The Infernal Machine and Other Plays Page 3

  TIRESIAS. And your jewels, don’t forget. Your brooch alone has pearls the size of eggs.

  JOCASTA. Other people can laugh and dance and enjoy themselves. But not the Queen. I’m supposed to leave this brooch at home, where there isn’t a servant I can trust. Tell the young soldier to help me down the steps. You can follow us.

  TIRESIAS. But… the way he affects you …

  JOCASTA. Yes, he does — he’s young and strong. He can assist me, and I won’t break my neck. Do as I say.

  TIRESIAS. You No, not you. You! That’s it. Help the Queen down the steps.

  SOLDIER. You’ve made the grade.

  GHOST. Jocasta! Jocasta! Jocasta!

  JOCASTA. He’s flustered, poor darling! Somehow steps are against me; steps and brooches and scárfs. I’m surrounded by things that are against me. They all want my death.

  She cries out again.

  Oh!

  YOUNG SOLDIER. Has Her Majesty hurt herself?

  TIRESIAS. No, you idiot! It’s your foot!

  Urgently.

  Your foot on the end of her scarf. You almost strangled the Queen.

  YOUNG SOLDIER. Forgive me, Your Maj —

  JOCASTA. Don’t be ridiculous, Zizi … the poor darling isn’t a murderer just because he stepped on my scarf — the way you did! Don’t let it upset you, my dear. His Excellency Tiresias is always quick to point out faults in others…

  TIRESIAS. But, Your Majesty …

  JOCASTA. Come. Thank you, my boy. Be sure to send your name and address to the temple. One, two, three, four. This is wonderful! Zizi, notice how well I’m going down. Eleven, twelve … Zizi, are you following? Only two more. Thank you. I can manage now. See if His Excellency needs any help.

  Jocasta and Tiresias go off left. She looks back wistfully at the Young Soldier, and waves. Crowing is heard.

  It’s your fault! I shall never know what my poor Laius wanted. You and your third eye….

  Fades out.

  GHOST. Jocasta! Tiresias! Have pity on me….

  SOLDIER. Look!

  YOUNG SOLDIER. The ghost!

  GHOST. At last! I’ve been calling you.

  SOLDIER. You were there all the time?

  GHOST. All the time you were talking to my wife and Tiresias. Why didn’t you see me?

  YOUNG SOLDIER. I’ll run and bring them back.

  SOLDIER. No use. When the carpenter arrives, the chair stops wobbling. When you walk into the shoemaker’s, your sandal stops pinching. When you get to the doctor, the pain is gone. And if you bring them back now, he’ll vanish.

  GHOST. Alas, this man of the people has more understanding than a priest.

  YOUNG SOLDIER. I will go.

  GHOST. Too late! They are coming for me. I must give you the message. Tell the Queen … warn the Queen that a young man … is approaching Thebes, and that she must not… No, no …

  Struggling, as though pulled by invisible guards. The young man is her … the young man is our …

  To the “guards ” .

  I am going to tell… I know your plans and the penalty but I shall risk everything … she is still my wife … and I defy you to stop me from telling … from telling … no, help! Help! I had to tell her… to try to tell her… she was my wife … she was my wife … I had … I had … I …I…

  He disappears into the wall. There is a taut silence as they stare after him.

  YOUNG SOLDIER. He wanted us to warn his wife.

  SOLDIER. Can’t wait to run after her, can you?

  YOUNG SOLDIER. It’s not that.

  SOLDIER. All he had to do was appear and speak to them. They were here, but they couldn’t see him or hear him. Nor could we — until they left. That proves that kings become ordinary people like you and me after they die. Poor Laius! Now he knows how hard it is in Thebes to be heard by the higher echelons.

  YOUNG SOLDIER. But why did he choose us?

  SOLDIER. Because we’re ordinary people, that’s why. Because we’re here. Officers, queens, high priests — they always leave before it happens or come when it’s all over.

  YOUNG SOLDIER. What do you mean by “it“?

  SOLDIER. I don’t know. But I know what I mean.

  YOUNG SOLDIER. Then we’re not going to warn the Queen?

  SOLDIER. You listen to me. Let princes deal with princes, ghosts with ghosts, and soldiers with soldiers.

  There is a trumpet call.

