possession of sleep and dreaming. Once more I saw Harpalus among the tombs. “Harpalus the Macedonian, who plundered large sums from Alexander’s funds, fled to Athens; there he fell madly in love with Pythonice the courtesan and squandered everything on her. Nothing like her funeral had ever been seen, choirs, artists, displays, massed instruments. And her tomb! As you approach Athens along the Sacred Way from Eleusis, at the point where the citadel is first seen, on the right you will see a monument which outdoes in size every other. You halt and ask yourself whose it is—Miltiades, Cimon, Pericles? No. It is Pythonice’s, triple slave and triple harlot.”

  On my way downstairs—I took a wrong turning and lost myself, blundering down at last into a sort of cellar which must once have served as a kitchen when the villa had been a normal habitation. Here a strange scene was taking place, illustrated, so to speak by the shadows which whirled and loomed upon the dirty ceiling. A group of starkly silhouetted figures stood grouped about a deal table on which lay the figure of a girl. It was their shadows which lobbed about up above like daddy long-legs: fascinating cartoons, travesties of ordinary gestures magnified to enormous size. Mrs. Henniker occupied the foreground of the animated Goya. Her friend the doctor was bent intently over the girl on the table whose parted legs suggested a fruit tree in espalier. To one side, seated along a bench, fading yellowly away from the centre of lamp light sat half a dozen candidates with cheap handbags. They looked contrite and hopeful, like extras at an audition.

  Abashed and curious I hestitated in the open door. Mrs. Henniker, who stood holding a bull’s eye lamp, turned with nonchalance and beckoned me in with: “Come in my poy, we are just finishing.” The doctor grunted as he inserted some kind of oldfashioned catheter with a bulb—or a swab. His bent head obscured for me the face of Iolanthe as she lay there like some taken sparrow-hawk. I was handed the torch while Mrs. Henniker busied herself with some documents, reciting the name and state of the subject. “Samiou Iolanthe, maid-servant in Megara.” The doctor wound up his gear and threw a towel over the exposed parts. “This one is also clean” he said and sitting up abruptly the girl gazed into my startled face. Her features sketched a mute imploring expression—almost she put her fingers to her lips. The doctor seized her thumb and stuck a syringe into the ball. She gasped and bit her lips as she saw him draw off a teaspoonful of venous blood to fill a tiny phial. Mrs. Henniker explained her preoccupations to me in a series of thorny asides. “I have to be careful they don’t come from other places, dirty places, what I mean. Specially the sailor’s brothel in Piraeus. So I take every precaution, what I mean.” I did see what she meant—for that is precisely where Iolanthe came from; nor did she, nor had she ever hidden the fact from me, for there was no promise of exclusiveness between us. On the contrary it was thanks to her that I had visited the place when the Fleet was away.

  We clattered down one summer dusk in the ill-lit and musty little metro; it was not a long run to Piraeus—a ragged and echoing township aboom with sirens and factories and the whimpering of seagulls. The place lay some way outside in a crepuscular and unsavoury quarter picked out in old bluish street-lamps obviously left over from the Paris exhibitions of ’88. It was traversed by a squeaky tram-line so sinuous that the occasional tram bucketed and swayed about as if stricken by palsy. The establishment had more than repaid my curiosity. It was built like a barrack around three sides of a wide flagged courtyard with a fountain in the centre, suggesting nothing so much as a khan at the desert’s edge. The flamboyant fountain, choked and dribbling, trickled down into a basin full of green slime and moss. On all three sides of the long low blocks stood the cubicles of the girls, somewhat like a row of bathing cabins; now of course, the place was empty, all doors lying open. One or two of the cells had been left still lit by cotton wicks afloat in saucers of olive oil—as if their tenants had just slipped out on an errand and would soon be back. But the only inhabitant of the place seemed to be the janitor—an old half-crazy crone who talked cheerfully to herself. “Soft in the head” said a gesture of Io’s.

  Outside every door stood a pair of wooden clogs, or pattens. It was extraordinarily beautiful in a story-book way—the dense shadow, the elfish yellow light, the dark velvety sky above. All the doors had the traditional Judas cut in them, but this time heart-shaped, which enabled the clients to peer in on the lighted girl before making their choice. Moreover on each of the doors was painted, in crude lettering, the name of the girl—all the names of the Greek anthology, the very perfection of anonymity! The furniture of each cubicle was identical, consisting of a clumsy iron bed, small dressing-table and chair. The only decoration was personal—tortoise-shell mirror, tinsel strips from biscuit tins, postcards of far-away ports, an ikon with a bottle of fresh olive-oil beside it. The oil performed a double service both religious and laic—for the only instrument of contraception was a slip of Kalymnos sponge dipped in it. Thus the sacred juice celebrated its historic ancestry by a double burning, igniting up man and saint alike. On the back wall, innocent as a diploma on a seminary wall, was the medical certificate of health with the date of last inspection. On this figured the girl’s real name.

