A Guest in the House of Illusion
Many a passer-by has paused outside the villa's walled garden, standing on tiptoe to spy on the overgrown trellises of vines and groves of pistachios and fruit trees through gaps where the parapet has crumbled away. Nobody lives there now, but the faded rose villa is not for sale. It is locked in the grip of its own mystique, its subterranean life and its secrets. Wild peacocks breed among the tangled grasses of the fig orchard, and feast on the unharvested fruit and nuts that fall from the trees.
The presence of Myrto, the villa's former owner, is so palpable that no living person can wrest control of it from her. Superstitious villagers, lowering their voices to a whisper, confide their belief that Myrto's shade is waiting for her beloved to return and set her free. Neither the passionate desire to possess her estate felt by prospective buyers, nor the money they are prepared to pay for it, can eclipse the aura she still casts upon the villa, though many have fallen under the spell of her former home and sought to acquire it. Their inquiries always draw a blank. Everybody in the small island port knows this villa can't be bought or sold.
The night she died, her peacock screamed incessantly. By dawn the island knew about her death. Women in the villages burned incense and invoked her name, for was she not their muse, renowned for awesome gifts and appetites?
No man could match her artistry, her genius for songs and tales. Many an overweening male had challenged her to verbal duels or even in erotic concourse, only to lose.
Without her prodigious gifts and lusts, Myrto would have been despised or pitied for her distorted frame, her lack of symmetry, her limp. Instead, she turned her grotesque features into fetishes, objects of desire for those on whom bland beauty palled. She was sought by lascivious suitors, male and female, and scandalised the petit bourgeoisie with her transsexual lovers. Sometimes when the island’s charms left her listless and unmoved, she would have herself ferried to the city on the mainland, and, richly robed and lightly veiled, would cruise the port’s most eclectic brothels. Occasionally, she would be moved to pay undisclosed sums in exchange for the release of a young transvestite courtesan, whom she would take to the island to admire her grape arbours and sit in courtyards where peacocks posed and fountains played.
Myrto owed her estate to her family. The fame of her other exploits helped her to embellish it. Being her parents’ only child, born late and ill-formed, she realised early in life that they felt shamed by imperfect proof of desire, and would give her anything she desired to compensate for their “mistake,” believing their age had caused their child’s body to wither in the womb.
Not so the mind. Myrto had no need of their lavish dowry to attract a suitor, since she set no store by marriage. She squandered her virginity long before nuptials were even considered, celebrating the event in brilliant, pornographic lyrics, which earned their pseudonymous author instant envy and acclaim. When the mystery poet’s identity became known, members of the metropolitan avant-garde sought invitations to her island out of curiosity, to see what kind of woman would dare write so explicitly of the erotic.
They were taken aback by what they encountered, but seldom disappointed. Myrto was stimulating, if sardonic company. Many a wine barrel was broached over all-night symposia, where the talk ranged freely from philosophy and poetry to eroticism in all its forms and the futility of attachment. The Romans of the late period on the brink of decline were often invoked. Their paradoxical weakness for beauty and cruelty was an intriguing topic. Who would have thought that people who cultivated eloquence would also relish pate made from larks’ tongues? Or that they would prize fruit harvested from trees specially planted in cemeteries? And then some Latin-speaking guest would entertain them with recitations, spiced with salacious accounts of antique Roman scandals.
None rose to leave the gathering before Myrto, and no man or woman presumed to approach the hostess’s veiled, harem-perfumed boudoir unless they had been singled out as her consort during in the evening. Despite her reputation for prodigious erotic appetites, she was selective and capricious. When the company bored her, she would clap her hands and call, in her sonorous voice that drowned all demur. “Enjoy your words and wine, my friends, but I have other hungers. Eros and Oneiros, the dream-maker, are waiting for me.” And she would take her lover for the night and retire.
By day, the most resplendent of her peacocks shadowed her. He was a pet she had raised herself after dogs killed his mother. She summoned him in the morning when she stepped onto her balcony, gently clapping her hands, and he would emerge from the courtyard and stand below, displaying his plumage while she admired him, calling endearments, letting fall grain and pomegranate flesh, crooning encouragement as he inclined his graceful head to eat.
