Joseph and His Brothers, page 113
We have joined in the thoughts of a woman struggling with her infatuation, and if, despite his fear and dislike of an alien sexuality. Favored Bes had eavesdropped on her, he would probably have wept at the deplorable cunning of thoughts that served natural proclivities and not the spirit. Easy for him to weep—he was but a toad and a dancing fool, who knew nothing of human dignity. But what concerned Mut his mistress was the honor of her flesh, and so she was at the mercy of thoughts that reconciled, as best they could, fleshly and divine honor. She deserved both forbearance and sympathy, despite a certain expediency in her reasoning—for thoughts seldom exist for their own sake. And she was having extraordinary difficulty with hers; for in being awakened to womanhood from a priestly and ladylike slumber of the senses, she was not at all like that ancient and model royal child who, upon beholding the princely majesty of heaven, found her childhood peace summoned to the torment and lust of all-consuming love. Mut's was not the—granted, ruinous— good fortune of falling gloriously in love with someone far above her rank (which may ultimately bring with it celestial jealousy and even acquiescence to being transformed into a cow), but rather the misfortune of having fallen in love far below her station—as she saw it—and of having come to know passion by way of a slave, the son of a nobody, a purchased piece of Asiatic household goods. This was a far bitterer blow to her female pride than our history has thus far known how to report. It prevented her from admitting her feelings for a long time, and when she was finally ready to do so, the happi-
ness love always brings was mingled with an element of humiliation, which, being rooted in deepest cruelty, can become a fearsome goad to desire. The expedient thoughts by which she tried to find a more correct definition of her humiliation played with the notion that a kedesha, or temple prostitute, could not chose her lover either, but that her body belonged to whoever tossed the god's wages into her lap. But how incorrect was her correction, what violence she did herself in regarding hers as the passive role. For she was the enterprising party who chose and wooed, even if her choice of a lover had not been entirely her own, but had been steered by Dudu's complaints—she was that by reason both of her years and of her station as his mistress, which in such a relationship is of course the station that provokes and initiates love—that, however, was all she needed: for that wish, that first decision to have come from her slave and for him to have lifted his eyes to her all on his own, turning her into the obedient follower and her feelings into a humiliating response to his own. Never, never would that be! Her pride was quite willing to assume, as it were, the male role in this enterprise—and yet deep within her she could not quite manage it. For however much she would have liked to try to force things, this young slave, whether aware of his arbitrary power or not, was the one who, by the sheer energy of his existence, had awakened her femininity from beneath its seal of sleep and, without his knowing or willing it, had made himself master of her mistress realm, so that her thoughts served him and her hopes clung to his every glance, fearful that he might notice she wished to be his woman, yet trembling all the while for fear he might return her inadmissible desires. All in all, it was humiliation drenched in a dreadful sweetness. But in order to make it less so and also because love's urges, though in fact never governed by value and worthiness, always burn for some equivalence of value and impute every conceivable worthiness to their object, she tried to lift the slave, whose mistress of love she wished to be, out of his servitude, told herself how his low rank was countered by his good manners, his cleverness, his position in the house; and in yielding to her affections—or "indulging her proclivities," as the mock vizier would have put it—she attempted (under Dudu's tutelage, by the way) to call religion to her aid by appealing to Atum-Re of On, the mild, inclusive god who was gracious to foreign nations, instead of to her former lord, the stern patriotic Amun, and by so doing to provide
her love the backing of the court, of royal power itself, which, as her conscience subtly reasoned, also had the advantage of bringing her spiritually closer to her husband, a man of the court and Pharaoh's friend, and in a certain sense of gaining as a partisan in her lust the very man she increasingly longed to deceive.
This, then, was how Mut-em-enet battled against the snares of her desire, struggling, so to speak, against a serpent sent by a god, its great coils winding round her, squeezing the breath from her, leaving her gasping for air. When one considers that she had to struggle alone and without help, unable to share any of this with anyone other than Dudu, and even with him in hints and words that hid her confession—or at least not at first, for later she cast aside all restraint and made the world around her a participant in her madness; when one also considers that the anguish in her blood had led her to choose a man who had to defer to the higher cause of a jealous God and wore in his hair an herb of faithfulness and arrogance—or, in a word, of his chosen state—and that he neither wanted nor was allowed to yield to her temptation; and when one likewise bears in mind that her agony lasted for three years, from the seventh to the tenth year of Joseph's sojourn in Potiphar's house, and that even then her torment was not allayed but simply slain—then one must admit that the fate of "Potiphar's wife" (popularly regarded as a shameless seductress and the honeyed bait of evil) was not an easy one and at least grant her the sympathy arising from the insight that the implements of such a testing carry their own punishment within them, bearing a greater share of it than they deserve, even if we admit the necessity of their function.
The First Year
Three years—in the first she tried to hide her love from him, in the second she let him know of it, in the third she offered it to him.
