Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Yes, she preferred beauty above all things, but she hated aestheticism. She loved literature but hated the literary. Like Beatrice, she did not profit from her lover’s immortal poems; indeed she was most absent when they were recited to her. Like many girls she resented the procedure of being the love-object exclusively; imagine the Dark Lady’s anger at Shakespeare after one hundred and twenty sonnets—“Oh for god’s sake, leave me alone!”—and you have a gauge of her impatience with her infatuates. Yet she loved men’s muscles, and their throbbing veins, which accounted for our enormous collection of idealized garden torsos. “They’re never the same as on statues,” she often sighed when walking among them, but she knew that the greater the man, the more aesthetically inferior his representation.

She also knew that beauty is a contest, no matter how much one denies it, and in the end the muse is mostly merciless, admitting to the lower slopes of Parnassus only the most palpable beings, while history groans with the hisses and moans of those whom they have rejected. Her counseling method was derived from Hypatia, who flung her menstrual cloth in the face of a student who was in love with her so that he might learn to love only immutable truths. With Mother, all exercises were useless unless done with the correct form, and the first order of business with men, as with dogs, was to breed the whining out. “To be good at anything,” she often said, “one must be a bit cold.”

How Ainoha became the Mistress of Semper Vero is one of those stories as definitive as it is open-ended. Priam’s marriage to Calliope Eriphyle, a woman of much neck but not much else, was barren, indeed barely civil; and Priam spent most of his time in the upcountry, hunting for rare Bonsai-type stunted evergreens on the Astingi plains of Crisulan. But one day upon his return from a month’s absence, there was seated in his break, along with a freshly dug cedar, windsculpted into the shape of a lyre, a gorgeous girl of nine with a basketful of adorable red-golden puppies. While obviously as proud of her as a cavalry charge, Priam never complained or explained, though his mustache had turned half-white. Calliope Eriphyle, for her part, was prepared to adopt a pragmatic solicitude, but the ethereal child showed no interest in her whatsoever, sitting upon the grass with her legs splayed carelessly about, tipping the litter basket over in her lap as one by one the dogs leapt up to kiss her, nip her, the largest male hanging for a moment from her earlobe. She had everyone’s attention, but at arm’s length, just the way she liked it. As the sun sank into the smoky, lilac-colored Mze, the child’s eyes turned green-orange, and seeing there a restless vivacity and a cynical boldness, as well as a shard of powerful melancholy skepticism, the wife was properly horrified and withdrew. As the dogs grew stranger than poets, they ran off into every corner of the house, each securing for itself a den which could be defended, reconvening only in the evenings when they bathed, gamboled, and danced like holy fools in the shallows of the Mze. The girl-child never asked for a thing, never spoke of her people or former home, but showed great interest in Priam’s ancestors, as well as the smallest details of running the estate. (The idea being that even if the past might not accept you, it didn’t mean that the past wasn’t yours.) She was, in fact, perfectly behaved, while exhibiting a healthy derision of every lofty conviction. She seemed to view humans as a remote if interesting species, well worth studying in some depth.

There were the usual rumors — that Priam had fathered her with a now disgraced Astingi maiden, that he had bought or kidnaped her, or more plausibly, that she was a gift from the Astingi Shaman to ingratiate themselves with the gentry, and to place a spy among us. Priam never bothered to refute any of the charges, and as the girl brought light and life into a house where theretofore no one had ever listened to music, read a book, climbed a mountain, looked at the sea, or been alone for a minute, no one really cared how she came to be there. She had arrived as had our ancestors from the East, on a cart drawn by buffaloes, and she learned her gait from geese.

When her preternatural teenage beauty captivated the cineastes , and cameras whirred and phosphorus flares ignited in every corner of the property, Priam seemed to think it was all some harmless ancient ritual, until he was shown an album of stills of his own family, as well as day laborers in their embroidered cloaks, and well-washed gypsies from the fringe of the village. These were the first photographs which he actually saw as photographs, which made everything flat, small, and quiet, and he realized immediately that his way of life was over and his class and character were doomed. Indeed, it was not long after that he disappeared from Semper Vero, and certainly I inherited his aversion, for if there is one thing I have always been utterly sure of it is that I am not a camera. And I have never permitted a photograph to be made of me.

Mother was not much interested in the attachment theorists. “To be the beloved is the only way you can learn anything about a man, though whether it’s worth it is another story,” she often said to me. What she loved in men was their simple bark of pure ambition, their getting down on all fours to howl at Rome. And in particular she loved Father’s selfishness without self-absorption, for it takes enormous courage to be happy. But she also knew that in the end, men have to be roped in to satisfy the demands of cruel conservative Nature and her strange imperatives. And with her nest of golden wires, no one was ever better at it.

What she was especially good at was frisson and lèse majesté . Her sense of nest spanned solar systems. One had the distinct impression from Ainoha that we were all going to live together forever, and I must say I could only admire this great intrusive female, always trying to civilize and sensitize my father and I, and always failing. Yet I was doomed to Mother’s revenge; her creaseless face and indomitable spirit would give me the bad habit of incessant rebirth. And if the muses are always pictured carrying something — a globe, a flute, a lyre, a mask, a scroll, a reversed torch — Ainoha could often be found walking alone with her tennis racket and a pensive look.

I could never discover the exact nature of her relationship to the Astingi, or where she actually stood in their pagan hierarchy, for they had very little contact owing to her marriage outside the tribe — and it is probably not in a goddess’s interest for things to be too clear or consistent. Her Astingi given name was Tritogeneia (“Thrice-born”), from changing her nature with the seasons. The Greeks imply that she was descended from Nyx, daughter of Chaos, mother of Sleep and Death, and feared even by Zeus. But the Astingi never had much of a taste for cosmogonical rhetoric, and one thing they knew for certain was that beauty was a real power, inseparable from terror, and nothing like a myth. The Astingi patrolled our property as if it were theirs, enforcing the poaching laws with swift and silent dispatch, leaving an unlit votive candle where a trespasser had been snuffed out. Ainoha was from the Naiad line, who presided over three thousand rivers roaring as they flow, and depending on your sources are capable of abrupt death by drowning or everlasting sexual bliss. But river goddesses have little or no mythology and disappear only when their rivers cease — so the only thing they fear is drought.

But it must have been frustrating to be goddess to a people who had no need of goddesses. Worship for the Astingi simply meant a silent gratitude that the higher powers walk among you, and the people you revere, you leave alone. They had no need for a leader, and thus were free in the only way that counts: free to worship her without expecting favors and without coveting her relative privilege. This respect was enforced by millennia of primogeniture, in which the eldest child inherited the house and land, gender notwithstanding, thus insuring a great number of women heads of household — a small and obscure concession, which over a period of time worked enormous changes in everyday relations. But as the eldest child also had the obligation to house and provide for their siblings, this guaranteed that domestic quarreling would, à la Tchekov , completely subsume the energies which would otherwise flow toward the overthrow of the state or contests of rival political factions. In Astingiland, all the battles of the Central Empires were fought out in the arena of the family. And ours was no different in that respect, except perhaps that as all three of us were only children, we were spared the care of poor elderly relations, and thus lived an unreal existence without the daily object lessons of declining powers and abject failure.