The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam Read online

  His voice failed and faltered; I noticed the huge circles under his eyes. His wife committed suicide last month; it must do something to a man’s pride. One says one is not to blame and one isn’t. Still. Quickly change the subject.

  We could see that he was rippling with anxiety, like wet washing on the line. Said Nash unkindly, “He needs a rest, does Felix, O yes.”

  Yes, this was true.

  Yes, this was true.

  I remember Koepgen talking of what he called the direct vision, the Autopsia. In a poem called “The relevance of thunder”. In the Russian lingo. “Futility may well be axiomatic: but to surprise oneself in the act of dying might be one way to come thoroughly awake, no?” I let out another savage growl. The waiters jumped. Ah! They are converging on us at last.

  Later, leaning out of the taxi window I say in a deep impressive voice. “I have left you a message written on the wall of the Gents at Claridges. Please go there and read it.” My two friends exchange a glance. Some hours earlier, a bag-fox drunk on aniseed, I had written in my careful cursive, “I think the control of human memory is essential for any kind of future advance of the species. The refining of false time is the issue.” I did not leave any instructions about how to deal with the piggybank. It was enough to go on with for people like Nash. I waved them goodbye in a fever of health.

  In the southbound train I read (aloud) the Market Report in The Times, intoning it like a psalm, my breast filled with patriotism for Merlins.

  MILAN

  The bourse opened quiet yesterday but increased buying interest spread to a number of sectors including quicksilvers, properties, textiles, and insurances, giving way to a generally firmer trend. Towards the close there was brisk buying of leaders with Viscosa and Merlin prominent.

  AMSTERDAM

  Philips, Unilever and Royal Dutch opened lower but later met some demand on some local and Swiss demand.

  BRUSSELS

  The forward market was quiet and prices showed little change.

  FRANKFURT

  Reversed the recent weaker trend in initial dealings and showed a majority of gains later: the close was friendly with gains generally up to seven points.

  PARIS

  Sentiment improved slightly under the lead of metallurgical shares, notably Merlin, which were firm.

  SYDNEY

  Quiet but easier.

  TOKYO

  Prices moved higher. All major industrial groups, along with rails, participated in the upturn. Market quarters looking for a significant summer rally found much to bolster their hopes. Among companies reporting improved net income were: Bethlehem Steel, Phelps Dodge, Standard Oil, Merlin Group.

  On the blackboard in the senior boardroom of Merlin House I had left them some cryptic memoranda for their maturer deliberations like

  motor cars made from compressed paper

  paper made from compressed motor cars

  flesh made from compressed ideals

  ideas made from compressed impulses.

  They will take it all seriously. So it is. So it is. Really it is.

  Watching the trees go by and the poles leap and fall, leap and fall, I reflected on Merlin and on the F. of F. The Fund of Funds, the Holy Grail of all we stood for. Nash had said so often recently: “I hope you are not thinking about trying to escape from the firm, Charlock. It wouldn’t work, you know?” Why? Because I had married into it? Vagina Vinctrix! At what point does a man decide that life must be lived unhesitatingly? Presumably after exhausting every other field—in my case the scientific modes: science, its tail comes off in your hand like a scared lizard. (“The response to shadow in the common flat-worm is still a puzzle to biologists. Then again, in the laboratory, inside a sealed test-tube the gravitational pull of the tides still obtains, together with the appropriate responses.”)

  Yes, he was right, I was going to try and free myself. “Start” Koepgen used to say wryly, sharply, lifting his glass, little drops of ouzo spilling on to the cheap exercise book which houses the loose nerve ends of poems which later, at dead of night, he would articulate. “Tap Tap, the chick raps on the outer shell in order to free itself—literature! Memory and identity. Om.”

