A Book of Memories (38 page)

I was being sentimental, he said.

Maybe, I said, but I couldn't express myself properly in this rotten language.

He'd do the expressing for me.

Please, stop acting silly.

Is that what he was doing? he asked.

He could go on acting silly, if he liked.

Did I still know what we were talking about?

Did he?

PART II

On an Antique Mural

The picture I had been keeping tucked away in my notes, the one I would have described in my planned narrative as the multisecret world of my presentiments and presumptions
—had I the necessary talent and strength to do it, of course—depicted a delicate, lovely Arcadian landscape with a gently rising clearing among hills that stretched into the horizon, sparse thickets and silky grass, flowers, storm-ruffled olive trees and weather-beaten oaks, a skillful copy of an antique mural I had had the opportunity to admire several years ago during my travels through Italy which, in the full splendor of its bold colors and formidable dimensions, captured the landscape in the very moment when morning slowly rises out of Oceanus to bring light to mankind, and with its infinitely fine light illuminated the dewdrops perched on blades of grass and settled in the hollow palms of leaves, the time of dew, a time when the wind does not rustle the leaves but seems to have abated, a time we think of as eternity, when night has already laid its silver egg but Eros, according to some tales the son of the wind god, cannot yet emerge from this egg and is still in a state of Before, before something, before anything we might call an event, in the moment just before that event but already after the noble act of impregnation and conception, when the two powerful primordial elements, the wild wind and the dark of night, have already coupled; this is a time when as yet there are no shadows, we are still before everything that might be described later as Afterward—this is the nature of a primal morning! and that is why this extraordinary moment should not be confused with, although it may be compared to, that other moment when Helios is about to vanish with his horses and chariot behind the rim of the earth, because then, terrified of mortality and hoping to overtake the departing sun—anything is better than to stay here! not here!—every living thing stretches to the limit of its own shadow and the pain of parting turns everything ruddily fatal, shining like gold; but in this early moment everything is almost lifeless, almost stiff, pale, almost gray, silvery, looming in the dimness, cold, and if just now I mentioned vivid colors, it was only because this silver is of course no longer the silver glow of the night which so eagerly draws into itself all the colors of the world, dissolving them into homogeneous metallic flashes; no, at this hour things have already received their own colors, which is to say these colors have been conceived but are not yet fully alive: the naked body of Pan, at the geometrical center of the picture, bursting with pleasure, shows a rich brown; the coat of the handsome little he-goat at his feet is appropriately gray, dirty white; the grass is an angry green, the oak tree an even deeper green, the stone is whiter than white, and the light capes of the three nymphs are turquoise, olive-green, and red silk; but just as at this dewy border of night and day the nymphs are motionless, having completed their last nocturnal movements but not yet begun the first gestures of their new day, so the colors of their bodies and garb remain within the shadowless outline of their pure forms, and so do the colors of the shadowless trees, grass, and stones, because just as at the border of the End and the Beginning these creatures have nothing to do with one another, each looking in a different direction—making the picture, even on our small copy, seem to grow in size—colors have no relationship to one another either: the red is red for and by itself, the blue is blue only for itself and not because it is to be distinguished from green, which is only green; it is as if the painter of the picture, in his own barbarically simplifying ignorance, had captured the very moment of the world being born, or, more simply, as if with deadly precision he had insisted on depicting the mood of a summer dawn when one is suddenly startled out of sleep without knowing why; one gets out of the blind warmth of bed, staggers out of the house to relieve oneself—that at least if one's already awake—and is greeted by a terrible silence undisturbed even by the dew congealing into dripping drops, and although one knows that in the very next moment the warming yellow of daylight will jolt the universe out of its frozen, mortal state, making it come alive in a new birth, one also knows that all one's experience and knowledge is as nothing compared to the silence of nonexistence, and if up to now one has sought death in the shadows of the day or while groping in the dark of night, one now discovers it, in this colorfully colorless instant, and unexpectedly and with such dreadful ease that the hot urine won't gush out: death lay in the moment that, until now, one has been fortunate to sleep through, one's body kept warm in the embrace of the gods.

