Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs (readera ebook reader .txt) 📕
er twentieth year, when from a young girl she became a woman, ambition suddenly awoke in her with maturity.
And one morning as she came out of a deep sleep, two hours past mid-day, quite tired from having slept too much, she turned over on her breast across the bed, her feet apart, rested her cheek in her hand and with a long golden pin pierced with little symmetrical holes her pillow of green linen.
She reflected profoundly.
There were at first four little points which made a square and a point in the middle. Then four other points to make a larger square. Then she tried to make a circle--but that was a little difficult.
Then she pierced points at random and began to call, "Djala! Djala!"
Djala was her Hindu slave whose name was Djalantachtchandrapchapala, which means: "Changeful-as-the-image-of-the-moon-upon-the-water." Chrysis was too lazy to say the entire name.
The slave entered and stood near the door without quite shutting it.
"Djala, who came yesterday?
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“What is our friend thinking?” said Phrasilas in his thin voice.
“I am perfectly happy,” replied Timon, “I have never understood so clearly as this evening the supreme mission of woman.”
“And what is it?”
“To be loved—with or without art.”
“That is one opinion.”
“Phrasilas, once more, we know that nothing can be proved; furthermore, we know that nothing exists and that even that is not certain. Remember that, and, to satisfy thy venerable mania, permit me to have a thesis at the same time debatable and vanquished, as they all are, but interesting for me who affirms it and for the majority of men who deny it. In the realm of thought, originality is more of a chimerical ideal than a certainty. Thou must know that.”
“Give me some more wine,” said Seso to the slave. “It is stronger than the other.”
“I maintain,” continued Timon, “that the married woman, in devoting herself to a man who deceives her; in refusing herself to every other; in bringing to the light children who deform her before their birth and monopolize her after it—I maintain that, in living thus, the woman called honest loses her life and that upon her marriage day the young girl makes a fool’s bargain.”
“She believes herself obeying a duty,” said Naucrates, without conviction.
“A duty? and toward whom? Is she not free to regulate a question which concerns herself alone? She is a woman and as such she is generally impervious to all pleasures of the intellect; and not content with remaining a stranger to this half of human joys, she marries and thus denies herself the other! Can any young girl say to herself, at the age when she is all ardor, ‘I will have my husband and know ten friends besides, perhaps twelve,’ and think that she will die without having regretted anything? As for me, when I quit life, the memory of three thousand will not satisfy me.”
“Thou art ambitious,” commented Chrysis.
“But with what incense, with what golden verse,” cried the gentle Philodemos, “should we not praise forever these beneficent companions! For your enlightened souls, love is not a sacrifice; it is an equal favor which two lovers exchange. We find among you the dreams of our lives. You are gentle to the graceless, consoling to the afflicted, hospitable to all, and beautiful, so beautiful! That is why I tell you, Chrysis, Bacchis, Seso, Faustina, that it is a just law of the gods which grants to you all the eternal admiration of men and the eternal envy of all women.”
The dancers had finished their steps.
A young acrobat had just entered who began juggling with daggers and walked upon her hands among the upright blades.
As the attention of the guests was entirely attracted to the child’s dangerous play, Timon looked at Chrysis and, little by little, without being seen, approached closer to her.
“No,” said Chrysis, in a low voice. “No, my friend.” But he slipped his arm around her.
“Stop,” she begged. “They will see us. Bacchis will be angry.”
A glance convinced the young man that no one was watching them. He emboldened himself to a further caress. Then, as a decisive argument against the scruples of modesty, he put his purse into the hand which lay, by chance, open.
Meanwhile, the young acrobat continued her subtle and perilous tricks. She walked on her hands, her skirt falling back, her feet hanging before her head, between sharp swords and long-pointed blades. Her uncomfortable position and perhaps also the fear of wounds, flooded her cheeks with dark, warm blood which heightened still more the brightness of her wide open eyes. Her waist bent and straightened. Her legs parted like the arms of a dancing-girl. Quick breathing pulsed in her bosom.
“Enough,” said Chrysis, curtly: “thou art annoying me! Let me go. Let me go!”
And at the moment when the two Ephesians arose to play, according to the tradition, “The Fable of Hermaphrodite,” she let herself slip from the couch and fled.
THE door scarcely closed, Chrysis laid her hand over her racing and burning heart as one presses a painful spot to lessen the throbbing. Then she leaned her shoulder against a column and wrung her fingers in an agony of exasperation, moaning softly.
Would she, then, never know?
In proportion with the passing hours, the augmented improbability of her success blazed out before her. To demand the mirror abruptly would be a daring way to learn the truth. But, in case it had been taken, she would draw all suspicions on herself and would be lost. On the other hand, she could no longer remain there without speaking; impatience had driven her from the hall.
Timon’s loutish behavior had exasperated her dumb rage into a trembling frenzy which forced her to press her body against the coolness of the great, smooth column.
She feared a nervous attack.
She called the slave Arete. “Keep my jewels for me; I am going out.”
And she descended the seven steps.
Not a breath of air fanned the heavy drops of perspiration on her forehead. This disappointment increased her discomfort and made her stagger.
She walked on, following the street.
Bacchis’s house was situated at the extremity of Bruchion, at the border of Rhacotis, the native town, the enormous slum peopled by sailors and Egyptians. The fishermen, who slept upon their anchored vessels during the overwhelming heat of the day, came there to pass their nights until dawn and to give up, to the girls and the wine-sellers, as payment for a double intoxication, the price of the fish of the day before.
