Lost in the Funhouse (26 page)

All this, mind, in a spirit of raillery; Clytemnestra would chuckle, and Merope chide him for overboldness. But I saw how the Queen’s eyes flashed, no longer at my cadenzas; and Merope’d say later, “At least he can talk about something besides politics and music.” I laughed too at his sallies, however anxioused by Merope’s pleasure in her new role, for the wretch was sharp, and though it sickened me to picture him atop the Queen—not to mention my frustrate darling!—heaving his paunch upon her and grinning through his whiskers, I admired his brash way with them and his gluttony for life’s delights, so opposite to my poor temper. Aye, aye, there was my ruin:
I
liked
the scoundrel after all, as I liked Clytemnestra and even Agamemnon; as I liked Merope, quite apart from loving or desiring her, whose impish spirit and vivacity reblossomed, in Aegisthus’s presence, for the first time since we’d left the goats, and quite charmed the Mycenaean court. Most of all I was put down by the sheer energy of the lot of them: sackers of cities, breakers of vows, scorners of minstrels—admirable, fearsome! Watching Clytemnestra’s eyes, I could hear her snarl with delight beneath the gross usurper, all the while she contemned his luxury and schemed her schemes; I could see herself take ax to Agamemnon, laugh with Aegisthus at their bloody hands, draw him on her at the corpse’s side—smile, even, as she dirked him at the moment of climax! Him too I could hear laugh at her guile as his life pumped out upon her: bloody fine trick, Clytie girl, and enjoy your kingdom! And in Merope, my gentle, my docile, my honey: in her imperious new smile, in how she smartly snatched and bit the hand Aegisthus pinched her with, there began to stir a woman more woman than the pair of Leda’s hatchlings. No, no, I was not up to them, I was not up to life—but it was myself I despised therefor, not the world.

Weeks passed; Clytemnestra made no reference to my
gaffe;
Merope grew by turns too silent with me, too cranky, or too sweet. I began to imagine them both Aegisthus’s already; indeed, for aught I knew in dismalest moments they might be whoring it with every man in the palace, from Minister of Trade to horse-groom, and laughing at me with all Mycenae. Meanwhile, goat-face Aegisthus continued to praise my art (not without discernment for all his coarseness, as he had a good ear and knew every minstrel in the land) even as he teased my timid manner and want of experience. No keener nose in Greece for others’ weaknesses: he’d remark quite seriously, between jests, that with a little knowledge of the world I might become in fact its chief minstrel; but if I tasted no more of life than Clytemnestra’s dinner parties, of love no more than Merope’s favors however extraordinary, perforce I’d wither in the bud while my
colleagues grew to fruition. Let Athens, he’d declare, be never so splendid; nonetheless, of a man whose every day is passed within its walls one says, not that he’s been to Athens, but that he’s been nowhere. Every song I composed was a draught from the wine jug of my experience, which if not replenished must anon run dry.…

“Speaking of wine,” he added one evening, “two of Clytie’s boats are sailing tomorrow with a cargo of it to trade along the coast, and I’m shipping aboard for the ride. Ten ports, three whorehouses each, home in two months. Why not go too?”

At thought of his departure my heart leaped up: I glanced at Merope, standing by with her flagon, and found her coolly smiling meward, no stranger to the plan. Aegisthus read my face and roared.

“She’ll keep, Minstrel! And what a lover you’ll be when you get back!”

Clytemnestra, too, arched brows and smiled. Under other circumstances I might’ve found some sort of voyage appealing, since I’d been nowhere; as was I wanted only to see Aegisthus gone. But those smiles—on the one hand of the queen of my person, on the other of that queen of my heart whom I would so tardily recrown—altogether unnerved me. I’d consider the invitation overnight, I murmured, unless the Queen ordered one course or the other.

“I think the voyage is a good idea,” Clytemnestra said promptly, and added in Aegisthus’s teasing wise: “With you two out of the palace, Merope and I can get some sleep.” My heart was stung by their new camaraderie and the implication, however one took it, that their sleep had been being disturbed. The Queen asked for Merope’s opinion.

“He’s often said a minstrel has to see the world,” my darling replied. Was it spite or sadness in the steady eyes she turned to me? “Go see it. It’s all the same to me.”

Prophetic words! How they mocked the siren Experience, whose song I heeded above the music of my own heart! To perfect the irony of my foolishness, Aegisthus here changed
strategy, daring me, as it were, to believe the other, bitter meaning of her words, which I was to turn upon my tongue for many a desolated year.

