Joseph and His Brothers, page 120
lord of the world? What young man does not equate his lover's giving herself to him with his being raised up to be lord of the world? And was it not precisely this, to make him lord of the world, that God had in mind for Joseph?
One can see the temptation to which his no longer unclouded reason was subjected. He was well on his way to making a muddle of good and evil; there were moments when he was tempted to give evil the meaning of good. And even though the mummy that was part of the symbol that came after "to He" ought to have opened his eyes to see from what realm this temptation had arisen and that his succumbing to it would be an unforgivable slap in the face of Him who was not a mummified god enduring forever without promise, but the God of the future—Joseph nevertheless had every cause to mistrust his seven reasons and the course that future solemn festal events might take, every reason for not lending an ear to his little friend, whose whispers pleaded with him not to see his mistress again, not to accept another narrow slip of papyrus from his wicked cousin, and to fear the fiery bull whose breath was very close to transforming a laughing meadow into a field of ashes. There is no denying that avoiding his mistress was easier said than done, and when she called, he had to come. But how gladly a man leaves open the choice for evil, basks in his freedom to make it, and plays with fire—be it out of overconfident courage, which falsely assumes it can grab the bull by the horns, or be it out of recklessness and secret lust. And who can tell the difference?
The Painful Tongue (A Play with Epilogue)
There came a night during that third year, when Mut-em-enet, Potiphar's wife, bit her tongue because it imperiously demanded that she say aloud to her titular spouse's young steward what she had written to him in her rebus, and yet, out of pride and shame, she wanted to prevent her tongue from speaking to him that way and from offering her slave her blood that he might stanch it. For this conflict was part of her role as mistress, so that on the one hand it was dreadful to speak to him that way and to offer her flesh and blood to him in exchange for his, but on the other, she had every right to take the initiative as the manly and, so to speak, bearded
lover. Which was why she bit her tongue that night, bit both top and bottom, bit it almost clear through, so that on the next day the pain of the wound left her lisping like a little child.
For several days after having sent him her billet-doux, she had not wanted to see Joseph and had refused to show her face to him, for she did not want to gaze into his after having demanded in writing that he accept defeat. But depriving herself of his nearness made her ripe for saying with her mouth what she had already said in magical script; her longing for his presence took the form of a longing to say words it was forbidden him to say as a slave of love, so that if she was ever to learn whether those same words were spoken from his soul, she had no choice but to speak them herself, as his mistress, and to take the words from his mouth by offering him her flesh and blood in the fervent hope that this corresponded to his own secret wishes. Her role as mistress condemned her to shamelessness; but she had punished herself in advance that night by biting her tongue, so that she might now at least say what was absolutely necessary—as best she could after her punishment, that is, in a lisping, childish way, which was itself a refuge, lending innocence and helplessness to drastic words and a touching air to something crude.
Through Dudu she had sent for Joseph to join her for a business discussion and a board game afterward, saying she would receive him in the Atum portico an hour after dinner, as soon as the steward had finished his service as a reader in Potiphar's hall. She came to him out of the room where she slept, and as she stepped before him, for the very first time he was aware, or consciously aware, of something we have refrained from noting before now: that is, that she had changed during the period of her infatuation and, we can only conclude, because of it.
It was a peculiar change, so that in describing and characterizing it one runs the risk of either putting others off or being misunderstood, and once it was apparent to Joseph, it gave him cause for considerable puzzlement and profound reflection. For life is profound not only in the spirit, but also in the flesh. Not that the woman had aged during this time—love had prevented that. Had she grown more beautiful? Yes and no. But more no than yes. Indeed, definitely no, if one understands beauty to be purely admirable, its perfection as something that gladdens the heart, a glorious image that surely it would be heaven to embrace, but that does not ask to be embraced,
and instead retreats from the very notion, because its appeal is to the brightest of the senses, the eye, and not to the mouth and hand—to the extent that it intentionally appeals to anything at all. For all the fullness of its sensuality, beauty retains about it something abstract and spiritual, asserts its independence and the priority of idea over manifestation; it is not the product and tool of sexuality, but rather just the opposite: sexuality is both its stuff and its instrument. Female beauty—it can be beauty embodied in the feminine, the feminine as a means for expressing the beautiful. But what if the relationship between spirit and stuff is reversed and instead of female beauty one would do better to speak of beautiful femininity, because the feminine has become the starting point and controlling idea, with beauty as its attribute instead of the feminine as the attribute of beauty—what then? What, we ask, happens if sexuality treats beauty as the stuff in which to embody itself, so that beauty serves and works as the means for expressing the feminine? It is clear that this will result in an entirely different sort of beauty from that which we celebrated just now—a dubious, indeed eerie beauty, that may even approach ugliness, all the while exercising the attraction and emotional effectiveness of beauty, but by virtue of the sexuality that replaces it, espouses its cause, and usurps its name. In such a case there is no longer a spiritually honest beauty revealed in femininity, but only a beauty in which the feminine reveals itself—an eruption of sexuality, the beauty of the witch.
