Collected Short Fiction, page 1337
“I’m Aphrodite. The life-force. Beauty. Passion. Those things don’t go out of fashion for long. I’ve done all right for myself, over the years.”
“Ah. Yes. Obviously you have.”
The waitress fluttered around us. I was boiling with questions to ask Aphrodite, but it was time to order, and that was what we did. The usual Greek things, stuffed grape leaves, grilled fish, overcooked vegetables. Another bottle of wine. My head was pulsating. The restaurant was small, crowded, a whirlpool of noise. The nearness of Aphrodite was overwhelming. I felt dizzy. It was a surprisingly pleasant sensation.
I said, after a time, “I’m convinced that Zeus is still around somewhere. I’m going to find him and this time I’m going to whip his ass and put him under Mount Etna.”
“It’s amazing how much like a small boy an immortal being can be. Even one as huge and frightful as you.”
My face turned hot. I said nothing.
“Forget Zeus,” she urged. “Forget Typhoeus, too. Stay human. Eat, drink, be merry.” Her eyes were glistening. I felt as if I were falling forward, tumbling into the sweet chasm between her breasts. “We could take a trip together. I’d teach you how to enjoy yourself. How to enjoy me, too. Tell me; have you ever been in love?”
“Echidna and I—”
“Echidna! Yes! You and she got together and made a bunch of hideous monsters like yourselves, with too many heads and drooling fangs. I don’t mean Echidna. This is Earth, here and now. I’m a woman now and you’re a man.”
“But Zeus—”
“Zeus,” she said scornfully. She made the name of the Lord of Olympus sound like an obscenity.
We finished eating and I paid the check and we went outside into the mild, breezy Mykonos night, strolling for fifteen or twenty minutes, winding up finally in a dark, deserted part of the town, a warehouse district down by the water, where the street was no more than five feet wide and empty shuttered buildings with whitewashed walls bordered us on both sides.
She turned to me there and pulled me abruptly up against her. Her eyes were bright with mischief. Her lips sought mine. With a little hissing sound she nudged me backward until I was leaning against a wall, and she was pressing me tight, and currents of energy that could have fired a continent were passing between us. I think there could have been no one, not man nor god, who would not have wanted to trade places with me just then.
“Quickly! The hotel!” she whispered.
“The hotel, yes.”
We didn’t bother to walk. That would have taken too long. In a flash we vanished ourselves from that incomprehensible tangle of mazelike streets and reappeared in her room at our hotel, and from then to dawn she and I generated such a delirium of erotic force that the entire island shook and shivered with the glorious Sturm und Drang of it. We heaved and thrust and moaned and groaned, and rivers of sweat ran from our bodies and our hearts pounded and thundered and our eyes rolled in our heads from giddy exhaustion, for we allowed ourselves the luxury of mortal limitations for the sake of the mortal joy of transcending those limitations. But because we weren’t mortal we also had the option of renewing our strength whenever we had depleted it, and we exercised that option many a time before rosy-fingered dawn came tiptoeing up over the high-palisaded eastern walls.
Naked, invisible to prying eyes, Aphrodite and I walked then hand in hand along the morning-shimmering strand of the fish-swarming sea, and she murmured to me of the places we would go, the things we would experience.
“The Taj Mahal,” she said. “And the summer palace at Udaipur. Persepolis and Isfahan in springtime. Baalbek. Paris, of course. Carcassonne. Iguacu Falls, and the Blue Mosque, and the Fountains of the Blue Nile. We’ll make love in the Villa of Tiberius on Capri—and between the paws of the Sphinx—and in the snow on top of Mount Everest—”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
And what I was thinking was, Zeus. Zeus. Zeus. Zeus.
And so we travel about the world together, Aphrodite and I, seeing the things in it that are beautiful, and there are many of those; and so she distracts me from my true task. For the time being. It is very pleasant, traveling with Aphrodite; and so I permit myself to be distracted this way.
But I have not forgotten my purpose. And this is my warning to the world.