“Don’t forget,” he reminded me with a grin: “I might be out to trick you! Maybe I’ll heave you overboard one night, or maroon you on a rock and have Merope to myself! For all you know, Minstrel, she might want to be rid of you; this trip might be
her
idea.…”

Limply I retorted, his was a sword could cut both ways. My accurst and heart-hurt fancy cast up reasons now for sailing in despite of all: my position in Mycenae was hot, and might be cooled by a sea journey; Agamemnon could scarcely blame me for his wife’s misconduct if I was out of town on her orders; perhaps there were Chief-Minstrelships to be earned in other courts; I’d achieve a taintless fame and send word for Merope to join me. At very least she would be safe from his predations while we were at sea; my absence, not impossibly, would make her heart fonder; I’d find some way to get us out of Mycenae when I returned, et cetera. Meantime … I shivered … the world, the world! My breath came short, eyes teared; we laughed, Aegisthus and I, and at Clytemnestra’s smiling hest drank what smiling Merope poured.

And next day we two set sail, and laughed and drank across the wine-dark sea to our first anchorage: a flowered, goated, rockbound isle. Nor did Aegisthus’s merry baiting cease when we put ashore with nine large amphorae: the local maidens, he declared, were timid beauties whose wont it was to spy from the woods when a ship came by; nimble as goddesses they were at the weaving of figured tapestries, which they bartered for wine, the island being grapeless; but so shy they’d not approach till the strangers left, whereupon they’d issue from their hiding places and make off with the amphorae, leaving in exchange a fair quantity of their ware. Should a man be clever enough to lay hold of them, gladly they’d buy their liberty with love; but to catch them was like catching at rainbows
or the chucklings of the sea. What he proposed therefore was that we conceal us in a ring of wine jugs on the beach, bid the crew stand by offshore, snatch us each a maiden when they came a-fetching, and enjoy the ransom. Better yet, I could bait them with music, which he’d been told was unknown on the island.

“Unless you think I’m inventing all this to trick you,” he added with a grin. “Wouldn’t you look silly jumping out to grab an old wine merchant, or squatting there hot and bothered while I sail back to Mycenae!”

He
dared
me to think him honest; dared me to commit myself to delicious, preposterous fantasy. Ah, he played me like a master lyrist his instrument, with reckless inspiration, errless art.

“The bloody world’s a dare!” he went so far as to say, elbowing my arm as we ringed the jugs. “Your careful chaps never look foolish, but they never taste the best of it, either!” Think how unlikely the prospect was, he challenged me, that anything he’d said was true; think how crushinger it would be to be victim of my own stupendous gullibility more than of his guile; how bitterer my abandonment in the knowledge that he and Merope and Clytemnestra were not only fornicating all over the palace but laughing at my innocence, as they’d done from the first, till their sides ached. “On the other hand,” he concluded fiercely, and squeezed my shoulder, “think what you’ll miss if it turns out I was telling you the truth and you were too sensible to believe it! Young beauties, Minstrel, shy as yourself and sweet as a dream! That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Meropes by the dozen, ours for the snatching! Oh my gods, what the world can be, if you dare grab hold! And what a day!”

The last, at least, was real enough: never such a brilliant forenoon, sweet beach, besplendored sea! My head ached with indecision; the rough crew grinned by the boat, leaning on their oars. Life roared oceanlike with possibility: outrageous risks! outrageous joys! I stood transfixed, helpless to choose; Aegisthus
snatched my lyre, clubbed me with a whang among the amphorae, sprang into the boat. I lay where felled, in medias res, and wept with relief to be destroyed at last; the sailors’ guffaws as they pulled away were like a music.

5

Long time I lay a-beachèd, even slept, and dreamed a dream more real than the itch that had marooned me. My privy music drew the island girls: smooth-limbed, merry-eyed Meropes; I seized the first brown wrist that came in reach; her sisters fled. Mute, or too frightened to speak, my victim implored me with her eyes. She was lovely, slender, delicate, and (farewell, brute dreams) real: a human person, sense and flesh, undeniable as myself and for aught I knew as lonely. A real particular history had fetched her to that time and place, as had fetched me; she too, not impossibly, was gull of the wily world, a trickèd innocent and hapless self-deceiver. Perhaps she had a lover, or dreamed of one; might be she was fond of singing, balmed fragile sense with art. She was in my power; I let her go; she stood a moment rubbing her wrist. I begged her pardon for alarming her; it was loneliness, I said, made my fancy cruel. My speech was no doubt foreign to her; no doubt she expected ravishment, having been careless enough to get caught; perhaps she’d
wanted
a tumbling, been slow a-purpose, what did I know of such matters? It would not have surprised me to see her sneer at a man not man enough to force her; perhaps I would yet, it was not too late; I reached out my hand, she caught it up with a smile and kissed it, I woke to my real-life plight.

