Читать книгу Ancient Manners; Also Known As Aphrodite - Pierre Louys - Страница 7

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Demetrios remained alone, leaning on his elbow, at the spot vacated by the flute-girls. He listened to the murmur of the sea, to the slow creaking of the ships, to the wind passing beneath the stars.

The town was illumined by a dazzling little cloud which lingered upon the moon, and the sky was bathed in soft light.

The young man looked around him. The flute-girls’ tunics had left two marks in the dust. He remembered their faces: they were two Ephesians. He had thought the elder one pretty; but the younger was without charm, and, as ugliness was a torture to him, he avoided thinking about her.

An ivory object gleamed at his feet. He picked it up: it was a writing-tablet, with a silver style attached to it. The wax was almost worn away and it had been necessary to go over the words several times in order to make them legible. They were even scratched into the ivory.

There were only these words:

Myrtis Loves Rhodocleia

and he did not know to which of the two women this belonged, and whether the other was the loved one, or whether it was some unknown girl left behind in Ephesos. Then he thought for a moment of overtaking the two musicians in order to restore them what was perhaps the souvenir of a cherished dead friend; but he could not have found them without difficulty, and as he was already beginning to lose interest in them, he turned round languidly and threw the little object into the sea.

It fell rapidly, with a gliding motion like a white bird, and he heard the splash it made away out in the black water. This little noise enhanced the immense silence of the harbour. Leaning against the cold parapet, he tried to drive away all thought, and began to look at the things around him.

He had a horror of life. He only left his house when the life of the day was dying down, and he returned home when the dawn began to draw the fishermen and market-gardeners to the town. The pleasure of seeing nought in the world but the ghost of the town and his own stature had become a voluptuous passion with him, and he did not remember having seen the mid-day sun for months.

He was wearied. The queen was tedious.

He could hardly understand, that night, the joy and pride that had possessed him three years before, when the queen, bewitched perhaps by the stories of his beauty and genius, had sent for him to the palace, and had heralded him to the Evening Gate with the sound of the silver salpinx.

His arrival at the palace sometimes lighted up his memory with one of those souvenirs which, through excess of sweetness, become gradually embittered in the soul and then intolerable . . . The queen had received him alone, in her private apartments, consisting of three rooms of incomparable luxury, where every sound was muffled by cushions. She lay upon her left side, embedded, at it were, in a litter of greenish silks which, by reflection, bathed the black locks of her hair in purple. Her youthful body was arrayed in a daring open-worked costume which she had had made before her eyes by a Phrygian courtesan, and which exposed the twenty-two places where caresses are irresistible. One had no need to take off that costume during a whole night, even though one exhausted one’s amorous imagination beyond the most extravagant dreams.

Demetrios fell respectfully on his knees, and took Queen Berenice’s naked little foot in his hand, in order to kiss it, as one kisses an object delicate and rare.

Then she rose.

Simply, like a beautiful slave posing, she undid her corselet, her bandelettes, her open drawers, took off the very bracelets from her arms, the rings from her ankles, and stood up erect, with her hands open before her shoulders, her head slightly thrown back, and her coral coif trembling upon her cheeks.

She was the daughter of a Ptolemy and a Syrian princess descended from all the gods, through Astarte, whom the Greeks call Aphrodite. Demetrios knew this, and that she was proud of her Olympian lineage. Accordingly he was not disconcerted when the queen said to him without moving: “I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image.”

“I am Astarte. Take a block of marble and your chisel and reveal me to the men of Egypt. I desire them to worship my image.”

Demetrios looked at her, and divined, unerringly, the artless, novel sensuality with which this young girl’s body was animated. He said, “I am the first to worship it,” and he took her in his arms. The queen was not angry at this brusquerie, but stepped back a pace and asked, “You think yourself Adonis, that you dare to lay hands on the goddess?” He answered, “Yes.” She looked at him, smiled a little, and concluded.

“You are right.”

Thus was why he became insupportable, and his best friends left him; but he ravished the hearts of all women.

When he entered one of the apartments of the palace, the women of the court ceased talking, and the other women listened to him too, for the sound of his voice was an ecstasy. If he took refuge with the queen, their persecution followed him even there, under pretexts ever new. Did he wander through the streets, the folds of his tunic became filled with little papyri on which the women wrote their names with words of anguish. But he crumpled them up without reading them. He was tired of all that. When his handiwork was set up in the temple of Aphrodite, the sacred enclosure was invaded at every hour of the night by the crowd of his feminine adorers, who came to read his name chiselled in the stone and offer a wealth of doves and roses to their living god.

His house was soon encumbered with gifts, which he accepted at first out of negligence, but ended by refusing all, when he understood what was desired of him, and that he was being treated like a prostitute. His very slave-women offered themselves. He had them whipped, and sold them to the little porneion at Rhacotis. Then his men-slaves, seduced by presents, opened his door to unknown women whom he found at his bed-side when he came home, and whose attitude left no doubt as to their passionate intentions. The trinkets of his toilet-table disappeared one after the other; more than one of the women of the town had a sandal or a belt of his, a cup from which he had drunk, even the stones of the fruit he had eaten. If he dropped a flower as he walked, he did not find it again. The women would have picked up the very dust upon which his shoes had trampled.

