Sappho (11 page)

Leto flitted like a shadow and Sappho after her. Finally, with their feet on the path, they raced down to the sand shore. Her brother caught her around the waist and lifted her into the air.

“Oh, Khar, Khar!”

“My turn,” said Alkaios, stepping forward, and they laughed.

Leto kept watch while they talked. Khar prevailed upon Alkaios to recite his most recent poem, dedicated to Pittakos the Shuffle Foot, whom he referred to as “a lute without charm.”

Sappho laughed until tears stood in her eyes. “Oh, if he could but hear this.”

“He will,” Khar said. “We worked half last night making wax impressions with a pointed stick, then sent them down this morning along with the timber to be delivered to a friend of Alkaios who will see they are copied and hung in the agora.”

Again she was overcome with mirth. “Poor Pittakos! He cannot be rid of us even here.”

They exchanged news. Alkaios composed and sang in the tavern, while Khar played games of skill and chance. They were treated as guests and had been invited to the villas lining the main thoroughfare. “We are instructed to bring you. Everyone is anxious to play host to Sappho.”

Sappho shook her head. “My hosts take their role of jailer more seriously. But I have a friend in Leto, and if we can meet like this now and then, I will not feel alone.”

*   *   *

As the months of exile passed, Sappho expressed in a poem what her friendship with Leto meant to her. She called it “A Blossomy June.” Like two children, they bathed in icy streams and afterward combed and plaited hibiscus into each other's hair. Sappho showed her how to stain her toes with the petals of crushed geranium, and found surprises for her among the many boxes of precious things that had been sent from Mitylene.

It was still blossomy and still June when Sappho said softly, “Come beside me and I will show you what I have under my cloak. See—a wonderful perfume. Lean forward and I will place the scent between your breasts.”

Leto exclaimed at the beauty of the small alabaster jar, and again when Sappho, removing the stopper, passed it under her nose. “Musk,” Sappho told her, “from the land of the Persians. It makes the skin breathe with desire.”

“Desire? Desire for what?”

The question was troubling. And she had been troubled by it. Just as she was troubled by Leto herself. Why? Why should a simple country girl become the felloe around which her thoughts turned? Leto's glance, her touch, her voice, her presence determined how her own day went, whether it was happy or sad or both. When happiness and sadness intertwine, then great confusion occurs.

Sappho lowered her head so nothing of what she felt could be read in her face and ran the perfume stopper between Leto's wide young breasts and under them. The girl closed her eyes and shivered in delight. “Musk is like a whole garden, a field of flowers!”

Sappho handed her the jar. “Now you do me.” When Leto bent over her, she caught her breath and held it.

Leto laughed at the contrast of their skins, hers so fair, Sappho's even more bronzed by the summer sun.

When Leto finished, Sappho placed the alabaster container in her hands. “It is for you.”

“I couldn't,” Leto protested. “It is too dear.”

“Are we not friends? You know we were from the first minute. And there is nothing that belongs to one friend that does not belong to the other. Take it from your friend.”

Leto still hesitated.

“I will share it with you,” Sappho reassured her, “by resting my head against your breasts and breathing the fragrance. Is that not fair?” Settling herself against Leto, she felt happier than she ever had. “Your breasts are soft, yet beautiful and high. Do you use a breast band?”

Leto, who had been revolving the problem of the alabaster jar, suddenly brightened. “I could perhaps accept the perfume of Persia as a wedding gift.”

Sappho did not move, yet life seemed to run out of her.

Leto must have felt a difference, for she asked, “Are you not betrothed?”

“No.” The word was brought out through a welter of pain.

“But a lady such as you—”

“I said no.”

Leto sought for a way to restore the easy companionship that somehow had been rent. “Will you sing today, Sappho?”

Sappho drew away. She felt cold as a corpse. Everything within her had turned sere. It was a moment before she could ask, “Who?”

“Who am I to marry? Smerdis. You must have seen him looking at me in the market. He always manages to be there when I am.”

“I want to see him,” Sappho said abruptly.

“I will point him out to you the next time we are in the agora.”

“I want to see him now.”

“Now?” Leto was astonished.

