King Candaules, ‘The English Patient’ and different trios | Culture | EUROtoday

Chance or destiny has it that the present resurgence of the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, creator of Thumbs down, through Gladiator II y Those who’re going to dieI’ve coincided with the great arrival, as if the simun, the ghibli or the khamsin I’d drag it, of desert sand. And not from simply any sand however one from the Great Sand Sea of ​​the Libyan desert, the land with out maps, the in depth properties, after all, and forgive me for the loop from which I feel I’ll by no means get out —Al-Hamdu evening!thank God—, by Count Almásy, the explorer protagonist of The English affected person. Among Gérôme’s well-known work, other than these of gladiators and chariots just like the aforementioned Thumbs down, Course de char or the terrifying The re-entry of the felineswith its lions, tigers and panthers and its charred crucified figures, there are some that particularly transfer me, comparable to Bonaparte in entrance of the Sphinx y Napoleon and his generals in Egypt (which should have additionally impressed Ridley Scott, I say). But above all I adore it Queen Rodope noticed by Gyges (1859), which recreates the well-known and morbid episode of the Lydian monarch Candaules that Herodotus narrates in ebook I of his History and that seems in The English affected person (Michael Ondaatje’s novel and Anthony Minghella’s subsequent movie).

“This Candaules,” says the nice Greek historian together with his finest tone for gossip and the scabrous, “was in love with his wife and, as a lover, he firmly believed he had the most beautiful woman in the world,” so he stored telling her about it. to his favourite officer, Gyges, an ideal spearman apparently. Thinking that he did not fairly consider it, he advised him: “Try seeing her naked.” Convinced that he was in serious trouble—as he was—Gyges tried to reject the bizarre provide. But the king insisted, and the reluctant voyeur ended up hiding within the royal bed room, the place he watched, swallowing saliva for numerous causes, because the queen (Herodotus doesn’t give her title however in line with different sources her title was Nisia or Rodope) was shedding her garments. garments till they’re stripped down (sic), the final linen garment, which was later additionally taken out.

Taking benefit of the truth that Candaules’s spouse circled and headed to the mattress the place the king was ready for her, who should have been very upset by all this, as a result of if not what (in actual fact historical past has given its title to a sexual apply, candaulism, getting excited by seeing your companion undress in entrance of one other individual, which is already a curious vice), Gyges ran out of the digital camera, though not earlier than she found him. The subsequent day, the queen, indignant with the entire operation (Herodotus factors out that among the many Lydians “being seen naked is a great humiliation, even for a man”), introduced the officer with two radical choices: “Either you kill Candaules and You take over me and the kingdom, or you are the one who must die without further delay to prevent, from now on, by following all the orders of Candaules, from seeing what you should not.”

Giges, voyeur despite himself, He very intelligently chose to preserve his life, and that night, “in the same place where he exposed me naked,” the queen arms a dagger to the officer, who kills the king whereas he sleeps, and, says Herodotus, “he took the woman.” and with the dominion of the Lydians.”

In The English patient where the episode takes on a very different meaning as a preamble to a captivating romantic relationship, the trio is made up of the rich Geofrey Clifton, his wife Katharine (they are newly married) and Count Almásy. The three are part of an expedition in the Great Sand Sea and the husband does not stop singing the excellence of his wife and how in love he is with her, leaving us a new word, “uxoriosness”, excessive love for one’s own woman. But Katharine, who has asked the explorer count for some reading (which is never a good sign on a wedding trip) and he has ended up leaving her annotated Herodotus, without which she never goes to the desert, reads during a party in the dunes the Candaules passage. And Almásy points out in Ondaatje’s book, magnificently summarizing the novel: “This is the story of how I fell in love with a woman who read a certain story by Herodotus.” When things start like this you can’t help but end up in a room in Cairo looking for Almásy’s Bosphorus (the vascular synoid, the little hole in the neck) while it plays on the record player Love, love, that melancholic Hungarian lullaby, and you evoke the burning flight over a lost oasis. In the film, with a script by Minghella himself (I have it on my nightstand next to Ondaatje’s novel, my Herodotus and certain Almásyan fetishes), there are some variations of the scene of the reading of the Candaules episode. The explorers, at the Pottery Hill camp, the script specifies, play around a bonfire to spin the bottle with an empty one of champagne and the task is to recite something. It’s Katharine’s turn (Kristin Scott Thomas) and she tells the story of Candaules while Almásy (Ralph Fieness) fixes his eyes on her. A paragraph to remember that in The English patient other readings come out as beloved as Anna Karenina, Kim y the last of the mohicans. The first two have plot logic (Tolstoy’s novel obviously, Kipling’s because of the presence of Kip, the Sikh sapper); The third one, the truth is, it’s a bit difficult to see, although I can’t think of anything more beautiful than having the adventures of Uncas read to the (supposedly) English patient.

