The Athenian Murders (2 page)

'Well, that was Iphimachus. He was the young master's pedagogue. He's very upset by the news.' And he added, more quietly: Iphimachus is a good man, if a little stupid. I get on well with him, but then I get on with almost everyone.'

'That doesn't surprise me.'

They came to a chamber.

'You must wait here. The mistress will be with you presently.'

Wide-necked amphorae were set about the room, a windowless cenacle, modest in size, lit unevenly by small lamps on stone brackets. It also contained two old couches that did not exactly invite one to comfortable repose. Once Heracles was alone, he began to feel oppressed by the dark, cave-like room, the ceaseless weeping, the stale air like a sick man's breath.

The entire house seemed attuned to death, as if lengthy daily funerals had always been held there. What was that smell, he wondered. A woman's weeping. The room was filled with the damp odour of mourning women. 'Is that you, Heracles Pontor?'

A shadow stood in the doorway to the inner chambers. The dim lamplight revealed nothing of her face save, by some strange chance, the area of her mouth. So the first part of Itys that Heracles saw was her lips. They opened for her words to issue, forming a black, spindle-shaped hole, like an empty socket watching him from a distance, or the eye of a painted figure. 'It is a long time since you have crossed the threshold of my modest home,' said the mouth, without waiting for a reply. 'Welcome.'

'Thank you.'

'Your voice ... I remember it well. And your face. Yet it is so easy to forget, even seeing each other often

'But we don't meet often,' said Heracles.

'That's true. Though your house is nearby, you are a man and I am a woman. I have my position as a
despoina,
a husbandless mistress of a house, and you yours as a man who discusses matters in the Agora and speaks at the Assembly . . . I am a mere widow. You are a widower. We both do our duty as Athenians.'

The mouth closed, the pale lips forming into a curve so fine it was almost invisible. A smile perhaps? Heracles found it impossible to tell. Two slavewomen appeared behind Itys' shadow; both wept, or sobbed, or intoned a single choking note, like the wail of an oboe. I must endure her cruelty, he thought, for she has just lost her only son. 'Please accept my condolences,' he said.

'Thank you.'

'And my help. In anything you might need.'

He knew immediately that he shouldn't have added it. He had gone beyond the limits of his visit, attempted to bridge the infinite distance, to sum up in a few words all their years of silence. The mouth opened - a small but dangerous animal suddenly sensing prey.

'You are thus repaid for your friendship with Meragrus,' she said drily. 'You need not say anything more.'

'This has nothing to do with my friendship with Meragrus ... I consider it my duty.'

'Oh, a duty.' This time the mouth formed into a faint smile. 'A sacred duty, of course. You talk as you always have, Heracles Pontor!'

She stepped forward and the light revealed the pyramid of her nose, her cheeks - marked with recent scratches - and the black embers of her eyes. She hadn't aged as much as Heracles had expected; the hand of the artist who made her was still apparent, he thought. The
colpos
of her dark
peplos
spilled in slow waves over her breast. One hand was hidden beneath her shawl; she clutched both edges of the garment with the other, and it was in the hand that Heracles saw signs of age, as if the years had flowed down her arms, blackening the ends. There, and only there, in the enlarged knuckles and crooked fingers, Itys was old.

'I am grateful for your sense of duty,' she murmured. There was deep sincerity in her voice for the first time, and it shook him. 'How did you find out so soon?'

'There was a great commotion in the street when they brought the body. It woke the neighbourhood.'

There was a scream. Then another. For a moment, absurdly,

Heracles thought they came from Itys' mouth, which was shut; as if she had roared internally, and her thin body were shuddering and resonating with this sound produced in her throat.

But then the scream, deafening, entered the room; clad in black, it pushed the slaves away, crawled from one side of the room to the other, then collapsed in a corner, writhing, as if seized by a holy madness. At last it dissolved into an endless lamentation.

'It's much worse for Elea,' said Itys apologetically, as if to excuse her daughter's conduct. Tramachus was more than a brother, he was her
kyrios,
her legal guardian, the only man Elea has ever known and loved ...'

