Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women's necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.
Hand in hand they made their way through the crowd.
A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. "Are you that man from the Outside?" she asked.
"Almost infinitely from the outside," he assured her.
She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.
"We're all very sorry for you," she said.
They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.
"What's it all about?" Will asked.
"It's about girls and boys sleeping together," Mary Sarojini answered.
"Oh-I see." He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child's untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day-or dying.
"And the part that made them laugh," Mary Sarojini went on, "was where he said the Future Buddha won't have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He'll have his Enlightenment while he's in bed with the princess."
"Do you think that's a good idea?" Will asked.
She nodded emphatically. "It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too."
"You're perfectly right," said Will. "Being a man, I hadn't thought of the princess."
The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.
"Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously- Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.
Love-and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void."
The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense min gled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.
"Who were Paul and Freud?" Mary Sarojini asked as they moved away.
Will began with a brief account of Original Sin and the Scheme of Redemption. The child heard him out with concentrated attention.
"No wonder the song says, Don't take them seriously," she-concluded.
"After which," said Will, "we come to Dr. Freud and the Oedipus Complex."
"Oedipus?" Mary Sarojini repeated. "But that's the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they're giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It's nice."
"Nice?" he repeated. "Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?"
"But he doesn't put out his eyes," said Mary Sarojini.
"He does where /hail from."
"Not here. He only says he's going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They're talked out of it."
"Who by?"
"The boy and girl from Pala."
"How do they get into the act?" Will asked.
"I don't know. They're just there. 'Oedipus in Pala'-that's what the play is called. So why shouldn't they be there?"
"And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?"
"Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope round her neck and he's got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn't know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper-and nobody had ever taught him to dance the Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just to stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus-all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn't know any better."
"Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls-they want to marry their fathers."
"Which fathers and mothers?" Mary Sarojini asked. "We have such a lot of them."
"You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?"
"There's twenty-two of them in our MAC."
"Safety in numbers!"
"But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they'd taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake."
They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted proscenium of a puppet theater glowed red and gold in the light of powerful flood lamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr. Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.
A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the facade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted "Oedipus" in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic beard. To a flourish of trumpets the door swung open and, crowned and heroically buskined, the king appeared. The priest made obeisance, the royal puppet gave him leave to speak.
"Give ear to our afflictions," the old man piped. The king cocked his head and listened.
"I hear the groans of dying men," he said. "I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication."
"Supplication!" said the deity in the clouds. "That's the spirit." He patted himself on the chest.
"They had some kind of a virus," Mary Sarojini explained in a whisper. "Like Asian flu, only a lot worse."
"We repeat the appropriate litanies," the old priest querulously piped, "we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us."
"Only a god can help."
"Hear, hear!" shouted the presiding deity.
"But by what means?"
"Only a god can say."
"Correct," said the god in his basso profundo, "absolutely correct."
"Creon, my wife's brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns-as very soon he must-we shall know what heaven advises."