Читать книгу Beyond Homer - Benjamin W. Farley - Страница 8

After returning to the pension, I became restless. I emptied my jacket of its contents, flopped on the bed for a while, then paced in the semi-darkness of the room. I paused to look out the opened windows. A veil of fog hovered about the roofs and buildings in front of me. I leaned out over the narrow balcony and stared down at the street below. The drone of the traffic and the constant and magical pace of the city’s life rose and throbbed unabated. It echoed off the rusting balconies along the street, down which I gazed in reflection. Afternoon shoppers and tourists walked briskly toward the street’s corner, across from which stretched the Garden of Luxembourg. I picked up Sullivan’s book, replaced my billfold and passport in my jacket’s inside pockets, pulled it on, and descended the stairs for the park.

Near one corner of the garden, a statue dedicated to Baudelaire had become my private haunt for those inner dialogues with the self, for those quiet moments with the psychosphere, when one requires escape and self-examination. I took a seat on a concrete bench and opened Sullivan’s book to his section on “The Myth of the Minotaur.” I read the following:

The story of the Minotaur is at once transparent and aretetical. Prior to investigating either of these poles, let us relish the myth anew. Having achieved acclaim by the time of his arrival in Athens, and having survived his father’s wife’s treacherous wiles, Theseus turned his attention to the dreadful calamity that annually numbed the city. At that time, the Athenians were compelled to send a tribute of seven maidens and seven youths to King Minos, ruler of Crete. Minos offered them as a sacrifice to the Minotaur: a grizzly monster with a man’s shaggy head and the body of a bull. The Minotaur roamed a vast labyrinth, known for its numerous and terrifying passageways that snaked endlessly beneath the palace. Daedalus, himself, had constructed the maze. Once victims passed through its entrance, none returned or escaped. Theseus convinced his father, Aegeus, to let him go as one of the seven sacrificial youths that he might slay the Minotaur. With a father’s anguish, Aegeus conceded. Theseus promised to change the ship’s sail from black to white, upon his return, if the adventure produced success.

Upon their arrival, the fourteen victims presented themselves to Minos. The king announced his satisfaction and set a date for the sacrifice. His daughter, Ariadne, however, became enamored of Theseus—the manliest of the youths—and he equally fell in love with her. The night before the ordeal, she managed to steal into his chamber and give him a magical sword and a spool of thread, the first with which to kill the monster, the second to retrace his steps to the entrance. Taking the lead as they entered, Theseus cornered the beast, slew it, and, with the help of the thread, saved the maidens and other youths. As Greek myths go, however, victory and prowess, valor and bravery, are inevitably accompanied by treachery and grief. On the return voyage to Athens, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the Island of Naxos, and, forgetting to raise the white sail, arrived in port under the mournful black canvas. Upon seeing it, Aegeus fell on his sword and died.

I folded an edge of the page down and closed the book. Now would come Sullivan’s reflections on the myth. In his Introduction, he had warned readers of a fondness for a methodology he intended to use ad nausea, if necessary, to ferret out the truth behind and between the lines of the stories. He never followed them in any particular order, but employed them with ingenuity and resourcefulness. Six motifs guided his approach. The first had to do with the transparent, or the historical kernel, to be identified. What was the story’s “setting in life,” or its Sitz im Leben? Could a date be determined on either archeological or historical grounds? A cognitive, or intellectual, thread formed a second concern. What does the story explain? What dimension of life does it elucidate? What intellectual enlightenment does it provide for understanding the self or the world? The aretetical, a third, had to do with value, excellence, or virtue. What insight into life’s conduct does a myth possess? What virtues did it hallow for its ancient audience? What lingering aretetical values might it still convey? A fourth motif, he identified as deontological. Deon means “duty” in Greek. What were the duties to be gleaned from the myth? What further duties might human beings salvage from the story for today? Sullivan argued that a distinction between aretetical and deontological is important, since virtues are often highly winsome and admirable, but difficult to attain, whereas duties are essential to rights and concepts of justice. He proposed that this was as true of the classical period as of our own. At some point, a fifth motif involved catharsis. Sullivan acknowledged his debt to Aristotle for catharsis. Beholding how others have suffered and borne life’s vicissitudes, as well as feeling a shared pity and dread with others, strengthens our own capacity to endure personal tragedies and private sorrows. This is especially so, since our own problems will go unsung and unheralded. To know that some are recorded and memorialized in dramatic epics provides a mantle for our own fleeting existence. They cloak our mortality with the solace of a universal immortality of the human spirit. Finally, but not always, Sullivan would sometimes address the ontological problem. By ontological, he meant something of the metaphysical. What does any myth or story tell us about the mystery of being? As in dreams and repressed fears, does the myth proffer a peek into the troubled subconscious, which, if we could probe and understand it, would bring us closer to the truth of our elusive humanness: that daunting mystery that still exists?

