Glory and the Lightning (19 page)

“Would that there were many such enchantresses in the world,” he would reply. “It would be a more delightful place.”

Had they been told that he loved her—a secret withheld even from Aspasia for fear that she might exploit it—they would have thought they were listening to madness, for what man loved a woman except in poetry which was not part of life but only an amusement for idle hours and dreams?

On this early morning, Aspasia, unattended, walked through the palace from her gorgeous chamber to the harem. She wore the eastern dress and not the tunic or peplos of Greece. The robe was blue, a color Al Taliph preferred for it warned against evil spirits, tight and revealing over shoulders and breast and waist and belly, then unfolding into flares and pleats bordered with gold embroidery. She did not wear a headdress and her hair floated behind her in a pale bright cloud, and embraced her hips and thighs. Her arms were partially bare and clasped by many gemmed bracelets, and her sandals were also gemmed over white arches and painted toes. Her strong yet delicate face was set, even fixed, and her eyes, the color of topaz wine, were very sober. The eunuchs everywhere, and the guards, stared after her, the guards furtively desiring her and even the eunuchs feeling a faint stir in their mutilated loins. They all believed she was an evil spirit, for what human woman possessed such divine beauty, such grace, such fluid movements of hidden limbs, such whiteness and scarlet and gilt? Her very regality was a wonder, and foreign, and intimidating. They believed that she did not even eat, for she was not plump; demons did not eat human food. They dined on unmentionable abominations. It was rumored that she conversed like a man at the table with their lord, and that alone frightened the inhabitants of the palace, who whispered that she was not truly a woman but a demonic masculine apparition. So, she was unclean, and dangerous. Each man, eunuch and guard, made the sign against the evil eye when she appeared.

She passed through gleaming white halls whose arched doorways blew with blue or red or yellow silk curtains, and whose floors were strewn with colorful Persian carpets. Silken couches and Chinese tables lined the walls, and immense vases filled with flowers. Through the grilled archways facing the gardens there came the passionate smell of blossoms and water and resin, and the cries of parrots and the screams of peacocks and the quacking of ducks and the songs of the gardeners. Everywhere there were dancing reflections from fountains and sunlight, striking on floor and fretted stone walls and on mosaics like strenuous paintings. There was the music of zithers and harps at a distance, and the far sound of women’s smothered laughter or the slap of some hurrying slave’s footsteps on marble.

It was still very early, yet the palace hummed with life and movement, and the presence of many people. Aspasia came to the bronze double doorway which led to the harem, and which was guarded by six enormous eunuchs, hairless, fat, naked to the waist, arrayed in magnificent trousers and with turbans on their heads, their hands holding bared swords. They wore golden chains about their thick necks and gold bracelets were clasped on their vast upper arms. Their shoes, of gilt leather, were turned up sharply at the toes. They eyed Aspasia without favor, and their eyes, sunken in fat, were sullen if respectful. She noticed that they made the sign against the evil eye, and she smiled and her beautiful white teeth sparkled. But she had to wait until the eunuchs opened the carved metal doors for her, and they did not hasten.

She entered the large room where the women of the harem disported themselves. Here it was dimmer, the light shaded by carved ebony screens from Cathay, the rugs thicker, one upon another, the walls hung with silken curtains, the floor scattered with heaped cushions of every hue, the divans soft and luxurious, the multitude of small brass tables from India covered with baskets and bowls of fruit and sweetmeats and cakes, the brazen urns redolent of wine even this early, and everywhere flowers on table and on floor so that the air here, hotter than in the halls, made the head swim with scent and musk and airlessness for all many slaves waved fans of ostrich plumes continually. There was also an odor of perfumed sweat, sickening to western senses. The overpowering luxury never failed to displease Aspasia, who thought it wanton and stale and deadening. It reeked of woman flesh, indolent and dissipated and oiled and sultry, and sensual. Aspasia thought of it as a voluptuous kennel of coddled bitches, constantly in heat and delivering litters. There had been a certain atmosphere of controlled and elegant austerity in the house of Thargelia, a civilized restraint, for all it had been sybaritic too.