Once, in Myrto’s infancy, a fortune-teller had predicted that a peacock would one day be her downfall. Her father had banished the soothsayer and peacocks from the island, but Myrto, scorning the strange prophecy, had filled her bowers with gaudy birds. She loved their high-pitched, querulous voices that made her think of the East. She had always longed to travel, but consoled herself instead with travellers’ tales. No guest was so welcome at her gatherings as a traveller with tales to tell.
The peacock was disdainful of her lovers. She teased him for his jealousy at times, so that he sulked. Their passage through the vine-hung arbours would delight her guests, for he would lower his outspread tail and move close behind her so that it seemed to be Myrto’s own iridescent train brushing the pallid dust. The peacock would accept food only from his mistress’s hands, and when her interests took her to the city, he refused to eat.
She would return to find him languishing, and take him in her arms and croon remorse and tender words. None of her lovers ever fared as well, and those unfortunate beings who succumbed unwisely to her spell resented the affection she would lavish on the bird. Respecting nobody, Myrto insisted that others defer to her, while she remained above all forms of dependence. She prided herself on having the heart of a whore, faithful only, in her inimitable fashion, to poetry.
One day Myrto returned from a trip to the mainland with a young man in tow. He was unlike her previous suitors, being in no way depraved, and seemingly unaware of the reputation she had by now for debauchery. He was a stranger from distant Persia, a devotee of the fire temples, whose homeland was under eclipse from another creed, and who had embarked on a pilgrimage to the temple-sites of the ancient world.
Arriving at the rose villa, he gazed around with astonished eyes, exclaiming softly at the beauty of it all. At table, heedless of her guests’ derisive eyes, Myrto fed him slivers of glazed quince, allowing her knowing fingertips to stray about his lips, flirting all the while with bold dark eyes. He seemed oblivious to her desires, and kept begging her to recite more poetry. “But this is the work of genius!” he would murmur. Late in the evening, he excused himself and retired, after again professing his admiration for her talent.
Myrto began to exhibit unaccustomed signs of attachment. The young man extended his stay at her insistence, and they were to be seen in the courtyard, reading their poetry together and strolling in the grape arbours, so deep in conversation that she didn’t notice the peacock had ceased to accompany her, and was hanging his head somewhere in the shade. He no longer screamed a greeting when she appeared on the balcony, but waited in silence, his tail in the dust, and pecked up the grain she cast without appetite.
As for Myrto, she could scarcely recognise herself: a pale, sleepless visage haunted her mirror, and she sat all night writing poems the antithesis of those that had brought her fame. Unrequited passion, denial of fleshly desire, insatiable longing, a striving after enlightenment became her new themes. Her entourage changed, as regulars soon became bored with, then dismissive of this new Myrto, sick with love for a callow youth who had come out of nowhere, and couldn’t even recognise a magnificent hetaera when he saw one. Instead, he extolled her lustre of mind, her clarity of poetic vision, until she was ready to scream her denunciation of art and the intellect.
Instead, she would beg him to tell her again of the fire temples and his beliefs, the magnificent city sacked by Alexander, the empire which had had the potential to change the way people thought and lived, had it not been made vulnerable by its own tolerance and humane attitudes, and had it not lain in the path of a megalomane from Macedonia. She would listen entranced while the young man recited Persian poetry. “Ah, my peacock,” she would say, “when you leave, you will have to take me with you!”
Days extended into weeks, until one morning the young man announced that he would be departing very soon on the next stage of his pilgrimage. Myrto was stricken with a sense of imminent loss. “You can’t,” she said, in a parody of her old, flirtatious self. “I shan’t let you. You are my muse, and you must never leave me.”
She made him promise to stay at least for a farewell feast, to which she would invite the loveliest and most gifted young women of her acquaintance. She concealed her desperation under elaborate preparations. Nothing she could do would captivate the Persian into staying, it seemed, but if she could only persuade him to postpone his departure, it would mean a little more time in his presence. The sound of his voice was like opium to her. She feared the silence that would take its place. Although he appeared impervious to easy pleasures of the flesh, perhaps feminine youth and beauty, a combination of girlish purity with other gifts, could lure him into lingering a few days longer. Myrto did not wish to think about the world she’d known before the Persian came, even though her own desires and needs had helped create it.
She could not go back to such a travesty of art and truth. Nor could she go forward, she believed, without the Persian’s help. Through his eyes she had glimpsed the possibility of a universe whose forces were in perfect balance, and where there was no need to resort to subterfuge and semblances. So she would do anything to stave off the moment of separation, even if it meant tempting him with other women’s charms and talents.
