The Double Tongue (2 page)

However, don’t run away with the idea that I am a wise woman and have worked out everything. I am a muddled person. Boys of our degree have been taught to think, or think they have been taught to think, though all it generally means is being able to catch you out and then shout ‘Zany! Zany!’ But I am indeed muddled and have not made sense of anything. I think I am muddled partly because I am a woman, partly because I was never taught to think and partly because I am me. Why! These tablets I have written are full of words and I haven’t even told you my name! It is Arieka and it is said to mean ‘little barbarian’. When I was young I would have liked to be called by a more resounding name, Demetria, say, or Cassandra, or Euphrosyne. But I am stuck with Arieka and there it is. Perhaps I looked like a little barbarian when I was born. Babies are so ugly.

After the fish my memories are successive so I don’t have any excuse for being muddled. But after the fish things altered a little. My mother (not my nurse) took me aside and explained that I had drawn attention to myself. It felt a bit like when I was incontinent. The very words ‘drawn attention to yourself’ were a reprimand. I understood a little more of what a girl was.

Still, there was my dear brother Demetrios – on whom be blessings and good luck wherever he may be! He was my dearest possession. He taught me my letters. He was a few years older than I and had hair coming on his face. I still can’t think why he did it and I dread the only explanation I can think of, which is that he was bored, but he drew shapes in the dust (imagine more sun!) and made me understand that each shape was uttering something. Then he put together two of those he had taught me and asked me what word they were saying and I was launched. It seems to me, remembering back, that I jumped from that first word clear over the hedges that some children find so hard and I read fluently from that moment. Of course this is impossible for two reasons. The first is that my brother only taught me a few letters on that first occasion and had to be pleaded with to ‘play that game again!’ The second reason is that I had no access to anything which would allow of fluent reading. There were very few books when I was a child. Of course there are more now, when people – and not the best people – have made a trade out of selling them. When I was a child, unless you had the luck to know a poet or writer well enough to beg his roll of paper off him, you had to put up with the tales people told at the hearth, the songs they sang, and if you were old enough to be present a story chanted to the whole assembled family by some wandering ‘Son of Homer’.

Though the centre of the world is just a walk away up the hill from us, my brother was the only one who had a book. It was his schoolbook and told the story of Odysseus in only a very few columns. He shared a schoolmaster with our neighbour’s son, but when he was sixteen – my brother I mean – he went off to Sicily to look after things there like sending corn in ships and so on and trading. As he left, laughing and shouting, he tossed the book to me and said, ‘Read that to me when I come back!’ The sorrows of childhood are complete and for many days I did not bother to examine the book, but at last I did and perhaps my sorrow was not as complete as I had thought, for when Demetrios came back after six months I could indeed read the book. But Demetrios was very manly, almost unrecognizable, and he had forgotten me, let alone his book. Then, after ten days or so, he went away again. Still, I could read and knew the book by heart. The result was that when a ‘Son of Homer’ was invited into the women’s part of the house and gave us a section of the
Odyssey
– as I remember, the very famous bit when he’s in Phaeacia – the man said (bowing to my mother) that now he had seen our house he understood that Odysseus did not immediately speak out, because he was awed at the magnificence of the palace of Alcinous. After the man had finished, I was exalted and cried out that he should go on to tell us how Odysseus had met Athene on the beach: but that exaltation led to me being told that I had drawn attention to myself again. I remember how envious I was of the boy who carried the man’s lyre and had seen so much of the world. I had a daydream of disguising myself as a boy and going off with the man, though I never found a satisfactory way of getting rid of his boy, who was always there at the back of my daydream to bring me down to earth and back to my senses.