  * * * * *

  But before leaving I did what I have so frequently done in the past—paid a visit to Victoria Station, to stand for a while under the clock. A sentimental indulgence this—for the only human fact that I know about my parents was that they met here for the first time. Each had been waiting for someone quite different. The clock decided my fate. It is the axis, so to speak, of my own beginning. (The first clocks and watches were made in the shape of an egg.) Seriously, I have often done this, to spend a moment or two of quiet reflection here: an attempt perhaps to reidentify them among the flux and reflux of pallid faces which seethes eternally about this mnemotopic spot. Here one can eat a dampish Wimpy and excogitate on the nature of birth. Well, nothing much comes of this thought, these moments of despairing enquiry. The crowd is still here, but I cannot identify their lugubrious Victorian faces. Yet they belonged I suppose to this amorphous pale collection, essence of the floating face and vote, epitome of the “90 per cent don’t know” in every poll. I had the notion once of inventing something to catch them up, a machine which solidified echoes retrospectively. After all one can still see the light from technically dead stars…. But this was too ambitious.

  Perhaps (here comes Nash) I might even trace my obsession with the construction of memory-tools to this incoherent desire to make contact? Of course now they are a commonplace; but when I began to make them the first recording-tools were as much a novelty, as the gramophone appears to have been for primitive African tribes in the ’eighties. So Hippolyta found them, my clumsy old black boxes with their primitive wires and magnets. The development of memory! It led me into strange domains like stenography, for example. It absorbed me utterly and led me to do weird things like learning the whole of Paradise Lost by heart. In the great summer sweats of this broken-down capital I used to sit at these tasks all night, only pausing to play my fiddle softly for a while, or make elaborate notes in those yellow exercise books. Memory in birds, in mammals, in violinists. Memory and the instincts, so-called. Well, but this leads nowhere I now think; I equipped myself somewhat before my time as a sound engineer. Savoy Hill and later the BBC paid me small sums to supply library stock—Balkan folk-songs for example; a Scots University collected Balkan accents in dialect in order to push forward studies in phonetics. Then while messing about with the structure of the human ear as a sound bank I collided with the firm. Bang. Om.

  Victoria, yes: and thence to the bank to transfer funds to Tahiti. Then to my club to pick up mail and make sure that all the false trails were well and truly laid: paper trails followed by vapour trails traced upon the leafskin of the Italian sky. Then to drift softer than thistledown through the violet-chalky night, skimming over the Saronic Gulf. Charlock on a planned leave-of-absence from the consumer’s world. Second passport in the name of Smith.

  “Hail, O Consumer’s Age” the voices boomed,

  But which consumer is, and which consumed?

  As might have been expected I caught a glimpse of one of the firm’s agents hanging about the airport, but he was not interested in the night-passengers, or was waiting for someone else, and I was able without difficulty to sneak into the badly lit apron where the creaking little bus waited to carry me north to the capital.

  The taste of this qualified freedom is somewhat strange still; I feel vaguely at a loss, like a man must who hears the prison doors close on his release after serving a long sentence. (If time had a watermark like paper one could perhaps hold it up to the light?) I quote.

  Yet the little hotel, it is still here. So is the room—but absolutely unchanged. Look, here are the ink stains I made on the soiled marble mantelpiece. The bed with its dusty covers is still hammock-shaped. The dents suggest that Iolanthe has risen to go to the bathroom. In the chipped coffin of the enamel bath she will sit s
oaping her bright breasts. I am delighted to find this point of vantage from which to conduct my survey of the past, plan the future, mark time.

  Iolanthe, Hippolyta, Caradoc … the light of remote stars still giving off light without heat. How relative it seems from Number Seven, the little matter of the living and the dead. Death is a matter of complete irrelevance so long as the memory umbilicus holds. In the case of Iolanthe not even a characteristic nostalgia would be permissible; her face, blown to wide screen size, has crossed the continents; a symbol as potent as Helen of Troy. Why here on this bed, in the dark ages of youth…. Now she has become the 18-foot smile.

  Junior victims of the Mediterranean gri gri were we; learning how to smelt down the crude slag of life. Yes, some memories of her come swaying in sideways as if searching deliberately for “the impacted line which will illumine the broad sway of statement”.