Itys turned towards the girl, who was crouching in a dark corner, her legs gathered tightly to her as if she wanted to take up as little space as possible, or to disappear into the shadows like a black cobweb, her hands raised in front of her face, her eyes and mouth wide open (her features were three black circles filling her entire countenance), as she shook with violent sobs. Itys said: 'That's enough, Elea. You are not to leave the gynaeceum, you know that, particularly in such a state. Displaying your grief before a guest. . . Such behaviour does not befit an honourable woman! Return to your chamber!' But the girl's weeping grew louder. Raising her hand, Itys exclaimed: 'I will not repeat my order!'

'Allow me, mistress,' said one of the slaves. She kneeled hurriedly beside Elea and murmured something to her that Heracles could not make out. Soon, the girl's sobs became incomprehensible mumbling.

When Heracles looked at Itys again, he saw that she was watching him.

'What happened?' asked Itys. 'The captain of the guard told me only that a goatherd found him dead a little way from Lycabettus

'Aschilos, the doctor, claims it was a wolf attack.'

'It would take many wolves to kill my son!'

And not a few to overcome you, O noble woman, he thought. 'Doubtless there were many,' he said.

Itys began speaking in a strangely gentle voice, not addressing Heracles, as if she were alone, intoning a prayer. The mouths of the cuts on her pale, angular face were bleeding again.

'He left two days ago. I bade him farewell as I had many times before, unconcerned - he was a grown man well able to take care of himself . . . 'I'm going to spend the day hunting, Mother,' he told me. 'I'll fill a knapsack with quails and thrushes for you. I'll set traps with my nets for hares.' He said he would return that night, but he did not. I was going to chide him, but...'

Her mouth opened suddenly, as if about to pronounce an enormous word. She remained thus a moment, jaw tensed, the dark ellipse of her maw motionless in the silence,
³
before closing it gently and murmuring: 'But now I cannot face and rebuke Death ... because it will not return with my son's countenance to ask my forgiveness .. . My beloved son!'

³
As the attentive reader may already have noticed, all the metaphors and images in the second half of this chapter relate to 'mouths' and 'maws', as well as 'screams' and 'roars'. What we have here, obviously, is an eidetic text.
(T's
N.)

Slight tenderness in her is more terrible than Stentor's roar, Heracles thought admiringly. "The gods can be unjust at times,' he said, because he felt he had to say something, but also because, deep down, he believed it.

'Don't speak of them, Heracles. Do not speak of the gods!' Itys' mouth trembled with rage. 'It was the
gods
who sank their teeth into my son's body, and smiled as they tore out and devoured his heart, breathing in the warm scent of his blood with relish! Oh, do not speak of gods in my presence!'

It was as though Itys was trying, vainly, to subdue her own voice, issuing as a powerful roar from her maw, imposing silence all around her. The slaves had turned to look at her; even Elea was silent, listening to her mother with mortal reverence.

'Cronius Zeus has brought down the last great oak of this house while it was yet in leaf! '
curse the gods and their immortal caste!'
She raised her arms, hands open, in a fearsome, precise gesture. Then, slowly lowering them and her voice, she added, with sudden contempt: 'The highest praise the gods may expect from us is our silence!'

The word 'silence' was torn by a triple clamour, which penetrated deep into Heracles' ears and remained with him as he left the terrible house - a ritual, threefold scream, from the slaves and from Elea, their mouths open, jaws almost unhinged, forming a single throat rent by three distinct, high-pitched, deafening notes - the funereal roar of the maw.
⁴

⁴
I find it surprising that, in his scholarly edition of the original, Montalo should make no mention of the powerful eidesis present in the text, at least throughout the first chapter. But maybe he didn't know about this strange literary device. It's not unusual to find translators, even among the most erudite, who are not familiar with a literary technique which may, in any case, have been used by only a handful of Greek writers - in some ways the most celebrated ones -and whose main feature is precisely that it is only noticed by those who know about it.By way of example for the curious reader , and also to be honest about how I came to discover the image hidden in this chapter (for the translator must be honest in his notes, lying is the author's perogative) I will recount the brief conversation I had yersterday with my friend Helena, whom I respect as a learned and highly experienced colleague. The subject of work came up and I told her enthusiastically that
The Athenian Murders,
the novel I had just begun translating, was an eidetic text. She stared at me for a moment, holding one of the cherries on the nearby plate by its stalk 'A what?' she asked.

