Sappho (23 page)

And Erinna of Telos persuaded her parents she could now travel in safety to meet the esteemed Sappho, poet of the known world, and join her household for a time. When she arrived at the white stone pier of Mitylene, Sappho was standing alone without entourage or servants. This gesture of independence amazed Erinna, the Asiatic.

Sappho gave greeting in a low voice in which the modulations of a singer could be heard. Her smile, by some interior route, lit her eyes. They glowed with pleasure at meeting her first student. The girl was very slender, perhaps too delicate, but beautifully so. Her slight body seemed fatigued by large crescent breasts.

Sappho embraced her, called her guest-friend, and said, “Erinna of Telos, I have heard your work sung. You speak in a new way of ordinary things and people. There are too many paeans to kings and heroes.”

Erinna's boxes and chest were unloaded, for at a signal Sappho was no longer alone but commanded a dozen slaves who took charge of the luggage. A garlanded carriage drew near, and from it Sappho removed a chaplet. “I wove this for you,” and she pressed tiers of blossoms on Erinna's head. She had to stand on her toes to do this and that made her laugh. “Perhaps you expected … more of me.”

Erinna laughed too, suddenly glad she had come, intrigued by the quick-witted grace of Sappho. She had been right to feel that her destiny was here.

They mounted the chariot lightly, Erinna no longer feeling tired. What promise the dark eyes of Sappho held, what fulfillment of herself as an artist.

“Yes,” Sappho said, as though she had spoken aloud, “we will work side by side, each an inspiration to the other.”

“You are Sappho,” Erinna demurred.

“And you, Erinna,” Sappho replied. “You are young yet, your parents said only nineteen. In time your verse will shine equally with mine.”

“You are kind…” Erinna began.

“No,” Sappho said, “honest. I am honest.”

“Do you think that is what makes a poet great?”

“It is an ingredient. Honesty must be present. But simply looking is a part also. And an interior looking, that most of all.”

“You have had much experience of the world,” Erinna observed.

“Experience of the world is something that comes by living in it,” Sappho said somewhat ruefully.

“Are you not a better poet for it?” Erinna asked.

“I do not know.”

They laughed together because she had been honest.

“I am already glad I have come,” Erinna said. “You have made me glad.”

*   *   *

Sappho installed her first pupil in quarters closest her own. If there had been no boxes at all, Erinna would have lacked nothing. Sappho had stocked her cottage with the best she had, given her slave girls to wait upon her, and placed musical instruments about so that if she wandered from one room to another and the mood took her, she could play.

The young women had great delight in each other's company. And ten-year-old Kleis adored Erinna. She was always clapping her hands in time to the new songs or tagging after when they strolled deep in conversation. It was she who gathered the flowers for their nimble fingers to weave.

Sappho sang the legends of great Homer and instructed Erinna in the art of finding on an instrument the pitch one wanted. She taught cult dancing and invented new positions and forms. She found she could discuss with Erinna the latest ideas from Miletos, Isle of Thought.

Interspersed with these studies were tales of her Syracuse days, of Maltese lap dogs and capering dwarfs decked out in finery, of pink flamingos, their slender legs stepping lightly against the splendor of the sea. She told of the dead city that lay in Poseidon's kingdom and of galas under stretched cloths with golden fringes. She spoke of the singers and poets she had entertained.

Sappho noticed, as though watching another Sappho, that she pruned her account, tailoring it to fit young Erinna's mind. Expunged, for instance, was the death of the sex-maddened slave in the sunken pool. She thought often of this incident, and the picture of his final rutting never failed to excite her. But she did not speak of it because of the puzzle. She recognized it as a puzzle of her own nature. In her mind she would place her dead slave next to Kerkolas's dead slave, the one he had run over. How upset she had been, frantic, that he would not stop. Yet as her own slave struggled, she felt merely a faster beating pulse as she wondered if he would gain the air or drown to complete orgasm. It was a betting question in which there was neither pity nor anxiety. Yet it was Sappho who experienced both episodes, the twin Sapphos, the two contenders. She could not reconcile her reactions, or know in advance what they would be.

