Aphrodite, Pierre Louÿs [top 50 books to read .txt] 📗
- Author: Pierre Louÿs
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Then without waiting for the astonishment of her sister to find words for expression, she continued with increasing exultation: “Yes, I have a lover! Yes! I have a lover! Why should I not have a lover like everyone, like thee, like my mother and my aunts, like the lowest of the Egyptians! Why should I not have a lover, since thou givest me no husband? I am a little girl no longer!…
[paragraph continues] I know! I know! Be silent; I know better than thyself… I am ashamed to have thee for a sovereign, thou who art someone’s slave!”
Little Cleopatra, erect, made herself as tall as possible and put her hands to her head like an Asiatic queen placing a tiara.
Her elder sister, who had listened to her, seated upon the bed, her feet drawn up, sank upon her knees to her and put her hands upon her delicate shoulders. “Thou hast a lover?”
She spoke timidly now, almost with respect. The little girl responded dryly, “If thou dost not believe me, look.”
Berenice sighed. “And when dost thou see him?”
“Three times a day.”
“Where?”
“Dost thou wish me to say?”
“Yes.”
Cleopatra questioned in her turn: “How is it that thou dost not know?”
“I know nothing, not even what happens in the Palace. Demetrios is the only subject with whom I allow myself to be interested. I have not watched thee; it is my fault, my child.”
“Watch me if thou wilt. The day when I can no longer have my will, I will kill myself. Then it will be all the same to me.”
Shaking her head, Berenice replied, “Thou art free… Besides, it is too late for thee to be confined… But… tell me, dear… Thou hast a lover… and thou holdest him?”
“I have my way of holding him.”
“Who taught thee?”
“Oh! I alone. One knows that instinctively or one never knows it. At six years, I already knew how I would later hold my lover.”
“And wilt thou not tell me?”
“Follow me.”
Berenice rose slowly, put on a tunic and a mantle, aired her hair, damp from warm sleeping, and the two left the room together.
First the young girl traversed the vestibule and went straight to the bed she had lately left. There, from under the mattress of fresh, dry byssos, she took a new, engraved key. Then, turning: “Follow me—it is far,” she said.
She ascended a staircase in the middle of the vestibule, followed a long colonnade, opened doors, walked over rings, flagstones, pale marble and twenty mosaics of twenty empty and silent halls. She descended a stone stair, crossed dark thresholds, passed echoing doors. Now and again two enormous guards stood upon mats, lance in hand. After a long time, she crossed a court by the full moon and the shadow of a palm tree caressed her hip. Berenice still followed, enveloped in her blue mantle.
At length they arrived at a thick door banded with iron like a warrior’s torso. Cleopatra slipped the key into the lock, turned twice, pushed the door; a man, gigantic in the shadow, rose to his full height at the back of this prison.
Berenice looked, was shocked, and drooping her head, said very gently, “It is thou, my child, who knowest not how to love… at least, not yet… I was right in telling thee so.”
“Love for love, I like mine better,” said the little girl. “This love, at least, gives only joy.”
Then erect upon the threshold of the chamber and without taking a step forward, she said to the man standing in the shadow: “Come—kiss my feet, son of a dog.”
And when he had done so, she kissed his lips.
NOW, having returned home with the mirror, the comb and the necklace, Demetrios was visited by a dream, during his sleep; and this was the dream:
He is going toward the jetty, among the crowd, through a strange night without a moon, without stars, without clouds, which shines of itself.
Without his knowing why, nor what draws him, he is in haste to arrive, to be there as soon as he can; but he walks with effort and the air opposes an inexplicable resistance to his legs, as deep water might hinder each step.
He trembles, he thinks that he will never arrive, that he will never know toward whom he walks thus, panting and uneasy, through the luminous obscurity.
At times the crowd disappears entirely, whether it be that it really vanishes or that he ceases to feel its presence. Then it elbows him afresh, more importunately, and all go, go, go, with a rapid and sonorous step, forward, quicker than he…
Then the human mass closes in; Demetrios pales; a man pushes him with his shoulder; a woman’s brooch tears his tunic; a young girl, pressed by the multitude, is so closely crowded against him that he senses the warmth of her skin, and she pushes away his face with frightened hands.
Suddenly he is alone, the first, upon the jetty. And as he turns to look back, he perceives in the distance a white swarm which is the whole crowd, suddenly drawn back to the Agora.
And he understands that it will advance no farther.
The jetty extends before him with all the fascination of an unfinished road which has undertaken the traverse of the sea.
He wishes to go to the Pharos, and he walks on. His legs have suddenly become light. The wind which breathes over sandy wastes drags him precipitately toward the undulating solitude into which the jetty reaches. But as he advances, the Pharos recedes before him; the jetty stretches out interminably. Soon. the high marble tower with its flaming crimson pile touches the livid horizon, palpitates, lowers, diminishes, and sets like another moon.
Demetrios still walks on.