  Her cell now (Antigone) was occupied by someone called Euridice Bakos according to the chart. But she too was away on some mysterious errand, though the wick burned in the alcove before a misty St. Barbara. This ikon was however Iolanthe’s—for she blew out the wick and reclaimed it. In the drawer of the rotting dressing-table with its gaudy oilcloth cover she rummaged purposefully to disinter a comb and brush of doubtful cleanliness and a few shabby articles of wear. Lastly in a corner, under the bed with its tin chamber-pot, she picked over a bundle of cheap magazines—Bouquetto, Romanzo, and the like—to trace a serial she wanted to continue; also a French grammar and an English phrase-book.

  The pattens she had not wanted to take, although they were hers; but I was loath to surrender the clumsy things and slipped one into each pocket. Later the ikon stood upon the mantelpiece in Number Seven. They lighted an expensive candle before it and turned off the harsh electric light. The clogs served later as book-ends. Then disappeared. Here they are again. The persistence of objects and the impermanence of people—he never ceased to reflect upon the matter, as he lay there listening to the distant music of the Plaka taverns and the nearer heartbeats of his watch. She slept so lightly, with such a shallow respiration, that at times she looked dead, as though her heart had stopped. Then to lie back under that shadowing ceiling and yonder into introspection once more, allowing his mind to fill up with all the detritus of thought—things far removed from fornication’s rubber pedal; and yet with the idle side of his mind he could go over her points like a mare or a hare. Reflecting I should suppose upon the unconscious alchemist he might one day become, the lion-man. But no, this is a perverse attempt to read back from memories which have faded. About sex? No. About death? Never. This young man never thought of making a will. No he thought in fields, fields which he hoped that one day Abel would arrange in valencies. Some document! It would ideally record how one day he, like everyone else, began to face the disruption of the ordinary
appetites, the changing electric fields of the impulses, so hard to place, to tame, to convert into practical usage like, say, the orgasm of electric light in a bulb, or a wheel moving under a lever.

  Koepgen used to say that human life is an anthology of states; chronological progression is an illusion. And that to be punished for what one does not remember except in dreams is our version of the tragedy the Greeks invented. The poetry is in the putty, as Caradoc used to say!

  Patterns of fading music from the south; early cocks compose their infernal paternoster. Clytemnestra lopped off the heavy limbs and carefully wiped her fingers in the thing’s hair. Delicate white fingers with their enormous vocabulary of gestures. The shadows on the cave of Plato lobbed and bounced now upon the walls of Mrs. Henniker’s dungeon. The performance was at an end. My smile of friendly complicity had reassured Iolanthe. But to my surprise I suddenly felt the pricking of a puzzling jealousy. The scientist does not like to see his algebra get up, shake itself, and walk away. I promised myself another banquet of Greek twilight soon, though it hardly allayed the absurd sensation. On the dirty wall I thought I descried moving ideograms of other love-objects living in their Platonic form—“man” “rose” “fire” “star”. All the furniture of Koepgen’s poems, which he claimed were really “acts, the outer skin of thought”. All this had passed over the head of the recumbent Charlock; now he had come back to take up the dropped stitch, so to speak, to recapitulate it all for Abel. All this vulgar data when “screened out” by the sign-manuals of the computer, or “panned out” (as if for gold), would be sifted down through the spectrum of language itself, punctuated and valued, to yield at last the vatic tissue which owes little to ordinary looms. Now I know that everything is remediable, that finally somehow somewhere memory is fully recoverable. These thoughts then bursting on the surface of the mind in little bubbles of pure consciousness would provide red meat for the Lion—Abel’s raw aliment.

  Life is an image (Koepgen) of which everything is the reflection. All objects are slowly changing into each other—dead man to dead tree, to dead rock, to vine, to marl, to tan sand, to water, cloud, air, fire … a movement, not of dissolution but of fulfilment. (To fulfil is to fill full.)

  Chemical reincarnations by the terms of which we all become spare parts of one another—excuse the biblical echo. Abel roars and roars. Our modern oracle like the ancient is this steel animal: bronze bull, steel lion. His diagnosis is as follows: “This young man should read Empedocles again. Complexity, which is sometimes necessary, is not always beautiful; simplicity is. Yes, but after the last question has been asked and answered there will always remain something enigmatic about a work of art or of nature. You cannot drain la dive bouteille however much you try.”

  The object of Abel’s operation you see was never the manufacture of a factitious literature, no; but a way of remodelling sensation in order to place one in a position of “self-seizing”. Such words then become merely a novel form of heartbeat as they do for the poet. In “real” life. Has not Koepgen always called his poems “my little prayer-siphons”? Gradually I find my blundering way back through the stale curtains….