She found the harem depraved with a spiritual depravity unknown in Miletus or Greece. She often thought that over-elaboration, the overly intricate and embroidered, the overly suffused with animal comforts, the too opulent, were not only decadent and cloying but hinted of dissolution and decay. Possessing the western mind she was revolted by redundance, by detail heaped on detail, as one is with exhaustive carnality—surfeited. She was never to come to terms with the eastern mind, the excessively ornate. In some peculiar fashion it wearied and oppressed her. She was aware of the hostility with which she was greeted.

The harem, as usual, was filled with women and babble and noise and clashing music and laughter. Some little naked children raced about, complaining and stuffing their mouths or flinging themselves upon their mothers with petulant cries and demands, or fighting. A few small monkeys swung from curtains and screeched, and a few cats yowled and leaped upon tables to devour the dainties there, and parrots shrieked from gilt cages. The hot dimmed air seemed to Aspasia the very atmosphere of Hades, reeking. There was a fetid smell, a sickening odor of overripe fruit, dates, figs, citrons and melons, all rotting away in beautifully painted and enameled Chinese bowls. Even the flowers had a sickly effluvium.

The fat oiled women, clad in rich trousers and tight bodices, reclined on cushions as bloated as themselves, or on soft divans, unveiled, languorous, smiling, gossiping, laughing, playing with the children or upbraiding slaves who were rough with their hairbrushes and combs, applying odoriferous cosmetics and perfumes, reddening their lips, scratching their hair or their voluptuous bodies, chattering, murmuring lewdly or slapping the more obstreperous children who were too exigent. The ostrich fans waved but could give no coolness nor for long banished the swarms of insistent flies which bit and polluted the sweetmeats and fruit. The music jangled on Aspasia’s ear, for it seemed discordant to her and without coherence.

For a long time now Aspasia had endeavored to teach the younger concubines the skills of reading and writing and the appreciation of art, and even, unfortunate girl! philosophy. At first the young girls had appeared interested and had even learned a little. Then their natural indolence overcame them and they asked her, in their light pouting voices, of what use this would all be to them. She had replied, “It is your right as a human being to learn about the world and to comprehend it.” At this the older women had laughed immoderately and had said, “It is enough for women to understand men.” Aspasia reluctantly acknowledged, from her teachings at Thargelia’s school, that that knowledge was the most important in the world, but there was also the question of a woman’s mind and soul. When she would tell the women this they would stare at her risibly and shrug, as at the intrusion of barbaric ideas. They had everything a man could give them, and what more did they need or desire? Too, who had said that a woman had a mind and soul apart from men? They had never heard such absurdities. In the meantime, life was enjoyable and for that purpose were they not created? In the face of this mocking argument, this bland and superior amusement, this contempt for her “barbarian” ideas, she could only fume and despair.

Still, she persisted. Today, as she entered, to the familiar humming babble and broad and ridiculing smiles and the stuffing of mouths and the clamor of tambourine and zither and harp and flute and lyre, and the screaming of children, she saw, to her vague alarm, that Kurda, himself, was stationed here instead of the usual eunuchs. He stood half-hidden against a drapery and Aspasia unconsciously shrank, for all she despised him. His eyes gleamed like the eyes of a wild animal in the dusk. She could only ignore him; and the sight of his deliberately bared sword.

She waited until there was a comparative silence, trying to avoid noticing the smiling repudiation in the women’s eyes, their overt envious scorn of her, their awaiting her next words and gestures as one awaits the antics of a comedian.

She said, “You have often remarked, ladies, that I am the favorite of our lord, the noble Al Taliph, and it has made you resentful and unhappy. Did you ever ask why he preferred me to you?”

They ruminated on that, exchanging mirthful sly glances. Then one of the wives, seated aside on a divan, said, “You make him laugh, and he needs laughter, as a king needs a fool to entertain him. We serve his deepest needs and passions, as you do not. What! You have never even borne him a child! Therefore, he has not regarded you as a woman but as a jester, a tumbler, a dancing girl of no importance.” She spoke out of malice, for she knew that Aspasia was treated as a queen in this house.

“I speak to his soul and his mind,” said Aspasia, standing among them. Her face was proud and pale.

