Once Ptah-nem-hotep had left, however, we were on guard against the servants for we could feel their ears come alive. Hathfertiti became conspicuously silent, and Menenhetet and Nef-khep-aukhem had a conversation about the best kind of throwing-stick to take out in the swamps for ducks. But their talk lapsed. I could hear my mother whisper to my father.
“Is He never like this on other nights?”
My father looked up from the last of his conversation with Menenhetet and shook his head.
Now, a dark and bearded Syrian in a heavy woolen ill-smelling garment was allowed to enter and he bowed profoundly before each of us, and poured out a liquid from a heavy vat barrel he carried in his arms, his own body reeking of the beer he served. So soon as he had filled our mugs, he was gone, but I could see the servants found the smell of his wet beer, old body-oil, sweat and damp wool altogether ferocious. The beer, however, to my parents’ surprise, was exceptionally good, or, at least, so they declared, since they would not let me drink any. Then Ptah-nem-hotep returned, and related to us, as if there had been nothing exceptional in His departure, a charming story about the brewer.
“One night, I told Overseer of the Royal Kitchen to bring Me the best beer in Memphi, and next day he groveled on the floor at what he had to confess, but it seems our best brewer in all of this city is a filthy fellow named Ravah, the same one you saw, and he declared he would not send his beer to Twin-Gates unless he could accompany it. ‘Didn’t you flog the fool?’ I asked. ‘I did,’ Overseer told me, ‘and Ravah poured his beer on the ground. I could beat him half to death, he said, but there would be no beer unless he could serve the Pharaoh himself.’ Well, it made Me curious. I told Overseer to bring the fool. Had to keep him at a distance because of his stench, but what a beer! Ravah claims it is his vat that makes it special, and I must say the drink gets better all the time. He says that since I have been sharing his beer, the cracks in his vat have more power than ever to flavor well. “Joy-Bringer’ he calls his filthy stuff, but it is good.”
“He speaks of You, Divine Two-House, as sharing his beer?” asked my mother.
“Yes. Ravah says the power of the brew is promiscuous, and must be shared by all. That is the center of its strength. Do you know, I believe him? I sip this stuff and feel close to My people. I never feel that while sipping Unguent of the Heart”—he pointed to one amphora of wine—“or”—pointing to another—“Cellared in this Preserve. No,” said Ptah-nem-hotep sadly, “then I feel close only to the priests.”
“I do not know how you can speak that way,” my mother said to Him in an intimate voice, as if at last, comfortable with her new manners on the Night of the Pig, she could scold Him just so naturally as if they had been married for ten years or more. “You are renowned for the quality of Your wine.” Here she smiled a little drunkenly, as if she knew she was going to reveal her pet name for my father—“Why our good friend, Nef, has eyes as dull as muddy water when he speaks to me. But when he speaks of You”—she paused as if taking a dare with herself—“his eyes look like diamonds.”
She gave a hiccup without covering her mouth, an act she would never have allowed on other nights, and said, “You may adore the snail, but I adore the Night of the Pig. You see, I think there is pig enough in each of us to make one feast a year. Of course,” she smiled deliciously, “on this night we have a fear that restrains us. We fear we are nothing but pigs, whereas You are a God as well, Great-are-Your-Two-Houses-of-the-Pig!”
I felt an immense commotion in my ears, yet not a sound was uttered. The attention of the servants was equal to the silence of fish after one of their number has been pulled from the sea. My father’s mouth did not close: so I had the first look of my life at the full size of his tongue—he had an immense tongue! Even Menenhetet stirred in disbelief. “You may not speak that way,” he said sharply to Hathfertiti.
