Alphēus & Arethūsa

In mud our tale is shaped; in water it comes to its end.

...

From the mud the beauty of Arethusa was revealed, enchanting seductress of the river Alpheus, in whose waters the nymph bathed and unfolded her virtues.

At the wonder of her, he made himself man so as to possess her; she, to escape him in body, turned into water and vanished beneath.

Alpheus reached her, becoming water once more and overflowing into Ortygia, where Arethusa already received him as a spring.

Together not in form, but in element. Twins, primordial and distinct.

They never became one, so that they might still exist as two, symmetrical and complementary. Forever catching sight of one another in that infinite instant, vanished and perpetual, which beholds them mingling in the glitter of the sea and with all else, now matter and oblivion.

Alpheus was there; the mire of his depths loomed above and weighed upon him, yet he was forever confined within it.

Neither at the source, where memory began, nor at the mouth, where it ended.

Across a vast region he flowed, giving life and refuge.

Arethusa moved from the earth into the wind.

Intent upon something else, drawn elsewhere, at last she yielded.

Her breath came suddenly, abundant. Patiently she awaited it, still and outstretched.

Unlike the coming of man, violent and impulsive, Arethusa arrived slowly, tightening her hold.

Her mud-covered face was enough to deny her.

She drew close to the clear waters, first with one foot, then with one hand, then two, raising them at last to her face.

Traveller, wherever you land, greedy fresh water.

As her garments of mud slipped away, she immersed herself, uncovering her perfect image.

It was the mask that stirred Alpheus, a negative of beauty.

Swaying down to rest in the depths, it brushed against him, whispering of the beauty it had concealed.

Alpheus turned sharply around. In a flash he swept back across the surface of the water, far and wide.

At last he clogged himself with longing, and began to hope, waiting for something.

Unable to imagine what might follow, he swallowed himself, while the mask surrendered fatally within him, dissolving its own likeness.

He had wondered, in the past, what forms beauty might assume, yet he had never conceived such marvellous contours.

He chose to forget the excess for a span of time; nothing had happened before it.

A transparent silence darkened the river waters.

Then, as suddenly, a playful stirring of water, tickling unfamiliar curves, awakened him.

A vast blanket whose geometry he commanded, flowing along its edges and pressing within them, Alpheus could feel the whole riverbed.

At that instant, the splashing and tugging of the waters did not interest him; it irritated him.

He appeared at the very heart of the trembling and there beheld the unheard-of beauty, a whiteness upon which the waters shone.

— Arethusa! —

Alpheus named her.

A river thirsting.

— Beautiful Arethusa! —

But she did not yet hear him; instead the waters grew nervous at a gesture, strong, enclosing her beyond measure.

Like threatening tentacles became the voluptuous streams with which she had only just been playing.

— