Jocasta: Wife and Mother

From the troubled ocean of her thoughts rose the idea of a golden child, the extension of the mother’s flesh that would be and become what the mother had failed to become – a fulfilled and perfect person. That link between the two, that identification, could scarcely be broken. In her intense if temporary sorrow, she recognised that she had not attempted to permit the child its freedom.

‘I know I have been a lustful woman. I know it, I admit it … How I have adored the ultimate embraces – particularly when forbidden! There are two kinds of love. Why doesn’t the world acknowledge as much? There’s the time-honoured love, honourable, to which all pay tribute. And there is the love time-detested, which all despise, or affect to. In me, those two loves combined, I cannot tell how …

‘This is the dreadful secret of my life … I am a good woman, or so I seem to be, and so I pretend to be. Yet if the world knew, it would condemn me as evil.

‘This pretence … It steals my sense of reality. Who am I? What am I?’

She struggled mutely with the confusion between her inner and outward realities.

‘And yet and yet … Oh, the misery of it! For if I had my chances over again, I would surely behave as before. Great goddess, since what is done cannot be undone, grant me the strength to contain my secret, to withhold it from the world. Come to my aid … Come to my aid, if not here in Thebes where I am in sin, then in Paralia Avidos, by the limitless seas. For I am sick at heart …’

She thought the goddess answered, ‘You are sick at heart because you know you do wrong, yet make no effort to mend your ways …’

She continued to crouch before her altar, where she had set a small light, repeating to herself ‘For I am sick at heart’, until she felt comforted by it.

She rose, smiling, and went to her husband.

2

The Oedipus family was preparing to go to the coast.

The hour of dawn had come. The cloud curtain lifted enough to permit a ray of sun to slip into the rooms where the daughters of Jocasta slept. It was an appropriate time for a small domestic quarrel. Half-naked, Ismene, the dark one, and Antigone, the golden one, discomfited each other.

Ismene wanted to take her pet bear on the journey to the coast. Jocasta had forbidden it. Ismene shrieked and cried and threw some clothes about. The bear growled and hid its eyes behind its paws; it foresaw a thrashing in its near future.

‘Hate, hate, hate!’ shrilled Ismene.

‘Sister, dear,’ said Antigone, assuming a studious pose, ‘why make such a fuss? Can you never understand that the more fuss you make, the harder grows Mother’s heart? Have you no more sensibility than your stupid little bear, that you cannot perceive how uncomfortable shrieking and weeping make you?’

‘Pheobe is not stupid,’ said Ismene. ‘She’s the cleverest little bear that ever existed. She can stand on her head and you can’t.’

‘Is that a test for cleverness? Don’t you see that the idiot thing stands on its head out of stupidity, because it does not know which way up it should be?’

Ismene rushed at her sister, screaming with anger. ‘Oh, if only you were a bear I would beat you to death!’

‘If I were a bear, I might be stupid enough to let you. Grow up, Ismene!’

‘I don’t want to grow up if it means being like you!’

‘Stop the noise and get yourselves packed!’ cried Jocasta, from the next room, where she was endeavouring to supervise Hezikiee’s attempts at packing. ‘You create a Hades for yourselves inside these four walls. If you quarrel again over that silly bear, I’ll have it slaughtered.’

The girls put out their tongues at one another, and dressed in silence. ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ said Antigone aloud to herself. ‘She just says these things. She doesn’t mean anything she says …’

The day seemed to pause before beginning, as if activity were something to be squeezed from the returning light. In valleys nearby, mists awaited the moment to clear. Cockerels crowed. Rats slunk into empty barns. Farmers, thinner than they once had been, woke to pray to their gods for rain – a bucketful, a mugful, a handful … Anything to offer the parched lips of the earth.

Oedipus, meanwhile, was coaxing the Sphinx into her grand gilded cage. He used many honeyed words, calling her sweetheart and mother. The Sphinx had no wish to enter the cage, despite the floral patterns into which the golden bars of the prison had been wrought. She squeaked in protest. She turned her head invisible, so that Oedipus should not see her. The ruse failed. Eventually, Oedipus caused a slave to light a fire in one corner of the gilded cage, away from a bank of cushions on which the creature might sleep. A spitted deer was set to turn hissing above the flames. Oedipus, mustering his patience about him, stood back and waited.