Ptah-nem-hotep, however, saluted her with the last of His beer. “I have been called Two-Lions, Two-Trees, and once I was called Two-Divine-Hippopotami. I have been termed Son of Horus and Son of Set, as well as Prince of Isis and Osiris, I have even been named as heir to Thoth and Anubis, but, never, dear company, has anyone had the wit to think of My Double-House as the Pig-Sty of the North and the Pig-Sty of the South. I must only ask: where is the pig? You can bring it to us,” He said over His shoulder to the servants, and gave back my mother something of the same delicious smile she had offered to Him. Yet each of His cheeks had a touch of red no larger than the pinch of a cruel finger, a red just so bright as blood in a boil beneath the skin, and anger rocked through the air. I felt as if the space between them had a red hue different from the air between others. The power of my mother and Menenhetet to glare at each other out of the very depths of their blood was equaled now as my mother stared into the face of the Pharaoh. While the heat of the great candles in the room became greater, the flame rose and my mother and Ptah-nem-hotep sat motionless.
Then she looked away. “Not even on the Night of the Pig may a woman gaze into the eyes of the Good God.”
“Look into them,” cried Ptah-nem-hotep. “On this night, the God is gone.”
To me, He seemed at this instant more like a God than He had appeared all day. When my mother did not reply, He made a harsh and barking sound of triumph. “This is a marvelous night,” He said, and took up His leopard’s tail to hold the tip before His nose. “The tail of the leopard,” He added, “was worn first by My great ancestor, Khufu, who taught the people of Egypt how to raise the weight of great stone. To the Pyramids!” and He pounded His tail on the table, as if pulling into Himself the strength of the stones. I thought I had never seen Him look so alive.
Nor so attractive to my mother. I knew jealousy again. Like a lover climbing a wall, so did my thoughts climb my mother’s dark hair, my jealousy taking me through all of her reluctance to let me in—but then she could hardly keep me out. She was in more of a hurry to protect herself from the desire of the Pharaoh to enter.
She had cause not to let Him know what she thought. Intimate as I expected to be, I was not prepared to feel so quickly the carnal breath of her true mind, and knew in an instant why she had spoken—incredible still was the ring of those sounds in my memory: Two-Houses-of-the-Pig!—but then the words, high on the wave of the last swallow of Joy-Bringer, had only broken out of a sudden disturbance between her legs. My mind being in her mind, my body was in her body, and my legs among hers—so did I know that she had one thumping exchange of meat with Ravah in the passing of her thoughts. That way, I learned again what I had known before: not only servants like Eyaseyab, but ladies like my mother could take Sweet Finger in their mouth, except that Ravah did not have a Sweet Finger, for by way of my mother I saw a warty club, heavy-veined as a forearm, and as red in color as the spots on Ptah-nem-hotep’s cheeks. She was still thinking of her mouth on Ravah, her nostrils breathing in his pubic hair, her head overtaken by old sweat, old beer and Syrian wool while through her thoughts went Ptah-nem-hotep’s words on cabbage—“sluttish!”—and she shivered in recollection, and saw the genitals of other men as well, Bone-Smasher for the first, even as she had glimpsed his groin through the parting of his breechcloth on the boat that morning, and I knew Ravah was a handle to the jug, no more, of her great recollection of Fekh-futi and how as a child, tickled at every recollection that his name was Shit-Collector, she used to sit on his lap and try to catch a whiff of the old trade—gardens being the root and breath of childhood pleasures. She had a moment when she passed through an orgy of embraces, taken by every hole in her body, a roar of sensations bloody as meat, and so she had cried the words aloud (furious at Ptah-nem-hotep for allowing the beer of Ravah to be laid on her tongue) had then, yes, indeed, said, or so I heard it now: “Great Double Pig-Sty.”
Yes, I had much to learn about my mother. If I could feel the Pharaoh’s pleasure that Hathfertiti had cast down her eyes after trying to stare into His, I also knew His anger at what she had said, and so must she, for now, as if His only wi
sh were for the pleasures of quiet conversation to absorb His new pleasures and calm His anger, so she said in her very best voice, “Were You only jesting when You spoke of wine as inferior to beer?”
“On, not inferior,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “but priestly. I’m too much of a priest Myself, you see.”
“Not at all,” said my mother.
“Your kindness is voluptuous,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. He reached forward and touched the tip of His middle finger to the tip of her bare breast. “Here comes the entertainment,” He said cheerfully.
NINE
A Beautiful girl, nude but for a girdle around her hips, entered with a three-stringed lyre. Taking no pause, she began to play a love song.
