Hunger's Brides (86 page)

The first banquet scene here was three months past, after the Maundy Thursday sermon at the Metropolitan Cathedral, to mark the feast in the olive grove of Gethsemane. Taking its inspiration from Christ's washing of the disciples' feet, the sermon's theme is humility. Naturally, then, Núñez would see himself as the obvious one to give it. Except his choice of sermon was not obvious—first, it was published by a man detested by the Inquisition, and second, it was not at all humble. I was not the only one to find the whole business dubious. My locutory soon filled with Churchmen who came to hear what I might make of it. What's more, one of the late arrivals had come directly from the college rectory where Núñez rebutted in private the very oration he had just given in public. Caught up in the mixed emotions of the moment—their outrage and perplexity, my merriment—I upstaged his rebuttal with a full demolition. Since then, I have had misgivings I cannot dispel. Not for fear of reprisals so much as over my own motives. The Last Supper. Of all the beautiful banquets in the stories of all the world, surely this is the loveliest, the most terrible. Two courses: a
plato fuerte
of the bread and the wine; and a
postre
of a delicate, an ineffable sweetness … Christ's humble washing of the feet. Then, as a final toast of Grace, there comes the Mandate to His companions:
A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you…
. And on the morrow of the Passion and on all the morrows ever after He leaves us to ask and ask and ask: But
how
has He loved us? That night He showed us, so beautifully, how we may be made humble by love.

Act II, Scene Two. A few days after the sermon, the sisters of Saint Bernard sent to ask that I write a cycle of lyrics for the dedication of
their new temple just two blocks up our street. For weeks I cast about for a fitting subject. Here was a fit challenge, for me especially, something simple for Bernard, advocate of a holy ignorance. Hearing that Núñez was to celebrate the penultimate Mass and with my blood still up, I chose my topic and wove into the lyrics an entire sermon to rival the one I could predict Núñez would give. On the Eucharist. There is no mystery more sublime than this; none finds my heart more surely than the mystery of this sacrifice. If Father Núñez so detests water, I thought, then he shall have his sacrament of bread. But this was not a commission from the Churchmen, not a favour to an ally in the Holy Office, this was the highest honour, a call from my own sisters. A call and a sublime sacrifice that plucked at my heart as I began to write. And though the reasons for my choice had been so vile, it was conceived as is a life, and from that passionate mire grew a small simple miracle for the simple people of the neighbourhood who would come to fill their new temple. This temple of Christ as the womb of Mary, this flesh of her Son as the Host rising in her womb, this temple of Christ as a house of bread.

Here is a mystery to feed the hungry, here, in three voices, a mystery the simple people need no theologian to understand.

The house of bread is the temple, the temple is Word and world. The bread of Christ springs from her nature, the wine is her harvest, the love of Nature springs from her beauty, as beauty itself springs from love, and love from the greatest Beauty of all.

This cycle too was to have been a banquet. The dedications in the
temple begin next week. Núñez has read my lyrics and in them found what I had woven there. A sermon by a woman, expressly forbidden now by the Council of Trent. The issue is clear. To press matters too far here would be foolhardy. It is almost certain that my lyrics will not be sung.

I have not so much as objected. Who, after all, is to blame? But it is only just beginning to come home to me, how this coming week may feel. I can see the new temple from my window. I will hear the music from here.

Act II, Scene Three. With all this, the prospect of peace seems more beautiful than ever to me. And more like a dream. We turn to
Lysistrata
for comic relief. As is fitting for a comedy, it ends with a picnic, but spread in the solemn sanctuary of the Acropolis; for as a dream of peace,
Lysistrata
is a serious comedy. After drenching the men's chorus with pitchers of water, reversing thus the unfair judgement against the Danaïdes, the women's chorus sits down to eat with the men. A picnic of peace that serves as preamble to a wedding feast.

Act II, Scene Four. Two camps and their aides are sitting down to dine, out in the open air—next to our academy, let us say, at the refectory. The long table is laid in the passageway beneath the boughs of our pomegranate trees, as was laid for us and the ladies of your court half a dozen times here in the convent courtyard—where our talks and our dreams ran to topics thought impious by many. You will remember the ones I am thinking of. Plato's
Symposium
was another such night, another such dream. Under lamps bright with finest oil, the two sides face one another, raise toasts and make gentle, generous jokes, and pass the vegetables and gravy boats. The guests Plato has assembled are to make speeches in praise of love. As the others discourse, Aristophanes sits silent until Socrates enjoins him to speak—a matter of duty for one who has devoted his life to Dionysus and Aphrodite. To this challenge and this banquet we owe a lovely legend of the sexes. You see, at first there were three: male, female and hermaphrodite. And here, as I recall, the story takes a turn, for it is from this third sex that we are descended, says Aristophanes, as can be plainly seen in our lurching about half our lives in search of our lost half.

No one could doubt, after such a wistful rendering, that the great comedian liked to be taken seriously. One might almost pardon Aristophanes his role, not long after, in the trial and conviction of Socrates. How strange that Socrates' great disciple Plato, so mistrustful of the theatre as it was, should befriend Aristophanes. Plato once wrote
of the soul of Aristophanes as the Temple of the Graces. Then again, Plato was given to such compliments….

But surely we must infer that they were friends—perhaps it was some secret shared love of contradictions, for such a bundle of them was this Aristophanes! Mocking the gods yet not denying their existence, mocking old-fashioned Aeschylus yet accepting his greatness. Mocking the art of lyric tragedy that died with him, even as the comedy of Dionysus would die with Aristophanes.