That word, however appalling, has proved indispensable for characterizing the change in Mut-em-enet's body that had come with the years. It was a change both touching and exciting, sad and thrilling—a change that made her witchlike. It goes without saying that in internally picturing this concept one must set aside any sense of the hag—one must, we repeat, set it aside, though it would be best not to do away with it entirely. A witch is certainly not necessarily a hag. And yet one cannot help observing a slight trace of something haglike about even the most charming witch—it is inescapably part of the image. Mut's new body was the body of a v/itch, a body of sexuality and love, and thus from a distance somehow haglike, although that element manifested itself at most in a clash between its voluptuousness and its gauntness. Tabubu, the guardian of the rouge pots, was, for instance, a hag of the first water, with breasts like leather bags. Under the influence of her own emotional state, Mut's
breasts, once dainty and virginal, had developed into great, robust, splendid fruits of love, whose protruding exuberance took on something haglike only because of how they contrasted with her thin, indeed emaciated and fragile shoulder blades. The shoulders themselves looked small, delicate, touchingly childlike, and the arms had lost a great deal of their fullness, had become almost skinny. But it was just the opposite with her thighs, which were unduly large and sturdy, their development having been, one may say, almost illicit in comparison to her upper extremities, so much so that one might picture a broomstick clamped between them, on which the woman now rose on high, holding tight with her weak arms, her thin back bent forward, her breasts protruding—an impression that seemed not merely to suggest itself, but indeed to force itself upon the observer. And this was intensified by her face in its frame of black curly hair— that saddle-nosed, hollow-cheeked face in which contradiction had long reigned, but that only now seemed to have found its true name and won its purest expression: the truly witchlike contradiction between the austere, indeed menacingly sinister look of the eyes and the daring serpentine shape of the mouth tucked deep at its corners, a poignant contradiction that, having now reached its peak, lent her face an abnormal, masklike tension, which was probably reinforced by the searing pain of her injured tongue. In point of fact, however, one of the reasons she had bitten it so hard was that she knew it would make her lisp like an innocent child, and that her childish lisping would perhaps varnish over and hide what she was fully aware was the witchlike look of her new body.
One can imagine the uneasiness that the sight of these changes stirred in the man who had caused them. What first welled up in him that day was an understanding of how foolishly he had acted in casting the pleas of his pure friend to the wind and instead of avoiding his mistress had let things come to a point where a virginal swan was now a witch. He became aware of the absurdity of his instructive, healing regimen, and for the first time it may have dawned on him that his behavior in his new life was no less culpable than his conduct toward his brothers had once been. This insight, which would ripen from surmise to full realization, explains much of what will happen later.
For now, however, his bad conscience and agitated awareness that his mistress had changed into a hag of love were hidden behind
the special respect, indeed reverence, with which he greeted her and spoke before her, continuing to pursue, for better or worse, his culpably absurd healing regimen; and with the assistance of the scrolls of accounts he had brought with him, he now held forth on the consumption and delivery of foodstuffs and sweetmeats to the house of women and also offered a partial list of those servants who had been dismissed and those newly employed. This prevented him from noticing right off the injury to her tongue; for she merely listened to him with an overanxious air and said almost nothing. But when they sat down to their board game on two sides of a beautifully carved gaming table—she on her couch of ebony and ivory, he on an oxen-legged taboret—and had placed their pieces, in the shape of recumbent lions, and had agreed upon the rules, he found that, much to his increased uneasiness, he could not help noticing her stammering; having observed it a few times, he was no longer in any doubt of it and so allowed himself a gentle inquiry by saying:
"What is it I hear, mistress, and how can this be? It seems to me there is a slight stammer in your speech."
And was compelled to hear in reply that the lady's tongue was "cauthing her thome pain"; she had hurd herthelf during the nighd, had bidd'n her tongue, and the thteward thould pay it no mind.
That is how she spoke—we record the pained elisions and childishness of her speech in our language rather than theirs, but it sounded much the same in the latter; and in great alarm Joseph pulled back from the game and would not touch another piece until she tended to her injury and applied to her tongue a balsam that Khun-Anup, the herbalist, would have to prepare at once. But she would not hear of it and mockingly accused him of making excuses and trying to slip away from their game, which after the opening move was already going very badly for him, so that he would soon be forced into the water—that was why he was trying to save himself by breaking off their game and appealing to the apothecary. In short, she kept him firmly in his seat with her pained childish speech and agonized teasing, for she instinctively matched her turns of phrase to the helplessness of her tongue and in every sense was now speaking like a little girl and trying to add an expression of foolish charm to her tense, suffering air. We shall not continue to mimic the way she stammered words like "pietheth" and "ecthutheth," for fear it might look as if we wanted to ridicule her, since she did indeed have death
in her heart and was on the verge of casting aside all pride and spiritual honor out of an overpowering desire to do honor to her flesh by fulfilling the dream of heaHng she had once dreamt.
