Chimera (22 page)

What a thing it is, to fly! His white wings spread and coursing easily, Pegasus drew up his legs and soared between the streetlamps and the stars. All fell into correct perspective: ships’ lanterns, shepherds’ watchfires, palace, temples, harbors, hills. Cold wind and dizzy altitude, night-loneliness—they were nothing: for the first time in my life I felt at home; I wanted never to come down. We lit on Athene’s pediment after a splendid shakedown circuit of the suburbs.

“Proetus!” I called down to the plaza. Torched guards drew back amazed; the King came out with his sheeted wife. “Anteia’s hipped out of her mind!” I cried. “Hallucinating! Don’t believe her! Hi yo, half-brother! Away!”

“Poor dear sister!” Philonoë would lament. “Honestly, honey, for all it hurts to imagine you with another woman, I guess I like your other versions of this story better.” For in some I had Anteia be a lovely woman, skin fragrant with sun, hair with sea-salt, as if she’d been day-sailing; she steals into the temple, where I lie dreaming lecherously of her cool brown thighs; suddenly her hand caresses my stomach; all my insides contract violently; I fairly explode awake; “Good Zeus!” I croak, and grab her—naked, unbelievable!—when she sits on my pallet-edge; I bury my face in her, so startled am I; pull her down with me, that electrifying skin against mine, and mirabile dictu! at the sheer enormous lust of it do indeed explode, so wholly that I’m certain liver, spleen, guts, lungs, heart, brains, and all have blown from me, and I lie a hollow shell without sense or strength, et cetera, until she restores me and we make repeated love; complaisant Proetus smiles on the ménage; Anteia is pleased when I lie to her that I was thitherto a virgin, but grows subject to fits of jealousy when I tell her later that I’ve raped an Amazon between our trysts, and breaks off the affair when she finds herself pregnant, but reinstitutes it some years later, I forget why, but breaks it off finally when she and Proetus go vacationing in Italy, et cetera, I forget. In another telling our initial intercourse is a paradigm of assumed inevitability: wittol Proetus leaves the polis on state business and bids me keep Anteia company in his absence; I spend the afternoon playing ball with their daughters in the palace, then stay to drink ale with Anteia during the evening; we talk impersonally and sporadically—mutual silences are neither unusual nor uncomfortable with that woman; on the face of it there is no overt word or deed that unambiguously indicates desire on the part of either of us; the Queen’s manner, which I find attractive, is of exhausted strength: throughout the afternoon her movements have been heavy and deliberate, like those of a helot after two straight shifts; in the evening she sits mostly without moving, and frequently upon blinking her eyes keeps them shut for a full half-minute, opening them at last with a wide stare and a heavy expiration of breath; all this I admire, but really rather abstractly, and any sexual desire that I feel is also more or less abstract; at nine-thirty or thereabouts Anteia says, “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, Bellerophon,” and I say, “All right”; to reach the palace baths she has to go through a little corridor off the ale-room where we sit; to reach Athene’s temple I must pass through this same corridor, and so it is still not quite necessary to raise eyebrows at our going to the corridor together; there, if she pauses to face me for a moment at the turning to the baths, who’s to say confidently that good nights are not on the tips of our tongues? It happens that we embrace instead before we go our separate ways, and further (but I would not say
consequently)
that our separate ways lead to the same bed, where we spend a wordless, tumultuous night together, full of tumblings and flexings and shudders and such, exciting enough to experience but boring to describe; for the subjects’ sakes I leave before sunrise, weatherless, et cetera; remorseful, Anteia soon declares to Proetus that I’ve seduced her; he obliges her, out of some mad craving for moral clarification, to repeat the adultery; presently she conceives, and fearful that the child will prove a parent-slaying demigod, considers suicide and abortion; I leave town on Pegasus and never see them again, but learn from my spies in Tiryns that the misadventure has produced a normal son and improved the marriage, et cetera. Yet another version—

Which was the truth?