The delectable smell arising attracted the Sphinx into her cage. Oedipus slammed the cage door and turned the key.

The slave cranking the spit cried out in alarm.

‘You stay with her and attend her,’ Oedipus ordered. ‘Obey the Sphinx’s every wish. Her life is of more worth than yours.’ The slave made an obeisance, his downcast eyes full of hate.

‘My life is worth more than yours,’ parroted the Sphinx. ‘My life is worth yours and more. Your wife is more than yours … When the family is undercast, the sky will be overcast.’ She flung herself against the bars.

‘Be a good Sphinx,’ retorted Oedipus. ‘You are precious to me. So I must keep you safe under lock and key while I am away.’ He had on his black robe and metal skirt, as befitted a soldier. As he strode through the halls of the palace, old women withheld their sweeping; clutching their besoms, they bowed as far as long habit allowed in humble salutation. Disregarding them, Oedipus marched out to see that his guard was ready for the journey.

The sky above Thebes was overcast. Heavy cloud had swallowed the infant sun. This was famine weather. Oedipus saw immediately that the cloud was too high for rain.

Ten soldiers stood at the ready beside two carriages, each drawn by two horses. The captain came forward and saluted Oedipus. Oedipus returned the salute. He went to inspect the horses, and check the bits that restrained them.

One of the mares was the cream-coloured Vocifer. She bridled as Oedipus stroked her nose.

‘Quiet, girl!’ He found the light was not good, as the mare cast a sideways glance at him, a glance full of implacable hatred from a dark eye fringed with lashes like reeds about a deep pool.

Vocifer spoke. Foam developed about her bit as the words came forth. ‘Oh, Oedipus, though my days as your captive mare are long, less long is the time before your downfall. I will not gallop many more weary miles before your eyes are blinded.’ Slobber ran from her mouth and dripped to the dust below.

Oedipus had never heard his mare speak before. He was shaken. But in a moment he recovered himself, grasping her bridle, answering the animal sturdily and saying, ‘Though you remain a horse and not a prophet, yet I remain a man, and men command mere horses.’

The mare replied, as she struck the ground with a hoof, ‘Though you command horses, yet are you harnessed to your fate.’

Oedipus looked anxiously about him. It appeared that no one had noticed the horse speaking her prophecy. Rather than hear another word, he whacked Vocifer’s flank and moved away from her. The evil look she had given him, more than her words, disturbed him. The mare snorted in contempt. She never spoke another word.

He took up a position beneath the four-pillared portico, to remain with arms akimbo. There he stood impassively waiting, giving no sign of his inward apprehensions, as first Antigone and Ismene came out, settling themselves rather sulkily in one of the carriages. Jocasta emerged next from the palace, smiling, dressed in a blood-red robe, her hair tied with a red ribbon. Her personal servant, Hezikiee, followed, garbed in her usual dusty black. Behind them, goaded on by a slave driver, came a small company of slaves – including Sersex on whom, Semele asserted, Antigone had cast an eye.

A rug draped about her shoulders, ancient Semele, bent but stormy, came out to witness their departure.

‘You will find no salvation by the dragon-haunted sea,’ she said. ‘What you will find is the beginnings of destruction. Be warned. Stay home, Oedipus, stay home!’

He set his gaze forward, away from the old woman.

‘Go back to your den, harridan,’ was all he said.

‘I am keeping Polynices and Eteocles with me, in my care.’

‘Send my sons out to me at once, harridan.’

Pouting, she brushed bedraggled strands of hair from her eyes. ‘They stay with me!’

Without raising his voice, he said, ‘Send out my sons at once, or I will come and whip them out, and whip you into the bargain.’

‘You are nothing but a brute, Oedipus!’ With that, she slowly turned her old bent figure, withered as a prune, to make her way back into the inner courts.

A few minutes later, the two sons of Oedipus and Jocasta emerged, eyes downcast, and made to climb into the carriage with their sisters and mother.

‘You are not women,’ said Oedipus to his sons, in a quietly threatening voice. ‘You will walk beside me along the way to the seashore.’

‘But, Father—’ began Eteocles.

His father silenced him with a terrible voice. ‘You will walk beside me to the seashore. I will teach you lads philosophy yet.’

