Sappho's Leap (5 page)

His arms enfolded me. His heart thundered against mine. We stared into each other's eyes as if they were torches lighting a pitch-black room. His lips found my lips. The inside of my mouth and the inside of his became one. His huge legs wrapped around my tiny waist. The inside and the outside of my body became one.

Aphrodite smiled down on us and blew her hot breath into all the orifices of our bodies. What was hard and strong opened into what was soft and warm. We moved together like dolphins playing in the waves, tail chasing tail, head nuzzling head. Then we became like horse and rider. There was no beginning of each other and no ending. We were one animal, one demigod, with four legs and two pairs of wings.

So
this
was the thunder of Pegasus—poetry's racehorse! So this was where Aphrodite's softness and the flinty arrows of her devilish son became one. Soft became hard, hard soft, outside in, inside out.

Time vanished. Space collapsed. The stars shone in the day sky. If we stayed together, the sun would never be quenched at night. We would make light with the heat of our bodies and spin off another universe between us. Our loving was that powerful.

At last, under a dawn sky of red and violet, we staggered back to the boat from our idyll in the olive grove. My insides were sore from Alcaeus' rough love. I wanted to feel sore forever. The sailors stared at me and smirked as if they knew.

“My darling boy,” Alcaeus joked. “I'd almost think you were a
girl
!”

The next night, we slept aboard ship but did not touch. The wind whipped and whistled in the rigging and the oars slammed against the side of the boat. Several of them floated away. Two men were lost off the bowsprit as if mythical monsters were nearby and the whole sea had turned into Scylla and Charybdis. In the shrieking of the wind, in the screeching and tearing of the ropes, the gods were heard:

“
Alcaeus is your first true love
,” Aphrodite sang in the voice of the wind, “
but he doesn't know it yet.
”

“Then come and guide him,” I whispered.

“
When the time is right
,” she said. “
Love you as I do, I cannot hurry fate. The spinners spin as slowly as they will.
”

“Unfair Aphrodite!”

“
I have been called unfair before
,” she laughed and disappeared.

Aphrodite has everything,

Can renew her virginity

With one immersion in the sea.

What can I give her?

All night the ropes of the ship cried like skinned cats. All night the stars hid behind clouds. The boat rocked precipitously. We were sorry we had not beached our boat and slept ashore in the shelter of the great sail.

The next morning, it was improbably clear and bright. Dawn's fingertips touched our unfurling sails with rose. We sailed around the island to Mytilene with three of Alcaeus' men as a practice run. Two would go ashore with him to do the bloody deed. Another and I would remain to watch the ship. We were to seek harbor in a hidden inlet near Hiera, waiting for word from them. But before we reached Hiera, when we were hugging the shore between the Temple of Dionysus at Brisa and the beginning of the Gulf of Hiera, a black ship fitted with a great black sail began following us.

At first Alcaeus dismissed this as coincidence, but soon it became clear that we were its quarry and it was swifter than we.

A race began along the rocky coast. As the black boat came closer, we saw that the sailors wore satyr masks, shields with the emblem of Pittacus, and brandished bronze-tipped spears.

“Pirates!” was Alcaeus' first thought, but these were no ordinary pirates. Pittacus had sent the boat. Politics played a part in this piracy. I prayed to Aphrodite.

“You are praying to the wrong goddess,” Alcaeus barked. “She doesn't give a damn about this sort of thing. Try Athena. She's a warrior! She's the one who rescued Odysseus!”

Of course he would joke grimly at a time like this.

For a while it seemed that, using only our sail, we could outrun the black ship before the wind. Alcaeus' sailor boys were good, but not good enough. We had lost too many oars and the black ship had oars aplenty and slaves to man them. The waves were rough and rose on either side. Alcaeus had sung of all this in his songs.

Look before you sail,
he had famously sung,
once at sea, you have to ride what comes.
This was not the time to remind him of his prophecy.

I remember the swell of the waves, the slop of seawater over the sides, and our boat seeming to go backward, as in a nightmare. The black boat was irrevocably gaining on us. The smells of wet wood, pitch pine, and the sea always bring back those terrifying moments. The enemy boat came out of the spray with its fierce eyes staring and its sea-worn battering ram like the tusk of a mythical beast. It approached, gathering speed from its oars, until its bowsprit was poised to pierce our virgin hull. The satyrs crouched on deck, ready to leap aboard our ship and take us.

