Voices from the Past Part 42

"Watch me play jacks with Libus, old soldiers at their fun. I could cheat you...if you gave me half a chance."

Again that chuckle.

The book lay open and his great arms lay across his lap, fingers up. My father had owned that book. With age it had come unsewed and hung in tatters: the smell of age was there: I rubbed my fingers over pages...

Quickly, he said:

"I like to feel those pages... I wanted to write a book as full of life...give back the thunder of the storm...look how the bugs have eaten the book...see that ripped page...well, where will you keep your Homer?"

And he smiled.

"Shall I read something?"

"Yes...now!"

Turning the pages so he could hear them I searched for a favorite pa.s.sage.

I read as slowly and as distinctly as possible, allowing each word time.

Cercolas, mother, Aesop, Phaon...gone. When shall I go?

I have been unable to write for days. I have nothing to say...there is only emptiness.

Yesterday a nightingale sang, a song of tattered leaves, sc.r.a.ps of Nile, bits of Euphrates, papyrus against night, against impending doom, against depression. Tender notes whispered insanity. Other notes urged self-pity. Others shattered-with sheerest delicacy- any hope of contrition.

A feather drops...a pause. One could die during such a pause.

All of us wait-life waits!

A bubbling deceives the spirit, a trill alienates the heart. Something summons the past, other songs on other nights, other songs of other people, the bone flute, of course.

This was not a bird, not a beak, not a feather but sail and spar, rigged to go at dawn, course along many sh.o.r.es.

"Beauty, you're frail. Your bones are able to carry next to nothing and yet your song travels, spreading as if a pebble had dropped on water..."

I walked under olive trees along the coast, following gra.s.sy paths, the breeze with me until I met Gogu, carrying a piece of kelp and a sh.e.l.l. At first, he did not seem to recognize me. How thin, how sick he is!

Shadows of the olives shadowed him. When he spoke, I hardly listened. Each of us is going the same way, I thought, and so we parted and stillness put its loneliness about me. The words he had said mixed me because I had not listened, mixed with my love-memories, adding incoherence.

Why was Gogu carrying kelp and a sh.e.l.l? Why was I walking where I had often walked?

In a hundred years, this path has changed little: the trees have become more gnarled, the shadows darker, the air quieter.

The marble shrine at the end of the path crumbles year by year and yet remains about the same: I can remember it when another brought me: Phaon remembered it: and now, memories are re-dedicated and burned, their ashes under my sandals, under my fingers and heart.

The best of life is illusion, I do not doubt. The best of Phaon may have been illusion.

Ah, the nettles of desire, the sleeplessness, the gnawing of regrets in my skull. These are emotions we can not share but must suffer alone till dawn, the dipper proving we are children.

I believe that we, as human beings, prove nothing: there is really nothing to prove except kindness and decency: all else is more illusion.

I take my harp but there are no words to accompany the notes. I urge Atthis to sing: play, darling, help me forget...let me see your face as I love to see it. Move your head with that fragile alacrity. Stretch your bare legs under your dress.

As I open the shutters in the morning, I miss him...the ocean has grown much, much wider.

My favorite olive tree says nothing to me.

Alcaeus wrote me:

"I know I can help you. Come over for the day. Courage, friend."

The note repulsed me. What could he know of Phaon, of man's cleanliness and beauty!

I did not answer. Instead, I climbed the hills with Atthis and Anaktoria, to lay a wreath at an altar that has been our shrine for a while.

The sea was rough and the wind was rough.

Tears overcame me at the altar and I made them leave me: I hoped to die there: I wanted my bitterness to kill me: Why couldn't it happen? Why couldn't there be this finality?

I pulled flowers from the wreath and wrote his name on the ground. A thrush hopped close by. The wind, gusting from the bay, scattered blossoms and I found Atthis beside me, kneeling to comfort me. We had shared so much, the three of us, days and weeks, grief and joy. She and Anaktoria got me to eat, under pines sheltered from the wind; she and Anaktoria fixed my hair.

Their sad faces made me long for happiness for their sake, and I tried to see beyond myself. There must be a trick that I can use to deceive others.