I was about to reopen the book, when a premonition of not being alone began to pulse from synapses to synapses, causing me to look up with a startle. Standing near the edge of the monument, the Viet Cong soldier, whom I had heard the previous evening, was staring at me. He wore a dull, silky green shirt, blue jeans, a Bolshevik cap, and sandals. A leather pouch, with long straps, teetered on his right shoulder. “Bonjour, may I join you?” he said in crisp French.

I knew what he wanted. For the past six months, a small legion of Vietnamese from the North had been in Paris, propagandizing any Americans they could.

“Why not?” I replied. “But it won’t be any use, I fear.”

“Please. Let us be at peace! At least, hear my side.”

He slipped the pouch off his shoulder and produced several printed articles. I had seen them before, sometimes in restaurants where Americans gathered, or along the Seine near the waste bins, or on park benches.

He sat next to me and handed me three folded sheets. They were printed on both sides and contained the “history” of the recent conflict, its sufferings and illegality from the North’s point of view, and the multitude of ills that wars of liberation and revolution spawn. The pages contained the story of Ho Chi Minh, his guerilla activity in support of the US during the Second World War, how Eisenhower had betrayed America’s promise after the war by siding with the French, the burden of the Indo China era under French colonialism, and on and on. No mention of Viet Cong atrocities appeared.

“We are only seeking to liberate our country, to do what you did during your own Revolution.” He studied me with his thin lips, his Asian brow only slightly furled. His dark eyes emanated the seriousness of his mission. “We want to unite our country and bring freedom and dignity to all Vietnamese. The Saigon regime is corrupt, and you know it. It’s merely a puppet power in the hands of ruthless thugs, doing what your government bids because you want to be all powerful. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you let us establish our own form of government, run by ourselves, even if it is a Communist one?” He seemed to relax. Having delivered the memorized essentials of his speech, he smiled widely and awaited my reply

“I guess that last point is why,” I said, without blinking. “We’re afraid of the Soviet Union, its Eastern Block countries, and Red China. Your system promotes insurgencies and wars of revolution, murder, and chaos wherever Communism goes. It forbids freedom of thought and expression. It enslaves poor classes and lowers the standard of living, rather than raising it. Like in Cuba and Central America and East Germany. Or Poland and Hungary.”

A slight twinge of color darkened his high cheekbones. “We are not Cuba, or East Germany. We are Asians. Proud and with a long history and culture of our own. We fear China, ourselves.” There was a touch of remorse in his voice, but no anger. Pride, yes, and perhaps a smidgen of desperation, but not anger. “Vietnamese have a right to determine their own destiny. We wish you no harm. I hate it that we have to kill your soldiers and they kill ours. Already I have lost my wife, my mother, two brothers, and a sister. My two children live with my father in a village north of Hue. They have known nothing but machine gun fire, grenades, mortar rounds, hunger, and, everywhere, death. You can at least understand that.”

He tried to smile, putting the best face forward he could with respect to his country’s war and his own miseries and personal anger, over which he continued to exercise enormous control.

“Do you do this every day?”

“Yes. My government is sacrificing dearly for me to be here. I want to be at home, with my children, and with my comrades at war. I bear you no animosity, nor enmity. You must surely know that.”

“Nor I you. I long for this war to end, too. It’s destroying us, as well.”

“I’m due to go home in eight more weeks. I will rejoin my unit, and we will have to kill more Americans and some of our countrymen. Revolutions are never clean. Both sides suffer.”

“I hope you survive. I hope your children will grow into adulthood, marry, have families, and die in their homes in peace.”

He struggled to his feet, re-slung his pouch, and extended his hand. I realized he had a war wound of some kind by the way he favored one side. I rose with him, accepted his hand, and shook it firmly.

“Salut, mon ami,” he smiled. “Perhaps we shall both live to see peace.”

“Would that that might come to pass.”

“You would like Viet Nam. Perhaps one day, you will come and visit it.”

“That would be nice.”

“Adieu!” he said, holding his head erect with dignity.