  CURTAIN

  THE VOICE

  Spectators, let us imagine that we can wind back the last few minutes and relive them elsewhere. While the ghost of Laius tries to warn Jocasta on the ramparts of Thebes, Oedipus encounters the Sphinx on a hill that overlooks the city. The same trumpet-calls, the same cock-crows, the same moon, the same stars.

  ACT TWO: THE SPHINX

  A deserted spot on a hillside overlooking Thebes, by moonlight. The road from Thebes (from left to right) passes across the front of the stage, and bends around a tall leaning stone. The base of the stone is held in place at the end of the platform and forms the entrance doorway on the left. Behind the remains of a little temple is a ruined wall. In the middle of the wall is an intact pedestal, which must have marked the entrance to the temple, and bears the remains of a chimera — a wing, paw, and haunch. Broken columns.

  A girl in white, The Sphinx, is sitting among the ruins; a jackal’s head rests in her lap, the rest of its body being hidden behind her. Distant trumpets.

  SPHINX. Listen.

  JACKAL. I can hear.

  SPHINX. The final call. We’re free.

  Anubis gets up. The jackal’s head belongs to him.

  ANUBIS. It was the first call. There are two more before they close the city gates.

  SPHINX. It was the final call; I’m sure it was.

  ANUBIS. You’re sure because you want the gates to be closed. We are not free. We have to wait. It was only the first call.

  SPHINX. Perhaps I was wrong.

  ANUBIS. You are wrong.

  SPHINX. Anubis …

  ANUBIS. Yes, Sphinx?

  SPHINX. I don’t want to kill any more.

  ANUBIS. We have to be obedient. Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours; they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.

  SPHINX. You see, Anubis, you were wrong. There is no second call. Let’s leave …

  ANUBIS. If we don’t kill anybody tonight, you’ll be happy.

  SPHINX. Yes, I will. Even though it’s late. I’m nervous … someone may still come along.

  ANUBIS. You’re becoming more and more human.

  SPHINX. That’s my affair.

  ANUBIS. Don’t lose your temper.

  SPHINX. Why do we always act without aim or understanding or explanation? Look at you, Anubis, why the Egyptian God of the Dead in Greece? And why with the head of a jackal? Because that’s how superstitious people picture you?

  ANUBIS. Amazing! You know, when you start asking questions, you really look like a woman.

  SPHINX. You haven’t answered me.

  ANUBIS. Here’s my answer: If we didn’t appear to men looking the way they picture us, they wouldn’t see us at all. That’s logic. To us, Greece, Egypt, Death, the Past, and the Future are meaningless. And you know perfectly well why I have the jaws of a jackal. The divine rulers were very wise to give me a physique that isn’t human; it saves me from losing my head, even this dog’s head. I’m here to guard you, but if they’d given you a regular watchdog I know what you’d be up to: we’d be in Thebes right now, with me on a leash and you surrounded by a pack of young men.

  SPHINX. You’re foolish!

  ANUBIS. You have assumed the body of a girl. That is why you feel sympathy for your victims, but remember that they are nothing more than zeroes wiped from a slate, even though each zero may be an open mouth crying for help.

  SPHINX. That may be so. But here on earth it is so difficult to remember what we planned when we were gods. Here the dead really die — I kill them.

/>   As the Sphinx is talking, looking down, Anubis pricks up his hears, sniffs, looks around and lopes off silently toward the ruins, where he disappears. A Theban Mother enters right front, with two children, A Boy walking ahead and A Girl whom the Mother is dragging along.

  MOTHER. Look where you’re going, not behind you. Leave your sister alone; go on.

  Boy walks full tilt into the Sphinx.

  Watch out! There! I told you. I’m sorry, my dear, he just won’t look where he’s going. Did he hurt you?

  SPHINX. No, not at all.

  MOTHER. I didn’t expect to meet anybody here as late as this.

  SPHINX. I haven’t been in Thebes long. I’m going to one of my relatives in the country, but I seem to have lost my way.

  MOTHER. Poor girl! Where did you say this relative lives?

  SPHINX. Not far from the twelfth milestone.

  MOTHER. Why I’ve just come from there myself, or very near it. We were at my brother’s house. We sat around talking after dinner, you know how it goes, and here I am now still on the way and the children overtired and fidgety, and it’s after curfew.

