The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam Read online

  LAWRENCE DURRELL

  The Revolt of Aphrodite

  Contents

  Title Page

  TUNC

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  NUNQUAM

  Dedication

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  POSTFACE

  About the Author

  Copyright

  TUNC

  For Claude-Marie Vincendon

  deux fois deux quatre, c’est un mur

  Dostoievsky. Voix Souterraine

  I

  Of the three men at the table, all dressed in black business suits, two must have been stone drunk. Not Nash, the reproachful, of course not. But Vibart the publisher (of late all too frequently): and then Your Humble, Charlock, the thinking weed: on the run again. Felix Charlock, at your service. Your humble, Ma’am.

  A pheasant stuffed with nominal chestnuts, a fatty wine disbursed among fake barrels in a London cellar—Poggio’s, where people go to watch each other watch each other. I had been trying to explain the workings of Abel—no, you cannot have a computer with balls: but the illusion of a proximate intuition is startling. Like a buggerish astrology only more real, more concrete; better than crystal ball or divining rod. “Here we have lying about us in our infancy” (they clear their throats loudly) “a whole culture tied to a stake, whipped blind, torn apart by mastiffs. Grrr! And here we are, three men in black overcoats, ravens of ill-omen in an oak-tree.” I gave a couple of tremendous growls. Heads turned towards us in meek but startled fashion. “You are still drunk Felix” (This is Nash). “No, but people as destinies are by now almost mathematically predictable. Ask Abel.”

  “Almost”

  “Almost”

  “You interest me strangely” said Vibart dozing off for a second. Emboldened Charlock continued: “I call it pogonometry. It is deduction based on the pogon (πóyov) a word which does not exist. It is the smallest conceivable unit of meaning in speech; a million pogons make up the millionth part of a phoneme. Give Abel a sigh or the birthcry of a baby and he can tell you everything.”

  Vibart dropped his fork on the floor, I my napkin. Leaning down simultaneously we banged our heads smartly together. (Reality is what is most conspicuous by its absence.) But it hurt, we were dazed. “I could explain what is wrong with you” said Nash all pious, all sententious “but in psychology an explanation does not constitute a cure.”

  * * * * *

  I was brought up by women—two old aunts in lax unmanning Eastbourne. My parents I hardly remember. They hid themselves in foreign continents behind lovely coloured stamps. Most holidays I spent silently in hotels (when the aunts went to Baden). I brought introspection to a fine art. A cid I fell into milk; a ribonuclear cid. Where was she? How would she look if she came? Abel could have told me, but he wasn’t born then. Eheu!

  “And what” says Nash, all perk and arrogance “could Abel tell me, eh?”

  “A lot, Nash, quite a lot. I had you in frame not a fortnight ago. I’ve recorded you frequently on the telephone. Something about a woman who lay on your horsehair couch, eyes shut, exciting you so much by a recital of her sins that you found you were masturbating. A real psi experience. Like religious confessors knee deep in sperm leaning forward in the confessional so as not to miss the smallest excuse for absolution. I didn’t bother to find out her name. But Abel knows. Now where is your Hippocratic oath? You let her smash up the transference because she wanted to do it with you there and then. Daddy! I have your squeaks and gasps; afterwards to do you justice you swore and shed tears and walked up and down.”

  Nash lets off a screech like a parrot; he is on his feet, scarlet, his mouth fallen open on its hinges. “Lies” he shouts.

  “Very well, lies; but Abel cannot lie. You must try and imagine it this way—as Abel sees it, with that infallible inner photoelectric eye of his. He X-rays time itself, photographing a personality upon the gelatine surface of flux. Look, I press a button, and your name and voice rise together like toast in a toast-rack. The fascia blaze blue, topaz, green, white. I spin the needles and they pass through the fixed points of a sort of curriculum vitae. The basic three points are birth-love-death.”

  Vibart gives a burst of hysterical laughter; tears crowd his eyes. We are going to be asked to leave at any moment now.

