The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [85]
“ ‘Let me go home,’ ” Carolus replies. Of course he knows his Oedipus as well as I do. “ ‘Bear your own fate, and I’ll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say.’ ”
His grandfather’s Tiresias mask is fine and light and old; the ribbon that would secure it around the actor’s head has yellowed and frayed away to scant fibres. At first it looks almost featureless: the eyes are shallow, unpainted pods, the nose and mouth minimally marked. The cheekbones are high and wide; the brow is delicately wrinkled, in the moulding rather than the paint. It’s large, larger than a human face so as to be seen from the back of a theatre, but light; my hands almost seem to rise as I hold it, tricked by the illusion, the contradiction between size and weight.
“Have you ever worn it?”
He lifts his hands and slowly takes it from me to lower it onto his face. After a moment’s rest he struggles to raise his hands again to lift it off. I help him, and lay it gently back in the box. “First time,” he says. “Last time.”
I lid the box and replace it under the bed.
“I miss my father.”
After a long moment I realize he’s crying.
“May I look at your books?” I ask.
They’re well used, torn and marked, some lines underscored and others struck through. He has some I don’t. When I turn back to the bed, he’s watching me.
“Yours,” he says.
“I’m greedy. Even now, and I let you see it. Forgive me.”
“I don’t forgive you. To be alive is to be greedy. I want you to be greedy. I want everyone to be greedy. You know he came to see me?”
I’ve lost the thread. “Your father?”
“My father’s dead. Alexander. Speaking of greedy. One day that monkey’s going to open his mouth and swallow the whole world.”
This costs him; he coughs until his whole being is concentrated in a long, gagging exhale that purples his face and closes his eyes to slits, like blind Tiresias himself. The housemaid, hearing, returns to the room with a cup of water and lifts him upright with a practised grip until his breathing eases. He sips, sags, sips again. She settles him back, smooths the covers, puts a palm briefly on his forehead, and gives me a nice look to say hurry up.
“You need to sleep,” I say.
I rise and arrange myself to go. I’m not sure what gesture to leave on. Perhaps I’m too aware of my own movements because of his stillness, or because he’s an actor after all and would know just what is needed, how to hold your hands when you leave someone for the last time. I bend to kiss his forehead. He opens his eyes again, obviously in pain now, and I hesitate.
“You need to love him better,” he says. “Alexander. He knows the difference.”
I go the last distance, let my lips touch his wrinkled forehead, which is not cool, not feverish, but warm, humanly warm.
FOUR
POOR PROXENUS. My sister’s husband tried so hard to be a father to me in those obscene first weeks after my parents’ deaths. He spoke gently, patted my back, frowned in concentration on the rare occasions that I spoke. But I was already such a cool boy, and my physiology was such that grief made me cold. So I overheard him telling my sister, Arimneste, on the ship from Pella to Athens, when they thought I was asleep in my bunk. He presented his bafflement to her as a medical diagnosis. I had rare blood and humours, and ran cool in the tubes where others ran hot; was it his fault he found my company distasteful? He was a naturally warm man, as she was a naturally warm woman. They wept, they spoke their love for the dead, they found succour in the rites of mourning, and then they moved on. They were like friendly dogs, but I was a lizard.
“Ssh.” Arimneste was feeding the baby again; I could hear the rhythmic sucking. Arimnestus snored quietly in the bunk above mine. “He’s not a lizard. His skin is warm when you touch him.”
“That could come from the outside, absorption from the sun,” Proxenus said. “I really do think he’s afflicted. The body needs to weep