  Caradoc was there, musing over a drink, and looking somewhat gibbous after his exertions; Fatma had produced a manicure set and was touching up his square fingernails. He indicated a siphon and said: “Drink, boy, until you detonate the idea within you.” He was I thought a trifle detonated himself already. Inconsequential ideas trailed through his mind. He stroked the golliwog and extolled her “great bubbles of plenty”. Ugh! He enjoined her to give us a tune on her zither, and then without waiting for accompaniment sang softly, wearily:

  Ah take me back once more to find

  That pure oasis of neurosis called

  The Common Mind

  To foster and to further if I can

  The universal udderhood of man.

  Obscure associations led him to speak of Sipple. “Sipple was a clown once, a professional clown. Aye! I have seen him at Olympia come on with boots like soap-dishes and a nose like a lingam. His trousers furled like a sail and the whole man was held together by a celluloid dickey which rolled up like a blind and knocked him down. His greatest moment was when the second clown set fire to his privates with a torch. Talk about Latimer’s ordeal: you should have heard the ladies screech. But his proclivities were not those of the refined. His habits were rebarbative. There was a scandal and he had to retire. Now he lives in honourable retirement in Athens—don’t ask me on what. Even the firm can’t tell me that.”

  He broke off and gave a surprised roar, for in the furthest alcove in the room a figure which had been lying completely buried in cushions suddenly sat up and gave a yellow yawn. It was a dramatic enough entry on cue to satisfy Sipple’s sense of theatre—for it was he. His pale lugubrious face was creased with sleep; his small bloodshot eyes, full of a kind of street-arab meanness, travelled round the room in dazed fashion. Only when he saw Caradoc advance upon him with outstretched arms did a vague smile wander into his countenance. “So you got here” he piped, without much relish, hitching his tubular trousers on to sagging braces, and laughed chick chick. His face was alive with little twitches, tics and grimaces—as if it did not know into what expression to settle. No, it was as if he needed to stretch out the sleep-creased skin. He submitted to some massive thumps of welcome from his friend, and yawning hugely accepted to come and sit in our corner of the room. A tame sloth I would have said: with a queer pear-shaped furry head.

  The Cham pushed and pulled him about as one might a pet. I was introduced and shook a damp octopoid hand; bizarre was Sipple, and rather disturbing. “I was telling the boy here” said Caradoc “about why you had to leave the motherland.” Sipple shot me a doubtful and cunning look, unable to decide for a moment whether or not to pick up this gambit, an obvious comedian’s “feed”. His eyes were far too close together; “made to see through keyholes” a Greek would have said. Then he decided to comply. “It was all Mrs. Sipple’s fault, sir” he whimpered with just the suspicion of a trembling underlip. “Yes” he went on slyly, moistening his lips and gazing sideways at me with a furtive and timorous air. “She didn’t hold with my exhibitions. We had to part.”

  Caradoc, who appeared to hang on his lips, struck his knee with massive sympathy. “Wives never do. To the ducking stool with them all” he cried in jovian fashion. Sipple nodded and brooded further on his wrongs.

  “It was the lodger” Sipple explained to me in a painstaking undertone. “I can only do it in exceptional circumstances, and then it all goes off in spray.” He looked woebegone, his underlip swelled with self-commiseration. Yet his ferret’s eye still watched me, trying to size me up. I could see it was a relief when I decided to find him funny, and laughed—more out of obedience to Caradoc than from my own personal inclination. However he took courage and launched himself into his act—a recital obviously much-rehearsed and canonised by repetition. Caradoc added rhetorical flourishes of his own, obviously keenly appreciative of his friend’s gifts. “You were right” he cried. “Right to leave her, Sippy, with dignity intact. Everything you tell me about her fills me with dismay. God’s ruins! Covered in clumps of toc. Ah God to see her haunches stir across the moon at Grantchester. No, you were right, dead right. A woman who refuses to tie up a Sipple and thrash him with leg-irons is not worth the name.”

  Sipple gave the stonehenge of a smile exposing huge discoloured teeth with some extensive gaps. “It wouldn’t fadge, Carry” he admitted. “But here in Athens you can do as you would be done by, as the scripture has it.” I suppose you could call it extra-suspensory perception.

  “Tell me again” said the Cham eager for further felicities of this kind, and the little pear droned on. “It came over me very gradual” said Sipple, raising his arms to pat the air. “Very gradual indeed it did. At first I was normal as any curate, ask my mates. Give me an inch and I took a mile. And I was never one for the boys, Carry, not then I wasn’t. But suddenly the theatrical
side in me came to the fore. I was like a late-blooming flahr, Carry, a retarded flowering. Perhaps it was being a clown that did it, the magic of the footlights, I dunno.”