“I quite understand,” Philonoë used to say, “that the very concept of objective truth, especially as regards the historical past, is problematical; also that narrative art, particularly of the mythopoeic or at least mythographic variety, has structures and rhythms, values and demands, not the same as those of reportage or historiography. Finally, as between variants among the myths themselves, it’s in their contradictions that one may seek their sense. All the same—not to say
therefore
—I’d be interested to know whether in fact you made love to my sister and wish you hadn’t, or didn’t and wish you had.”

“What a horse!” I invariably replied. “I spent the whole night learning how to fly him and unstarving myself with moussaka at all-night restaurants. By morning I was able to make a perfect four-point landing atop the statue of Abas, Proetus’s father, which stood in the breakfast-terrace of the palace. The children were delighted; Proetus blushed; Anteia flushed, hushed the kids, and hmped off with them from the table, giving her husband a last sharp look.

“ ‘We’re at your service, sir,’ I said. He bade me park my brother elsewhere, the pigeons were bad enough, then told me frankly that his wife, per program, was holding to her accusations and agitating for my life, motivated no doubt in part by some final urge, such as comes sometimes on ladies at her age and stage, to inspire jealous anger in her husband and prompt him to dramatic if not heroic action in her behalf. For himself, Q.E.D., if he believed her accusation and gave a damn, he’d arrange to have me done in quietly, with minimal fuss. But he was indifferent, except for the sake of public appearances. He therefore requested simply that I disappear. ‘At the same time she’s hollering for your head,’ he said with a sigh, ‘she’s giving out already that she’s eight hours pregnant with a semidemigod.’ Doubly impossible, I told him. He raised his hand wearily: if I would not do him the service of assassinating Perseus, at least I might leave the Queen her delusions: fact was, she did show signs of being a couple months gone again, by himself or whomever, and that condition, which given her age et cetera might as possibly be menopause, perhaps accounted for her late irrationality. His p.r. people would do their best to minimize the gossip, but as Anteia was insisting that she’d been divinely raped (half-ravished, anyhow, by a demi-deity), the best thing I could do for him was not deny the child’s paternity should she bring it to term, and in the meanwhile go and
be
a mythic hero—somewhere else.

“I shrugged. ‘Set me a task.’ ‘Kill Perseus!’ he whispered. ‘Nope.’ So he gave me a sealed letter to Iobates—diplomatic business, he declared—and asked me to deliver it to Lycia, air mail special, no peeking, no reply or return necessary, okay? ‘Okay.’ I took off, came back: ‘Which way is Lycia?’ He covered his eyes, pointed east-southeast-by-east; here I am; there it is. Philonoë’d say “Thanks for the story; you tell it better all the time.” Those were the days. And “When can we visit my sister, Bellerophon? It’s a pity the kids have never met their own cousins. Better get off to your lecture now; here’s your notes. Kiss goodbye?” I’d tear my hair then, do now, one digression still to go, Zeus Almighty, half a hundred pages in and only launched. How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn’t my cup of wine; isn’t somebody’s; my plot doesn’t rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself like a whelk-shell or the snakes on Hermes’s caduceus: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies.

Q:
“What about the purification of your blood-guilt, sir?”

A:
“Granted Pegasus, I inferred I was clear with Athene, who, Deliades having been her particular votary, I presumed to be the only god concerned.”

Q:
“How far up did Pegasus get this morning, sir?”

A:
“Not above a meter. Our investigation of this problem, to which my administration gives the highest priority, continues, and you may expect a full report after the present digression.”