And maybe it's not even Pan sitting on that stone: in spite of my careful and thorough studies, I have been unable to determine for sure
—maybe it's Hermes my picture represents, which means not the son but the father, no small difference, that! for in that case it is not the son's lovemates whom we see, his frolicking maid-lovers depicted as the three nymphs, but the woman-mother herself: in an ambiguous way, every little motif in the picture refutes its own assertions, so much so that I could afford quietly to suppose—in fact, this supposition is what has excited me—that the painter deliberately did this brave mixing up, showing the father but meaning the son or, conversely, painting the son but meaning to show the father in his youth, and depicting for us the mother as the adoring lover of them both, for this figure in her olive-green cloak at the right side of the picture, with her head lowered, her sparkling eyes following her fingers gliding over the strings of the lyre pressed against her bosom, seems somewhat older, perhaps considerably older than the naked youth, and we must risk drawing this conclusion even if we shudder at the thought that our eyes, prompted by wishful imagination, may deceive us and even if we know well that gods are ageless; of course, when it comes to nymphs, this is not entirely accurate, for their immortality, as evidenced by traditional narratives that have come down to us, is directly proportional to their proximity to the divinities, and consequently there are mortals among them: nymphs of the sea are said to be immortal, like the sea itself, but the same cannot be said about the more common naiads of the springs, and even less so of the nymphs of the meadows, groves, and trees, especially those who live in oak trees and die when the trees die; and if, following the painter's rather confusing hints, we try to guess the age of a particular nymph by examining her face, as her fingers reach for the most distant string of the lyre, her glance measuring the exact intervals between the strings, for she wants to produce an elegant light glissando, we must remind ourselves of the ancient method of reckoning life spans according to which the chattering crow lives the equivalent of nine human generations, a stag has as many as four crows' lives, and three stags' lives add up to a raven's age; a palm tree lives as long as nine ravens, and nymphs, Zeus' lovely-haired daughters, can expect to live as many years as make up the lives of ten palm trees; in this calculation, then, our nymph must have been into her sixth raven's lifetime, so by declaring her older than the naked youth I don't mean to measure her age in human years, and I did not see the tiniest wrinkle on her face—she appeared to be blessed with the wisdom of motherhood, at least when compared to the two other nymphs, who, although closer to the youth, in fact identical to him in age, were untouched by that bliss beyond pain; and I could not exactly tell you why, but her neck also indicated this maternal wisdom, arching out of the rich folds of the cloak draped over her shoulders; oh, that exquisite feminine neckline! which remained bare and white under auburn hair gathered into a loose bun by a silver clasp and seeming so attractively and shamelessly naked precisely because of a few unruly curls, short, frizzy strands falling back onto the flesh—of course this is most attractive, for it is the mix of being dressed and being naked that we like so much; and if I succeeded in describing the nymph's neck in some such fashion, I'd most likely put into words the experience I've preserved in the image of my betrothed's neck, no, not just preserved, but cherished, adoringly, an experience of the two of us sitting next to each other while leafing through a photo album, let's say: she would lean forward a little, to look at some negligible detail in a picture, and I'd gaze at her from the side, quite close, wanting to bend over her, touch her neck with my lips, with tiny kisses barely graze the skin made taut by her movement, dissolve her warmth and smell in my mouth, work my way up to her hair—but I don't, I am held back by a sense of propriety, tact.

When the dawning day melts night's residual silver into gold
—oh, if only I could speak of ancient mornings in such phrases!—and fingers pluck the strings, the flurry of sounds will be the beginning; with the dulcet tones of her lyre, the nymph wishes to be first to greet the new day in whose warm light the oak tree casts its pleasing shadow.