In the days thereafter, I imagined several endings to the dream: she fled with a laugh or hoot; I pursued her or did not, caught her or did not, or she returned. In my favorite ending we became friends: gentle lovers, affectionate and lively. I called her by the name of that bee-sweet form I’d graced her with, she me my own in the clover voice that once had crooned
it. I tried imagining her mad with passion for me, as women in song were for their beloveds—but the idea of my inspiring such emotion made me smile. No, I would settle for a pastoral affection spiced with wild seasons, as I’d known; I did not need adoring. We would wed, get sons and daughters; why hadn’t I Merope? We would even be faithful, a phenomenon and model to the faithless world.…

Here I’d break off with a groan, not that my bedreamèd didn’t exist (or any other life on my island, I presently determined, except wild goats and birds), but that she did, and I’d lost her. The thought of Merope in the swart arms of Aegisthus, whether or not she mocked my stranding, didn’t drive me to madness or despair, as I’d expected it would; only to rue that I’d not been Aegisthus enough to keep her in my own. Like him, like Agamemnon, like Iphigenia for all I knew, I had got my character’s desert.

Indeed, when I’d surveyed the island and unstoppered the first of the crocks, I was able to wonder, not always wryly, whether the joke wasn’t on my deceivers. It was a perfumed night; the sea ran hushed beneath a gemmèd sky; there were springs of fresh water, trees of wild fruit, vines of wild grape; I could learn to spear fish, snare birds, milk goats. My lyre was unstrung forever, but I had a voice to sing with, an audience once more of shaggy nans and sea birds—and my fancy to recompense for what it had robbed me of. There was all the world I needed; let the real one clip and tumble, burn and bleed; let Agamemnon pull down towns and rape the widows of the slain; let Menelaus shake the plain with war-shouts and Helen take on all comers; let maids grow old, princes rich, poets famous—I had imagination for realm and mistress, and her dower language! Isolated from one world by Agamemnon, from another by my own failings, I’d make Mycenaes of which I was the sole inhabitant, and sing to myself from their golden towers the one tale I knew.

Crockèd bravery; I smile at it now, but for years it kept me off the rocks, and though my moods changed like the sea-face,
I accomplished much. Now supposing I’d soon be rescued I piled up beacons on every headland; now imagining a lengthy tenure, in fits of construction I raised me a house, learned to trap and fish, cultivated fruits and berries, made goatsmilk cheese and wrappings of hide—and filled jar after jar with the distillations of my fancy. Then would come sieges of despair, self-despisal, self-pity; gripped as by a hand I would gasp with wretchedness on my pallet, unable to muster resolve enough to leap into the sea. Impossible to make another hexameter, groan at another sundown, weep at another rosy-fingered dawn! But down the sun went, and re-rose; anon the wind changed quarter; I’d fetch me up, wash and stretch, and with a sigh prepare a fresh batch of ink, wherein I was soon busily aswim.

It was this invention saved me, for better or worse. I had like my fellow bards been used to composing in verse and committing the whole to memory, along with the minstrel repertoire. But that body of song, including my Mycenaean productions, rang so hollow in my stranded ears I soon put it out of mind. What are Zeus’s lecheries and Hera’s revenge, to a man on a rock? No past musings seemed relevant to my new estate, about which I found such a deal to say, memory couldn’t keep pace. Moreover, the want of any audience but asphodel, goat, and tern played its part after all in the despairs that threatened me: a man sings better to himself if he can imagine someone’s listening. In time therefore I devised solutions to both problems. Artist through, I’d been wont since boyhood when pissing on beach or bank to make designs and clever symbols with my water. From this source, as from Pegasus’s idle hooftap on Mount Helicon, sprang now a torrent of inspiration: using tanned skins in place of a sand-beach, a seagull-feather for my tool, and a mixture of wine, blood, and squid-ink for a medium, I developed a kind of coded markings to record the utterance of mind and heart. By drawing out these chains of symbols I could so preserve and display my tale, it was unnecessary to remember it. I could therefore compose more and faster; I came largely to exchange song for written speech,
and when the gods vouchsafed me a further great idea, that of launching my productions worldward in the empty amphorae, they loosed from my dammèd soul a Deucalion-flood of literature.