The boys went dumbly to him where he stood, beside the carriage loaded with their provisions. He patted their shoulders.

‘Courage, boys. We require the help of Apollo. To be obedient pleases the gods. Compliance delights Apollo.’

In this manner, the Oedipus family prepared to go to the coast.

The procession wound its way through the streets of Thebes, bone dry and dusty under the thrall of a new day. Many citizens came out of their homes to watch from their poor doorsteps as the procession passed. Few cheered. Few jeered. Who would venture to express disgust of their king, when his intercessions at the temple of Apollo, at Paralia Avidos, might deliver them from the present miseries which afflicted their city? And moreover, to entertain another line of argument supporting the wisdom of silence, to venture criticism now was to risk losing that small but eloquent instrument of criticism, the tongue – if not the entire head housing it …

Only dogs dared to run snarling at the heels of the soldiery and the wheels of the carriages as they rumbled through the uneven streets. These hounds were grey. The streets they prowled were grey. Even the garb of the citizens, protracted through poverty beyond their best years, was grey. The houses, too, were of a slatey tone under the leaden sky. It was as if Apollo had withdrawn the benison of colour from the once-thriving city of Thebes.

Once through the gates and out in open country – heedless of the failing crops – the Oedipus family found its spirits reviving. The daughters, now reconciled, their squabbles forgotten, began to sing in sweet voices. They sang, ‘Mother, You Are Ever-Loving’, and then, in descending sentiment, ‘Where Did I Leave That Undergarment?’

They had some twenty miles to travel to the temple of Apollo at Paralia Avidos, on the shore of the warm sea, where they hoped a better future awaited them.

The ruined village of Eleo stood on their route, inhabited now by nothing living but goats and a few scrawny hens. The hens had long since relearnt the art of flight. They rose clucking out of the path of the procession. Beyond the ruins, the entourage entered on a more dreary landscape. Here began bleak heathland, denuded of trees, where three ancient roads met: the roads from Delphi, Ambrossos and Thebes. The procession took the right-hand fork, which led to the coast. A white commemorative stone stood by the track. This was the region called Phocis.

Jocasta gave a small shriek, belatedly attempting to smother it in the hem of her red robe. Her daughters asked her why she shrieked.

‘I thought I saw a wolf lurking by the bush,’ she said.

‘Where? Where?’

‘Over there!’ She stretched out one of her shapely arms, to point vaguely into the distance.

‘You saw nothing but what was in your mind, Mother,’ said Antigone, patting Jocasta’s arm.

While her sons argued the possibilities, and the lack of desirability, of being attacked by wolves, a different dialogue was playing in Jocasta’s mind.

She was of a noble family, its history darkened by feuds and vendettas. Fathers had strangled their sons, mothers had slept with their daughters, brothers had raped their infant sisters. The juices of their line had become mixed. Yet they had been learned; they understood astronomy and kept doves and enjoyed music, sport and drama. Jocasta herself had been an independent-minded child. She was the jewel of her mother Hakuba’s eye. Her grandmother Semele then lived away in the forest.

Semele had come to look after her grandchild only when Hakuba had died unexpectedly. Those were the years of Jocasta’s greatest grief.

In her adolescence, she had become a keen runner. Only the generous size of her breasts had robbed her of a championship in the Theban games.

She had thought nothing of marrying Prince Laius. She considered it her birthright to wed into the royal line. She knew – her father had told her as much – that Laius had at an earlier age cohabited with two wild youths whom, in a drunken quarrel, he had stabbed to death. What were these sins but the follies of youth, the jeux d’esprit of a bold disposition? Besides, now that he was King of Thebes, Laius was as beyond reproach as he was above the law.

So Jocasta wed Laius. Laius wed Jocasta.

Oaths were sworn. Flowers were thrown.

The throats of many nanny goats were cut.

Offerings were made, dances danced, wine consumed.

Jocasta’s tastes were lascivious. This pleased Laius.

The marriage went well enough. At least she lived in a palace.

There was that trouble with Athens.

Laius became more brutal. He lost interest in Jocasta sexually. He preferred beating her to making love to her. All these recollections flowed through her mind like blood from an altar.