Days and nights seem to have passed since he left in the distance the great quay of Alexandria, and he dares not turn his head for fear of seeing nothing more than the way already passed: a white line to the infinite and the sea.
Nevertheless, he turns.
Behind him lies an island covered with great trees from which enormous flowers droop.
Has he journeyed blindly, or did it rise at that very instant, becoming mysteriously visible? He does not think of asking; he accepts the impossible as a natural occurrence…
A woman is on the island. She stands before the door of the only house, her eyes half closed and her face bending over the flower of a huge iris which grows to the height of her lips. She has deep hair the color of dull gold and of a length which one might suppose marvelous by the mass of the swollen knot which lies upon her drooping neck. A black tunic covers this woman and a still blacker robe is draped over the tunic, and the iris whose scent she inhales, closing her eyes, is also tinted like the night.
On this apparel of mourning, Demetrios sees only the hair, like a golden vase upon an ebony column. He recognizes Chrysis.
The memory of the mirror and of the comb and of the necklace returns to him vaguely, but he does not believe in it, and in this singular dream only the reality seems to him a dream…
“Come,” she says. “Enter behind me.”
He follows her. Slowly she ascends a staircase covered with white skins. Her arm rests over the balustrade, her bare heels float under her skirt.
The house has but one story. Chrysis halts upon the last step. “There are four rooms,” she says. “When thou hast seen them, thou wilt never again come forth. Wilt thou follow me? Darest thou?”
But he would follow her anywhere. She opens the first door and closes it behind him.
The room is narrow and long. It is lighted by a single window which frames the whole sea. To the right and to the left, two little tables bear a dozen rolled volumes.
“Here are the books thou lovest,” says Chrysis. “There are no others.”
Demetrios opens them: they are the “###140###neus” of Chaeremon, the “Return” of Alexis, the “Mirror of Lais” of Aristippos, the “Witch,” the “Cyclops” and the “Bucolics” of Theocritos, the
[paragraph continues] “###140###dipos at Colonos,” the “Odes” of Sappho and some other works. In the midst of this ideal library, a young girl reclines, silent, upon some cushions.
“Now,” murmurs Chrysis, drawing from a long golden case a manuscript of a single leaf, “here is the page of antique verse which thou never readest alone without weeping.”
The young man reads at random:
<<Oi men ar’ ethreneon, epi de stenaxonto gynaikes.
Teisin d’ Andromaxe leykulenos Erxe gooio,
Ektoros androfonoio kare meta xersin exoysa
Aner, ap’ aiunos neos uler, kadde me xeren
Aeipeis en megaroisi: pais d’ eti nepois aytus,
On tekomen su t’ egu te dysammoroi….>>
He stops, casting at Chrysis a tender, surprised look. “Thou?” he says to her, “thou showest me this?”
“Ah! thou hast not seen all. Follow me. Follow me, quickly!” They open another door.
The second room is square. It is lighted by a single window which frames all nature. In the center, a wooden stand bears a mass of red clay and in the corner, on a curved chair, a young girl rests in silence.
“Here thou wilt model Andromeda, Zagreus, and the Horses of the Sun. As thou wilt create them for thyself alone, thou wilt destroy them before thy death.”
“It is the House of Happiness,” says Demetrios, under his breath.
And he rests his forehead in his hand.
But Chrysis opens another door.
The third chamber is vast and round. It is lighted by a single window which frames the whole blue sky. Its walls are bronze grilles, reticulated in regular lozenges, through which steals the music of flutes and citheri, played in a melancholy mode by invisible musicians. And against the farthest wall, upon a throne of green marble, a young girl sits in silence.
“Come! Come!” repeats Chrysis. They open another door. The fourth chamber is low, somber, hermetically closed and of triangular form. Heavy draperies and furs bedeck it so softly, from floor to ceiling, that nudity does not astonish. When the door is closed, it is impossible to tell where it is. There is no window. It is a tiny world, out of the world. Here and there, hanging locks of black fir let tears of perfume slip into the air. And this chamber is lighted by seven myrrhine panes which color diversely the incomprehensible light of seven subterranean lamps.
“Thou seest,” the young woman explains, in a calm and affectionate voice, “there are three different beds in the three corners of our room…”
Demetrios makes no reply. And lee asks himself: “Is this indeed the end? Is this truly the limit of human existence? Have I, then, traversed the three other rooms but to stop in this one? And could I, could I leave it if I sleep within it a whole night in the attitude which is the outstretched posture of the tomb?”
But Chrysis speaks…
“Well-Beloved, thou hast commanded me, I have come. Look at me well…”
She raises her arms together, rests her hands upon her hair and, elbows advanced, smiles. “Well-Beloved, I am thine… Oh, not so soon. I promised thee to sing. I will sing first.”
And he thinks no more but of her as he lies down at her feet. She wears little black sandals. Four threads of bluish pearls pass between the slender toes whose every nail has been painted with a carmine crescent.
Her head inclined upon her shoulder, she strikes the palm of her left hand with the finger tips of her right, slightly undulating her hips:
“I sleep, but
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