I learnt about love and grief when my brother Demetrios went away for the second time. I don’t know whether I was a scrawny little girl before he went away but I am very sure I was soon afterwards. My face has always been uneven, the one side not properly balanced by the other. Generally people say that girls of my kind are redeemed by animation or a pair of beautiful eyes, but I wasn’t. Leptides, the son and heir of the smaller estate which marched with ours, was just as scrawny, but seeing that he was a boy it didn’t matter. He had light sandy hair and light brown freckles all over his pink face. He called himself a ‘light-haired Achaian’ as in the war story. He and his two sisters were allowed to play with me but that all came to a sudden end. Leptides used to make up games in which I and his sisters were his army and sometimes his wives or his slaves. His army was Alexander’s, of course, and far more strictly disciplined than the Macedonians ever were as far as I’ve heard.

My nurse was supposed to be supervising these games, but she was getting fat and foolish and slept most of her life away, a natural slave and only worth punishing for the look of the thing. One day when I was his slave, he said that since I was no longer a free woman I should be beaten on my bare bottom. Of course in real life, and particularly in a great house like ours, the house slaves are never beaten. They are more or less adopted into the family, at least the girls are. It hurt a great deal though I didn’t mind it as much as you might think. Looking back I believe Leptides was jealous of our house and estate. That makes sense, but of course it’s the kind of insight you only get when you are much older; or perhaps you know it when you are young but don’t know it – there you go, Arieka, getting things muddled again! But you can see how ignorant or innocent a child I was in that I asked my nurse whether a house slave could really be beaten on her bare bottom or whether she would be allowed to draw her himation tightly over her bottom. I was not prepared for the following questions nor the commotion my answers started. Nurse had palpitations and hot flushes and breathlessness. How she summoned up courage enough to tell my mother what was going on I cannot think. Not only was I forbidden to play with Leptides any more but I had some more bread and water and hemming to teach me something or other.

When I came out again I had to stand in front of my honoured father with my hands properly clasped in front and my eyes looking at the floor midway between us. My mother started to speak but my father silenced her with a gesture.

‘In this kind of situation, Demetria, it is almost always the girl’s fault.’

There was a long silence after that. My father broke it at last.

‘I suppose you know, young lady, that you’ve got young Leptides into trouble? He’s been sent off to do three months’ military training. I don’t wish to see you any more. Now go.’

So I curtsied and went to my place. Of course, whatever my father said, the military training was not really a punishment like bread and water, solitude and plain hemming. My mother said it would get all the nasty thoughts out of his head and he might even form a lasting friendship with one of our brave soldiers. Of course the men of our degree are cavalry. Indeed, boys who get sent early to military training think it’s a holiday and come back boasting of being on watch in the middle of the night ‘like the other men’. I was very lonely at this time and became acutely aware of my own insignificance. In addition to being scrawny with a lopsided face I am on the sallow side. My nurse told me that my father would have to pay an extra large dowry to get me off his hands, which is why he was so stern with me. She said it was enough to make any man stern because what did he get out of it? The proper dowry for a girl of my degree – provincial aristocrat – would be a thousand silver pieces. He would have to pay more like two thousand.

There were times, as I moved towards my courses, when I still had hopes that the gods and in particular Aphrodite would work their customary miracle and turn a child with my natural disadvantages into a flower-like creature and do it more or less in a single night. There is a dread insult in our part of the world, and I sometimes thought I saw it behind the faces of the people responsible for me – the thought that I should have been disposed of at birth, though of course no one ever uttered the words and I dare not myself. But the thought was there, behind their faces.

I was brooding on all this one day and going towards the fish tank when one of our boughten slaves came whining out of their place with a child in her arms and thrust it at me. She was howling by the time she reached me. My arms came up automatically to cradle, but almost as quickly I used them to push the child back at her for it was covered with spots. She, curious creature, fell silent at that, ducked a lame reverence and walked back again into her own place. But I had felt something in the instant between holding and letting go. I should be hard put to describe it further. So my simplest recourse is to tell you baldly that the girl believed I had some power and that once I had touched the child it would get better, which it did. This goes back to the half-cooked fish, a story which was now a bit of family history and, like most family history, simplified and exaggerated. I do not think I am a healer and I am the one to know, surely!