Chrysis plunged into the alleys of this Alexandrian Suburra, full of voices, of movement and of barbarous music. She looked furtively through open doors, into halls eerie and reeking with the smoke of lamps, where shadowy forms, never single, seemed unreal. At the cross-ways, upon low trestles ranged before the houses, many-colored mattresses groaned in the shadow, loaded with human weight. Chrysis walked along uneasily. A lone woman begged. An old man fumbled at her. A gaping peasant sought to kiss her. She fled, in a sort of blushing fear.
This foreign town in the Greek city was, for Chrysis, full of darkness and dangers. She was unfamiliar with its strange labyrinths, the complexity of its streets, the secrets of certain houses. When she ventured into it, now and then, she always followed the same direct way toward a little red door, and there she forgot her lovers.
But this evening, without even having turned her head, she sensed herself followed by a double footfall.
She hastened her steps. The double tread hastened also. She began to run; she was pursued; then, frightened, she turned up an alley, then another which doubled back, then a long way which led in an unknown direction.
Her throat dry, her temples throbbing, sustained by Bacchis’s wine, she fled, turning from right to left, pale, without knowing her way.
At length a wall barred her course: she was in a blind passage. Hastily she tried to turn back, but two sailors with brown hands barred the narrow way.
“Whither goest thou, little golden arrow?” asked one of them, laughing.
“Let me pass.
“Eh? Art thou lost, young girl? Thou dost not know Rhacotis, eh? We are going to show thee the town…”
And they both grasped her by the girdle. She cried out, struggled, struck out with her fist, but the second sailor seized both her hands in his left hand and said only: “Be quiet. Thou knowest they love not the Greeks here; no one will come to help thee.”
“I am not a Greek!”
“Thou liest, thou hast white skin and a straight nose. Be still, if thou fearest a beating.”
Chrysis looked at the speaker. “I will follow thee,” she said. “Thou wilt follow us both. Walk with us; thou wilt be amused.”
Whither would they lead her? She had no idea; but the second sailor pleased her with his roughness, his brute-like head. She considered him with the imperturbable gaze of a young dog before meat. She swayed her body toward him, to touch him while walking.
With rapid steps, they traversed strange quarters, without life, without lights. Chrysis could not understand how they found their way in this nocturnal maze from which she could not have escaped alone, so fantastically complicated were its alleys. The closed doors, the empty windows, the motionless shadows terrified her. Above her, between the conjoining houses, she saw a ribbon of pale sky flooded with moonlight.
At length they re-entered life. At a turn of the street, suddenly, eight, ten, eleven lights appeared, illuminated doorways where young Nabatoeah women squatted between two red lamps which lighted their gold-hooded heads from below.
They heard the swell of a distant murmur, then an increasing tumult of wagons, of tossed bales, steps of donkeys and human voices. It was the market-place of Rhacotis where during Alexandria’s sleep all the provisions heaped up for the nourishment of nine hundred thousand mouths in one day were brought together.
They skirted the houses of the square, among the green heaps, vegetables, lotus roots, shining beans, panniers of olives. Chrysis took a handful of mulberries from a violet heap and ate them without stopping. Finally they arrived before a low door and the sailors descended with her for whom had been stolen the true pearls of the Anadyomene.
It was an immense hall. Five hundred men of the people, waiting for dawn, were drinking cups of yellow beer, eating figs, lentils, cakes of sesame and olyra bread. In the midst of them swarmed the rabble of yelping women, a whole field of black hair and many-colored flowers in an atmosphere of fire. They were poor girls without a shelter who belonged to everybody. They came there barefooted, scantily covered by red or blue rags over the body, to beg for the scraps. Most of them carried upon the left arm a child enveloped in rags. There were also dancing women, six Egyptians on a platform with an orchestra of three musicians, of whom the first two tapped skin-covered tambourines with wands, while a third shook a great clanking sistrum of bronze.
“Oh; bon-bons of myxare!” cried Chrysis, joyfully.
And she bought the worth of two coppers from a little girl vendor.
But suddenly she grew faint, so insupportable was the odor of this foul retreat, and the sailors bore her away in their arms.
In the outer air she recovered a little. “Where are we going?” she begged. “I can walk no longer. I shall fall in the street.”
WHEN she arrived once more before Bacchis’s doorway, she was filled with the delicious sense of relaxation and cooling. The clouds were gone from her brow. Her mouth had softened. She mounted the steps and crossed the threshold.
Since Chrysis had left the hall, the festivities had developed like a flame.
Other friends had come in whom the twelve dancers had welcomed wildly. Crushed wreaths strewed the ground with flowers. In a corner, a leathern bottle of Syracusan wine poured out a golden river which flowed under the table.
Philodemos, beside Faustina, was singing the verses he had written about her, as he played with the material of her robe, “O, feet,” he sang, “O rosy knees and handsome limbs! O perfect form! O you who madden me—warm hands, sweet voice! Roman thou art, and brown, and do not sing the verse of Sappho; but did not Perseus himself love the Indian Andromeda?”
Meanwhile, Seso, prone on the table in the midst of the scattered fruit, and completely beclouded by the vapors of the Egyptian wine, cooled her flesh in a sherbet of snow and repeated
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