“Jump!” Alcaeus commanded as the satyrs from the black ship rushed to capture him. I looked at him one last time, tears blinding me. But I could still blurrily see his beloved face. I jumped overboard and began to swim as if furies were behind me.

“We'll meet again,” he screamed, “in this world or the next!”

I swam like mad for shore while my breath still held.

Because I had loved him but never wholly possessed him, he stayed in my mind like a myth through subsequent adventures. When we met again, we were both older, but were we any wiser?

Shipwrecked, parted from Alcaeus, swimming for dear life to the shore of my green island, I found myself unmoored from time. I became weary, exhausted. My breath felt as if it would fail me. Then, just as I thought I was going down, a sharp nudge in my buttocks awakened me and I looked down to find myself buoyed by dolphins. These playful creatures leapt and dove around me, lifting me up when I was most exhausted. They ferried me to shore on a deserted coast and left me there to brave the elements.

A search party had been sent out for me, led by my grandfather, but of course I did not know this at the time. I lived on the sandy coast for days, until my lips were parched and I was so hungry I took to eating crabs that I caught and cracked open. My chiton torn into rags, my skin burned from the sun, I hardly looked like a woman at all—let alone the boy I was masquerading as—but rather like a strange human crab scuttling along the beach.

I came to know why our ancestors worshiped Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane, above all other gods. The sea is the source of life for an island people. But it is even more capricious than golden Aphrodite who was born from it, bearing its wildness. The ocean's roar nearly convinced me to abandon Aphrodite for Poseidon. Perhaps it was because I wavered in my fidelity to the goddess that she cursed me. Aphrodite is a goddess who tolerates no disloyalty. Actually, that is one of the great characteristics of the gods—fierce jealousy of each other. The gods are babies with the appetites of grown men and women. That's why they torment us so.

I do not know how long I lived on that timeless beach dreaming of Alcaeus to keep myself alive. Day gave way to night, and night to day. I built a hut for myself and learned to catch fish in my bare hands. I wove leaves for my hat and rushes for my bed. After fear left me, I was proud that I could endure this life. And then I was saved yet again. My grandfather arrived with his men in a small boat, expecting to find me dead. They had been circling the seas in search, of me, and fear for my fate had made my grandfather furious instead of tender.

“Pittacus would have you killed for conspiring with Alcaeus,” he screamed. “You are a little fool who hurts no one but herself and her family. But I have saved you. I have made a pact with Pittacus to marry you off instead….I have found this certain Cercylas of Andros who seeks a wife of noble family. He has agreed to take you despite your rebellious nature.”

“Despite my rebellious nature!” I spat. “Are you my grandfather or my jailer?”

My grandfather's brow lowered in ferocity. Whatever pity he might have shown me was now undone. We sailed back to Eresus, without exchanging a word.

So I was to be married to someone ugly but sufficiently rich to crush my spirit. It was thought that weaving and raising children would substitute for the gifts of the muses, and that, buried in domesticity, I would have no time for political plots or love affairs. Or singing.

Marriage and death were not so dissimilar in those days. When I look back on my marriage procession, I think that it might as well have been a funeral march. My mother, my grandparents, my brothers, and I journeying yet again from Eresus to Mytilene, where I was to be given to the ancient Cercylas.

Strangely, I was less angry with my grandfather than I was with my mother for abandoning me to this ghastly marriage. How could she conspire in exiling her only daughter?

I had demanded this of her as she bedecked me for my marriage—a necklace of golden grapes and quinces, matching earrings that dangled to my shoulders, a golden diadem that held my lustrous hair.

“I would rather you were married than dead, Sappho.”

“I see little difference between the two states.”

“Because you are young and think you know everything. But husbands can die and liberate you.”

“That's something to look forward to.”

“And you have other gifts that can free you. The way you held the audience at that symposium was extraordinary. Underneath my fury I was proud. It reminded me that when I was pregnant with you, a priestess made a prophecy—that you would be known in times to come.”