  SPHINX. Good night.

  MOTHER. Good night.

  She makes as if to go.

  Oh, by the way, don’t hang about here. You and I, being women, may not have much to worry about, but I won’t feel safe until I’m inside the city walls.

  SPHINX. Are you afraid of bandits?

  MOTHER. Bandits? No! What could they take from me? Where are you from? I can tell you’re not from Thebes. I’m talking about the Sphinx.

  SPHINX. You don’t really believe that story, do you?

  MOTHER. That story! You’re young and, like all young people, you don’t believe anything. No, you don’t! Let me tell you something that happened in my own family. My brother — the one I just left —

  She lowers her voice confidentially, and sits down.

  — he married a tall, beautiful blonde from the north. One night he woke up and found his wife’s body lying there right next to him without a head or stomach. What an unpleasant experience! She was a vampire. Of course, he was terrified at first, but then he took an egg and put it on the pillow where his wife’s head should have been. That’s how you stop a vampire getting back into its body. Then all of a sudden he heard a wailing. It was the head and entrails flying around the room like mad and begging him to take away the egg. My brother wouldn’t. The head got angry; then it began to cry; then it kissed him. In the end, the fool gave in and took the egg away and let his wife back into her body. So there he is, married to a vampire. My sons tease him about it. They say he invented the whole story about the vampire, to cover up the fact his wife went out at night — but with her head on somebody else’s pillow — and her body. But I know better. My sister-in-law is a vampire. If my brother says so, I believe him. It’s the same with the Sphinx. You don’t believe in it, any more than my sons do — you’re all the same, you young people.

  SPHINX. You have other sons?

  MOTHER. I had four; now I have three. This rascal here is seven. Then there’s one sixteen and one seventeen … and the way those two carry on about the Sphinx!

  SPHINX. They argue?

  MOTHER. My dear, they just can’t live under the same roof. The one who’s sixteen is only interested in politics. He says the Sphinx is a hoax. There might have been a Sphinx at one time, according to him, but now it’s dead and the priests use it as a bogey to scare the people, and the police use it as a cover-up for their inefficiency and corruption. Starvation — he says — rising prices, bandits infesting the countryside, no government to speak of, one bankruptcy after another — Why? The Sphinx! The temples are crammed with holy offerings, he says, while mothers with families haven’t a loaf of bread to call their own. Wealthy tourists are leaving the city. Why? The Sphinx! And he gets up on the table, shouting and waving and stamping, denouncing the authorities, preaching revolution and praising the anarchists — he’ll have us all hanged. Strictly between us, my dear, I know there is a Sphinx but — you mark my words — they’re taking advantage of it, no doubt about that. What we need is a man, an iron fist, a dictator.

  SPHINX. It sounds as if you already have a dictator in the family. What is his brother like?

  MOTHER. Ah, now, he’s a different case again. He despises everything and everybody — his brother, me, even the gods! He says the Sphinx would be interesting if it killed for the sake of killing — what a thing to say! — but it’s hand in glove with the oracles. So he doesn’t care about it, one way or the other.

  SPHINX. And your fourth son? When did he… ?

  MOTHER. Lost him almost a year ago. He was just nineteen.

  SPHINX. You poor woman! What did he die of?

  MOTHER. The Sphinx.

  SPHINX. Ah.

  MOTHER. My young son says he was caught in a police trap, but I know better. The Sphinx killed him. If I live to be a hundred I’ll remember that morning when they brought him home. I opened the door and there I could see the soles of his poor feet, and far, far off his poor little face. On his neck — just here — was a great wound, but the blood wasn’t flowing any more. He was on a stretcher. I just said, “0-oh!” and fainted dead away. You never really recover from a blow like that. It’s lucky for you you don’t come from Thebes and have a brother. My third son — the one who jumps all over my table with his politics — he wants to avenge him. He hates priests, and after all, my poor son was one of the sacrifices. But what point is there …

  SPHINX. Sacrifices?

  MOTHER. Certainly. When nobody could find the Sphinx, the priests insisted that it was calling for human sacrifices. They picked out the youngest, the weakest, the finest-looking.

  SPHINX. How terrible for you!

