Sappho's Leap Read Online Free PDF

mother.”
    â€œYou ask too much, Alcaeus, if you ask me to betray my mother.”
    â€œI said nothing about betrayal.”
    â€œYou didn’t say betrayal, but you meant it.”
    â€œNonsense. Forget I asked. But remember it is Pittacus who has made you fatherless. He would sacrifice you in a flash. Your mother too. He has no loyalty. He considers loyalty a toy. All he has is a potbelly and a ravenous appetite.”
    â€œFrom what I’ve seen, all men consider loyalty a toy. My father comes home as ashes in a jar, but I am supposed to be happy that he died gloriously—whatever that means. I hate all these glorious deaths. I hate death. It was my father who decreed I should be raised, not set on a hilltop to die like other girl babies. I loved him. And he adored me. I owe him and my mother loyalty—even if loyalty is no longer the fashion in Lesbos.” So I said, but somewhere in my rebellious heart I must have burnt to betray my heartbreakingly beautiful mother!
    Alcaeus cajoled. He beguiled and nagged. He stroked my cheek, my arm, my thigh. He made up songs for me. At last I agreed to accompany his treacherous expedition. I told myself that I would only watch, not become part of the bloodshed. Even after his reckless behavior at the symposium, I thought I could control Alcaeus. I thought I could control myself .
    Together in the woods we talked and talked, and the more we talked, the more I fell in love with Alcaeus. I loved his looks, his poetry, his wild talk. Men with eloquent tongues have always swayed me.
    â€œBefore the gods, all was shapelessness, chaos, and darkness,” he said, “a black-winged being whose unblinking eyes saw everything. Then the wind came, made love to the night, who hatched a silver egg, giving birth to Eros—without Eros there would be no creatures on the face of the earth….”
    â€œBut Eros was born of Aphrodite, who himself was born of the sea foam that bubbled when the testicles of Uranus were tossed into the sea by his son, Cronus,” I said like a dutiful mother’s daughter.
    â€œBelieve whichever version you wish, but know that Eros is the root of all….Eros blows through our lives, leaving chaos in its wake…and Aphrodite laughs.”
    â€œI will not believe any philosophy that dishonors Aphrodite,” I said solemnly.
    â€œAphrodite dishonors herself,” Alcaeus laughed. “And so do her devotees.”
    â€œBlasphemy!” I protested.
    When we had been together for a time—long enough for me to see Alcaeus ravish beardless sailor boys—I asked innocently, “When did you last make love to a woman?”
    â€œWomen are too complex,” he said, “too unknowable. Sometimes I long to make love to a woman, and then I think how much work it will be to satisfy her. I get tired just thinking about it.”
    Did he say this to shock me or to deny his own attraction to me? Anyway, it did the trick. I left him alone. Sometimes I wished I had the courage to seduce him. I didn’t really believe he was as unmoved by me as he claimed.
    Maybe I wasn’t conventionally pretty, but I knew I had a kind of power. When I had played the lyre at the symposium, people had stared at me as if I were a great beauty. I would catch Alcaeus staring at me from time to time. Then he’d remember that he was supposed to be indifferent to me and he’d turn away. He seemed to be torn between fascination and derision. He was always trying to impress me with how worldly he was and how many exotic lovers he had conquered.
    â€œI have been to Naucratis in Egypt, the city of the Greek traders in the Nile Delta where Lesbian wine is traded,” he began. “I have been with Egyptian prostitutes who are skilled at beguiling the Greeks with their mouths and hands. In Babylon, I have seen the Temple of Ishtar, where women copulate with strangers for the glory of the goddess, where they set up little