Jocasta: Wife and Mother

‘I’ll lock the Sphinx in her cage,’ she promised, ‘so she won’t bother you.’

‘I shall be lonely. No one cares how lonely I am. Antigone must stay here with me.’

‘Our journey is ritual. Antigone must come with us.’

‘Ritual, my arse! The girl’s about to have an affair of some sort with Sersex.’

‘What, that slave? That stable hand? More reason why she must come with us.’ Jocasta knew Sersex, a handsome and willowy young man, only recently employed at the palace.

‘It’s time Antigone matured,’ said the old woman. ‘Let her be. Don’t interfere. You’re always interfering. She is twelve years old. She’s got hair round it.’

‘She must come with us, Grandmother. It’s ritual. You’ll stay here. You can have an affair with Sersex.’

Semele gave a high-pitched shriek of laughter. ‘Sersex? You’re mad!’

‘I was only joking.’ Jocasta sighed. ‘Why do you never understand jokes?’

‘Don’t sulk! It’s a bad habit. We’ve all noticed how you are becoming rather sulky.’

They heard the voice of Oedipus, calling his daughter Antigone. No longer was his voice grating, as it had been when he addressed his subjects. It took on a gentle note of coaxing, more dovelike. Semele raised an eyebrow in scorn.

‘Always Antigone. Never Ismene. You had better watch your husband, my girl.’

Oedipus had put on a white robe for his hour of audience with his subjects. He wore the crown of the King of Thebes, though it was no more than a modest ring of gold, pressed down into his mop of dark hair. With the audience concluded, he tossed the crown aside. It was caught by his attendant slave who rarely missed a catch, knowing the punishment that missing entailed.

Entering the courtyard, Oedipus sank down on a couch which had been positioned in the shade. Kicking off his sandals, he put his feet up, calling again for his favourite daughter. ‘Antigone!’

Antigone came running, barefoot. She sat by her father’s legs and stroked them, looking up with a sunny smile into his face.

‘Wine is coming, Father.’

He nodded. ‘Our poor Thebans, always complaining, always starving … They have no understanding of hardship.’

Antigone’s hair was of a dark gold, close to sable. It fell straight, without a curl. She had tied it with a golden ribbon so that it hung neatly down over her right breast. Her dress was of muslin, through which the dark aureoles of her breasts could be glimpsed. Her eyes were blue, and though her nose straight and long gave her a stern look, the soft bow of her lips denied it.

‘With what were the tiresome creatures plaguing you today, Papa? Not the water shortage again!’

Oedipus did not answer immediately, or directly. He rested a hand lightly on his daughter’s head as he spoke, and stroked her hair.

‘I know that it seems as if a curse is upon Thebes, just as the superstitious old ones declare. I don’t need telling. I cannot change what is the will of the gods. If it is decreed, it is decreed.’

‘A decree, Father – is there no way round it?’

When he did not answer, his daughter spoke again.

‘And is it decreed that you should suffer their complaints, Father? Does not a king have absolute rights over his subjects?’

With a hint of impatience, he said, ‘My subjects fear that plague will descend on Thebes. Tomorrow we must journey to the coast, to Paralia Avidos, and there offer up sacrifices, that matters will become well again and the crops revive.’

A female slave came forward with a jug of wine, followed by the Sphinx, who loomed over the slave like a grotesque shadow. She arrived with a catlike and slinky walk, wings folded, befitting her approach to her captor.

‘What is one, master, yet is lost if it becomes not two?’ she asked.

‘Please, dear Sphinx, no riddles now. I am fatigued,’ said Oedipus, waving a hand dismissively.

The Sphinx sat down and licked a rear paw.

Antigone picked up one of her father’s sandals and flung it at the bird-lion. The Sphinx squawked terribly, turned and galloped off.

‘Father, I cannot abide that absurd thing with its absurd riddles!’ Antigone declared, taking the jug from the slave to pour her father a generous libation into a bronze cup. The slave bowed and backed away, her face without expression. ‘Can’t we let it loose?’

‘Let your indignation rest, my precious,’ said Oedipus soothingly. ‘It was decreed that I, having answered the riddle of the Sphinx, should become King of Thebes. So I acquired the animal, and must keep her by me if I am to remain king. She is wonderful. I cannot help loving her. If the Sphinx goes, then my days of power are numbered. It is decreed.’

‘Another decree!’ exclaimed Antigone.

Oedipus drank of the cool wine without commenting. Over the rim of the cup, he viewed his favourite daughter with affection and amusement. Meanwhile, the Sphinx came creeping back to Oedipus’ presence, belly to the ground, feline.

‘Mother doesn’t like the Sphinx,’ Antigone pouted. ‘She says she does but I know she doesn’t. Why can we not live out our own lives, without the constant interference of the gods? That’s another thing I don’t like.’

He patted her behind. ‘What we like or don’t like is a mere puff of breeze in the mighty gale of the will of the gods. Be content with things as they are, lest they become worse.’

His daughter made no response. She could not bring herself to confess to her father that unease and fear invaded her heart.

‘If only the silly creature would not make her messes in corners,’ she said. She put her tongue out at the Sphinx. The animal got up and walked slowly away again, hanging her head.

Jocasta, meanwhile, had retreated to her private shrine in her private bedchamber. Dismissing Hezikiee, she crouched down before it. The corner was decorated with fresh rosemary.

For a while she said nothing. At length, however, her thoughts burst into speech.

‘Great goddess, we know there are things that are eternal. Yet we are surrounded by trivial things, domestic things with which we must deal …

‘Yet in between these two contrasting matters is another thing … Oh, my heart is heavy! I mean the thing that can’t be spoken. I can’t speak it. Yet it’s real enough – an unyielding lump which blocks my throat.

‘I must remain silent. When he first appeared to me as a young man, I rejoiced. I loved him purely. A burden was lifted from my conscience. Now there is an even heavier burden. I cannot say it, even to you, great goddess …’

From the troubled ocean of her thoughts rose the idea of a golden child, the extension of the mother’s flesh that would be and become what the mother had failed to become – a fulfilled and perfect person. That link between the two, that identification, could scarcely be broken. In her intense if temporary sorrow, she recognised that she had not attempted to permit the child its freedom.

‘I know I have been a lustful woman. I know it, I admit it … How I have adored the ultimate embraces – particularly when forbidden! There are two kinds of love. Why doesn’t the world acknowledge as much? There’s the time-honoured love, honourable, to which all pay tribute. And there is the love time-detested, which all despise, or affect to. In me, those two loves combined, I cannot tell how …

‘This is the dreadful secret of my life … I am a good woman, or so I seem to be, and so I pretend to be. Yet if the world knew, it would condemn me as evil.

‘This pretence … It steals my sense of reality. Who am I? What am I?’

She struggled mutely with the confusion between her inner and outward realities.

‘And yet and yet … Oh, the misery of it! For if I had my chances over again, I would surely behave as before. Great goddess, since what is done cannot be undone, grant me the strength to contain my secret, to withhold it from the world. Come to my aid … Come to my aid, if not here in Thebes where I am in sin, then in Paralia Avidos, by the limitless seas. For I am sick at heart …’

She thought the goddess answered, ‘You are sick at heart because you know you do wrong, yet make no effort to mend your ways …’