The awful mouth writhed.
"You have seen," she said. Somehow the stretched and distorted lips brought out these words. There was even that nuance of humour I had heard before, the smile, although physically, a smile would have been out of the question.
"You have seen."
She picked up the mask again, gently, and put it on, easing the underpart of the plastic beneath her chin, to hide the convulsed tendons in her throat. I stood there, motionless.
Childishly, I informed myself that now I comprehended the reason for her peculiar accent, which was caused, not by some exotic foreign extraction, but by the atrocious malformation of jaw, tongue and lips, which somehow must be fought against for every sound she made.
I went on standing there, and now the mask was back in place.
"When I was very young," she said, "I suffered, without warning, from a form of fit, or stroke.' Various nerve centres were paralysed. My father took me to the very best of surgeons, you may comfort yourself with that. Unfortunately, any effort to correct the damage entailed a penetration of my brain so uncompromisingly delicate that it was reckoned impossible, for it would surely render me an idiot. Since my senses, faculties and intelligence were otherwise unaffected, it was decided not to risk this dire surgery, and my doctors resorted instead to alternative therapies, which, patently, were unsuccessful. As the months passed, my body adjusted to the unnatural physical tensions resulting from my facial paralysis. The pain of the rictus faded, or grew acceptable. I learned both how to eat, and how to converse, although the former activity is not attractive, and I attend to it in private.
The mask was made for me in Athens. I am quite fond of it.
The man who designed it had worked a great many years in the theatre, and could have made me a face of enormous beauty or character, but this seemed pointless, even wasteful."
There was a silence, and I realized her explanation was finished.
Not once had she stumbled. There was neither hurt nor madness in her inflexion. There was something… at the time. I missed it, though it came to me after. Then I knew only that she was far beyond my pity or my anguish, far away indeed from my terror.
"And now," she said. rising gracefully, "I will leave you to eat your meal in peace. Good night."
I wanted, or rather I felt impelled, to stay her with actions or sentences, but I was incapable of either. She walked out of the green marble room, and left me mere- It is a fact that for a considerable space of time, I did not move.
I did not engage the swim back to Daphaeu that night, I judged myself too drunk, and slept on the beach at the edge of the trees, where at sunrise the tidal water woke me with a strange low hissing. Green sea. green sunlight through leaves.
I swam away and found my course through the warming ocean and fetched up, exhausted and swearing, bruising myself on Daphaeu's fangs that had not harmed me when I left her. I did not see Pitos anywhere about, and that evening I caught me boat which would take me to the mainland.
There is a curious thing which can happen with human beings. It is the ability to perform for days or weeks like balanced and cheerful automata, when some substratum, sometiling upon which our codes or our hopes had firmly rested, has given way. Men who lose their wives or their God are quite capable of behaving in this manner, for an indefinite season. After which the collapse is brilliant and total. Something of this sort had happened to me. Yet, to fathom what I had lost, what she had deprived me of, is hard to say. I found its symptoms, but not the sickness which it was. 110 Tanilh Lee Medusa (I must call her that, she has no other name I know), struck by the extraordinary arrow of her misfortune, condemned to her relentless, uncanny, horrible isolation, her tragedy most deeply rooted in the fact that she was not a myth, not a fabulous and glamorous monster. - - For it came to me one night in a bar in Corinth, to consider if the first Medusa might have been also such a victim, felled by some awesome fit, not petrifying but petrified, so appalling to the eyes, and, more significantly, to the brooding aesthetic spirit that lives in man, that she too was shunned and hated, and slain by a murderer who would observe her only in a polished surface. 1 spent some while in bars that summer. And later, much later, when the cold climate of the year's end closed the prospect of travel and adventure,! became afraid for myself, that dreadful writer's fear which has to do with the death of the idea, with the inertia of hand and heart and mind. Like one of the broken leaves, the summer's withered plants,! had dried. My block was sheer. 1 had expected a multitude of pages from the island, but instead I saw those unborn pages die on the horizon, where the beach met the sea.
And this, merely a record of marble, water, a plastic shell strapped across a woman's face, this is the last thing, it seems, which I shall commit to paper. Why? Perhaps only because she was to me such a lesson in the futility of things, the waiting fiat of chance, the random despair we name the World.
And yet, now and then, I hear that voice of hers, I hear the way she spoke to me. I know now what I heard in her voice, which had neither pain nor shame in it, nor pleading, nor whining, nor even a hint of the tragedy, the Greek tragedy, of her life. And what I heard was not dignity, either, or acceptance, or nobleness. It was contempt. She despised me. She despised all of us who live without her odds, who struggle with our small struggles, incomparable to hers. "Your Greek is very good," she said to me, with the patronage of one who is multi-lingual. And in that same disdain she says, over and over to me: "that you live is very good." Compared to her life, her existence, her multi-lingual endurance, what are my life or my ambitions worth? Or anything. it did not occur immediately, but still it occurred. In its way, the myth is perfectly accurate. I see it in myself, scent it, taste it, like the onset of inescapable disease. What they say about the gorgon is true. She has turned me to stone.
Griffin
"Griffin" can also be spelled "griffon" or, more correctly. though this spelling is not often used, "gryphon."
The word is from the Greek gryps, meaning "having a hooked nose," for reasons that will soon be plain.
The griffin is a composite creature, like the centaur, and such composites are common in mythology, in early periods of history, it was common to deify the animals on which a hunting society lives. Perhaps, as people grow more sophisticated, they become embarrassed at having their gods in the form of animals, and they compromise by making those gods human, but with animal heads. Thus the Egyptians had human gods with the head of a hawk, or an ibis: the Indians had human gods with the head of a monkey or an elephant, and so on.
One could also make a composite of a monster, so that one could combine the characteristics of several dangerous creatures into one. The most familiar such composite is the chimera, from a Greek word for "goat." since it had the body of a goat. However, it had the head of a lion and its tail was a serpent. (Sometimes it was pictured as a creature with three heads, one of a lion, one of a goat, and one of a serpent). It was slain by the Greek hero Bellerophon.
Nowadays, plants and animals made up of mixtures of material from different species, through human manipulation, are called chimeras.
The griffin has the body of a lion, but the head and wings of an eagle, and, sometimes, a serpent tail. It is a kind of dragon in its functioning, and may be viewed as breathing fire. It is usually pictured as guarding treasures, as dragons are commonly represented as doing, and, in modern limes, it is frequently represented in grotesque carvings as in the story you are about to read.
It is the curved beak of an eagle, by the way, that is the "hooked nose" that gives it its name.