In addition to the fact that this persecution was becoming dangerous and threatened to kill all his sensibility, he had reached the stage of manhood at which a thinking man perceives the urgency of dividing his life into two parts, and of ceasing to confound the things of the intellect with the exigencies of the senses. The statue of Aphrodite was for him the sublime pretext of this moral conversion. The highest realization of the queen’s beauty, all the idealism it was possible to read into the supple lines of her body, Demetrios had evoked it all from the marble, and from that day onward he imagined that no other woman on earth would ever attain to the level of his dream. His statue became the object of his passion. He adored it only, and madly divorced from the flesh the supreme idea of the goddess, all the more immaterial because he had attached it to life.

When he again saw the queen herself, she seemed to him destitute of everything which had constituted her charm. She served for a certain time to hoodwink his aimless desires, but she was at once too different from the Other, and too like her. When she sank down in exhaustion after his embraces, and incontinently went to sleep, he looked at her as if she were an intruder who had adopted the semblance of the beloved one and usurped her place in his bed. The arms of the Other were more slender, her breast more finely cut, her hips narrower than those of the Real one. The latter did not possess the three furrows of the groins, thin as lines, that he had graved upon the marble. He finally wearied of her.

His feminine adorers were aware of it, and though he continued his daily visits it was known that he ceased to be amorous of Berenice. And the enthusiasm on his account doubled. He paid no attention to it. In point of fact, he had need of a change of quite other importance.

It often happens that in the interval between two mistresses a man is tempted and satisfied by vulgar dissipation. Demetrios succumbed to it. When the necessity of going to the palace was more distasteful to him than usual, he went off at night to the garden of the sacred courtesans. This garden surrounded the temple on every side.

The women who frequented it did not know him. Moreover, they were so wearied by the superfluity of their loves that they had neither exclamations nor tears, and the satisfaction he was in search of was not dashed, in that quarter at least, by those frenzied cat-cries with which the queen exasperated him.

His conversation with these fair, self-possessed ladies was idle and unaffected. The day’s visitors, the probable weather on the morrow, the softness of the grass, the mildness of the night—these were the charming topics. They did not beg him to express his theories in statuary, and they did not give their opinion upon the Achilleus of Scopas. If it befell that they dismissed the lover who had chosen them, and that they thought him handsome and told him so, he was quite at liberty not to believe in their disinterestedness.

When freed from the embrace of their religious arms, he mounted the temple steps and fell to an ecstatic contemplation of the statue.

Between the slim columns crowned with Ionian volutes, the goddess stood instinct with life upon a pedestal of rose-coloured stone laden with rich votive offerings. She was naked and fully sexed, tinted vaguely and like a woman. In one hand she held her mirror, the handle of which was a priapus, and with the other she adorned her beauty with a pearl necklace of seven strings. A pearl larger than the others, long and silvery, gleamed between her two breasts, like the moon’s crescent between two round clouds.

Demetrios contemplated her tenderly, and would fain have believed, like the common people, that they were real sacred pearls, born of the drops of water which had rolled in the shell of Anadyomene.

“O divine sister!” he would say. “O flowered one! O transfigured one! You are no longer the little Asiatic woman whom I made your unworthy model. You are her immortal Idea, the terrestrial soul of Astarte, the mother of her race. You shone in her blazing eyes, you burned in her sombre lips, you swooned in her soft hands, you gaped in her great breasts, you strained in entwining legs, long ago, before your birth; and the food which the daughter of a sinner hungers for is your tyrant also, you, a goddess, the mother of gods and men, the joy and anguish of the world. But I have seen you, evolved you, caught you, O marvelous Cytherea! It is not to your image, it is to yourself that I have given your mirror, and yourself that I have covered with pearls, as on the day when you were born of the fiery heaven and the laughing foam of the sea, like the dew-steeped dawn, and escorted with acclamations by blue tritons to the shores of Cyprus.”

He had been adoring her after this fashion when he entered the quay, at the hour when the crowd was melting away, and he heard the anguish and tears of the flute-girls’ chant.

But he had spurned the courtesans of the temple that evening, because a glimpse of a couple beneath the branches had stirred him with disgust and revolted him to the soul.

The kindly influence of the night penetrated him little by little. He turned his face of the wind, the wind that had passed over the sea and seemed to carry to Egypt the lingering scent of the sweet-smelling roses of Amathus.

Beautiful feminine forms took shape in his brain. He had been asked for a group of the three Charites, enclasping one another, for the garden of the goddess, but it was distasteful to his youthful genius to copy conventions, and he dreamed of bringing together on the same block of marble the three graceful motions of woman. Two of the Charites were to be dressed, one holding a fan and half closing her eyelids to the gently-swaying feathers; the other dancing in the folds of her robe. The third should be standing naked behind her sisters, and, with her uplifted arms, would be twisting the thick mass of her hair upon her neck.

His mind conceived still other projects, as, for example, to erect, upon the rocks of Pharos, an Andromeda of black marble confronting the tumultuous monster of the sea, or to enclose the agora of Brouchion between the four horses of the rising sun, like wrathful Pegasi; and what was not his exultant rapture at the idea, which began to germinate within him, of a Zagreus terror-stricken by the approaching Titans? Ah! how beauty had once more taken him for its own! how he was escaping from the clutches of love! how he was separating from the flesh the supreme idea of the goddess! In a word, how free he felt!

Now, he turned his head towards the quays, and, in the distance, saw the yellow shimmer of a woman’s veil.