There came the night, filled with the greyness of a watching moon, when she dined with her brother Creon, spilling out her troubles in confidence to him, exhibiting her bruises. Creon was good to her. Creon and she had enjoyed carefree sexual relations when children.

They had spurned conventional entrances. It was long ago.

Creon grew up to be a stubborn law-abiding man, wedded to the fair Eurydice. He had never forgotten his early affection for his sister. Nor had Jocasta ceased to love her elder brother. She knew his weaknesses. She knew, too, that he coveted the throne on which her husband Laius reigned.

She recollected now, as her carriage bumped over the barren heathland, a night when she returned to Laius’ palace, after dining with Creon and Eurydice. Creon had accompanied her, since it was deemed incorrect for women – even queens – to walk in the streets alone.

Entering the palace, they heard cries, sounds expressing something between pain and ecstasy, or a blend of both.

Hastening through to the courtyard, they came on a scene which remained, though many a year had passed, vivid in Jocasta’s mind. Laius was bent naked over a naked boy. About these figures, as in a diseased dream, stood four naked slaves, holding lamps aloft, and all with erections gleaming as if oiled.

The sweat of Laius ran from his back and down his buttocks to the floor.

Laius had penetrated the rear exit of the boy. His left hand clutched the boy by the throat, while with his right hand he agitated the puerile organ of the child. It was from this boy that the cries of agony and joy issued. Laius himself was mute, his face in the lamplight a mask of lust.

Creon leapt forward, drawing his short sword.

‘You beast! How dare you perform this foul act before mere slaves?’

As he waved his sword, the four slaves dropped their lamps and fled, clutching those organs they no doubt thought imperilled by Creon’s avenging blade. The darkness would have been complete, had the moon overhead not been at full, throwing its drab light on the scene.

Although considerably aghast at being discovered, Laius was defiant.

‘You dare speak thus to your king? Go! I must satisfy myself somehow. My wife will not do it.’

To all this Jocasta had been witness, concealed behind a curtain. Only now did she step forth to confound her husband’s words.

‘You liar!’ she cried. ‘On how many occasions have I not bent to your drunken whim, yielded my body to your thrust – yielded to your wretched preferences, while you poured your disgusting seed into my hinder parts?’

‘Who is this wretched urchin you were defiling?’ Creon demanded of the king. ‘Some common street boy, doubtless!’

Creon seemed to grow in authority and darkness, while Laius shrank back, snatching up his disordered robe and clutching it about him with one hand.

The boy seized on the opportunity, slipping from Laius’ grasp, to run away. They heard him as he rushed into the street, yelling at the top of his voice that the king had molested him.

‘Do shut that brat up!’ cried Laius. His voice was faltering. ‘He’ll awaken the neighbourhood. He liked what we were doing, Creon, begged for it, believe me. He’s no slave. He’s a freeman’s son, by name Chrysippus. Do pray silence him.’

Creon drew himself up, while still wielding his sword in a threatening manner.

‘Put your clothes together, you pederast. I will see that this vile act is known, and your four menial witnesses executed in due time. Your reign as King of Thebes is at an end.’

Jocasta’s mind drifted to the present. It was many a year since that gross incident, buried within the sinews of a June night. Laius, forgetting his crown, had fled the city. Yet, as Creon said, a curse lay over Thebes to this day. There was a pollutant in its bloodstream: so Creon declared. It kept him from the throne.

The memory of those days returned roughshod to Jocasta when the procession passed another place where three roads met, on the edge of the heathland. There, it was said, brigands had attacked Laius in his chariot and killed him. That act of regicide haunted the situation still in Thebes.

Such reflections caused a melancholy disturbance in Jocasta. She felt herself tremble inwardly. Why was it that human life should be so troubled? The life of a wolf was better. Wolves enjoyed the wilderness and the hunt. They relished their strength, their speed, and their family relations. Why was a human being’s life more troublesome than a wolf’s?

Perhaps wolves had no memory. Perhaps animals were not born to carry the burden of the past with them every day.

Why did she suffer from black spells, during which she felt her life to be hardly worth a candle? She had experienced similar moods when her first child was growing inside her body. Her grandmother had rebuked her for them.

She had become bound to religion, undertaking incantation and self-chastisement. Then, when her child had been born, she – little more than a child herself! – had gone to the shrine of Apollo to seek a blessing for the infant, and had experienced the great black moment of her life.