'Eidesis,' I explained, 'is a literary technique invented by the Ancient Greeks to transmit
secret
messages or keys in their works. It consists in repeating, in any text, metaphors or words that, when identified by a perceptive reader, make up an idea or image that's independent of the original text. Arginusus of Corinth, for example, used eidesis to hide a detailed description of a young woman he loved in a long poem
apparently about wild flowers. And Epaphus of
Macedonia inserted his will by means of eidesis into an epic tale describing the death of the hero Patroclus. And Euphronius of—'

'How interesting,' smiled Helena, bored. 'And would you care to tell me what's hidden in your anonymous
Athenian Murders?'

'I won't know until I've translated the whole thing. In Chapter One, the eidesis mainly involves "hair" or "manes", "mouths" and "maws" that "scream" and "roar", but—'

'"Manes" and "maws that roar"?' she interrupted simply. 'It could be referring to a lion, couldn't it?'

And she ate the cherry.

I hate the way women always arrive at the truth effortlessly, by the shortest route. It was my turn to go very still and stare. 'A lion, of course ...' I muttered.

'What I don't understand,' Helena went on casually, 'is why the author thought the idea of a lion so secret that he had to hide it through eidesis ...'

'We'll find out once I've translated it. An eidetic text can only be fully understood once you've read all the way through.' As I spoke, I was thinking: A
lion,
of course . .. Why didn't I think of that?

'Right.' Helena considered the conversation at an end. She bent her long legs, which had been stretched out on a chair, put the plate of cherries on the table, and stood up. 'Get on with the translation and let me know how it goes.'

'What's surprising is that Montalo didn't notice anything in the original manuscript,' I said.

'Why don't you write to him?' she suggested. 'It'll make you look good and bring you some kudos.'

And, although at the time I pretended not to agree (I didn't want her to know she'd solved all my problems at a stroke), this is exactly what I have done.
(T's N.)

⁵
'The surface is sticky; one's fingers slide over it as if smeared with oil; the central area is fragile, like scales,' states Montalo, regarding the pieces of papyrus that make up the manuscript at the opening of the second chapter. Could it have been made from the leaves of different plants? (T's N.)

_II
⁵

Slaves prepared the body of Tramachus, son of the widow Itys, according to custom: the horrific lacerations were glossed with ointments from a
lekythos;
agile-fingered hands slid over the ravaged flesh, anointing it with essences and perfumes; it was wrapped in a delicate shroud and arrayed in clean clothes; the face was left uncovered, the jaw firmly bandaged to prevent the horrifying rictus of death; an obol to pay for Charon's services was placed beneath the slimy tongue. The corpse was then laid out on a bed of myrtle and jasmine, feet towards the door, watched over by the grey presence of a guardian Hermes; the wake would last all day. At the garden gate, the
ardanion,
the amphora of lustral water, served to make public the tragedy and to cleanse the guests of contact with the beyond. From midday, the hired mourners intoned their sinuous canticles, and tokens of condolence rained down. By afternoon, a line of men snaked the length of the garden path. All stood in silence, beneath the cold damp of the trees, awaiting their turn to enter the house, file past the body and offer their condolences to the family. Tramachus' uncle, Daminus, of the
deme
of Clazobion, acted as host: he possessed a considerable fortune in boats and in silver mines in Laurion, and his presence drew many. Few, however, attended in memory of Meragrus, Tramachus' father, condemned and executed as a traitor to democracy many years earlier, or out of respect for the widow Itys, who had inherited her husband's dishonour.