I am a restless being, a mighty thrusting force. I was created that way. My adversary doesn’t seem currently to be around. But Zeus is here somewhere. I know he is. He wears a mask. He disguises himself as a mortal, either because it amuses him to do so, or because he has no choice, for there is something in the world of which he is afraid, something from which he must hide himself, some god greater even than Zeus, as Zeus was greater than Cronus and Cronus was greater than Uranus.
But I will find him. And when I do, I will drop this body and take on my own form again. I will stand mountain-high, and you will see my hundred heads, and my fires will flash and range. And Zeus and I will enter into combat once more, and this time I will surely win.
It will happen.
I promise you that, O small ones. I warn you. It will happen.
You will tremble then. I’m sorry for that. The mind that came with this body I wear now has taught me something about compassion; and so I regret the destruction I will inevitably visit upon you, because it cannot be avoided, when Zeus and I enter into our struggle. You have my sincerest apologies, in advance. Protect yourselves as best you can. But for me there can be no turning away from my task.
Zeus? This is Typhoeus the Titan who calls you!
Zeus, where are you?
The Church at Monte Saturno
When confronted with the impossible, the rational man has two choices: believe or run. Or both.
SERAFINA SAID, “YOU ARE English, no?”
“American, actually,” Gardiner told her.
“I would say English. The studious look. The glasses. The bad haircut. The way you dress. Like you have money but don’t think it’s nice to spend it. Very English, I think.”
True enough. Only he wasn’t. And he had taken her at first glance for a simple Sicilian peasant girl, but obviously that was wrong also. There was nothing simple about her. Both of them, it seemed, had instantly invented imaginary identities for each other and were working their way backward now to the actual ones.
“I’m a professor. An associate professor, actually. History of art.” Who had taught at three different universities in fourteen years, and still was only an associate professor. Who did not even have his doctorate. And now was roaming the edges of the classical world peering at Byzantine mosaics in the hope they would somehow rescue him. “Associate professors often tend to seem a little English. I dress like this because it’s what I can afford. It’s also very comfortable.”
They were sitting under a gnarled old oak on a summer-parched brown hillside at the edge of the little town of Monte Saturno in central Sicily, looking southward into a steep gorge densely covered on both slopes with tough, leathery-looking grey-green shrubs. The sky was a hot iron dome, painted a pale blue. Even at this early hour of the day the air was stifling. Gardiner felt a little dizzy. This was a dizzying place, Sicily. The air, rich with lemon and herbs. The heat. The dark fissures of decay everywhere. The beauty. The taint of antiquity, the unfathomable mysteries lurking in every narrow alleyway, behind every crumbling façade.
He had arrived in town late the night before, driving down from Palermo, and had known her for less than half an hour. He was just finishing breakfast at the little albergo where he was staying when she came in to chat with the proprietor, her uncle. Gardiner had lured her out for a stroll: past the low lopsided cathedral, the scruffy and padlocked municipal museum, the ancient windowless building that was the post office. Almost at once they were in the open countryside, staring out into the island’s immense empty hinterland. She was long and lean, nearly as tall as he was, with prominent cheekbones, a long sharp nose, dark penetrating eyes. She had been born in this village, she told him, but lived in Palermo and had spent considerable time in Rome; she had come here a few days before to visit her grandfather, who was ninety. Gardiner found her attractive, and also oddly forward, flirtatious. But of course he knew better than to indulge in any fantasies. This was Sicily, after all.
“The history of art? You come to Sicily to study Italian art? There is some confusion here, I think. You should be in Florence, Venice, Rome.”
“Not Italian art, especially. Byzantine. I’m writing a doctoral thesis on the transition from the Roman style of mosaic work to the Byzantine.” How tidy that sounded! But he hardly wanted to tell her that he had come to Italy seeking something that he could not define, that his life, though satisfying in some ways, seemed fundamentally static and insubstantial: that he yearned for a coup, a grand achievement that would establish him before the world. Serafina sat leaning towards him, listening intently, with her long legs crossed, her hands outstretched on her knees. “You understand what that is, a doctoral thesis?” he asked.