  “Now if you take a simple geometrical progression, a scale, you can elaborate your graph until the needle passes through an infinity of points: whatever you choose to set up—say, jobs, skills, size, pigmentation, I.Q., temperament repressions, beliefs…. You see the game? No, there’s nothing wrong with cogito or with sum; it’s poor bloody ergo that’s been such a curse. The serial world of Tunc whose God is Mobego. But come, we mustn’t be cry-babies, mustn’t pout.”

  I suddenly felt the need to vomit. Leaning my cold head against the colder glass wall of the urinal I continued. “As for me, scientifically speaking the full terror of death has not informed my loving. Ah Nash, my boy. I was a gland short.” Ah Benedicta, I might have added under my breath. He holds my head while I am sick: but he is still trembling with rage at this astonishing exposure of his professional shortcomings.

  I am forced to laugh. This carefully prepared hoax, I mean, about Abel. Actually I got the facts from the girl herself. At last my stomach comes to rest again. “The firm has given and the firm has taken away, blessed be the name of the firm” I intoned.

  “Listen” says Nash urgently. “For godsake don’t develop a delusional system like so many have. I implore you.”

  “Pish! Abel has coordinated all the psi-factors. A computer which can see round corners, think of it! On the prospectus it says distinctly ‘All delusional systems resolved’; now what is our civilisation but a … ribonucleic hangover, eh? Why, Abel could even give you a valency notion for literature. Jerk, jerk, jerk, you in your swivel chair, she on her couch.”

  “I’ve told you it’s a lie” he shouts.

  “Very well.”

  Myself I much needed to be loved—and look what happens. At full moon in Polis, when cats conjugate the verb “to be”, I held the thousandth and second night in incompetent arms watching the silver climb the cold thermometers of the minarets. Ach! I yark all this gibberish up for little dactyl my famulus; faithfully the little machine compiles it. To what end? I want the firm to have it, I want Julian to have to wade through it. When I am dead, of course, not before.

  Iolanthe, in this very room, once removed the spectacles from my nose—like one lifts the lid from a jar of olives—in order to kiss me. Years later she starts to have a shadowy meaning for me, years later. While I had her, possession of her, I was quite unaware that she loved me. I had eyes for nobody but Benedicta. With her things were different, floating between rauwolfia-induced calms. Something had jumbled up her inner economy, she had never had a period: would the brain poisoning have started from this? I don’t know. But I started things off. “Now” she says “I am bleeding at last, profusely bleeding: thanks to you, my darling Felix, thanks to you. Now I know I shall have a child.” Well, and what came of all that? Answer me that, gentlemen of the jury. Rolling back to the alcove table to join Vibart my mind oscillates between the two women once more. Iolanthe talking of her film husband: “Always accusing me of not loving him, of not trying; but just when you’re trying your best to come off an irrational thought cross
es your mind and freezes you: if I forgot to turn off the stove those pigeons will be cinders.”

  Nash trots along beside me holding my sleeve. “I have an awful feeling you are going to try and break away, make a run for it. Tell me Felix? For goodness sake don’t. The firm would always find you, you know.” I gave him an owlish glance. “I have been granted leave by the firm” said firmly. “Up to two years’ sick leave.”

  “Ah well. That’s better.” Nash was vastly relieved.

  “I am going to the South Seas on legitimate leave.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because it’s like everywhere else nowadays. Why not?”

  Is that why I am in Athens? Yes, just to make things a little difficult for them. Vindictive Felix. Partly that, but also partly because I had a sudden desire to come back to the point from which all the lines sprang out—the point of convergence being little Number Seven in this flyblown hotel. One candle and by God, the little wooden pattens which recently turned up in a suitcase full of junk—the very pattens of Iolanthe. The survival value of objects never ceases to puzzle and enthral me. People, yes, they turn up again and again, but for a limited time. But things can go on for centuries, quietly changing their owners when they tire of them: or quietly changing their owners tout court. I am terribly tired. Most of the pre-recorded and digested stuff I have fed into Abel—for the computer is simply a huge lending library of the mind—most of it has passed through these little dactyls, as I call them. Do you think it would be possible to resume a whole life in terms of predestination? I have imagined my own so thoroughly that you can switch it on like an obituary. The two women, one dark and one graven fair; two brothers, one darkness one light. Then the rest of the playing cards, catalogues of events, humble contingencies. A sable history! Well I’ve brought it up to this point. Abel must be carrying it on. Just pull the lever on the sign manual and traverse across the fascia marked “contingent data”. Every sensible man should make a will…. But only after a long, wasteful and harmful detour across the parching watersheds of celebrity, financial success. I, Felix Charlock, being sound in mind and body ha ha do hereby etc etc. Not that I have anything much to leave; the firm has got its hands upon everything except for a few small private treasures like the dactyls here, my latest invention. I found a way to get the prototypes built without them finding out. Hardly larger than a lady’s dressing case, she is a masterpiece of compression, as light as a feather. What is it?