When the Muses gifted her, they allowed her to encompass all that men knew. The good and the gentle were hers. But the intensity of feeling drove the other Sappho to depths she did not want to probe. She would like to deny her—but there was a dead slave with protruding eyes, wasn't there?

There were times when she searched her being. What had occurred between the incident of one dead slave and the other: the knowledge of her pregnancy, the death of her husband. But would not such events tend to soften her nature? She shook her head at the conundrum and the dark-chambered ways of her mind, recognizing that, though she sang like a goddess, the three sisters spun her fate as they did all.

The companionship of Erinna meant a great deal to Sappho. There was an air of tranquillity about the girl which she found soothing. The two poets took pleasure in dissecting the rhythms of Aeolic meters. Erinna was sensitive to the textures of sound, and it was a delight to explore with her the forces that drive language. The cool logic Erinna used to praise Sappho's conversational tone or the harmony of a rightly selected word was a joy. And the girl sang sweetly as she rested on mounds of clover or dainty anthrysc, on which cushions had been strewn. Erinna sang with the same detached freshness with which she untwined the scorching threads of Sappho's lays. Her songs, when she could be persuaded to sing them, held a serenity that reflected her own person, and repose stole over Sappho as she listened to the kithara of seven strings.

One afternoon when the singing was done, they became quiet. Silences were always easy between them. They were the anteroom to confidences. Soon they were telling each other of the dreams the gods sent them. And Sappho spoke in hushed tones from the nadir of her soul, laying before Erinna the dread prophecy that haunted her. “It began in Syracuse and has rung in my head since. What being put it there, I do not know.”

“Tell me, for it may be I can separate lying words from true.”

Sappho hesitated, yet she was eager for Erinna to discount the dream. “Always,” she began, “I have known who I am. Long ago I accepted myself, my smallness, my darkness, my ugliness.” Erinna would have defended her against herself, but she waved her to silence. “No, no, this is part of Sappho, just as the great gift the gods endowed me with. It was ordained that men sing my songs wherever the Attic tongue is spoken.

“But in dreams it was told me that indeed my name will echo through time, but not with praise. Circe it was who whispered that I shall be remembered for ill and not for good, that Sappho the Lesbian will be abhorred and my words erased from earth.” She gripped Erinna in terror. “I beg you, can you see into the truth of these things? Can you tell if they will come to pass? And why I am so cursed?”

Erinna considered what Sappho said and was a long time answering. “The Songstress of Lesbos is held in awe the world over. How could your reputation be otherwise than what it is? Therefore, they are your doubts that speak to you, and not dread Circe.”

Sappho allowed herself to be persuaded. Erinna's gentle wisdom convinced her. In a rush of grateful feeling she embraced her friend.

That night Sappho held a long imaginary conversation with Erinna, in which she said how strange it was that so young a girl could provide such solace. “I think it is because of your wonderful breasts; they are like a mother's.”

And she had Erinna say, “If you would nestle against them, I would be content.”

Whether it was by night, or at noon selecting a menu with Niobe, there came into her head thoughts of Erinna. It occurred to her that the girl should be sculpted. Immediately she pictured the artisan smoothing those deep breasts, going over them first with flint, then with his hands. “Ah,” she imagined Erinna turning to her and saying, “if they could be your hands.”

All summer days were lazy, filled with pleasant walks and talks. One such day Kleis left them to hunt in a glade for a flower of many petals she could not identify.

Erinna sat with her kithara in her lap. “Have you noticed that in your poems you locate your feelings in the organs of your body?” she asked Sappho.

“Where else?” Sappho responded. “They are my feelings.”

“It is often as though you are speaking to yourself.”

“Perhaps I am.”

“Why? When I am here?”

Sappho's luminous eyes surveyed her, lingering on the luscious fruits that hung before her. She took the stringed instrument from the girl, lowering it to her own lap. Her imaginary conversations with Erinna no longer satisfied her; Erinna herself must answer. So she said, “I wrote a song for you. I vowed not to sing it.”

“For me? But why?”

Sappho sang without taking her eyes from Erinna.

