IPHIS AND IANTHE
Let me tell you the story of my becoming.
Let me tell you the story of my boyhood.
Let me tell you the story of how I got my dick.
This is a love story.
I know everything now. I know the pieces that have been sewn together. I know the tapestry of my childhood; the stories we are told as children that we only uncover as adults. The million ways people tried to protect us, and did the very opposite. I understand that love is all there is.
Love is our only means to get free. Love is the act of freeing one another. Love promises freedom and runs headlong toward it. It doesn’t draw breath. Love, at its best, beats like wings beneath you, taking root in your body and connecting you to something so much larger.
I am so lucky to have known this love.
I am alive because I have known this love.
This love is everywhere. It’s in our mothers, our lovers, our children, our friends, our teachers, our trees, our water, our land, our air, our stars, our sun, our moon, our gods. This love is everywhere. If our hearts are listening, they will hear it.
I was born in love. My birth was an act of love. My first breaths were because of love.
*
My mother felt my feet press the edges of her insides. She tells me that if she really listened, she could hear my heartbeat. Always a loud heart, she says.
My father, Ligdus, was not a generous man, in silver or in spirit. He loved my mother, his Telethusa, like a soldier loves his country – theoretically and with entitlement. He cared for her aimlessly and without intention. His hands were cold, his touch thoughtless. He didn’t care to learn her, to study her body or the pattern of her breath. But he needed her all the same.
I wasn’t supposed to happen. I spent the better part of my youth living in the shadow of what was supposed to happen. How I was supposed to exist.
When my mother was pregnant with me, my dad told her of his two wishes :
- For her birth to be painless.
- For the baby to be killed if it was a girl.
She pleaded with him. She screamed at him. She cried. He cried too. Or at least, that’s what she told me.
They could not afford a girl, he said. Girls were expensive. Girls required a dowry and were no help working the field. Their hands were too small, their arms too weak.
So, if I was born a girl, I would be killed. Though devastating, this is common. This is not a unique tragedy, nor one specific to my family. This is Crete.
I continued growing in my mother’s belly like the rolling of a dice. She held me within her, knowing it might be the only chance she got. She wrapped her arms around me. Placed her hands on my feet when I pressed them to the walls of her womb. She sang to me. She prayed for me. Oh man, she prayed for me. She prayed like a storm. She prayed on her knees with her hands beating against her chest. She prayed like it was the only thing left for her to do.
She begged the Fates for answers. Heads, he lives; tails, she dies.
I could feel her love even then. I swear, I remember it in my body. I could feel the love she gave me even before I was born. Before I drew breath. That’s how strong her love was.
My mother went into labour while my father was out working in the field. It was just her and a midwife in a small, ramshackle room. My mother was laid down on a low, hard bed lined with sea sponges and wool bandages. The midwife lay cloths soaked in warm olive oil over her stomach and hips. She kept fragrant herbs around her neck in case my mother fainted.
Sweat stung my mother’s eyes. She could not find her breath. She was a woman of her body, but panic was ripping her away from it.
Blackness.
That was all she saw.
Just blackness. This is the bottom of the ocean, she thought.
Only the bottom of the ocean could be this dark.
There was no midwife. No olive oil or wool.
She wondered if she had died. If even death could be as dark as this.
She began to see colours in the distance. Like splodges. Like when you press against your eyes too hard for too long and strange grainy puddles of colour begin to move in the darkness.
Blue and brown and gold. Moving toward her. Brighter and brighter, the closer they got.
Isis, Osiris, Anubis, Bastet and Apis came to her bedside.
My mum. A poor lady from Phaistos with a wicked sense of humour, whose greatest wealth was the feeling of saltwater on her skin. My mother. In the company of gods.
She sat upright as her tears fell, and didn’t stop falling. She wept. Not in sadness or pain, just in witness. ‘Very beautiful things can make you cry, Iphis,’ she tells me still.
All children on this island obsess over the passage of the afterlife. They stay up late, until the stars have pushed their kisses through the darkness and the sky is lit up with their loving. To a sky full of gods, the children tell the story of the soul.
I continued growing in my mother’s belly like the rolling of a dice.
They whisper of the forty-two divine judges who wait at the mouth of the afterlife, ready to determine the fate of the dead. They act out the confessions of innocence, pleading desperately against their unlived sins. Little boys bite their nails and ruffle their hair while they wait for their hearts to be weighed by the gods. The purer the heart, the lighter it would be. It is quite the performance.
Each night the children give the stars a different show. Sometimes their hearts are lighter than the feather of truth and they pass the trial, floating and blissful on their passage to the afterlife. Other nights, they drop to their knees and shake their fists at the sky as their heavy hearts are devoured by Amit – the beast with the head of a crocodile, the torso of a lion and the hind legs of a hippo. Little girls clap their hands together as he snaps his jaws and licks his lips. At the end of their shows, they bow to the stars, twinkling in their applause. Thank you for coming, you’ve been a wonderful audience, goodnight.
These gods – the ones who weighed hearts and dispensed eternal life and threw your soul to the crocodile, the celebrities of my childhood – these were the very gods who stood before my mother.
They looked like a painting, she tells me, a painting made from light. They emitted a glow that was alien to her, and also the most natural thing she had ever seen. It was as if the full moon and the midday sun were shining on their skin. Or from their skin. They eclipsed.
Through tears, her eyes adjusted to their brightness in the dark and finally, she could see them with visceral clarity. Anubis’s eyes were the first she found. They glowed pure white, and exhaled a kind of mist that caught the light streaming from his pupils. He had the head of a jackal, with pointed ears that betrayed the seriousness of his jowl. She could feel the heat of his breath from his long, wet nose. She took in the hardness of his body, all lean muscle draped in gold. Upon seeing Anubis, my mother knew she was dead.
I must have died in labour, she thought. Anubis has come to walk me to the afterlife and embalm what remains.
She tells me she wasn’t afraid. She tells me the only terror that struck her cold was the possibility that I had met the same fate.
‘Is my child dead too?’ she sputtered, wiping the snot dripping over her lips. She was surprised to find that she didn’t feel embarrassed.
Isis moved toward her.
This is an extract from Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers (Hachette), available now at your local independent bookseller.
