She confronted him that very night. “Do you deny it?” was the first thing she asked, too furious even to say the words that made up her accusation.
“Hmm?” he responded as he unwrapped his cloak, knowing full well what she meant.
“You don’t deny it. You can’t. I only wish that the gods will strike me dead for being so foolish as to attach myself to you!”
She gave pious punctuation to this statement by spitting into a fold in her frock. He eyed her, tempted to insist on a denial, but strangely encouraged by the speed at which she had diverted her anger at herself. He frowned.
“All right, what of it? She is only a helot. Besides, am I expected to change overnight? You must have known about me already.”
“I knew nothing. I don’t talk to anybody.”
With a shrug that he intended to be rueful, he turned to unlace his riding shoes. Damatria chewed a finger as he left, looking confused, and then with a certain coolness reached out to slash his eyes with her nails. He caught her easily, spinning her around and pinning her arms. She then felt, with a frisson of disgust, his erect manhood pressing against the small of her back.
“Accuser, be sure thou do not offend,” he said, resting the pad of his left thumb against her surviving eyeball. He pressed until she gasped. “Do you understand? Say something. Shake your head.”
She shook her head for yes-she understood.
He shoved her to the floor. Surprised, humiliated, Damatria looked up at him in frank disbelief.
“See the ephor if you want to make something of this,” he finally told her. “But I think not. You may have been ignorant of me, but I know about you. What you really want has always been clear.”
Thus Damatria learned the true nature of the creature she had married. It was a bitter lesson, invited by the tenderness she had foolishly shown him. It was not a mistake she would ever repeat.
Dorcis thereafter made no effort to hide his infidelities. At night Erinna’s voice-or the voice of a woman she took to be Erinna, for she had never heard her speak-was audible through the floor of her upstairs apartment. The next morning Dorcis would speak to Damatria in a friendly way, as if nothing had happened. This seemed to be his way of suggesting that his betrayal bore no significance to him, and therefore shouldn’t to her.
At this point Damatria did what any practically minded Greek wife would do. Seizing a lead tablet, she pried the metal out of its wooden frame and, by bending one end back and forth, came away with the strip about three inches wide by six long. She then took her bronze stylus in hand and etched onto the lead every malicious hope she could imagine for Dorcis and his helot whore: Borphorbabarborphorbabarborphorbabarborphorbabaie. O divine Hekate under the earth, bind Dorcis whose mother is Leonis, and Erinna whom he beds, so that their ardor goes as cold as this lead, and that his penis may droop, and her vagina go as dry as the earth that covers this prayer to you, and to you, O Meliouchos Marmaraoth. May they be bound, that Dorcis may burn only for Damatria, who desires him not, and Erinna burn only for that which is shown by the pulled-back foreskin of the he-goat, so that they forget each other, and share passion no more.
It wasn’t enough just to compose such a curse, fold it up, fix it with a nail, and drop in some well to send it on its way to the goddess. Though she judged her letters to be good, and her use of the charmed formulae adequate, she would enhance her chances for success by finding a magician to pronounce the right words at the time of its deposition. For that she would have to make her inquiries around the marketplace, and so was obliged to nurse her fury through to the morning.
She had a dream that night about three girls traveling to the Apollo sanctuary at Amyclae in a carriage wreathed with carnations. All of the youngsters, who had all just been cropped for their wedding night, laughed like drunks with every dip of the carriage wheels on the road. In their hands they bore their own shorn hair, the locks they had been growing since infancy, gathered tenderly in brushes that were fastened at the center with iron rings. In the sanctuary, under the great columnar image of the god, Damatria consecrated these remnants of the girlhood that would end with the mystery they all blushed about, but already understood. Her hands shook as she put her offering in the ground and buried it. Then she dreamed that she sang, in a voice of such ingenue purity that she shed tears in her sleep, the maiden song of the virgin bride.
She was jerked awake by the fear that she had made a terrible mistake. Lighting a lamp, she picked up the lead again and added a line to the curse:
And may any other women he desires or will desire be thusly bound.
7.
Damatria soon learned that the hearts of men, fathomless as they are, cannot match the inscrutability of the gods. Her fitful sleep caused her to rise late the next morning. Before she left for the market, she was informed that Dorcis had to be carried home from his morning ride.
“Why has he been brought back?”
“It seems he has suffered a grave accident-” began the slave.
And so she heard, as she stood with her binding spell still undelivered in the fold of her cloak, that her husband had been badly hurt when his horse, at a gallop, put a hoof through a rabbit hole. The horse did not go down, but Dorcis was thrown face-first into the ground with his hands still tangled in the reins. Of the extent of his injuries the slave was unprepared to say. Damatria rushed down the corridor to his quarters, making a show of the appropriate concern, but inwardly wondering why her prayer had such good effect before the goddess received it. Had someone else cursed him first? If so, was it another lover she had yet to learn about?
The figure on the couch had a face like a boxer’s after some endless, evenly matched bout. The brow was bloated and split like a rotten fruit showing its pulp, the mouth caked with the lees of dried blood flecked with dirt. When he cracked his bluish, raked lips, there was nothing hanging from his upper gums but sharp little serpent’s tongues of enamel. The rest of his teeth were left behind where they had implanted in the ground. The orbits of his eyes were stuffed with pinkish bulbs swollen enough to hide all but the tips of the lashes. When she saw him, Damatria could not help but pull up short and, in her shock, make a small, sharp inhalation. And though Dorcis’ face could hardly form an expression that was recognizably human, he gave a little turn of the head as he heard and recognized her through his cauliflower ears.
She ordered all the servants to leave. Removing her street cloak, she stood over him with a wet cloth in her hands, struggling to decide where to begin cleaning him. Except for that single movement of his head, Dorcis lay so passively that it was hard to tell if he was awake. She wrung out the cloth in the bowl and wet it again, at last going to work on the skein of scratches that ran from his solar plexus to the bottom of his chin. That was when he spoke at last through his broken teeth, his voice wheezing, childish.
“I see one of us here is happy.”
Damatria said nothing, determined to show neither satisfaction nor hysteria at his misfortune.
“Why have you tied me down?” he asked. As she began to wipe the blood from his mouth, she glanced down at his body: he was naked except for a breechcloth, and there was nothing at all holding him down.
“By Herakles loosen the bonds, woman! I can’t budge my arms or legs!” he cried.