“Au-voir, to you, too,” I bowed slightly, as I shook his hand a second time.

He walked slowly past the monument, the surrounding tall plants, and was gone.

After dinner, I retired to my room to resume reading Sullivan’s chapter on the Minotaur. I had left the windows open; a light breeze stirred the long yellowed muslin curtains where I had pulled them aside. The room’s warm air felt muggy, but it was comfortable enough to sit at the long cherry table and look toward the window. The glow of neon signs and the evening sheen of the deepening spring night filled the skyline with muted shadows that pulsated red, green, and purple.

What should I do the coming day? Perhaps translate more Pascal, or attempt some verses of Baudelaire. I had scarcely begun to ponder the possibilities, when a faint rap sounded at the door. Was it a knock or not? I heard it again, ever so timidly and softly.

“Yes? Is someone there?”

I went to the door and opened it. It was the British girl. Her hands were trembling and her face appeared pasty.

“I am so embarrassed, but I think someone’s hiding in my room. I was sitting in the room, reading, when I heard a noise behind the drapes.” The dark pupils of her eyes loomed wide open. Her lips had turned pale, almost dark blue.

“I’ll come down right now,” I said, with a smile.

“Number eighteen!” she referred to her room’s number.

“Sure.” I followed her to the end of the hall and slightly to the right, down another wing. “I didn’t realize this floor was so long.”

“And spooky,” she added, “when the lights go out.”

“Is it unlocked?”

“Yes.”

I eased the door open and entered the room. The rush of air from the hallway caused the drapes to balloon outwards. No outline of anyone or anything appeared behind them.

“I’ll check your armoire and under your bed.”

The armoire was latched; no one was inside. I ran my hands between her hanging garments. “Sorry,” I blushed.

“Oh, no! That’s quite all right. I’ll check under the bed.”

While she bent down to complete her own inspection, I walked to the windows and pulled back the drapes, along with their frail dusty curtains. I leaned forward and stared out, first to the left and then to the right of her room’s tiny balcony and down to a narrow street below. I realized that her room was on the same side of the hall as mine, but it looked down into an alleyway rather than into the busy rue that I was accustomed to viewing. “I’m not certain I would leave these unlocked.” I hated to frighten her, but anyone could make his way up the building and enter this side of the rooms. Then, of course, the noise she heard might have been the breeze, or a puff of wind in the drapes. I looked again into the black pit of the alleyway. Only someone desperate or mad would attempt such an entry.

“I’ve never once been afraid, till now. Please sit down and have a glass of wine with me. I’m still very jittery.”

“I guess we all are, since the murder across the street.”

“Yes,” she mumbled, attempting to smile.

In all the time that I had been at the pension, I had paid her but scant attention. She rarely showed for breakfast, and generally came in late at dinner. I couldn’t help but return her smile. “I would love to sit down and have that glass of wine.”

“Thank God! Incidentally, I’m Christine. Christine Cunningham. What’s your name? What do you do?” she asked. “What brings you here?”

“Clayton Rogers Clarke. I’m a professor of humanities on sabbatical. An aficionado of French history, philosophy, and literature. What about yourself?”

From somewhere in the bottom of her armoire she produced a bottle of red wine and several glasses. She poured me half a glass and herself as much. We scooted the room’s two fragile wooden chairs up to the table and sat down.

“I teach French in a little school northwest of London. I’m attending the Institut Français. I used to be a jeweler. Not really,” she smiled. “But I clerked for this chap who trafficked in diamonds, gems, and silver. He made pendants, lockets, bracelets—you name it. My favorite gems were garnets and rubies. One morning, he discovered his shop’s back door lock broken. The thieves had made off with everything. I was dating a somewhat brawlsome, rugged Welshman at the time. Clarence, the owner, accused me of tipping the guy off, and being an accomplice in the heist. I tell you, I had nothing to do with it, and I told him as much, too. The bobbies checked me out, but, of course, there was no evidence to charge me.”

“What about your friend?”

“Tobby was just a rough pub boy. They searched his apartment, but found nothing. He dropped me like a stone after that and returned to the slag mines of Wales. He was ruddy, but I loved him.”

She moved her chair a little closer to mine. I had left the windows open, and a cool draft ruffled the drapes and swayed the curtains. “Is that what you heard?”