“How beautiful is my prince
“How beautiful is his destiny.”
Ptah-nem-hotep gave her no attention, other than to tap the table in time to the music. An Ethiopian with a bony body, and a flute longer than I was tall, came in behind the girl and began to play as well. While the girl sang, three other girls started to dance. Like the lute player, they were naked but for the girdle that concealed the hair at the head of their thighs. I could not keep from looking at their navels and the beauty of their exposed breasts. How bright were their black eyes in the brilliant reflection of the great candles. The lute-player sang:
“Place sweet oils and good odors in my head
“Lay flowers on my limbs
“Kiss the body of your sister
“For she lives in your heart
“Let the walls fall down.”
“Let the walls fall down,” sang Hathfertiti in refrain, and patted the buttock of the servant nearest her, even as the girl was laying flower petals around my mother’s plate. “You are darling,” said my mother to her, and the girl, reaching into a basket she carried at her hip, passed over to my mother a ball of wax with a delightful smell—roses and lotuses were in its perfume.
I began to understand that we were all to be covered with wreaths of lotus flowers, and that petals of roses would surround our new plates of alabaster, large and clear and milky-white, and I also understood that all of this, the girls, the flowers, the songs, and the intimacies of the servants—“You are so beautiful,” whispered the serving girl to my mother even as her hip was being caressed, while my serving girl whispered to me, “You are not old enough to know where I could kiss you!”—yes, these agreeable conversations (which I had heard at more than one feast) were not unusual, but tonight they offered a fine fever at just the moment when the pig was brought out to us by two black eunuchs, nude but for their cloths. Yet, tonight, these breechclouts had been studded with precious stones that could come only from the Pharaoh’s linen. The male servants carried the body on a great black serving dish and set it in the center of our table in the midst of a quick movement by the dancing girls that had much beating of feet, much undulating of their bellies, and a scintillating play of notes from the three-string lyre, the sounds coming in all the quick multitude of some altercation between the birds in the Pharaoh’s garden. I was now aware of animals crying out all over the place, a dog first.
Here was the pig. I was not ready for the sight. He looked alive and Fierce and like a man. I had seen wild boars in their cage, and they were ugly and full of spiky hair matted with filth and litter. Their snouts made me think of the stumps of thieves’ arms after the hands had been cut off or would have, if not for the two holes of the nostrils, as dull and stubborn as any two holes you could poke in the mud with your fingers. This pig, however, had had his hair shaved off, no, he was peeled, I saw, as I looked at him, and his under-skin, now nicely cooked, was pink. His two fangs were covered with gold leaf, his paws had been manicured, then fixed with silver leaf, his nose had been scraped, and painted pink, the buds of white flowers were in his nostrils, a pomegranate in his mouth, and the servants, revolving the platter to show all sides of this decorated beast to all of us, I was given a view of the spiral of his tail, yet before I could demonstrate my cleverness by commenting that the spiral reminded me of the snail, I was treated to another surprise: a small roll of papyrus had been inserted into the pig’s well-scrubbed anus.
“It is for you to pluck it forth,” said Ptah-nem-hotep to Hathfertiti. With a sweet wash of giggles from the servants, full of the delight that they were witnessing the rarest of sights, Hathfertiti gave a kiss to her left hand, and with a flick of her fingertips plucked the papyrus from its place.
“What does it say?” asked Ptah-nem-hotep.
“I promise to read it before the meal is done,” Hathfertiti answered with a droll look, as though to give the papyrus time to breathe.
“No, read it now,” said our Pharaoh.
So she broke its seal of perfumed wax, unrolled it, gasped with delight as a ruby scarab fell into her plate—then touched it for luck to the tip of her nipple before she set it down. She read to all of us: “Just a slave on the Night of the Pig, but may you seek My freedom,” to which my father and Menenhetet laughed. Ptah-nem-hotep and Hathfertiti did not. They stared back and forth with a tenderness so agreeable I wished to sit between them. It was as if there could be no end to the fascinating conversations they might have. All the while, my father looked on with pride, a happy, even a boyish look on his face as if by these attentions given to his wife, he was receiving an honor he had not wholly earned, while my great-grandfather kept a firm smile on his face until the corners of his mouth looked like two short fenceposts, and contented himself by rotating the great round black plate on which the pig rested, as though in this animal there were other messages to read.