For, needless to say, it was an oak tree behind her, gnarled and to our eyes quite old-looking, probably hit by lightning once, because it seemed oddly tilted, though the wind had already ripped out and scattered the withered branches, and in their places new clumps of foliage had sprouted; this not only confirmed my sense that she had to be rather advanced in years but directly indicated that we are dealing with the nymph of the oak who, strumming her lyre in the morning, was none other than Dryope, of whom we know that with her slender body and noble mien she so aroused the passion of the Arcadian shepherd Hermes that the inflamed god spent a long time pursuing her
—though let it be said in passing only long in human terms, about three lifetimes, but no more than one-third of a crow's life span—until their love was properly consummated: this was by no means an extraordinary occurrence; we might even say that the nymph, whose name suggests a female creature who turns a man into a
nymphios,
that is, a bridegroom confirming his manhood, did only what she had to do, as did the god himself; nevertheless, the love-child brought into the world of immortals by the beautiful Dryope could not be judged by the standards to which this poor dutiful mortal, almost human girl-mother, had been accustomed.

We don't intend to claim that Dryope was a timid, fragile, easy-to-frighten maid, of course; as we know, she was rather tall, strong-boned, often mentioned as having powerful limbs, and when pursued by amorous gods or men she didn't always flee; from time to time she would also attack, stand firm as if her feet had taken root, immovable like an oak, hiss, snarl, use her fists, and be ready to bite; when on the banks of cool mountain streams she took off her green mantle to wash away her body's sweat, her round arms and her thighs, exercised in running, showed firm muscles, filling out her pearly skin; her breasts, too, were firm, set high by their own, tense roundness; and her clitoris, as would be revealed in the moment of ecstasy, at the height of her pleasure, could grow as large as the phallus of a child awaking from sleep; therefore, it may be said that the god had good reason to wish to soften this hardness, tame this wildness, make tender this toughness; still, when she tore the umbilical cord with her teeth and in the bloody afterbirth between her legs glanced at the blinking, bawling, giggling, kicking issue, she let out a girlish scream of terror and had to bury her face in her hands; and no wonder, how was she to know that there was no cause for alarm, that she had given birth to a god, how could she have known that, seeing only what she could see? at that moment it seemed to her that she had yielded not to carefree Hermes' lust but to a stinking he-goat, for long, coarse strands of hair were growing on the infant's head, two tiny crescent horns sprouted from his forehead at the very spot where in people and in gods the bone protrudes just a little, and his feet
—how horrible!—terminated not in soles like ours but in hooves, like a kid's, hooves still soft and pink that in time, we know, would harden most horrendously, would clatter and throw off sparks over stone and turn an ugly black.

Terrified by the fruit of her womb, Dryope sprang up and ran away.

Her story ends here, we know no more of her, or of how she fared thereafter, and if we should want to learn more, we must rely on our imagination.

We do know, however, that Hermes found his son in the grass, and not only did the little boy's appearance cause him no surprise but it put him in a prancing good mood; by then the boy stood on his feet, or rather on his little hooves, took a few tumbles, turned a few cartwheels, rolled around and enjoyed being prickled by blades of the dewy grass; then he chased flies and wasps, plucked flowers, tore out and munched on their petals, and with his soft hornlets butted stones and trees, his body tickled with pain; to satisfy his longing for pranks he pissed on a butterfly and shat on a snake's head; in short, creation itself seemed to function perfectly within the small creature; we shouldn't be surprised, then, that with all this, the sight of the son found favor in the eyes of the father; and since fathers tend to view their sons' lives as reprises of their own, Hermes suddenly remembered the morning of his own birth, when gentle Maia had brought him into the world and laid him in his cradle, but in an unguarded moment he climbed out of the cradle and left the cave: outside he found a turtle, fashioned a lyre out of its shell, and with the lyre set out on his wanderings; by the time that even the ears of Helios' horses had vanished in the glowing red rim of the earth
—and we know precisely that this was the eve of the fourth day of the lunar month—he had killed two oxen with his bare hands, skinned them, and to roast them quickly invented fire, then proceeded to steal a whole herd of cattle to cover up his mischief before climbing back into his cradle; now he lifted up his young one, just as Apollo had lifted him, and took him up to the gods, so they could delight in him as well.