Three years—and in that time she must or may see him daily, for as members of Potiphar's household they lived in close contact, which is a source of great comfort and great torment and nourishes her folly each day. But must and may are not so gently entwined in love as they are in slumber—including our final slumber, as when Joseph's soothing words equating may with must assuaged Mont-
kaw. Instead, they form a tangled conflict full of anguish and confusion, rending the soul by damnably fulfilling its wishes, until the lover curses the must-see with the same fervor as he ecstatically blesses the may-see, and the more he suffers from the consequences of his most recent encounter, the more he yearns for and pursues the next opportunity to fan the fire of his craving—and always at the very moment when it is about to ebb, which should be a solid reason for the lovesick soul to be happy and grateful. For it can indeed happen that an encounter that somehow detracts from the luster of the object of one's love brings with it a certain disappointment, disillusionment, and detachment; and this should be all the more welcome to the lover, since the waning of his own infatuation allows him a greater freedom of mind and, with it, an increasing capacity for conquest and the ability to inflict upon the other party what he suffers himself. His main concern should then be to become lord and master of his passion, rather than its victim; because, in fact, the possibility of winning the other party increases considerably as one's own emotion ebbs. But the lover wishes to know nothing of this, and he regards the benefits of revived health, vigor, and audacity—which are indeed benefits, even in relation to that goal that he holds second to none—as nothing in comparison to the loss that he must suffer as a result of cooling passion. For this leaves him in a state of bleak desolation—perhaps much like that felt by a drug addict deprived of his narcotic—and he employs all his energies in rekindling the fires of experience in order to restore his previous condition.
That is how things stand with must and may when it comes to the folly of love, which of all follies is the greatest, so that one can best learn from it the nature of folly itself and its relation to its victim. For however much he may sigh beneath the burden of his passion, the lover is not only incapable of not desiring his state, but also incapable of even wishing he were capable of it. He knows quite well that, after a longer period of not-seeing the object of his love, he will over time—in perhaps an embarrassingly short time—be rid of his passion. But it is precisely this forgetting that he despises above all else—and indeed the pain of every farewell is rooted in secret anticipation of inevitable forgetting, for once that has occurred, one will no longer be able to feel any pain at all, and so one weeps in advance. No one beheld Mut-em-enet's face when, after struggling in vain with Petepre, her husband, for him to banish Joseph, she hid it in the
folds of her garment as she leaned against a pillar. But there is good, indeed best reason to suppose that the face she concealed was beaming with joy, because now she might have to go on seeing the man who had awakened her and might not have to forget him.
That had to have been of great importance to her in particular, and her fear of separation, of the forgetting that inevitably follows, of the dying of passion, must have been especially acute, because mature women of her age, whose blood has been awakened late and perhaps might never have been awakened without some extraordinary cause, surrender themselves with more than usual fervor to their emotions, to this first and final emotion, and would rather die than exchange their previous peace—which they now call desolation—for this new life made blissful by suffering. It is all the more admirable then, that, persuaded by reason, earnest Mut had done her best to convince her indolent consort to remove the object of her longings—and could such an act of love ever have been wrenched from him, she would even have sacrificed her feelings. But it had simply not been possible to awaken or move him, for he was an inveterate titular commander; and, to give truth its due, Eni had secretly known as much beforehand, had counted on it, and her honest struggles with her consort had actually been only a performance, so that upon his refusal she might give free rein to her passion and all her inborn destiny.
After their conjugal encounter in the hall that evening, she could indeed consider herself free; and if she bridled her desires for so long afterward, she did so less out of duty than out of pride. There was perfect dignity in her demeanor when, at sunset on the same day of those three conversations, she stepped forward to meet Joseph in the garden, just below the little summerhouse, and only the keenest eye would have detected brief moments of weakness or tenderness shimmering through. Dudu had, in fact, been very clever and cunning in carrying out his secret plan, and, upon leaving Joseph, had returned to his mistress and informed her that the new steward would be more than happy to give her an account of the business of the estate, but placed great importance upon his doing so undisturbed and tete-a-tete, at whatever time and place she would prefer. Joseph had, moreover, so Dudu said, announced his intention to visit the little temple in the garden that very day, at dusk, so that he
might inspect the condition of its furnishings and murals. Dudu had offered this second bit of news independently of the first, interjecting a quite different matter between the two and delicately allowing his mistress to make the connection. But seasoned as he was at intrigue, he was only half successful this time, since both parties were content with taking half measures. Joseph had chanced upon a middle course between the alternatives of his free choice, choosing to take a walk around the garden just below the summerhouse but without entering it, a tour he might have made, indeed ought to have made, once again in any case, just to make sure that the trees and flower beds were as they should be; and Mut, his mistress, was likewise not in a mood to climb the embankment, but had seen no reason to let some bit of dwarfish news that had merely brushed her ear spoil her plans—made early that morning as she definitely recalled—to take a brief stroll in Petepre's garden at the close of day and enjoy heaven's beautiful fire reflected in the duck pond, while accompanied, as usual, by two young maids who followed in her footsteps.