  The grooves of the backbone were drilled in a tender white skin which reminded one of the whiteness of Easter candles. On the back of the neck the hair came down to a point, a small tuft of curl. The colouring of Pontus and Thrace are often much lighter than those of metropolitan Greece—vide Hippolyta with her ravenswing darkness and olive eye. No, Io had the greyish green eye and the hair tending towards ash-blonde which were both gifts from Circassia. The sultans used to stock their harems with toys such as these; the choicest colourings were such, lime-green eyes and fine fair curls. Well, anyway, these tricklings through the great dam of the past cannot touch her now—the legendary Iolanthe; she may have forgotten them even, left them to litter the cutting rooms of gaunt studios in the new world. For example, I had trouble to get her to shave under the arms; in common with all girls of her class, the prostitutes of Athens, she believed that men were aroused by an apeswatch under each arm. Perhaps they were. Now however when she raises her slender arms on the screen like some bewigged almond tree the pits beneath them are smooth as an auk’s egg.

  The young man that I was then cannot escape the charge of exercising a certain duplicity towards her; he condescended, letting his narcissism have full sway. Well, I don’t know, many factors were involved. This little angel had dirty toes and was something of a thief I believe. I found some notes from this period whose irrelevance proves that even then Charlock had an obstinate vein of introspection running along parallel, so to speak, with his mundane life of action. The second, the yellow exercise book—the one with the drawings of the cochlea and the outline for my model deafness-aid—had other kinds of data thrown about in it.

  Walking about Athens at night he might note: “The formication, the shuddering-sweet melting almost to faintness…. Why, the structure of the genitals is particularly adapted to such phenomena, Bolsover. (Bolsover was my tutor at Kings. I still converse with him mentally in prose and worse.) The slightest friction of a white hand will alert the dense nerve ganglia with their great vascularity. The affect disperses itself through the receiving centres of the autonomic nervous system, solar plexus, hypogastric plexus, and lumbosacral or pelvic…. Hum. The kiss breaks surface here. The autobiography of a single kiss from Iolanthe. Note also, Bolsover, that in embryology the final organ is progressively differentiated from an anlage—which may be defined as the first accumulation of cells recognisable as the commencement of the final organ. This is about as far as one can go; but even this is not far enough back for me. Surely once in the testes of my old man, in the ape-gland once, I was?”

  These problems brought sadness and perplexity to my loving. I would light a candle and examine the sleeping figure with concern for its mysterious history; it seemed to me that it might be possible to trace back the undermeanings of pleasure and pain, an unreasonable wish I now recognise. Ass. Ape. Worm.

  Her teeth were rather fine and small with just a trace of irregularity in their setting—enough to make her smile at once rueful and ravenous. She was too self-indulgent to husband her efforts in the professional sense—or perhaps too honest not to wish to give service? She could be blotted out sexually and retire into an exhaustion so extreme as to resemble death. Poor Iolanthe never got enough to eat so it was easy for a well-fed man to impose orgasm after orgasm on her until she reached the point of collapse. In our case the thing worked perfectly—indeed so perfectly that it puzzled her; we ignited each other like engines tuned to perfect pitch. Of course this is purely a technical question—one of perfect psychic and physical fit—queer there is not a science of it, nor a school in which one can try it out experimentally. If we could apply as much exactitude to sexual habits as, say, a machine turner to his toys, much unhappiness in love could be avoided. In an age of advanced technology it is surprising that no attention is given to such problems. Yes, even with her eyes closed, piously trying to think about something else in order to avoid exhaustion: even then, the surf carried her irresistibly to the other beach, rolled her up into the blessed anonymity of the fading second. Sometimes he shook her awake simply to stare into her eyes. But if at such moments she had asked him what he was thinking he would probably have replied: “The true cancer cell, in the final analysis, an oxygen-deficiency cell, a poorly breathing cell, according to Schmidt. When you coughed I suddenly saw in the field of my instrument a patch of tubercule bacilli stained with eosin to a pretty red—anemones in some Attic field.” People deprived of a properly constituted childhood will always find something hollow in their responses to the world, something unfruitful. You could accuse both of us of that, in order to explain the central lack. The weakness of the marrow. A racing heart. Of course other factors help, like environment, language, age. But the central determinant of situations like this is that buried hunger which is only aggravated by the sense of emotional impotence. Om.