  Come closer, I will tell you. The dactyl was designed for those who talk endlessly to themselves, for Everyman that is. Also for a lazy man, such a one as myself who has an abhorrence for ink and paper. You speak and she records: more than that, she transcribes. The low feminine voice (the frequency dictated my choice) encodes the words and a tiny phonetic alphabet, no larger than a lama’s prayer wheel, begins to purr. From the snout marked A the tip of the foolscap protrudes, and goes on slowly extending until with a sniff the whole page is evacuated, faultlessly typed. How is that done? Ah, that is what any firm would like to know. Nor is there any limit to the amount of dactyl’s work, save lack of paper or a failing torch battery. But it is easy to see why the toy is so valuable—it could put all the stenographers in the world out of business in a matter of weeks. Moreover the machine will sensitise to an individual voice to such a degree that she accepts a code-tone instead of a switch. This is arbitrary, of course. But in my case “Konx” will set her off, while “Om” will cut her out. She has made a joke of the laborious anachronism of typing. Yet I did not dare to try and take out a patent in my name, for the firm keeps a watchful eye on the Patents Office. They are at once informed when something new is in the wind … Julian anyway.

  The reasons I have for wanting to get away are various and complex; the more superficial being self-evident, but the more profoundly buried inexpressibly difficult to expose, despite my relative experience with words. After all, the books are decently written, even though they deal with mechanics, electronics and that sort of thing. But if I were to apply a little archaeology to my case I would come upon the buried cultures of deeper predispositions I suppose which determined what I was to become? On the one hand, purely superficially, I could date my existence from the moment when, with a ball of thin twine and two empty cigarette tins, I managed to make an imitation of the telephone. Ting a ling! Nothing very strange about that, you will say; the old Bell system was clear as daylight even to a schoolboy. But then let me take a plunge in another direction. I gradually came to equate invention with creation—perhaps too presumptuously? Yet the symptoms are much the same, are they not? Anxiety, fever, migraine, anorexia nervosa, cyclothymia, (The Mother!)… yes, all the happy heralds of the epileptic fit. An intense strain, sense of dispersal. Then, quite suddenly the new idea breaking free from the tangle of dreams and fevers—Bang! That’s how it is with me. The pain was in allowing the damned thing to ferment, to form in the imagination. In my youth I had not learned to recognise the signs. When my teeth began to chatter I suspected an attack of malaria. I had not learned to luxuriate in the convenience of a nervous breakdown. What rubbish!

  Well, I have been off the map for some days now, alone in Athens with my famulus, doing a little occupational therapy every day in the form of these autobiographical notes! I have been delayed in my quest for Koepgen; the one man who could tell me where he is is out of Athens and nobody knows for how long. Om.

  * * * * *

  I went to see Nash in a purely formal way: I have always got on with him. He can rise to a joke on occasions, plonk! Like all analysts he is highly neurotic, leashing his hysteria with little grins and yawns and airs of omniscience. Take off glasses, cough, tap thumb, adjust paper flower in button-hole. I make him, I think, feel a little uncomfortable; he wonders no doubt how much I know about everything, for is not Benedicta his patient? We sparred gracefully in the fashion of well-educated Englishmen overcompensating. He was not surprised to hear I was going away for a rest. I did not mention the firm but I could see the thought flicker across his mind. Did the firm know where? Yes, the firm knew where—I took care to tell all my friends where: Tahiti. Already no doubt a message had flashed out to our agent there. I would find a large pink blotchy man in a Panama hat waiting shyly on the dock for me. Quietly, tactfully, unobtrusively my arrival would be recorded, reported upon. “I suppose you are just tired” he said. “Yet I see no cause for it. You’ve done nothing for months now, locked up down in Wiltshire. You are a lucky man Charlock. Except for Benedicta’s illness. You have everything.” I watched him quizzically and he had the grace to blush. Then he burst out laughing with a false heartiness. We understood each other only too well, Nash and I. Wait till I tell him about Abel, just wait.