  MOTHER. I say again: what we need is a dictator, a man of action. Queen Jocasta is still young. From a distance you’d take her for twenty-nine or thirty. We need a ruler who’d marry her, kill the monster, punish the criminals, lock up Creon and Tiresias, straighten out our finances, cheer us all up and — well, somebody who would be on the side of the people and rescue us…

  BOY. Mother.

  MOTHER. Hush!

  BOY. Mother, what does the Sphinx look like?

  MOTHER. How should I know?

  To Sphinx.

  And now, my dear, with the little money we have left, they want to build a memorial to the victims of the Sphinx. Can that bring them back to us, I ask you?

  BOY. Mother, what’s the Sphinx like?

  MOTHER. Poor child. And his sister’s asleep. Let’s go.

  Boy examines the Sphinx’s skirt.

  Now, don’t worry the lady.

  SPHINX, stroking his neck. He’s all right.

  BOY. Mother, is this lady the Sphinx?

  MOTHER. Don’t be silly.

  To Sphinx.

  I hope you don’t mind, dear. At that age they don’t know what they’re saying. Now then, come along, sleepyhead.

  The Girl has fallen asleep in her arms. She takes the Boy by the hand and they move off.

  BOY. Mother, is this lady the Sphinx? She is the Sphinx, isn’t she, this lady?

  MOTHER. That’ll do now. Say good night to the lady.

  BOY. Good night, Sphinx.

  MOTHER. Good night, dear. Excuse me for talking so much. I was glad of a chance to catch my breath. Do be careful.

  The second trumpet sounds.

  There’s the second call. After the third, we’ll be locked out.

  SPHINX. You’d better hurry. I have to be on my way, too. Thank you for warning me.

  MOTHER. Take it from me, we need a strong man to free us from the scourge.

  Exit.

  BOY, offstage. Mother, if that lady isn’t the Sphinx, who is?

  SPHINX. Scourge!

  ANUBIS, reappearing from the ruins. Don’t let that woman disturb you.

  SPHINX. I’ve been miserable for two days, Anubis, hoping this would end. Now I am going to make a wish, and if it comes true I sha
ll never have to mount this pedestal again, never kill again. I wish for a young man to come and climb the hill … a fearless man. I shall fall in love with him, and he will answer the riddle, as if he were my equal. And when he gives the answer, I shall die.

  ANUBIS. Only your human body will die.

  SPHINX. Yes, the body that could make him happy. You see, Anubis, I was right. That was the last trumpet we heard.

  ANUBIS. I tell you it was not.

  He climbs on an overturned column.

  It was the second. When I hear the third you can go. Oh!

  SPHINX. What?

  ANUBIS. Bad news.

  SPHINX. Is someone coming?

  ANUBIS. Yes.

  SPHINX, up beside him and peering offstage, right. Anubis, I can’t — I won’t question him.

  ANUBIS. You may look like a young mortal, but here’s a mortal who looks like a young god.

  SPHINX. What a stride, Anubis I And those shoulders I He’s almost here.

  ANUBIS, hiding. Remember: you’re the Sphinx. I’ll be watching, if you want me …

  SPHINX. Anubis, listen …

  ANUBIS. Sh!

  Enter Oedipus upstage, walking fast, his eyes on the ground. He starts.

  OEDIPUS. Oh, excuse me.

  SPHINX. Did I startle you?

  OEDIPUS. Not really. I was far away, and when I looked up…

  SPHINX. An animal. You took me for an animal.

  OEDIPUS. Almost.

  SPHINX. Almost an animal? That would be the Sphinx.

  OEDIPUS. I know.

  SPHINX. Oh, you took me for the Sphinx. Thank you.

  OEDIPUS. I was wrong. I can see that.

  SPHINX. Nice of you to say so. But I suppose it wouldn’t be a laughing matter for a young man to look up and find himself face to face with the Sphinx.

  OEDIPUS. Or for a young woman.

  SPHINX. It never attacks young women.

  OEDIPUS. Young women don’t usually go near the places where it’s likely to be after dark.

  SPHINX, coquettishly. Young man, you’d do well to mind your own business, and let me be on my way.

  OEDIPUS. Which way is that?

  SPHINX. I’ve never seen you before. Why should I tell you?

  OEDIPUS. Perhaps I know.