For what had the servant of Apollo said?

She felt the trembling overcome her again as she recalled the prodromic utterance: that her innocent babe, her boy-child, would grow up to kill his father and, even worse, would take his father’s place and cohabit with his mother. This grievous prediction would surely be fulfilled.

She had told Laius of this terrifying prophecy. He had struck her, alarmed and made furious by the blackness of the prediction. Laius was full of pride. He had gone, humbling himself, to Apollo. Apollo had spoken in precisely the same terms Jocasta had been forced to hear: that their infant boy would grow up to be a regicide and, having killed his father, would take his place in his father’s bed, to mate with his own mother.

Laius pleaded. Laius swore. Laius sacrificed a dozen goats. Laius covered himself with dust and pleaded again. Still the answer came: that the future was immutable. What had been predicted could be turned aside by no man.

Husband and wife, Laius and Jocasta, had discussed this ghastly prediction in whispers; talked in the dark bedchamber, failed to sleep, became ill, quarrelled, made it up, whispered again.

And decided that the prediction must not be fulfilled.

That Apollo must be defied.

Decided that their infant must be killed.

That his tainted blood must be spilled.

‘Do you feel unwell, Mama?’ Ismene asked. The question brought Jocasta back into her present, to the vehicle with its creaking wheels, the barren land all about them, and dark clouds frowning on the horizon.

Jocasta glared at her daughter under her long lashes.

‘Leave me to myself, Ismene. I’m well enough.’

Ismene made a face. ‘I know. “My happiness is my own, so’s my gloom” …’ She was quoting an earlier saying of her mother’s against her, in a sing-song voice.

Jocasta merely sank back into her cloak of dismal introspection as the carriage jolted on its slow way, a creak for every turn of the wheels. In her mind, she heard her grandmother declare that she was sulking again.

Oedipus and his sons walked beside the carriage. The king gave no indication that the march brought him pain. They discussed how far a man might walk before he came to the edge of the world. Soldiers marched before and behind the party. The landscape, tawny and desolate, lay like a lion asleep. There was no suggestion that it would ever cease, or ever awaken.

Jocasta feared that she could never escape from the past. Like the landscape, it surrounded her, went on for ever. Past, present and future were one whole garment. She could not tear that garment from her body.

Laius had been weaker of will than his wife. She had forced him to act against Apollo’s prophecy. She had steeled herself to look on while he pierced the infant’s feet with a skewer and tied them together with cord, so that the child was unable even to crawl. Laius had then gone to the end of the city with the howling child under his cloak. There he had thrust it on a shepherd, with instructions to leave the infant to die on a distant hillside, away from the sight of men.

There was an element of comfort for Jocasta to recall that she had rushed forward and kissed the poor babe farewell on its wet cheek. Then the shepherd had it firmly under his arm and was off.

It was a while after the child had been left for dead on the hillside that Laius had turned against her and, in sodomising the boy Chrysippus, had become outcast from Thebes.

She rested her head on the curve of the arm of the carriage, remembering. The heathland bumped by under her lustreless gaze. All that misery had occurred so long ago; yet when she allowed herself to remember it, back it came, sour and chilling. Snatches of Oedipus’ conversation with his sons drifted to her darkling senses. She listened idly. He was talking now of the curse that lay over the city of Thebes.

Oedipus was saying, ‘Certainly there is cause for sorrow in Thebes. But it has happened before. Why do the citizens vex me? The reason lies beyond philosophical conjecture. Why, they go so far as to accuse me of causing the grief! Why do they not love me? I hate the lot of them. Why should they not love me?’

And Polynices’ sharp response, in a bored tone, ‘Perhaps because you hate them …’

The boys showed their father little respect. They don’t realise, Jocasta said to herself, that the poor man is in pain every step of the way. Yet he deliberately resolved to walk the distance to Paralia Avidos.

Her thoughts were drawn back to those terrible days when she and Laius had condemned their infant son to death at the hands of the shepherd. She had gone back into the palace in a storm of weeping. It was then that the shadow deepened between her and Laius. There were lies to be told, pretences to be kept up. She had become withdrawn. And Laius, of a disturbed mind, had turned first to whores and then to catamites.