Free The Revolt of Aphrodite by Lawrence Durrell Page B

dining Chez Vivi with a group of money-loving boors with polish. Laughing until his buttonhole tumbled into his wineglass. “We must work for the greatest happiness of the highest few.” I had by then confided my orient pearls to the care of Hippolyta for Graphos. A queer sort of prosopography reigns over this section of time. Arriving too early, for example, I waited in the rosegarden while she saw Graphos to his car. I had only seen his picture in the paper, or seen him sitting in the back of a silver car, waving to crowds. I had missed the club foot; now as they came down the path arm in arm I heard the shuffling syncopated walk, and I realised that he had greater burdens to carry than merely his increasing deafness. His silver hair and narrow wood-beetle’s head with those melancholy incurious eyes—they were set off by the silver ties he wore, imported from Germany. Somewhere in spite of the cunning he gave offall the lethargy of riches. I came upon exactly the quality of the infatuation he had engendered in an ancient Greek poem about a male lover.
     
    He reeks with many charms,
    His walk is a whole hip dance,
    His excrement is sesame seed-cake
    His very spittle is apples.
    Insight is definitely a handicap when it comes to loving. (His rival shot him stone dead with a longbow.) On the lavatory wall someone had marked the three stages of man after the classical formula.
    satiety
    hubris
    ate
    “The danger for Graphos is that he has begun to think of himself in the third person singular” she said sadly, but much later. All this data vibrates on now across the screens of the ordering condensers in Abel, to emerge at the requisite angle of inclination.
    Nor was my experiment with Caradoc’s voice less successful; amongst the confusion and general blurr of conversation there was a brief passage extolling the charms of Fatma to which she listened with considerable amusement, and which I found centuries later among my baggage and fed to A. “She may not be a goddess to everyone ” he begins a trifle defensively “though her lineaments reveal an ancient heritage. An early victim of ritual infibulation was she. Later Albanian doctors sewed up the hymen with number twelve pack thread so that she might contract an honourable union. No wonder her husband jumped off a cliff after so long and arduous a honeymoon . In their professional excitement the doctors had by mistake used the strings of a guitar. She gave out whole arpeggios like a musical box when she opened her legs. Her husband, once recovered, sent her back to her parents with a hole bored in her frock to show that she was no virgin. Litigation over the affair is doubtless still going on. But meanwhile what was Fatma to do? She took the priapic road like so many others. She walked in peace and brightness holding the leather phallus, the sacred olisbos in the processions of Mrs. Henniker. Nor must we forget that these parts were aidoion to the Greeks, ‘inspiring holy awe’. There is no special word for chastity in ancient Greek. It was the Church Fathers who, being troubled and a trifle perverted, invented agneia. But bless you, Fatma does not know that, to this very day. When she dies her likeness will be inall the taverns, her tomb at the Nube covered with votive laurels; she will have earned the noblissima meretrix of future ages. Biology will have to be nudged to make room for Fatma.”
    But the rest scattered with the talk as gun-shy birds will at a clapping of hands. Something vague remains which might be guessed to concern the Piraeus brothel where many of the names live on from the catalogues of Athenaeus—like Damasandra which means, “the man-crusher”: and the little thin ones, all skin and bone and saucer eyes, are still “anchovies”. Superimposed somewhere in all this Iolanthe’s just-as-ancient moral world out of Greek time. Skins plastered with white lead to hide the chancres, jowls stained with mulberry juice, blown hair powdering to