“It was more like a stir, a muffled sweep of cloth against cloth. That’s when I came to your room.” She looked at me deeply with her twinkling black eyes. A full head of long brown hair flounced about as she turned her face toward me. I studied her fine aquiline nose, her high, arched eyebrows, her freckled pink cheeks and rich red lips and wondered why I had never noticed her before. Her sweater’s rounded bulges of orange-sized breasts were equally noticeable. She smiled when she caught me looking at her. “I wish you would stay with me tonight,” she said with crimson cheeks. “I know that’s terribly forward and a bit hasty, but I’m afraid. Really, quite so!”

I leaned forward and kissed her. Her hands trembled as she touched my forearm. She pressed her soft, wet mouth against mine. I could feel her tongue. We each sipped our wine and kissed one another again. I studied her eyes. They were sparkling, yet demure.

“I need to go to my room for a few things,” I said.

“I’ll be waiting,” she kissed me gently with her warm lips.

When I returned, she was clad in a silky, rose nightgown. I could see the curves of her breasts and the indentation that her naval created, along with the lines of her thighs.

She stepped toward me and began unbuttoning my shirt. I slipped off my trousers and underclothes. She removed her slippers and I my shoes, and we lay down on the bed together. I put my arms under hers and around her back and rolled against her. We kissed and fondled each other and changed positions while emitting a series of pleasurable moans. I had not loved a woman this way since the breakup with the “beautiful girl” I had mentioned to Julene. I wondered if intimacy with Julene would be as lusty or glowing as this.

Christine adjusted her legs and opened them fully. Her hands guided me along. The rush came amidst a powerful throe of audible groans of enjoyment.

“Oh, God! Don’t let me go yet,” she whispered. “Please don’t leave for a while.”

“I’m here for the night, if you want.”

“Yes. Oh, yes.” She kissed my ears and neck.

We lay there for a long time; then rolled out of bed to wash off and pour ourselves the remaining wine. We propped ourselves up on her long French pillows, lay naked under the sheet, and sipped the wine.

After a while, she began to talk. “My mother was killed during the Blitz. My father died of a seizure while working at the plant, near our cottage. An elderly aunt raised me and put me through school. What about you?”

“I was reared on a farm in Virginia, of proud Scots-Irish and English descendants. They were proud relics of ante-bellum aristocracy, including the Civil War. Only the land remained after that fiasco, and now much of it is mortgaged to banks. But I loved roving it as a kid, fishing its streams, and hunting quail in the fall.”

“Sounds idyllic. You’re a born romantic.”

“That’s what everyone says, though I teach logic and arcane subjects as epistemology and metaphysics.”

“‘Inane’ might be a better word.”

“Thanks a lot. Just for that, I’m coming after those breasts again.”

I handed her my wine glass, while I rolled against her soft body and put my mouth over her right breast.

“Oh, God! I’m going to want to do it again, if you don’t stop,” she laughed.

She set the wine glasses down and we played with each other some more.

“What have I started?” she whispered. “I’ll probably hate myself in the morning.” She kissed my chest and stroked my loins.

“Why? Whatever evil lies in this?”

“No evil. Just pain. I’m not ready to have my heart broken again. You are beautiful, and your body is great. You’re quite a chap, you know.”

“That’s the kindest thing any woman has said to me in months.”

“You sweet man,” she signed, as she placed her hands between my legs. “How I needed you tonight!”

I fondled her with my tongue and kissed her naval.

“Snuggle against me and hold me. Put your arm around my bosom and let’s drift to sleep. I have to be at the Institut by seven.”

I slipped out of bed, closed the windows and fastened the latch. I turned off the light and climbed in beside her. I lay my face against her long hair, nudged my nose against a warm ear, cupped her breasts in my hands, and listened to her breathing. Soon, she was asleep. The darkness of the room slipped within my own dream world; mists of white fog lifted me skyward. I was flying, soaring like a great bird, gliding across Paris, the Seine, Notre Dame, the Ile de la cité. From somewhere a black girl was calling. I was scampering through the wheat, near a split-rail fence. I was a child once more on the farm. I could see the hay, the ripening corn, the green tobacco plants, the dust from the horses harvesting the wheat, the trout stream in the bottom meadow, and the cattle on the pastured hills.

The next morning, we kissed, and I returned to my room. That evening she passed my table, smiled, and placed her hand momentarily on my shoulder. She walked to her seat without glancing back. I knew she needed time, just as I did. But the memory of our sensuous liaison fired my heart for more. I knew she needed me as much as I needed her. Perhaps time would bring us together again. I would have to wait and see.