There are other paintings that describe the central episode of the Candaules story, such as that of Jacob Jordaens, with a very Rubensian king’s wife, from 1646, or the controversial one by William Etty, an author much better at painting butts than arms, known very accurately as The recklessness of Candaulesfrom 1830. But for me, the best without comparison is that of Gérôme. I have become so obsessed with the painting that on one occasion I went to see it where it is kept, which is quite far away: the Ponce Art Museum, in that town in Puerto Rico (how Gérôme’s Candaules ended up there would deserve another chronicle). I crossed the entire island with the Spanish consul Eduardo Garrigues to see it, but it turned out that it was in the warehouse and there was no way for them to get it out, so we had to console ourselves (!) with the contemplation of June blazing sunLeighton’s dazzling work and the museum’s collection of Pre-Raphaelites.

There are also other literary revisions of the Candaules passage (and a Petipa ballet!). Plato collects in his Republic the legend that Gyges had a ring that made him invisible, which would have saved him a lot of trouble in Herodotus’ story. But the two most interesting and elaborate versions of the story are those of Théophile Gautier (1844) and the one included by Mario Vargas Llosa in his stimulating Stepmother’s Praise (1988, Tusquets, The Vertical Smile). Gautier tells it with a wild orientalism dripping with romanticism that moved Victor Hugo himself. The wife of Candaules (Nisia, daughter of the Persian satrap Megabaze), who appears mounted on an elephant and covered in clothing and jewels, is described as a goddess whose barbaric modesty prevents her from revealing herself to anyone other than her husband. In Gautier’s story, Giges, “le beau”, the beautiful one, has seen her before, since a gust of wind had briefly revealed her face. To remember a phrase from the French writer: “Women are only given to those who do not deserve them.” Candaules suffers because by only being able to see his wife, no one knows what treasure of beauty he possesses (that very masculine attitude that is essentialized in the joke about the castaway and Claudia Schiffer). And he seeks the confidence of Gyges, whom he introduces to the royal chamber, where the queen’s involuntary striptease occurs. “He dropped his robe and the white poem of his divine body suddenly appeared in its splendor, such as the statue of a goddess whose wrappings are removed on the day of the inauguration of a temple.” And Gautier points out, unable to describe more: “There are things that can only be written on marble.” In the story, Gyges is so impressed by Nisia’s vision that it does not take him much to convince himself to kill Candaules (“meurs ou tue!”). She, it seems, was not immune to the officer’s allure either. Once the king, the last of the Heraclids, was eliminated, Gyges took on the crown, established his own dynasty, and, Gautier says, “he lived happily and did not let anyone see his wife, knowing what it would cost him.”

What Vargas Llosa does, in the erotic genre, is very different. The Candaules passage appears, along with other classic episodes represented in art, in the middle of the morbid story of the couple formed by Don Rigoberto, his wife Doña Lucrecia (the stepmother of the title) and the former’s child, the clever and disturbing Alfonsito, Fonchito, advanced voyeur and of a perversity that leaves astonished and refers to Bataille. The Candaules that the novelist recreates reflects Rigoberto’s interest in his lady’s rear and what he boasts to Gyges is the queen’s “rump.” Vargas Llosa, fortunately for those of us who venerate Herodotus’ version and Gérôme’s painting (not to mention the echo in The English patient), refers to Jordaens’ painting in his thuggish and sycalyptic story, dedicated to Berlanga.

I said that the memory of Candaules that gave rise to these many lines came to me with a blast of sand from the Libyan desert. It was sent to me by Ángel Carlos Aguayo, who has been there with his stuff. The golden sand, in which I dug to see if the lost army of the Persian king Cambyses was buried, which Almásy searched for so much, came packed in a bottle of Egyptian mineral water of the brand Shiva, which comes from the springs of the famous oasis. Siwa is the oasis of Amun, famous in ancient times for its oracle and often mentioned by Herodotus. And it is where the Bedouins take the English patient (Almásy) burned after falling with his burning plane into the Great Sand Sea. Ángel Carlos has added another bottle of Siwa to the shipment (Natural Water from the Siwa Oasis, it says on the label), this one with the original water, with the nice suggestion that I use it to baptize my grandson Mateo. I can’t think of a better idea: a baptism of adventure and legend, with Herodotus in the readings, and Count Almásy as godfather.