“Now you tell me!”

Cercylas the hideous was fifty if he was a day, and he wore a girdle to bind his paunch, which otherwise would have wobbled. His hair was sparse and draped over his baldness, fooling nobody. He smelled strongly of perfume and sweat. And wine. Like a barbarian, he loved to drink his wine unmixed with water.

He also seemed to be the sort of man who rehearsed his jokes before a symposium and then claimed they came to him at the minute as gifts of the gods. (This turned out to be true!) When, at the wedding ceremony, he gravely said to my grandfather, “I take this woman for the ploughing of legitimate children,” my brothers and I could not help but giggle. By the time the guests pelted us with nuts and fruit, I was still terrified of the fate to which I'd committed myself. I thought of Alcaeus—our passionate lovemaking and equally passionate arguments—and I looked at Cercylas as in a nightmare.

The feasting went on and on. It began at noon and continued until midnight. The wine from my grandfather's vineyards flowed like water. The food was rich and abundant—breads, fish, fowl, meats, sweets of every description. There was singing and dancing, the procession to Cercylas' house, more singing and dancing, more heaps of delicacies.

At last, at midnight, the horrible time had come. Choruses of maidens singing sweet epithalamia I myself had written accompanied us to the bridal chamber. Cercylas was by then so drunk, he reeled and staggered. I steeled myself to the pain of allowing Cercylas into that sanctuary where only Alcaeus had lovingly trespassed before.

I ate the wedding quince and Cercylas removed my girdle as ritual dictated. The maidens choired. I begged for another chorus. They choired again. Cercylas' eyes began to close.

“Sing again!” I begged the maidens.

“Damn you, Sappho,” Cercylas raged, “I will have your maidenhead!”

What maidenhead? I thought.

At last we were left alone. Cercylas stripped off his clothes and appeared in all his hideousness. Taking a pomegranate from the many fruits arranged in a bowl at the foot of the bed, he pressed six red seeds into the bridal sheet and hung it up in the window for all to see. Then he collapsed in a drunken swoon.

Raise high the roof beams!

The groom comes like Ares,

Towering above mortals

As the poets of Lesbos

Tower over all the others!

Lucky bridegroom!

We drink your health!

I lay awake in bed and pondered my fate as Cercylas snored. I felt like Persephone transported to the Land of the Dead to be the bride of Hades. I wept until I soaked my bed with tears. I thought of Alcaeus somewhere far away, banished for his treachery.

Then I slept and Aphrodite spoke to me in a dream.

She was dressed as a bride herself and was singing the epithalamium I'd written.

Raise high the roof beams!
she sang, smiling wickedly.
The groom comes like Ares….

I cried and cried inconsolably even in the dream.

“
Don't cry, my little Sappho
,” she said, like a loving mother calming an infant. “
A husband is merely a means of transport between childhood and womanhood. If it is love you want, passion you want, that always happens outside the bridal bed…. The bridal bed is where you sleep, but you will find your lovers everywhere
—
on beaches, in palaces, in apple groves, olive groves, under the shining moon…. It will be full for you
—
full of lovers, full of love, full of inspiration
!”

“But I only want Alcaeus!”

“He is not the only man on earth. Come, now, Sappho—I have had many men—Ares, Adonis, so many others—I have forgotten their names, women too. Life is meant for pleasure. There is more to life than your first man….Your life is just beginning, not ending. It will be rich and full…lucky bride! You will be free and full of life!”
Then she drifted off and I slept like the tired child I was.

I have only had one husband, so I have to judge all husbands by him. The truth is he was not an evil man. He was only weak and common and a drunk. He believed that a wife should stay indoors and tend to the looms and the slaves and the larder—except on religious holidays. If you wonder why women were so damned religious in those days, know that the festivals were the only times we got out of the house! I figured pretty quickly that my songs in honor of Aphrodite were my tickets to freedom. Once I grew famous enough to have my presence demanded at festivals, weddings, distant rituals to foreign gods, Cercylas could not hold me back. He was clever enough to know that my renown reflected glory on him. Besides, I left him alone with his dearest love—the wine he drank and drank until he fell headfirst into a delirium.