And so that evening the young steward and his mistress met on the red sand of the garden path and what happened in that encounter is as follows:
Upon catching sight of the women, Joseph responded with solemn alarm. Forming his mouth in a reverent "Oh!" and raising his hands, he bowed and began to retreat in an easy crouch. For her part, Mut formed her serpentine lips into a fleeting, gentle smile of vague surprise, a questioning "Ah?," above which her eyes remained austere, indeed grim, and first let him take a few more ceremonial backward steps while she walked on, before signaling with a quick downward motion of one hand for him to halt. She, too, came to a stop now, as did the dark-skinned maids of honor behind her, their artificially lengthened eyes full of the joy with which every servant in the household greeted Joseph, while from beneath the curled fringe of their black, woolly hair flashed the large enameled disks of their earrings.
There the two stood face-to-face, and it was not an encounter to engender sobering disappointment in either of them. The light fell at a flattering angle, drenching the garden scene of cottage and reeds in rich color, lending a still fierier hue to the red path, a soft glow to the
flowers, and a lovely shimmer to the rustling foliage of the trees; and its reflected luster in human eyes was exactly like that in the pond, whose ducks, foreign and domestic, seemed more like heavenly than earthly ducks, as if they had been painted and lacquered. And by this light human beings—not just shimmering eyes, but entire bodies— took on that same heavenly look, as if they too were painted, were free of all care and inadequacy; they looked like gods and funerary statues, their makeup enhanced by the grace of light, and as each gazed with shining eyes into the beautifully hued face of the other, surely they took pleasure in the sight.
Mut was enraptured to see the man whom she knew she loved, in so perfect a form; for love is always eager to find justifications, but is so sensitive that it winces at any flaw that might mar the image of the beloved and is triumphantly grateful for every favor granted by illusion; and even though the beloved's glory—guarded and protected by love for the sake of its own honor—causes great pain because it belongs to everyone, is visible to everyone, and is a constant cause of much uneasiness, since the whole world is now a suitor, that same pain is more precious than anything; and love presses its sharp blade to its heart, with but one worry: that its keen edge may be blunted by some darkening or blurring of the image. And in seeing Joseph so enhanced, Eni rejoiced to think she might be as well and hoped that she, too, looked glorious to him, even if by ordinary, more direct light things might no longer appear as they had in the bloom of youth. She was aware, was she not, that the long, open cloak of white wool—for winter was approaching—cast over her shoulders and held by an agraffe just above her wide necklace made her look even more majestic? That her breasts were thrust with youthful firmness against the batiste of her close-fitting gown that ended in a hem of red glass beads just above her feet? Look at that gown, Osarsiph! It fell from ribboned clasps at her shoulders, and how very aware she was that it not only left her perfectly groomed, virtually chiseled arms free, but also distinctly revealed the long, stately outline of each wonderful leg. Was that not reason enough for her to hold her head high out of love? She did it. But out of pride she acted as if she found it difficult to raise her eyelids, as if she must lay her head back to gaze out from under them. She knew, and it frightened her to know, that her face—framed this time by a golden
brown headscarf held in place at her brow by a broad gem-studded clasp that did not quite encircle her head—was no longer the youngest and how very strange and arbitrary its shadowy cheeks, saddle nose, and deeply tucked mouth must look. But the thought of how precious her painted, jewelUke eyes must appear against the ivory pallor of her face gave her confident hope that her countenance would not be an outright impediment to the effect of her arms, legs, and breasts.
Mindful, out of both pride and fear, of her beauty, she gazed at his—at the beauty of Rachel's son in Egyptian finery, which, though it was a work of highest civilization, was cut for a comfortable walk in the garden. All the same, his head had been carefully dressed in a black ribbed-silk headscarf, which ended in curls to show that it was meant to symbolize a wig, and there was something especially smart about the way one corner of his white linen cap, neat and tidy as always, peeked out just from below one small ear. But except for his wig and a matched enameled set of collar and bracelets, plus that flat necklace of reed and gold from which his scarab hung, he wore nothing but a, granted, elegantly cut, knee-length double skirt around his narrow hips, its petal white contrasting charmingly with the skin color of his ornamented upper body, its bronze deepened now in the slanting light—a young man's gently powerful, just rightly formed body, which in the cool breeze and colorful light seemed to belong not to the world of the flesh, but to the purer world of Ptah's thoughts executed in stone, its spirit enhanced by the head and intelligent eyes to which it belonged. And together, head and body were the realization of a unity of beauty and wisdom to gladden both him and everyone who looked upon him.
In her proudly fearful self-awareness, Potiphar's wife gazed across to him, to his dark facial features—large in comparison with her own—and into the cordial night of Rachel's eyes, made even more expressive by the masculine enhancement of the son's heightened understanding; with one glance her eyes took in the golden bronze sheen of his shoulders, the moderate but manly bulge of muscle in his trim arm, crooked for holding his walking staff in one hand—and welling up from within her, feminine anguish intensified maternal tenderness and admiration to an overwhelming, desperate ardor that released from her deepest depths a gasp so violent that her
