John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

I used to feel it at times with my son Kleon. I would observe him at play, transforming the pebbles on a path into houses, ingeniously constructing and peopling cities, or talking to imaginary friends under a roof of low-hanging branches behind the goat pen. In all he did there was a gentleness, an insistent faith in the goodness of things, that turned on harsh actuality, would make him, inescapably, what he would be. When he was overtired, as a small boy, and things went wrong for him — some game interrupted by a command to go to bed, or his will frustrated by the recalcitrance of matter (a stubborn pony, a pebble that obstinately refused to stay put on the wall he was building) — the gentleness would give way to an alarming rage, a childish yet terrible nihilism that filled me with fear. The change I would see in Kleon at such moments made his future seem to hang on blind chance: given the right set of accidents, he would grow up to be the best of men; given the wrong accidents, he might become the worst. I fully credited this doctrine, the fortuity of time, but for all the certainty of my intellect I would find myself struggling to penetrate his future; anticipate and control it. The point is, I caught glimpses which seemed to deny — no, overwhelm — my doctrine: I felt moments of emotional certainty, however illogical or nonsensical, that I was onto something, that I was suddenly face to face with some potential more real than all the others — moments of heightened awareness, as it seemed, that cried out with all the fixed authority of a parent or a king or an oracle — sudden and final as an earth-splitting, river-building stamp of star-rimmed Pegasos’ hoof: This is it.

So, too, with Iona. Throughout my long affair with her, I again and again experienced periods in which it seemed that whatever strange hold she had on me had relaxed a little; I might eventually free myself of her cacodemonic influence. I would meet her with pleasure at some Helot party or walking on the street, the same pleasure I’d have felt on meeting Solon unexpectedly, or my father, or some fellow poet-sage. We’d talk casually, brightly, Iona and I, and I would think, At last we can be friends. And then one day, at the height of my confidence, I would turn and catch her out of the corner of my eye, and she would smile and I would know I was trapped forever. She was my Great Bitch, my ambsace, my doom. If she had said, before Lykourgos and all the ephors, “Kiss me, Agathon,” I would have done it. And it’s a matter of fact that whenever she sent me out into the hills for thorns and stones and wild flowers for some room decoration, I dropped all my labors, poor miserable wretch, and went (I’d sit baffled, marveling, as she wove bits and pieces of the world together into charming, riotous wholes of blooming confusion, substance triumphant. “Are you going to use that?” I would say as she toyed with some black, shriveled olive leaf. She took it as a challenge. She’d have used the Kolossos of Rhodes if I could have lugged it to her house.) It would all have been simple if Tuka hadn’t had equal, if not greater, power. Between them, I was as helpless as a ship in a hurricane. I was never short on will — I am capable even of violent opposition to what I disfavor. But there were forces, both inside me and outside, that turned my will to jelly. It was sexual partly, of course. If I feel the itch of it even now, a sensibly impotent old Seer, no wonder if in my middle thirties I walked crouched over or hopped on one foot. They were the two most beautiful women I’d ever encountered, and when I touched either one of them I was fiercely aroused, driven madder, in fact, than I’ve ever been since by Apollo. (An accident of time and situation, perhaps. Old, I look at ladies fifty years my junior and wonder that any man alive is moderately sane.) But it was more than that. They were, both of them, goddesses in the only sense of the word I understand. They were embodiments of heavenly ideals — conflicting ideals — that my soul could not shake free of. Tuka, even on those awful occasions when her mind came unhinged, had the precision of intellect, the awesome narrowness of purpose, of a mathematician or a general. She knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, what she wanted from life and why she wanted it, and she would stalk her desire with the single- mindedness of a carpenter driving a nail. Iona wanted not some one thing but everything; she had a mind as wide, as devious and turbulent, as a poet’s, and she went for what she desired like a swarm of blind bees in a windstorm. I danced with Tuka once, at one of the Helot festivals, and when the dance shifted and I turned to Iona she whispered with a fixed smile and eyes like a Lystragonian’s, “Get out! Don’t speak to me! Get out!” She was enraged, jealous of my dancing with my own wife, and when I begged her to be reasonable she snatched her veil from the back of a chair and quit the place. Dorkis, though he grinned, looked baffled and meek. She had always been too much for him, though they both pretended it was merely his respect for her independence. (Perhaps it was. Perhaps I’m too hasty.) “You should go after her,” I told him. “It’s not safe, out on the streets at night. Suppose some young Spartan fools should come across her, out there alone.” He left at last, reluctantly, more afraid of perturbing Iona, I think — invading her privacy, he would have said — than of what any Spartan thug might do. I wanted to go after her myself. I couldn’t stand Iona’s rage, and she knew it. But Tuka’s eyes held me, nailed me where I was like bat’s wings on a barn door. I understood again, that instant, the two women’s power over me, and I wondered, riding the current of their bedazzling rage, what I was riding toward. I would not think about it. The future was blind chance, and I would wait it out. But whatever is deepest in a man told me I was lying. This was it. A glimpse of Destiny. I was sure of it. But this was what?

Many years later, after Dorkis’s execution, her power over me changed its form, though not its intensity. She accepted, rightly, her blame for his death, and accepted something else more strange, her mysterious identity, through me, with Tuka — alter ego, mirror image, incubus. And so Iona committed a kind of suicide: curbed her will and physical desire with the same whimsical violence she’d once used to execute them. There was for her no question, now, of our being lovers — though now, curiously, since Tuka had gone home to Athens, there was nothing material to prevent it or nothing but the fact that Iona’s heart had turned to iron and stone and cleansing sulfur fire. Iona’s hairline had begun to recede, there were shiny wrinkles crossing her forehead and fanning out at the corners of her eyes, and her flesh was no longer as firm as it had once been. Nevertheless, even now when I met her it was like meeting a dryad in the woods. Her shape sealed off reality: beyond it nothing of the same intensity existed. She controlled me absolutely, and though I clowned, exaggerating the foolishness and invertebrate absurdity of my sad condition, neither of us misunderstood. I waited for her to assert her will, as I wait for the stars, and she did nothing. I learned the meaninglessness of space: the two women, one in Athens, one beside me, were equally remote. “Iona, my lovely Iona!” I said, and wrung my fingers in theatrical despair. She smiled, girlish, pretending to be flattered, but her eyes were as cold, as aleatory, as the Kyklops eye of Lykourgos.

And so I believed, again — and thought I would go on believing — that everything was chance. But one day around twilight, when I was sitting on a hillside where horses grazed, the strange conviction came over me that there was no longer a city of Methone. I set out, that same night, walking. Three weeks later, when I arrived at Messene, I encountered the first of the refugees laboring — emaciated, half crazed, silent — toward the sandstone ridges of Stanyclarus. The war would come there too, I could have told them. The wheat-yellow plain would burn to white ash, the villages would belch up smoke. I went on to Methone. Snow was falling. There was no sign of the Spartiate army. No one had buried the city’s dead. This time there could be no mistake. I had foreseen it, I’d known. But I’d known what? The sea stretching out from Methone was lead gray, dark as spoiled wine, mute. There were no birds. I saw what I took to be a corpse huddled on the stone stoop of a doorway. The arm moved, like a black leaf stirred by wind. “Go away,” the old man whispered. “Plague!” I fled.