Without warning

as a whirlwind

swoops on an oak

Love shakes my heart

She put by the kithara and reached with both her hands to the girl's shoulders, bringing her close so that their breath mingled.

Erinna closed her eyes and waited like a statue. Sappho let go of her, jumped to her feet, and stripped off her garments. She stood defiantly before the girl, all parts of her glowing, the rosy teats of her breasts standing erect.

“This is I, this! Is it enough? Is it enough that Sappho loves you? You see me here. There is nothing else. Yet these arms could hold, these hands caress. Would you taste my kisses? I could cover your whole body with kisses.”

Erinna trembled and said nothing.

Sappho was breathing fast and angrily. “Very well, go back to Telos. Go in the morning. You can laugh at me with your friends. Tell them that the poet was awkward and foolish, that she was utterly mistaken. Sun-struck by your beauty, she declared her love. It is a joke at which the world can laugh. Go in the morning, Erinna. Some man there is, with the usual rod for loving a woman. And he will love you.”

“No.”

At that single word Sappho flung her arms about her and held so tightly that each memorized the other's body with her own. The sweet oils with which their skin was rubbed made the slightest movement an undulation. All provocative swellings and private declivities were felt out.

“Here? In the garden?” Erinna gasped.

“Why not in the garden?” And they sank down together among cushions. Later Sappho was to write:

I will put you to rest on soft cushions

And again:

You shall lie on cushions new

Her hands skimmed the girl at her side as though they could not come to rest.

“I would never have laughed,” Erinna said, “or told any mortal.”

“Softer than fine raiment,” Sappho whispered as her hands cupped the full breasts—“daintier than rosebuds.” Her lips settled there as though drinking nectar. “This will be a night without blood,” she said softly as she bared the girl's thighs and found between them dewy response, and a clitoris straining with expectation. The girl opened all recesses to her as a flower unfolds. Sappho's tongue flicked and her fingers skillfully brought sighs, until Erinna twisted and lifted in a demand for the final ecstasy. Sappho rode her own desire like a horse when the bridle has been cast off. She had imagined this a thousand years ago with Leto, and yet she had not. The reality of orgasm, which she had never experienced, was like the limb-loosener of Death. So completely was she stricken that she, too, would have drowned to make the body she had pinioned yield the final, divinely maddened moment. Then, clinging to Erinna, whom she had ravished as completely as herself, she paid homage to her beauty with incoherent words:

With what eyes …

She began again but must stop to give pleasure-giving kisses.

“Which of the gods,” Sappho murmured, “has set this wild love in my heart?”

Erinna nestled against her like a sated child. “Have you never before…?”

“Never! Aphrodite, whose servant from this moment I am, put it in my mind to dream—but until you opened yourself to me, I have been virgin, though bloodied.”

“I am trembling from your love, Sappho. I feel consumed by you. I would die for your kisses. So tell me, for I will never know, what is it a man does to a girl in his lovemaking?”

Sappho's slender body became rigid. “A man stares at your nakedness, not with joy as I behold you, but to examine the differences between you. His member swells with pride that you are defenseless against him. Because he comes into you, he believes thereafter that you are his toy, his creature, his!”

“Does a man give no pleasure?”

“To himself. And by the manipulation of your hidden parts he rouses you, then turns on his back and snores, while you ache and throb, want and desire. Come, Erinna, lie with me on my bed. I cannot be away from you, I cannot do without your touch.” And she led the girl to the main house.

At supper they devoted themselves to Kleis, but could not avoid secret looks and outbursts of merriment, which they covered by demanding further accounts of her rambles. That evening she suggested Kleis retire early.

“May this night last for me as long as two.” Sappho said it as prayer, as once more her small body demanded to reacquaint itself with her partner's.

Through the tumult of her senses she heard Erinna cry out. A goddess possessed her, the foam-born, who felt each quivering triumph with her. Like the shaft of an arrow Sappho slid between her lover's legs, abandoning herself to pleasure-giving. Then with a dancer's agility, she turned completely on the supple young body, spreading herself that her student might practice what she had taught. Pleasure grew to such dimension that it surpassed pain, equaled childbearing, equaled death.