The women burst out laughing, throwing their heads on each other’s shoulders, slapping each other’s hands, feigning exhaustion of laughter, sprawling on their many colored cushions, and exhaling sighs of exquisite titillation. The slaves laughed also, and the children screamed with delight, not knowing why. The whole harem moved in a tumult of derisive joy. Kurda grinned at this evil woman. Only here did she find her proper position as a rejected slave.

One of the wives said, “Last night my lord called me to his bed and was pleased by my ministrations and I slept at his feet until dawn, and then he kindly rewarded me with a gift and a smile. Where were you last night, O Aspasia of Miletus?”

“This morning,” said a concubine of about thirteen, “my lord summoned me for unusual pleasures and I gratified him and he said I was delicious. Where were you this morning, Lady?”

I was in his libraries, reading, thought Aspasia. Nevertheless, she was filled with angry humiliation, for all that she knew of Al Taliph and his harem. He never spoke of these women to her and in her fashion she had thought them of no consequence to him.

“I am about to bear his third child,” said the second wife. “Is your belly swollen, O Aspasia of Miletus, you his favorite?”

It is absurd to feel betrayal, thought Aspasia. I am a hetaira. I am his chief concubine. Why, then, should I feel degraded?

“He was weary when he came dusty from the city yesterday,” said the third wife. “Did he summon you to his green marble bath, there to anoint him and massage him and clamber on his body for pleasure? Did he then slide into his pool and invite you to engage in more acts of love and tender consolations? Did you disport with him like a dolphin, a female dolphin pursued by her mate? Did you then enfold him in soft garments, give him wine while he reclined and sing to him softly until he slept? Where were you, O Aspasia, learned one?” She added: “I am again with child by him.”

I was pondering on Hesiod, thought Aspasia, and she was mortified. Never had Al Taliph asked these things of her as he asked his wives and concubines. She was formally summoned to his bed when he desired her, and then fondled and loved, but in no other way was she asked to serve him out of her woman’s heart. After the lovemaking he would discuss poetry and politics and art and science with her, and philosophy, while her head faced his on the pillow, and then he would sleep. She forgot that his arm would still embrace her as a treasure. Now she only thought of his disporting with his wives and his slaves, and laughing, and a terrible sorrow overcame her which she had come to fear was the sorrow of love.

Then her pride came to her rescue. She was an Ionian woman, and she had been educated and trained and was a human being, not a mere thing such as these women. It was a poor consolation, but she clung to it. Let him disport himself with these animals she had tried to raise to the status of humanity. She had his mind and respect—she hoped—and could entertain him with epigrams and stories and philosophies, and was that not the better part? She paused, doubtful.

She then noticed two little naked girls disporting themselves among the other children, and they were strangers to her. They were not more than seven years old, pretty olive-colored little girls far from puberty, and as hairless, except for their flowing black hair, as young pigs. Slaves kept catching them to massage their small bodies with scented oils and to comb and dress their long hair and weave pearls among it and brush it. Their infant bodies were smooth and vulnerable, their private parts closed and tender. Their only ornaments were earrings of pearl and enamel. Their childish eyes were smeared with kohl, their plump cheeks colored with unguents, their voices keen and babyish. They ran from ministrations and shrilled with the other children, until caught again. One was eating pomegranates with gusto, her chin running with scarlet. The other hugged a doll to her breastless chest, and kissed it lavishly and jingled its bells, holding it up for admiration. They were as newborn as lambs, and Aspasia was touched.

“I have never seen these little ones before,” she said. “Who is the mother of these twin children?”

The women tittered, overcome with laughter. Then one of the wives said, “Our lord purchased them in the slave market yesterday, as a gift to a great merchant tonight, from Damascus.”

Aspasia was appalled, and she thought of Cleo, who, at thirteen and still not nubile, had been given to Cadmus. She said, “As handmaidens, until they are of a proper age?”

The women were even more hilarious, rocking on their fat buttocks. “No,” said one, “as concubines.”

Aspasia disbelieved. “They will die,” she said.

The eldest wife said with superiority over this barbarian: “They have been introduced today to phallic instruments of ivory.”