  II

  The Parthenon left stranded up there like the last serviceable molar in some poor widow’s gum. Ancient Grief, my Greece! “Art is the real science.” Well, well. Where they made honey cakes in the shape of female pudenda. Yes, but the Acropolis then was our back-garden—hardly a corner of it where we didn’t make love. The smallness of its proportions gave it a monumental intimacy. In that clear hard enamel air the human voice carried so far that it was possible to call and wave to her from the top while she walked the Plaka streets below. “I-O-lanthe!” Note that the stress falls upon the second syllable not the third, and that its value is that of the omega. Now she is known to the world in a hideous Erasmic pronunciation with the stress on the third syllable. Actually I don’t mind, as it makes her real name private property. She belongs, then, to Number Seven, and to the Nube, to the eternal Athens which miraculously still survives outside memory. In that mirror over there she wrestled with her eyebrows which had a tendency to grow too thickly. You should see them now—single soft lines of the purest jet. Though the room squints out on the marbles we dared not open a shutter until dusk; we lived all day in brown shadow like carp in a cool pool. Until sunset.

  Sunset! Wake suddenly against the lighted wall and you have the momentary impression that the whole marble spook has taken fire and is curling up like burning cardboard. You put your hand to the hideous wallpaper and feel the actual heat of the mere reflection—or so you imagine. Up there outside the honey-coloured marbles, after a full day’s exposure to the sun, echo on the heat long after nightfall, temperature of mammals’ blood. Gradually the light sweats dried… stomachs gummed together like wet leaves. Yawning and smoking they lay about in whispers. She has a toy vocabulary and an island accent.

  The marbles still reflect back, translated into the whiteness of flour, the dying day’s burnish. Bit by bit she keels, veers, founders. The sun slithers down the nether side of Hymettus and into the sea with a huge inaudible hiss, leaving the islands to glow like embers which the young moon will soon reillumine. (They lie beside each other as quietly as legs; no kiss but would break the curvature of the unperfected thought.) Gradually leaks up from Salamis the smell of baked bread, melons, tar, borne on the breath of the evening freshets which will soothe wet armpits and breasts.
/>   They had been refugees from Pontus, and had trekked down with a dancing bear to settle in Crete. When the bear died (their only means of livelihood) they had a last tearful meal of the paws in oil. A smallholding barely sustained her parents. To lighten the burden she had come to Athens in search of work—with the inevitable result, for work there was none. When she described these days she stood up and acted the bear, the padding and jingling of paw and bell, the harsh panting. The froth gathered at its snout where the iron ring ran through. It was half blind, the whip had struck out an eye.

  The sheet had lipstick-marks on it, also the tooth-mug; our shoes lay side by side like fish. But she was gay, friendly, almost mannish in her directness and simplicity. A gaily coloured little parrot from an island. In those days for a whole summer black fingernails were de rigueur among her friends and workmates. This beastly shellac stuff used to peel off on to the sheet. Her one brother had “gone to the bad”; her lip shut on the phrase, framing it instantly in the harsh rectangle of peasant judgement. Had she, then, “gone to the good”? It was an attempt at a pleasantry which miscarried; her long under-lip shot out, she was in tears. During the microfield tests on Abel I sifted a good deal of this stuff about her through the field, and the king of computers came back in oracular fashion with some chunks taken from another field—Koepgen I think. It was all about love, its scales. (After Io leaves I can watch her from the window. She takes the crooked path up the side of the Acropolis, swaying a little, as if she were a trifle tipsy, hand to heart.)