“That’s mighty funny,” said Mavranos patiently. “But Euripides wrote a play that deals with what Mr. Cochran is talking about.” He glanced at Angelica. “It’s another play with a secret hidden in it, like your Troilus and Cressida”
Cochran sighed, with a shiver at the bottom of his lungs. “This would be Les Bacchants, wouldn’t it,” he said. This soaked ceiling may as well fall in on me, he thought; everything else is.
“I guess so,” said Mavranos. “That’s French? I mean what in English they call The Bacchae, this ancient play about a guy named Pentheus, who was king of Thebes, and his mom, Agave, who cut his head off and brought it to town.”
“Agave is the cactus they make tequila from,” noted Plumtree. “Often enough I’ve felt like it cut my head off.”
“I never read the play,” Cochran told Mavranos. He yawned, creaking his jaw and tipping tears from the comers of his eyes. “But as a matter of fact my in-laws were reading bits of it to me just last week, in France.”
Cochran wished for another cold American beer, to chase away the palate-memory of the flinty claret with which Monsieur Leon had kept topping up his glass—the family’s most prized vin de bouche, the old 1945 vintage, picked from vines that had gone unpruned during the Nazi occupation—while Madame Leon had droningly read page after leisurely, age-yellowed page of the old play; and he remembered how his weary brain had eventually stopped struggling to translate the French sentences, and had begun simply letting the syllables come through as random near-miss English, and how it had all seemed then to be phrases of idiot obscenity, both childish and shocking at the same time. There had been some moral the elderly couple had wanted him to derive from the play, and though he had come to their fifteenth-century farmhouse in Queyrac to turn over to them the urn that contained the ashes of their daughter and unborn grandchild, it had soon become clear that they were trying to get him into bed with their other, younger daughter, the slow-witted Marie-Claire. The thought that had sent him running from the house to his rented car and speeding away down the D-l across the low country of the Bas Medoc toward distant Paris was It’s only January—they want a second try at a grandchild crop out of me in this thirteen-moon year.
“At the start of the play,” said Mavranos, “Dionysus comes to Thebes disguised as a stranger from Phrygia, but he gets all the local women to go dancing off into the hills in his honor, wearing animal skins and waving these staffs that are wrapped in ivy and topped with pinecones—”
“Easy on the vino there, Kootie,” interrupted Angelica.
But the boy didn’t put the bottle down until he had refilled his gold cup; and when he spoke, it was to Mavranos: “Was there blood on these staffs too?”
“After a while, there was,” Mavranos told him. “The old retired king, Cadmus, he puts ivy vines in his hair and goes out to honor Dionysus too; but the present king, Pentheus, disapproves of all this crazy behavior and has the stranger arrested and thrown in jail. But since the stranger is really the god Dionysus, it’s no problem for him to conjure up an earthquake and blow the jail to bits and get out. Pentheus asks him who set him free, and the stranger says, ‘Him who provides mortal man with the grapevine.’ And Pentheus says something argumentative back, which makes the stranger laugh and say, ‘That’s hardly an insult to Dionysus!’”
Dutifully, Cochran asked him, “What did Pentheus say?”
“Well, officially that line has been lost. In all the modern editions the editors have put in something like, ‘The god who makes men and women act like lunatics.’ But Scott Crane’s dad had a real old copy, in Latin, and in this old version the original line’s still there—and it translates to An unjust gift—that lets men forsake their wronged dead.’ Then the stranger talks Pentheus into putting on a dress so he can go spy on the women, disguised as one of them. Pentheus is like somebody with a concussion at this point—he’s seeing double, and he asks the stranger, ‘Were you an animal a minute ago? You’ve got a bull’s head now.’”
Cochran could feel Plumtree’s gaze on him, but he didn’t glance at her; instead he strode into the kitchen and managed to fumble three cans of Coors out of the refrigerator without looking squarely at the dead man on the table. Perceived only in his peripheral vision, the body seemed huge.
“Sorry,” he said when he had stepped back into the office and popped open one of the cans. He took a deep sip of the stinging cold beer and gasped, “Do go on.”
“Well,” Mavranos said, “the women aren’t fooled by Pentheus’s disguise, and they chase him down and just tear him apart. His own mom, Agave, is the worst—she’s, like, delirious, and doesn’t recognize him, she thinks they’ve caught a mountain lion or something, and she cuts off his head and carries it back to town, real pleased with herself. Old Cadmus, who’s her dad, he sees that this is his grandson’s head, and he talks her out of her delirium so that she sees it too; they’re both horrified at what she’s done—and then there’s another missing section, a whole couple of pages. Modern editors have put in made-up speeches from Cadmus and Agave saying what a terrible thing this is and how bad they feel. And then when the old, real text picks up again, Dionysus is condemning Cadmus and his wife to be turned into snakes, and sending Agave off into destitute exile. “
“Is that how it ends?” asked Plumtree. “Downer play, if you ask me.” Angelica closed her eyes and sighed, obviously weary of Plumtree’s remarks but reluctant to snap at her.
“Well, yeah,” Mavranos agreed. “You do wonder why the god treats ‘em so rough, when they were apparently just doing what he wanted ‘em to do. It doesn’t make sense—the way it’s published these days. But in the original version, after Cadmus and Agave realize what she’s done, the god offers them a sacramental wine, called the debt-payer; he tells them that if they drink it, they will lose all memory of Pentheus, and therefore all guilt and unhappiness and grief over his bloody murder. They’ll be turning over Pentheus’s ghost to the god, and in return he’ll give them forgetfulness and peace. And the reason the god is being so harsh to them at the end of the play is that in the last bit of the omitted section they refuse his offer, his gift—they can’t bear to renounce their love of Pentheus, can’t make themselves disown him, even though he’s dead.”
Angelica was frowning, and looked as though she was ready to spit. “Dionysus wants to take grief, and then more of it—and he won’t wait for it to occur accidentally.” She visibly shivered. “We don’t want to deal with him face-to-face, visit him where he lives—if we’ve got to deal with him at all, we want to deal with his borders.”
Pete was half-sitting against the desk, and he looked up at Angelica with raised eyebrows. “He takes in boarders?”
Diana had sat down on the couch and was holding her distended belly. “It doesn’t sound like Dionysus will want to help us, does it?” she asked. “We want to do the opposite of renounce Scott.”
“That’s why we need an intercessor, I reckon,” said Mavranos. He squinted at Cochran. “How did you get that mark on the back of your hand?”
“I was—” Cochran began.
“Jesus!” yelled Pete Sullivan suddenly, leaping away from the desk. “Angle! Get me the can of brake-parts cleaner!”
Angelica had jumped when he shouted, and now she spoke angrily. “No. What is it, a wasp?”
Kootie had scrambled down from the desk, so fast that his forgotten bouillabaisse bowl flew off too and hit the carpeted floor with an echoing clang and a spray of tepid fish broth.