We are wrapped in mysteries. I know that. I have come to know that. Until I had my courses time did really stand still for me. I know that too. Yet among us Hellenes, whether we are Aetolians or Achaians or no matter what, courses come later according to our degree. I was in my fifteenth year. Things made a kind of unruly sense. This time it wasn’t fish or even a baby, but a donkey. I have told nobody, ever. This donkey turned the mill for the coarse grain. Naturally, meal for the family was done at a rotary quern with the slave women singing the turning song, usually the one about Pittacus, but quite often if another name would fit the turning they used it. This donkey, which naturally again we all called Pittacus, walked round and round and at the end of a bar a huge ball of stone rolled round in a groove full of grain, or sometimes the mush from the olive’s third pressing. Well of course you know how that kind of mill works! I was watching Pittacus and interested in his thing which he had under his belly which was sticking out and hurting him because he was braying so loudly as he walked round. This thing was as if alive on its own and quite separate from poor Pittacus it seemed. Every now and then it would snap up against his belly with a sound like hitting a big drum. It was then that a weirdness overcame me so that I felt I might fall down. But I pushed through that because I was interested and horrified and frightened. At the moment when I emerged – if emerged is the right word – one of our boughten slaves came with a gag and I was fascinated by the struggle. He had to strap the animal’s jaws together to keep its mind on the work in hand. Pittacus was trying to rear, but could do nothing but strike out sideways with a hind leg. I found out afterwards that he had scented one of our most valued mares which was to mate with my father’s war stallion, so Pittacus couldn’t be let go even when the mush was all pulped.

There is something very strange about girls immediately before menstruation. I don’t mean the pretty ones, the beauties or even those who are comely enough to be welcomed into a family with only a modest dowry. I mean really the unattractive ones, whom a god has blighted and who have nothing for sale and who have become so defensive they can never make contact with anyone, least of all with the rites of the Paphian. They acquire, these unfortunates, strange abilities. Or perhaps abilities is the wrong word. The situation is not really describable, except that the girl becomes very clever in a useless way – useless it may be to anyone else, though the girl may think there is substance in it. Well. It may be indescribable but I will do my best. It is a furtive power. They wish: and if they wish in the right way – wrong way? – sometimes, if the balance is ever so slightly on their side, then – just more often than not but only just – they get what they want or somebody does. The world is riddled with coincidences and the girl sees this. She uses this when it is available. Perhaps to somebody else who gets what he wants. Or, I mean, gets what he didn’t want. You can never prove this. As I said it is furtive and dishonest, knows how to hide, how to claim, how to disguise, avoid, speak double like the snake or not at all. Moreover, this is not a power to be exaggerated. It is no oracle, does not win battles. It cannot cure the plague but only some headaches, cannot cure heartache but can supply the necessary tears for it.

When my father clapped me up on bread and water the first time, he took my doll away. I wished it back but, of course, how could it come? But when they let me out I knew where they had put it and went straight there. I knew indeed where it was, went and took it because they were such and such and would put it there. So I watched the donkey Pittacus struggling against the spikes in his gag and the weirdness overcame me and I quietened him, feeling the consolation and love go out, out through my aching head and suddenly reeling mind, out to poor Pittacus, and quietened him in his struggle so that his tail dropped and his member drew back in and he stood silent at the mill with his head down by his feet. It was at that moment that I heard a shout of laughter and there was Leptides grinning over the wall of the yard and showing his teeth through a sandy beard and crying aloud to the whole world: ‘He fancies you!’ Into that blazing moment, drawn and irritated by the ass’s clamour, strode my father. He stopped ten yards away. He went white, turned and fairly ran into the house. My head cleared as if he had run out of it. There was a great silence of change and discovery. I heard a faint but positive
tap
and, by some instinct looking down, I saw the first drop of my blood starred on the strap of my right sandal.