“Capisco, si.” She was speaking mostly in English, which she handled well, though she dropped into Italian now and then for emphasis. Gardiner, fairly fluent in Italian, had begun the conversation in that language but something about her expression made him think that she found that condescending, and he had cut it out. She could be, he suspected, a prickly, difficult woman. “You write your thesis, they make you a dottore della filosofia, and then you become a real professor, that is how it works, no?”
“A full professor.”
“Ah. Si. So you are here to see our mosaics. Already you have seen the mosaics in Palermo? The Capella Palatina, the church of La Martorana, the cathedral at Monreale?”
“All of them. Plus the one at Cefalu. They’re all later than the ones I’m studying, really, but how could I pass them up?” Gardiner loved mosaics with a powerful passion. Not for the religious scenes they depicted, which had no real importance or significance to him beyond an esthetic one. He was in no way a religious man. The holy saints and martyrs of the Christian mosaics and the gods and goddesses of the older, pagan ones were simply just so much mythology for him, quaint, mildly amusing. But the mosaics themselves—their plasticity of design, their glinting surfaces, their inner light—that was what excited him. It was nearly impossible for him to put his feelings into words: an almost sexual yearning, focused on bits of colored tile glued to walls. He was possessed, and he knew it.
“And now?”
“Today I’ll head down to Piazza Armerina, the Villa Romana, the palace of the Roman emperor. With absolutely wonderful mosaics.”
“I have never been there,” she said.
Never? That was odd. Piazza Armerina was, he calculated, no more than an hour’s drive away. But New Yorkers never went to the Statue of Liberty or Parisians to the Eiffel Tower, either. Gardiner toyed with the idea of inviting Serafina to accompany him.
“From Piazza Armerina I’ll continue on south to Agrigento for a look at the Greek temples, and then up along the coast to Trapani, where I can catch the ferry for Tunis. The Bardo Museum in Tunis has one of the finest collections of mosaics in the world.” Into his mind now there sprang the wild notion of asking her to join him for the Tunisian expedition too, and he was startled by the sudden throbbing beneath his breastbone at the idea. On half an hour’s acquaintance, though? At best she would laugh; she might spit in his face. The old days of impenetrably guarded chastity might be gone here, but at the outset she would want him at least to pretend that he thought of her as a respectable woman. He looked guiltily away, as if fearing that his intentions were visible on his face.
I should ask her now, he thought, about herself: where she went to school, what she does, how it happens that she speaks English so well. But he hesitated, momentarily unwilling to plod through the standard conversational gambits. A sharp silence fell between them. Gardiner heard the buzz and click of insects all around, and a peculiar ticking coming from a nearby tree, as though the heat were shrinking its bark. The sudden tension sharpened his senses, and he became aware of a tumult of Mediterranean scents assailing him on all sides, lavender, maybe, rosemary, the fragrance of prickly-pear blossoms and lemon leaves.
A hawk drifted diagonally across the sky. Gardiner, idly following its path with his eyes, watched it descend abruptly into the gorge as if diving to seize a rabbit. His gaze traveled downward with the plunging hawk and he noticed for the first time what appeared to be a small isolated building on the far side of the valley, all but hidden in the scrubby brush. Not much more than the curving arc of its low white dome was visible. Something about the shape of that dome aroused his attention. He had seen buildings like that before. But not in Sicily.
“What is that across the way?” he asked her, pointing.
She knew what he meant. “A ruin. Not important.”
His guidebook had said nothing about ruins in Monte Saturno. So far as he knew there was nothing of that sort here, neither Greek, Roman, Byzantine, nor Norman, none of the multitudinous layers upon layers of superimposed realities out of which this island was built. He had stopped here last night simply because he had had a late start out of Palermo and decided en route not to risk driving on into Piazza Armerina after dark on this rough country road. It had been pure luck that the town’s one trattoria maintained a few upstairs rooms for tourists passing through.
“A church of some sort, is it?”
“Of some sort, yes. Not Catholic. A Greek church, the Orthodox faith. Empty a long time. Not a holy place any more.”