The man who had instilled this desire in her likewise felt death squeezing his heart, and rightly so. He pursed his lips and did not dare look up from the board, for his conscience spoke against him. He played a sensible game nonetheless, he could not do otherwise, and it would have been difficult to say whether reason mastered him or vice versa. She, too, moved her pieces, picking them up and setting them down, but in such distraction that very soon she was defeated straight-out, with no route of escape, yet had not even noticed and so kept on making even more inane moves, until his refusal to respond brought her back to her senses and she now stared down at the muddle of her ruin with an anxious smile. Under the delusion that he could bring healing and order to this abnormal situation, Joseph tried to save it with reasonably measured and polite words.
Which is why he said in deliberate tones, "We must begin again, my mistress, either now or at some other time, for our game has gone amiss, most likely because I opened so clumsily and now cannot make another move, as you can well see; nor can you, because I cannot, and I cannot because you—the game is blocked on both sides, so that one would truly be wasting words to speak of victory or defeat, since it is both for both players ..."
These last words were halting and toneless by now, for although he could not stop once he had started, neither could he hope to save the situation by discussion, for it had already happened—her head and face had fallen forward onto his arm, which lay beside the game board, so that her gold- and silver-powdered hair pushed the recumbent lions from the board and he could feel against his arm the hot breath of her feverish stammers and futile lisps, whose sickly childishness we shall not mimic out of respect for her distress. The sense and nonsense of them, however, was as follows:
"Yes, yes, no further, we can go no further, the game is blocked and our only recourse is defeat for both, Osarsiph, my beautiful god from far away, my swan and bull, for whom my love is hot and high and eternal, so that now we can die together and descend into the night of desperate bliss. You may speak, speak out and speak freely, for you cannot behold my face since it is lying upon your arm, upon your arm at last, and my vanquished lips brush your flesh and blood,
while pleading and begging with you that you freely confess, without looking into my eyes, whether or not you received the billet-doux I wrote you before I bit my tongue so that I might not have to say what I wrote, but must say nonetheless, because I am your mistress and it is for me to speak the word that you may not speak, that you dare not make bold to speak for reasons long since devoid of any meaning. But I do not know how gladly you may say it—that is my great sorrow, for if I knew that you would speak it eagerly and gladly if only you might, then I would blissfully take the word out of your mouth and speak it as your mistress, even if as a lisping whisper, my face hidden upon your arm. Tell me, did you receive from the dwarf the letter that I wrote, and did you read it? Were you happy to see the symbols I painted and did your blood crash in a wave of happiness against the shore of your soul? Do you love me, Osarsiph, my god in servant's form, my heavenly falcon, as I love you, have loved you for so long, so long in rapture and torment, and does your blood burn for mine as I burn for you, so that after much struggle I had to write that little note, enthralled as I am by your golden shoulders and by how everyone loves you, but above all by your godlike glance, which has changed my body and made my breasts grow to be fruits of love? Sleep—with—me! Give to me, give to me of your youth and glory, and I will give to you raptures of which you cannot dream—I know whereof I speak. Let us put our heads and feet together, so that all may be well for us beyond all bounds and we may die, each in the other, for I can no longer bear that we live as two, you there, I here."
These, then, the words of the fully enthralled woman; but we have not imitated what her pleas sounded like in reality as she lisped with a split tongue, each syllable a sharp pain, and yet all of it stammered upon his arm in an unbroken flow, for women can bear a great deal of pain. But one should know, imagine, and keep in mind from here on that her misinterpreted words, those lapidary words of tradition, were spoken not as an adult with tongue intact, but amid pain that cut like knives and in the language of small children, so that I she stammered: "Thleep with me!" For she had done harm to her tongue so that it might sound like that.
And Joseph? He sat there, reviewing his seven reasons, review-] ing them forward and backward. We would not want to claim that ' his blood did not crash upon the shore of his soul in a great wave,
but the reasons standing in its way were sevenfold and they held. It should be said to his credit that he did not strike back at her and treat her with contempt as a witch who had tempted him to break with his God, but was gentle and kind to her and sought to comfort her with loving reverence, although, as any insightful person will admit, therein lay great danger for him—for where is the end of comforting in such a case? He did not even pull his arm back roughly, despite the damp heat of her lisped words and the touch of her lips thrusting against it, but casually let it lie where it was, until she had stammered her way to the end, and even for a while longer, during which he said:
"My mistress, for God's sake, what is your face doing there and what words do you speak in the fever of your injury—come to your senses, I implore you, for you have forgotten yourself and me. Above all—your chamber is open, do but recall that someone, be it dwarf or man of full stature, might see us and catch sight of where you have your head. Forgive me, I dare not allow it, and with your permission must now withdraw my arm and look to see whether from outside there might..."
