Elizabeth Costello полностью

But in Anchises' case the goddess, when she rose from his bed, warned her sweetheart pretty plainly to keep his mouth shut. So there was nothing left for a prudent fellow to do but lose himself, last thing at night, in drowsy memories: how it had felt, man's flesh lapped in god flesh; or else, when he was in a more sober, more philosophically inclined mood, to wonder: since the physical mingling of two orders of being, and in specific the interplay of human organs with whatever stands in for organs in the biology of gods, is strictly speaking not possible, not while the laws of nature continue to hold, what kind of being, what hybrid of slave body and god soul, must it have been that laughter-loving Aphrodite transformed herself into, for the space of a night, in order to consort with him? Where was the mighty soul when he took in his arms the incomparable body? Tucked away in some out-of-the-way compartment, in a tiny gland in the skull, for instance; or spread harmlessly through the physical whole as a glow, an aura? Yet even if, for his sake, the soul of the goddess was hidden, how could he not, when her limbs gripped him, have felt the fire of godly appetite – felt it and been scorched by it? Why did it have to be spelled out to him, the next morning, what had really happened ('Her head touched the roof-beam, her face shone with immortal beauty, Wake up, she said, behold me, do I look like the one who knocked at your door last night?')'? How could any of it have taken place unless he, the man, was under a spell from beginning to end, a spell like an anaesthetic to blanket the fearful knowledge that the maiden he had disrobed, embraced, parted the thighs of, penetrated, was an immortal, a trance to protect him from the unendurable pleasure of godlike lovemaking, allowing him only the duller sensations of a mortal? Yet why would a god, having chosen for herself a mortal lover, put that same lover under such a spell that for the duration he was not himself?

That is how it would have been for poor bewildered Anchises, one would imagine, for the rest of his life: a whirl of questions, none of which he would dare to air to his fellow cattlemen except in the most general form, for fear of being struck dead in his tracks.

Yet that is not how it was, not according to the poets. If one is to believe the poets, Anchises led a normal life thereafter, a distinguished but normal human life, until the day his city was set ablaze by foreigners and he was plunged into exile. If he did not forget that signal night, he did not think overmuch about it, not as we understand thinking.

That is the main thing she would have liked to ask Robert Duncan about, as an expert on extraordinary intercourse, the thing she fails to understand about the Greeks, or if Anchises and his son were not Greeks but Trojans, foreigners, then about Greeks and Trojans together as archaic eastern Mediterranean peoples and subjects of Hellenic myth-making. She calls it their lack of inwardness. Anchises has been intimate with a divine being, as intimate as intimate can be. Not a common experience. In the whole of Christian mythology, setting aside the Apocrypha, there is only one parallel event, and that in the commoner form, with the male god – rather impersonally, rather distantly, it must be said – impregnating the mortal woman. Magnificat Dominum anima mea, Mary is reputed to have said afterwards, perhaps misheard from Magnam me facit Dominus. That is pretty much all she says in the Gospels, this maid who is matchless, as though struck dumb for the rest of her life by what befell her. No one around her has the shamelessness to enquire, What was it like, how did it feel, how did you bear it? Yet the question must surely have occurred to people, to her girlfriends in Nazareth for instance. How did she bear it? they must have whispered among themselves. It must have been like being fucked by a whale. It must have been like being fucked by the Leviathan; blushing as they spoke the word, those barefoot children of the tribe of Judah, as she, Elizabeth Costello, almost catches herself blushing too, setting it down on paper. Rude enough among Mary's countryfolk; positively indecent in someone two millennia older and wiser.

Psyche, Anchises, Mary: there must be better, less prurient, more philosophical ways of thinking about the whole god-and-man business. But has she the time or the equipment, to say nothing of the inclination, to do so?