The old theatres had been of wood. Pericles, in his wealth and his love of glory, remade them of stone, to outlast the age. Yet stone is for Apollo; the art of Dionysus is not made to last. In his art lies something Pericles has not grasped: that in its decay, the temple and the theatre, the city itself, possess a greatness that the original could not capture. For now in the mossy lineaments of each ruined façade, in the tumbled furniture of rotted dados and cleft pediments, scrawl the worm-scripts of chance and circumstance, whispering of a different plan. The ruin invites us to reimagine it, reseed it, it needs
us
to complete it, as the perfect original never does. The art of Dionysus does not outlast its age. It laughs it off the stage.

Act II, Scene Five. Lysis, there are things we may no longer write to be spoken aloud, for it would mean we must first rebuild the theatres, which Apollo would never permit. Even so long ago, Aeschylus knew his art was dying. I believe he must have, for in this art the chorus writes the artist. The lyric tragedy is a drama not so much of
héroes y heroïdes
but of the great race that bore them. Homer may begin in the tenth year of the siege, aware that the audience knows the first nine fully as well as he. Centuries later, Aeschylus begins the greatest play cycle ever written and laces the
Agamemnon
with the briefest of reminders. King Agamemnon has lured his daughter Iphigenia to Aulis, to marry swift-footed Achilles, or so the father tells her as he leads her to another altar. Ending her life there, the King procures not fair weather for the crops but fair winds for his armada. Returning victorious from Troy with Paris's sister in tow as his concubine, Agamemnon is met by his Queen, Helen's sister. Clytaemnestra has waited twenty years to avenge the murder of their child. And who is to say whether this second hatchling, Clytaemnestra, is not the other city on the shield of Hephaistos? The city of the wedding procession and slow judgements.

But Athens is changing quickly and by the time the trilogy is complete, the lyric tragedy of Aeschylus is dead. Dead without an epitaph. The
Eumenides
is a great play but of another kind, heralding a new age built on the passing of the old. In the trial of Orestes, the people of Athens are not chorus but jury. The trial offers a final contest between the young defender Apollo and the ancient Furies of the prosecution, but in the end it is the guile of the judge Athena, her wiles of Reason and Persuasion, that win the Furies' parting blessing on Athens and its harvests.

The audience for the
Eumenides
no longer truly knows and feels who the Furies were—or rather of what they were born, these daughters of Night. The new Athens has lost its fear of the dark. And so, unmarked, lyric tragedy slips into the night even as the Furies must. The play opens before the temple of the Pythoness at Delphi and closes before the Erechtheum in the sanctuary of the Acropolis. The comedy
Lysistrata
ends in the same sanctuary and on these four lines of praise, with all kneeling before the shrine of Victory.

The greatness of the comedian Aristophanes is to see his art as that epitaph, to know that the death of an order, even one day Apollo's, must be sung drunkenly, by an old reveller of Dionysus. And for all that, Aristophanes could not bear to see the new move beyond the old. The greatness of Aeschylus was to see that a new order just might, if it is built upon the old, but he could not bring himself to write its epitaph as a
ruin. In the
Oresteia
he has given us the greatest play cycle made. In the ancient Furies' blessing on a young Athens, he has shown the way. But he could not take that path himself, he could not end the
Eumenides
in comedy. He was too great to ruin it.

Who am I, with one book, to stand in judgement of Aristophanes, much less of Aeschylus who wrote seventy tragedies, with the seven to come down to us each greater than our greatest? What work is left to us who follow giants such as he? Perhaps a few small steps are left. What indeed would be the last great work of a golden age but both the proof and chronicle of its dying? A lyric end to the cycle, a tragedy written by a comedian, to be played in a burning theatre. Now the paradox: that its end be written by one not great, whose worst fear is not ruining the work but no longer knowing what greatness is.

For our next collection, María Luisa, here would be a purpose and a dedication, no? And yet once written we could not publish—it would not be heard, its place does not exist, except we rebuild the old theatres of wood. No, we live in an age of stone that calls for guile and persuasion, and it is not the righteous Furies we must cajole but Apollo, choleric now in his middle years.

Act II, Scene Six. And here is the final scene of our lyric comedy tonight. I ask that you read this one, too, obliquely, and by its conclusion I may have convinced you it is not yet time for Sappho to take the stage. There is another banquet I am thinking of. It was in 1611 or '12, at any rate not long after Galileo Galilei was made a member of the Lyncean Academy. The banquet was in Florence, at the palace of the G rand-Duke of Tuscany. Galileo Galilei was there, as was a Florentine cardinal. After the meal, before the dessert, a debate was staged, much as in the
Symposium
. That night the contest was between Galileo and a professor of the Natural Philosophy of Aristotle. Plato would have been delighted, no doubt, particularly by the outcome. The question addressed floating bodies: why some float in water, like ice itself, and why others sink. Galileo took up the question eagerly against the Aristotelian. The contest was not close. Those companions not among the judges were invited to take sides to make the affair more interesting. Taking what was clearly the winning side, Lord Cardinal Barberini expressed eloquent support of Galileo. Galileo had skill and knowledge, the Cardinal had skill and subtlety; both debated with passion. The two easily carried the evening. Afterwards His Grace the Most Reverend Lord Cardinal, one day to be
elected Pope Urban VIII, was reported to have prayed God preserve Galileo and grant him a long life, for such minds were for the enduring benefit of Man.

The book I asked if you would get for us a few months back, that you say you now have and are only waiting on a messenger to bring it across … you know the one, on the floating and sinking of all sorts of bodies. It might be best not to send it for a while. The climate, just now, is not good for ice.

I cannot tell when we will be able to write in the old way again, or publish Sappho's lines, but for the next letter or two let us make little songs of prayer for fair weather, and sing blessings over the land.