That also gave me an opportunity to study our roasted monster, who looked like a pink hippopotamus just born, or some swollen dwarf, or now, turned so his head was toward me, looked human for certain, a priest, I thought to myself. I also began to giggle, for although dead, the pig-eye near me was open and almost transparent. It was like looking into a murky hall of marble, then worse—somewhere in the hall of marble, a beast stirred. Maybe it was the light of the candles reflecting from those pale dead green eyes, maybe the frozen straining gusto with which the jaws bit on the pomegranate, or even the voracious thrust of the nose, as if that painted snout were capable of breathing in not only the worst but the most powerful of smells—at any rate something in the immense calm and greed of this dead pig made me think of the High Priest Khem-Usha. I felt most peculiar, not a doubt.
“Cut the creature, and serve us,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.
I could hardly swallow at first. My throat was numb with awe. The others, however, would show many expressions. My father, after the first bite, had an absurd glint in his eye as if he were trapped between pleasure and exposure—I had seen that look on his face once when I came into his room with my mother, for at that moment, he had his hands on a servant, one to the front, one to the rear, and both below her navel. In turn, my mother now showed a troubled expression as if fearful of dire consequences in all the comforts she tasted. Then I was so bold as to look at my Pharaoh, and He betrayed something like disappointment as if expecting a good deal more from the meat on His tongue. The music was playing loudly, but He silenced it. The dancers left, as did the lyre player, and the black slave with the long flute.
My great-grandfather had another expression altogether. He chewed the food slowly in his strong teeth, strong even for a man of sixty—I did not dare to think of one hundred and eighty!—and, as always, he took the measure of what he did, eating with strong regular motions of his jaws that produced the same soothing effect upon me as the rocking of my cradle and thereby brought back the kindness that lives in sleep side by side with the most terrible dreams. So I felt lulled by the way he ate as if no force could shift the center of his heart. That encouraged me to take a bite of my own food, but I almost gagged. For the meat was fat and soft and surprisingly intimate in its taste—something like the confidence of Eyaseyab’s tongue was in my mouth. The pig knew me better than I knew the pig!
I wanted more at once, more
of this low and fatty meat, and recollected by way of a little shiver how I had felt once when tasting an atrocious medicine, its ingredients all secret—the worst taste and smell of anything I had ever known, and it made me vomit endlessly. I had nonetheless known in the peace that followed a smell that lived in my nostrils, soft and warm and sly, even a little dirty, but it was like the taste of the pig in my mouth now, and so I felt as if I were in communion with the Gods of wet corn, spoiled barley, moldering weeds, even the odor of roses when they are dead was near to me as I ate the pig and so I wondered if the pig was an animal not as alive as other animals or at least lived closer to death, or to say what I really thought, was stuck in its shit.
“Chew more slowly,” said my mother.
Now, with the redolence of my nose, I watched and admired the delicacy with which the Pharaoh ate, and took instruction from His movements on how to use my hands. His fingers flew over the food like birds’ tongues, and when He chose to pick up a piece of meat before Him, it was with one light precise pointing of His fingers. “I think,” He said, “we have had enough of this creature.” One of the servants made a sign. “Yes,” Ptah-nem-hotep declared, “it has the most contrary taste, Horus found the pig an abomination, and Set, of course, adored it. I find Myself ripped in two by such disagreement among our Lords.”
Now, black servants came in to remove our alabaster plates and what was left of the pig; I became intrigued with the deft fingers of these servants and the humor of their movements. It was then I recollected how furious our Syrian servants had become when my father acquired six black slaves trained for use at the table. It meant—even then I understood the importance—that my mother and father were now at a level of splendor equal to the Pharaoh’s near family, a few high Officials, and two or three of our outstanding Generals. We could afford Syrians to bring the food, and blacks to take it away.