“Empty how long?”
A shrug. “A long time?”
“Five hundred years? A thousand?”
“Who knows? But a long time. It is very ruined. Nobody goes there except goats. And young innamorati. You know, lovers looking for a place to be alone.”
Gardiner felt a slow stirring of excitement.
“A Greek church,” he said slowly. “Byzantine, you mean?”
“That may be.” Serafina laughed. “Ah, you think there are mosaics there? You think you have made a great artistic discovery? There is nothing. Dirt. Ghosts.”
“Ghosts?”
“It is very haunted there. Yes.”
She sounded almost serious. He had, for a moment, a sense that a door had opened into a dark place forever inaccessible to him and Serafina was standing on the far side of the threshold. He knew that many of the villagers here lived on the interface between modern civilization and that shadowy realm of antiquity that was beyond his understanding; but Serafina, he had thought, was entirely of his world. He saw now that he might have been wrong about that. But then she grinned and was a contemporary woman again.
He said, forcing a grin of his own, “I’d be interested in seeing it, haunted or not. Is there any way of getting to it?”
“A road. Very bad, very rough.”
“Could you take me there? I very much would like to have a look at it.”
Anger flashed like summer lightning in her eyes. “Ah, you are so subtle, you inglesi!”
“American,” he said. And then, comprehending: “And you misunderstand me, if you think I’m trying in some roundabout fashion to engineer a rendezvous with you. Lei capisce, ‘rendezvous’ ?” She nodded. “But as long as I’m here—a Byzantine church that isn’t even in the guidebook—”
Another eyeflash, this one more mischievous. She still seemed angry, but in a different way now.
“Truly, Professore, you are interested only in the architecture of this dirty abandoned church? You take me to this rendezvous for lovers merely to see stone walls? Ah, I think I misjudge the kind of man you are. A beautiful woman means nothing to you, I think.”
Gardiner sighed. He was caught in a no-win situation. Bluntness seemed the best tactic.
“They mean a great deal. And you are extremely beautiful. But I know better than to proposition a Siciliana five minutes after I’ve met her, and in any case there’s a bed in my hotel room, if that’s what I was after. I don’t need to take you to an abandoned building full of goat shit and straw. But I would like to see the church. Honestly.”
Serafina’s expression softened. She looked merely amused now.
“You want to go?” she said. “Really? Allora. We go, then.”
She snapped her fingers under his nose. “Come! Up! We get ready, we go, at once, subito!”
BUT OF COURSE THEY DIDN’T GO SUBITO. Nothing ever happened subito in Sicily. They had to prepare themselves properly for the expedition, sturdy boots, jackets to ward off brambles, and wide-brimmed hats for the sun, plus a bottle of wine, some bread and cheese and salami and fruit, as if they were going on a long journey, not just down the side of one nearby hill and up another. The preparations mysteriously stretched on for hours. He had a suitable jacket and even a hat but no hiking boots, only sneakers, which Serafina glanced at with contempt. Her cousin Gino would lend him a pair of boots.
Cousin Gino was twenty-three or so, sullenly handsome, a swarthy, bull-necked bushy-haired man with enormous forearms and bright, fierce eyes, unexpectedly blue in this land of dark-eyed people. Though Gardiner was a big man himself, broad-shouldered and ruggedly athletic of build, who looked more like a football coach than an assistant professor of the history of art, it appeared likely to him that in any kind of fight Gino would twirl him around his wrist like spaghetti. And just now Gino was glowering at Gardiner with what looked very much like unconcealed hostility, bringing to mind all of Gardiner’s stereotyped notions of the way the men of this island defended their women’s chastity. Serafina said something to him in the transmogrified and deformed dialect of Italian, both clipped and slurred, that was Sicilian—a patois which Gardiner found utterly opaque. Gino, replying with an equally unintelligible stream of brusque, sputtering words, gave them both a furious glare and went whirling away from them.
“What’s bothering him?” Gardiner asked, still inventing Gino’s proprietary rage, imagining dire warnings, threats of vendetta.