  “Shall we talk syllogistically, Nash, or just talk? Causality is an attempt to mesmerise the world into some sort of significance. We cannot bear its indifference.” Tears came into his eyes, comico-pathetic tears, left over from laughter turned sour. “I know you are sick of your job, and just about as ill as I am, if I am ill.” He blew out a windy lip and gave me a cunning sidelong glance. “You sound as if you have been playing with R.N.A. It’s dangerous, Charlock. You will miss a step and go sprawling among the archetypal symbols. We’ll have to reserve you a room in Paulhaus.” That was the firm’s private mental asylum. “It is true” I said “that I wake up with tears pouring down my face, sometimes of laughter, sometimes of plain tears.”

  “There, you see?” he said triumphantly. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. “You had better take some action smartly, go on a rest cure, write another scientific book.”

  “I am off to Tahiti. Gauguin was here.”

  “Good.”

  “Inventors are a happy laughing breed.” I stifled a sob and yawned instead. “Nash, is your laughter a cry for help?”

  “Everyone’s is. When do you go?”

  “Tonight. Let me give you lunch.”

  “Very well.”

  “The glands all down one side are swollen—t
he sense of humour is grossly inflamed. Let us go to Poggio’s.”

  He was pouring out Chianti when Vibart put in an appearance—my publisher, purple with good living: a kind of tentative affability about him whenever he spoke about the book he wanted me to write for him. “The age of autobiography.” He solicited Nash’s good offices in the matter. He knew too that over all these years I had been dribbling into recorders of one sort or another. A friend of twenty years’ standing I first encountered here, yes, in Athens: dear old slowcoach of a horse-tramway buried in some minor proconsular role with his cabinets of birds’ eggs. And here was Vibart persuading poor Felix to quit quasars and debouch into memoirs. I drank deeply of the wine and smiled upon my two friends in clownish gag. What was to be done with them?

  “Please Charlock” he was fearfully drunk.

  “Let those who have a good bedside manner with a work of art throw the first stone.”

  “Nash, can’t you convince him?”

  “Flippancy is a form of alienation” said Nash rather to my surprise; nevertheless I could not resist making dear Vibart sing once more “The Publisher’s Boating Song”. We were always asked to leave when he did this. I beat time with my fork.

  Lord, you may cancel all my gifts,

  I feel they can be spared

  So long as one thing still remains,

  My pompe à merde

  My books will stand the test of slime

  My fame be unimpaired

  So long as you will leave me, Lord,

  My pompe à merde.

  To my surprise, despite angry glances, we survive this outburst. Vibart has just been acclaimed Publisher of the Year by the Arts Guild; he owes his celebrity to an idea of breathtaking simplicity. Who else would have thought of getting Bradshaw translated into French? The effect on the French novel has been instantaneous. As one man they have rallied to this neglected English genius. Vibart bangs the table and says in a sort of ecstasy: “It’s wonderful! They have reduced events to incidents. It’s truthful to your bloody science, Felix. Non-deterministic. In Nash’s terms it would be pure catatonia. Hurrah. We don’t want to get well. No more novels of the castration complex. Do you like the idea of the God of Abraham advancing on you with his golden sickle to cut off your little—your all too little bit of mistletoe?” He points a ghastly finger at Nash, who recoils with a shudder. “Nevermore” continues my friend thickly. “No more goulash-prone Hungarian writers for me, no more vieux jew, I spit on all your frightened freckled little minds. I’m rich! Hurrah. Bookstalls display me which heretofore were loaded with nothing but blood-coooling sex-trash. No more about sex, it’s too boring. Everyone’s got one. Nastiness is a real stimulant though—but poor honest sex, like dying, should be a private matter.”