On the morning of the feast, the peacock did not appear. Myrto stumbled through the arbours, calling him, and then forgot about it in her distraction at the Persian’s impending departure.
Serving-women from the estate brought delicacies for the feast, and girl-musicians took their places in the evening courtyard. Long-haired, lustrous-eyed young women sat around the table, and a feminine voice poured forth from the shadows in songs of undying passion. Somewhere deep in the orchard a peacock’s cry seemed to echo her.
The guest of honour, wearing a loose blue robe of a kind once worn in Persepolis, entered the courtyard with Myrto, who wore a trailing indigo gown, embroidered on its train with aureoles of sapphire and emerald and violet, worked with gold and copper thread to emulate a peacock’s tail.
The Persian sat beside her at the head of the table, smiling and raising his wine-cup to her in salute each time she refilled it. But when not engaged in conversation, his gaze took on a pensive cast. The women eyed him approvingly in the torchlight, for his face and limbs were well composed, his demeanour noble. Some of them attempted to catch his eye, but he eluded direct contact, perhaps confused at being the centre of attention.
As wine-cups were being raised to wish him a safe journey, the hostess leaned towards him and murmured something that made him blush. Her last word was audible to others. “Choose,” she said.
The ensuing silence was broken by the voice of one of the guests.
“If he won’t choose, then he must submit to chance,” she said. “You remember the ancient game, the one with Orpheus.”
The young man sat as if mesmerised, then rose and walked into the night.
Myrto clapped her hands. “The torches, girls,” she cried. “But while you are playing your girlish games, remember! He is mine.”
The young women, flushed with wine, ran shrieking into the midnight orchard, flaring torches held above their heads to light the way. Their voices carried back from the vineyard and groves of pomegranates and figs, laughing and calling: “Come out, Orpheus, we know you are there! If we have to hunt you down, beware!”
The hostess sat alone, brooding, melancholy, sipping the sweet wine that tasted bitter as green almonds on this night. Her features were reflected darkly in the burnished surface of the wine pitcher. She stared at the unfamiliar image.
“Ah, Myrto,” she said softly, “what has become of you?”
An unexpected taste of bile, a rancorous, suppressed emotion caught in her throat. “In the name of Hecate, Myrto, you have taken leave of your senses for too long! He’s not for you, this lily-hearted boy. Let the girls tear him asunder, you would have had no joy of him. Remember who you are. Do not betray yourself. You are Myrto, muse of lust, hetaera, unrivalled whore…”
She rose unsteadily, brimming chalice in hand, and ascended the broad parapet of the courtyard, flare held shoulder high. She could see the torches bobbing among the fig trees and vines, hear the hysterical shrieks of young women suddenly possessed of a maenad instinct to hunt and ravish their quarry. Perhaps he would seek refuge in the courtyard, like her shy, elusive peacock. But she would not protect him. His god was symbolised by light, while night was Myrto’s oldest ally.
At length, fatigued by the effort of trying to follow the movements of what seemed like erratic comets, she turned to descend, when a sudden gust of breeze from the sea doused her flare. For a moment she wavered, striving for balance, then, appearing to become entangled in the toils of her own gown, plummeted from the top of the wall, just as a shadowy form sped past, seeking the way to the heavy main gates.
After the dull impact of the fall, there was a brief silence and stillness, until a peacock shrilled from above, where she had been standing.
True as an arrow from a Parthian marksman, the cry froze the women in their chase, then indistinct figures came running to investigate. A flare illumined a strangely positioned form, with long, dark hair awry, lying with arms outflung as if glimpsed in an unguarded moment of dreaming. Blinking at the intrusive light, the peacock lowered his plumes and melted into darkness.
The Persian guest sailed on his way at dawn, with the peacock's cries growing fainter and then inaudible as the waves slapped the wooden keel of the small boat. On returning to his homeland he became an enigma - a recluse, known only by hearsay for his asceticism and saintly ways. Some said he devoted much time to prayer for the soul of Myrto, whose poetry had ravished him as much as her person had repelled him.
Sometimes he sat, hidden from the eyes of the world, in his small, austere courtyard, holding the heavy, cast-iron key to the rose villa in his hand, gazing at it intently as if it might one day begin to speak.