The Double Tongue Read Online Free Page B

window and closing the shutters as if there had been a dead body in the room. I wished at the time that there had been. When they were closed and the room in an artificial twilight she still stood looking down at me.
    ‘You fool.’
    After that, there was a long pause. She began to walk up and down, then stopped again.
    ‘What are we to do with you?’
    Still I drew myself in and hid in my own mind.
    Presently my mother left me. There is not much to say about my state except that it is a retreat, further and further away from the daily world. It is not a drawing into one’s self; or rather it is, I suppose, since in those circumstances where else is there to go? But what it feels like is a deliberate descent into the earth, down and down. Each time I realized afresh the enormity of my disgrace, the depth of my shame, I drew myself in and thrust myself down, down, away from the daylight, away from people. Also away from the gods. I suppose that was where my ignorant but now one-pointed mind came on a fact which would have astonished me if I had been in a condition to think round it. The fact was that I missed the gods and was not just ashamed, but stricken down with grief, and when at last I got to the level where there were no people but only gods, my heart broke. Do not think it was this god or that. They had drawn together in a sacred band. Even our herm, the cheeky column with the privates of a man and a bearded face, who stood, fronting the path from the ferry, even he seemed glad in my imagination to be turned away from me.
    Oh, that child! It is a kind of self-love I suppose that makes me smile to myself when I remember her. Well. For all the ascetics say, a degree of self-love is no bad thing. It makes life possible, unless like the ascetics you think it wholly bad and to be rid of as soon as you can. But whatever you think of her, whatever I remember of her there is no doubt about the poor thing’s shame and grief with her gods turning their back on her! Until then I had accepted them as being there because everyone else – grown-ups I would say – believed in them or said they did. I was too young and ignorant to know that people do not always believe what they say they do. Anyway, in that small room, with its pallet, its single chest, its hooks with one or two cloaks hanging from them, there in the artificial twilight she dropped down into grief, into sorrow beyond the shame. She dissolved away like a lump of salt in fresh water. There was nothing but grief before the retreating backs of the gods: then they were gone.
    There is a void when the gods have been there, then turned their backs and gone. Before this void as before an altar there is nothing but grief contemplating the void. Time passes but irrelevantly. The void with the grief before it is eternal. Even the sound of the wooden bolt being shot back and the latch lifting did not alter that contemplation. My mother’s voice was more deeply bitter than I had ever heard before.
    ‘He has withdrawn his offer. Leptides, that oaf, has withdrawn his offer. He’ – and it sounded as if she spat the words out – ‘He pities us!’
    Life is not bad. It is intolerable, which is different. I sat up heavily. I stared at my mother’s feet.
    ‘He doesn’t want the thousand pieces of silver?’
    ‘What decent man would when a woman went with it who has shown everything she’s got to half Aetolia? But a boy, heir to no more than a farm, to turn down alliance with us – with us!’
    I heard the door close again and the latch drop. I listened for the wooden bolt to move but it never did. Well. What bolt is needed to cage a naked girl?
    Presently I sat up, then stood up. I felt my nips and they had hardly broken the skin. The hounds were well enough trained – no Molossian dogs those! They had known their place and the difference between human skin and a stag’s leather. I took my phial of olive oil and rubbed a little of it into my face. I thought to myself