Sappho was already on her feet and dressing.

“But I do not know where he is at this hour.”

Sappho sat down again. “Of course,” she said. Leto watched her with a concerned expression.

“Describe him,” Sappho said.

“I hardly know—”

“You know,” Sappho snapped. “Is he tall, short, dark, blond?”

“He is tall,” Leto said unhappily.

“Go on.”

“He is blond.”

“From your description he is a regular Apollo. Why did you not speak of him before?”

“I don't know. We have been betrothed since I was seven.”

“But the marriage time draws near?”

Leto nodded. “At the harvest, so Hera will send us luck and many children.”

“I see.”

“I was going to ask you for a wedding song, but I thought—it is too much. A song from Sappho, it would seem as though I thought myself some fine lady. I know I am only Leto.”

“Stop it, Leto. You shall have your song.”

Leto embraced her knees. Her thanks was blinding pain to Sappho. “Go to Niobe. Tell her I want the lyre of the symmetric horns that was sent with the other items from Mitylene.” She would start to work at once. The Muses would help her; something familiar—music, song, poetry—would bring her back to herself. “The wedding lays will be the most beautiful any girl ever had,” she promised.

Leto's smile broke with radiance. “Then there is nothing wrong between us?”

With great effort Sappho returned Leto's smile. “Why should there be, my Leto?” She waited a moment for control before continuing. “Only … you must know that when the Muses are with me, no other can be present.”

Leto's smile died. “You will not come to the washing springs anymore, or find a spot to bathe with me anymore?”

Sappho could not speak her reply but shook her head that it was so.

“You will not braid hibiscus into my hair?” She said it simply as though to make herself understand.

Sappho threw a flower at her. “What look of sadness is this, Leto? You will be the best-sung bride in all Lesbos!”

*   *   *

With Khar and Alkaios, Sappho began visiting those homes that previously she had been content to avoid. It was good, she told herself, to go about once more, and while the company did not compare to the scintillating, sophisticated circles of Mitylene, still there was talk of the philosopher of Miletus, one Thales, who returned from travels, and, after much study, made the startling declaration that the earth floated on a sea of water. “All that appears to contradict this,” Alkaios explained, “he claims is only a seeming, that actually all things are of a wholeness. In fact, all is water.”

Sappho laughed. “Then why aren't my feet wet?” But it was stimulating to hear what was being debated in the greater Hellenic world. For too long her thoughts had been confined to this rock. She told herself she missed the stimulation of cultivated people. How could I have allowed myself to rusticate? she wondered.

“Did you hear the latest on your friend Pittakos?” her host asked.

Sappho shook her head.

“We all know that what rankles him most is his own common origin. So what does he do but find himself a bride of impeccable family!”

“Pittakos is married?” How easily she could accept it now.

“Wait until you hear. He had to go as far as Thrace to find someone who was both of noble birth and would have him. I understand the woman was brought to Mitylene with great pomp.”

“There is more,” Sappho prompted, delighting in the gossip. “You are not telling it all.”

Their host laughed. “It is rumored the lady is not as young as she might be, or as beautiful. Breeding Pittakos wanted, and breeding he has.”

Alkaios knew instantly who the lady was and instantly rhymed a ditty:

She has been hammered by lovers,

as any old ship's bottom

As an afterthought he added that lead and vinegar did not lighten her leathery skin, that red ocher on her cheeks failed to give the bloom of youth, and that her lamp-blackened eyebrows always managed to appear smeared. Whites of egg mixed with mastic could not help her sagging throat. “I tell you, she could hurry a coffin into the ground. What is our Splayfoot about? O poor horny Yellow Toes! What are you thinking of? At what cost have you bought yourself a bloodline?”

Sappho laughed with the rest, but she no longer had any interest in Pittakos nor cared that he made a fool of himself. “There is to be a wedding much closer to us exiles,” she said, changing the subject. “Leto, daughter of Didymus, in whose house I live, is to be married.”

“Yes, quite soon, I believe. On Hera's day,” their host informed them. “Smerdis comes of an old family of freemen. The union will unite their farms, both small, but together it will make a good parcel. The match is well conceived.”