Q:
“In one of the earlier meetings of this course of lectures on the First Flood of the Distinguished History of Bellerophon the Mythic Hero, required of all members of the court of Bellerophon the King in hopes of alienating them from him in partial fulfillment of the fourth quadrant (Reign and Death) of the mythobiographic Pattern, describing your recent systematic abuse of Queen Philonoë, the Princes Hippolochus and Isander, and Princess Laodamia by prolix and tactless rehearsals of your childhood, you mentioned that writing—as a means of ordinary communication as opposed to a mode of magic—will not be introduced into Hellenic culture for some centuries yet except as borrowed in isolated instances from the future by seers like Polyeidus. Yet the ‘labor’ imposed on you by King Proetus was the delivery to your late father-in-law of a diplomatic message in epistolary form. Moreover, the lecture in which you made the aforementioned mention was itself, we recall with excitement, read from a written text, at least delivered from written notes, as have been all the lectures in this thrilling course—the very word
lecture,
I believe, comes from a barbaric root-verb meaning ‘to read,’ and reading, a priori, implies writing. Finally, our presence here in the University of Lycia’s newly established Department of Classical Mythology, your stimulating requirement from us of term papers on The Story of Your Life Thus Far, et cetera, all suggest that we are, if not a literate society, at least a society to which reading and writing are not unknown. Is there not some discrepancy here?”

A:
“Yes.”

Q:
“Several other things also perplex us, sir, researchers after truth that we are and in no way disaffected from our country, our king, or our university by, respectively, your prolongation of the Carian-Solymian war, your mistreatment of good King Iobates’s gentle younger daughter, and your unseemly perversion of professorial privilege to the ends of self-aggrandizement and/or -abasement—all which we readily accept as the self-imposed rigors of the above-alluded-to Pattern. Are you not inclined, as we are, to see a seerly hand, perhaps Polyeidus’s, in such apparent lapses of authorial control, even narrative coherence, as the presentation, before we’ve even heard today’s lecture, of these Q’s and A’s, which in fact
follow
that lecture? Or the mysterious, to us very nearly unintelligible, text of the lecture itself, which reads:

“Good evening. On behalf of the mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth, I would like to thank
[supply name of university, publisher, sponsor of reading, et cetera]
for this opportunity to put straight a number of discrepancies and
problematical details in the standard accounts of his life and work; to lay to rest certain items of disagreeable gossip concerning both his public and his private life; and to respond to any questions you may wish to put concerning his fabulous career.

“My general interest in the wandering-hero myth dates from my thirtieth year, when reviewers of my novel
The Sot-Weed Factor
(1960) remarked that the vicissitudes of its hero
—
Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet and Laureate of Maryland
—
follow in some detail the pattern of mythical heroic adventure as described by Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, and other comparative mythologists. The suggestion was that I had used this pattern as the basis for the novel’s plot. In fact I’d been till then unaware of the pattern’s existence; once apprised of it, I was struck enough by the coincidence (which I later came to regard as more inevitable than remarkable) to examine those works by which I’d allegedly been influenced, and my next novel,
Giles Goat-Boy
(1966), was for better or worse the conscious and ironic orchestration of the Ur-Myth which its predecessor had been represented as being. Several of my subsequent fictions
—
the long short-story
Menelaiad
and the novella
Perseid,
for example
—
deal directly with particular manifestations of the myth of the wandering hero and address as well a number of their author’s more current thematic concerns: the mortal desire for immortality, for instance, and its ironically qualified fulfillment
—
especially by the mythic hero’s transformation, in the latter stages of his career, into the sound of his own voice, or the story of his life, or both. I am forty.

“Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience and therefore point always to daily reality, to write realistic
fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick, however meritorious such fiction may be in other respects. Better to address the archetypes directly. To the objection that classical mythology, like the Bible, is no longer a staple of the average reader’s education, and that, consequently, the old agonies of Oedipus or Antigone are without effect on contemporary sensibility, I reply, hum, I forget what, something about comedy and self-explanatory context. Anyhow, when I had completed the
Perseid
novella, my research after further classical examples of the aforementioned themes led me to the minor mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth.

“As it was among other things the very unfamiliarity of Bellerophon’s story, even to those acquainted with the myths of Menelaus and Helen or Perseus and Andromeda, that I found appropriate to my purposes, a brief summary might be helpful. Here is Robert Grave’s excellent account in
The Greek Myths,
itself a collation of the texts of Antoninus Liberalis, Apollodorus, Eustathius, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the
Iliad,
and Tzetzes: