John Updike: The Centaurus

“Come now; this you do exaggerate.”

“He is. He looks at a scroll but his eyes never move.”

“And what of his twin Artemis, the fair huntress beloved by the very prey she dispatches?”

“Ha! She never hits them, that’s why. Tittering around the woods with a pack of Vassar freshmen whose so-called virginity not a doctor in Arcadia-”

“Hush, child!” The centaur brought his hand toward her lips and in his extremity of alarm almost did touch them. He had heard faint thunder behind him.

She backed off, startled at his presumption. Then she looked skywards over his shoulder and laughed in recognition; it was a mirthless laugh, a high heated syllable defiantly prolonged; it tightened her face across her skull and sharpened her perfect features cruelly, out of all femininity. Cheeks, brow, and throat flushed, she shouted toward Heaven. “Yes, Brother: blasphemy! Your gods, listen to them-a prating bluestocking, a filthy crone smelling of corn, a thieving tramp, a drunken queer, a despicable, sad, grimy, grizzled, crippled, cuckolded tinker-”

“Your husband!” Chiron protested, striving to keep himself in the graces of the firmament above him. His position was difficult; he knew that the indulgent Zeus would never harm his young aunt. But he might in annoyance toss his bolt at her innocent auditor, whose Olympian position was precarious and ambiguous. Chiron knew that his own intimacy with men was envied by the god, who never visited the created race except, in feathers and fur, to accomplish a rape. Indeed it was rumored that Zeus thought centaurs a dangerous middle-ground through which the gods might be transmuted into pure irrelevance. But the sky, though it had darkened, remained silent. Gratefully Chiron pursued his tactic, telling Venus, “You fail to appreciate your husband. Hephaestus is dexterous and kind. Though every anvil and potter’s wheel serves as an altar to him, he remains humble. The calamity of his fall upon Lemnos purged all dross of arrogance from his heart; though his body is bent, there is not a mean bone in it.”

She sighed. “I know. How can I love such a ditherer? Give me that mean bone. Do you think,” she asked, with the expectant and subtly condescending face of a not usually curious student, “I’m drawn to cruel men because I have a guilt complex about my father’s mutilation? I mean, I blame myself and want to be punished?”

Chiron smiled; he was not of the new school. The sky above had paled. Feeling safe, he dared a touch of impudence. He pointed out, “There is one deity you have ex empted from your catalogue.” He meant Ares, the most vicious of all.

The girl tossed her head; her orange hair flared into a momentary mane. “I know what you’re thinking. That I’m no better than the rest. How would you list me, noble Chiron? ‘A compulsive nymphomaniac’? Or, less circumspectly, ‘A born whore’?”

“No, no, you misunderstand me. I did not mean yourself.”

She paid him no heed, crying, “But it’s unfair!” She clutched the towel about her emphatically. “Why should we deny ourselves the one pleasure the Fates forgot to take from us? The mortals have the joy of struggle, the satisfaction of compassion, the triumph of courage; but the gods are perfect.”

Chiron nodded; the old courtier was familiar with the way these aristocrats blithely extolled the class that in the previous breath they had calumniated. Did the girl imagine that her petty set of jibes went near to the heart of the real case against the gods? He felt a weight of weariness; he would always be less than they.

She corrected herself. “Perfect only in our permanence. I was cruelly robbed of a father. Zeus treats me like a pet cat. His blood love is reserved for Artemis and Athene, his daughters. They have his blessing; they are not driven again and again to clasp into their loins that giant leap that for a moment counterfeits it. What is Priapus but His strength without a father’s love? Priapus-my ugliest child; worthy of his conceiving. Dionysos made me perform as if I were another boy.” She touched the centaur’s chest again, as if to reassure herself that he had not turned to stone. “You knew your father. I envy you. Had I seen Uranus’ face, heard his voice-were I not the afterthought of his desecrated corpse-I would be as chaste as Hestia, my aunt, the one god who truly loves me. And now she is demoted from Olympus, reduced to a household trinket.” The girl’s darting thought took another turn. She said to Chiron, “You know men. Why do they revile me? Why is my name a matter of jokes, why is my caricature gouged into lavatory walls? Who else serves them so well? What other god gives them with the same hand such power and such peace? Why am I blamed? ”

“Your accusations, my lady, are all from yourself.”

Her flood of confession drained, she dryly mocked him, “So prudent. So wise. Good Chiron. Our scholar, our propagandist. So docile. Have you ever wondered, nephew, if your heart belongs to the man or the horse?”

He stiffened and said, “From the waist up, I am told I am fully human.”

“Forgive me. You are kind, and I repay you in divine coin.” She stooped and plucked an anemone. “Poor Adonis,” she said, idly fingering the starlike sepals. “His blood was so pale. Like our ichor.”

A gust of remembrance ruffled her hair, in whose feathery crown the moisture had evaporated. She turned her back and in half-secrecy brought the flower to her lips, and her still-damp mane dripped in sympathetic curves down flesh as white and smoothly molded as that fabled powder, the earth of Olympus, snow. Her buttocks were pink and faintly roughened; there was a golden tinge of pollen on the backs of her thighs. She kissed the flower, dropped it, and turned with a new expression-tremulous, flushed, diffuse, shy. “Chiron,” she commanded. “Make love to me.”

His great heart jarred against his ribs; he waved her back with a trembling hand. “But my lady: below the waist, I am fully animal.”

Gay, she stepped forward on violets. The towel fell. Her breasts were already tipped with desire. “Do you think you will rupture me? Do you think us women so negligible? We are weak in the arms; but strong in the thighs. Our thighs must be strong; the world is rooted between them.”

“But a goddess, and a centaur-”

“Men are reeds; they no longer fill me. Come, Chiron, don’t insult your lady. Disrobe of wisdom; you will be wiser when we rise.” She cupped her palms below her breasts and stood on tiptoe against him, so that her nipples thrust against his own, the male’s vestigial ornaments. But their chests were of unequal spans; she giggled with the game of making the double opposition, and Chiron even in his distraction saw that the problem might be expressed geometrically.

“Are you afraid?” she whispered. “How do you do it with Chariclo? Do you mount her?” His voice rose small and parched in his constricted throat. “It would be incest.”

“It always is; we all flow from Chaos.”

“It is day.”

“Good; then the gods are asleep. Is love so hideous it must hide in the dark? Do you disdain me because I’m a trollop? But as a scholar you know how after every bath I am restored to virginity. Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead; it hampers my walking.”

More in weakness than in strength, as one would embrace in despair a fevered child, he put his arms around the wiggling girl; her body was slippery and limp with complaisant dissolution. The hollow of her back felt downy. The crest of an erection grazed his belly; a neigh seethed through his nostrils. Her arms were clenched around his withers, and her thighs, lifting weightlessly, murmured among his fore legs. “Horse,” she breathed, “ride me. I’m a mare. Plough me.” From her body issued a swift harsh scent of flowers, flowers of all colors crushed and tumbled in the earth of his own equine odor. He closed his eyes and was swimming through a shapeless warm landscape studded with red trees.