“Have you been asked to make an epithalamion?” Alkaios wanted to know.

“I will make one, of course. She and her family have been kind to me.”

“Such wedding songs are the pearls of your poetry.”

“I will not only devise the wedding hymenaeus but also train the girls.” She sought the old excitement such doings roused in her in the past.

“And I,” exclaimed Alkaios, “will sing with the boys and beat them into a chorus. It will be something to do.” Immediately he was all apologies to his host. “Not that the time has not passed pleasantly. But no exile is sweet.”

Sappho had stopped listening. The next farm. They grew some kind of coarse bean. She had seen it from a distance, and watched the ploughing. How could Leto have been so confiding with her, yet not mentioned … Aphrodite presides over the deceits that girls employ. But Leto the golden-haired was surely not deceitful. It was a matter she did not consider important; that was why she had not mentioned it sooner. This explanation did not satisfy Sappho. When is a girl's marriage not important?

She left the party early, and Leto, already in bed, roused to blow her a goodnight kiss when she entered. But Sappho was obsessed with Smerdis. She would have no rest until she'd seen him, judged his beauty, both of face and body. On the girdle of Aphrodite is embroidered all the goddess's wishes—if I had such a girdle, it would be worked with one name, Leto.

She turned restlessly from one side to the other. Some god has maddened me, she thought as she lay awake listening to that nocturnal bird, the iynx. Some thoughts she guided: I will send to Mitylene for my Erythraean stone earrings as a wedding gift. Other thoughts burst from her without control: She must not marry, she must not!

Finally she confronted it. She could not bear Leto in the arms of some farmhand.

Sappho slept in tumbled hair and dreamed she fell from morn to morn. When she woke, it was as dark as when her eyes were closed, but she was thinking clearly. She was twenty years old and had no desire to marry. “I shall remain eternally maiden,” she spoke aloud to Night. It was a solemn vow. And having made it, she knew it was time to consider her peculiar virginity. She thought sometimes, because of the force within her, that she was a female in whom a man's soul slumbered. Could such a thing be?

She loved the beauty of her own sex. Their voices were sweet to her ear. And she found their soft, pliant bodies comely, their ringed fingers delicate and pleasing. She liked small feet and the pretty turn of a slender ankle. Narrow waists and swelling uptilted young breasts seemed to her incomparable loveliness. She took pleasure in going to the baths, in watching the voluptuous attitudes into which the maidens fell. She had thought all women experienced the same joy. Now she wondered. Did any other of Leto's friends feel torment, know restless agony?

It occurred to her that Adonis, favorite of Aphrodite, was double-sexed. Had the same gift been granted her? Gift? It was a curse, if true. Yet what of Alkaios and the other men with their lads? Men, of course, had love-friends of their own sex, young boys to pet and write odes to, even march into battle and fight beside—but a woman?

Was it so strange if the same longing, the same passion seized a female? Sappho knew herself to be a divine instrument. But what god was it who compelled her to write wedding songs for a wedding she did not want to take place? The sentences her mind formed were certainly no part of a wedding lay, but surely had been sent by Eros in revenge for her vow of chastity:

For whom curl my hair,

for whom perfume my hands?

Since I go not to …

She broke off. Why was it she could not stand the thought of Leto's secret night with her bridegroom? Or think of his kisses on that full mouth? Why did she find such pain in it?

She twisted and turned until light, then lay pretending to sleep while the household rose. She joined them for breakfast, watered wine and barley cakes. She could not eat and only brought the cup to her lips to moisten them. The mother of the house set Leto and Niobe to spinning.

“I am going for a walk.” Sappho avoided Leto's glance, for she usually waited until the girl was free.

“Where are you going?” Leto asked.

“Nowhere, anywhere, to think on someone's wedding.” She took the footpath to the neighboring farm. On the pretext of gathering flowers, she went close. A young man followed the plough, steering an ancient ox. He ploughs straight, she thought, and drew nearer. His hair, she saw, was blond as a sheaf of wheat—why must mine be black as a goat's? She felt despair at his finely wrought body. It gleamed with sweat as though oils of great cost anointed it. And what height he had, like an oak of Dionysos.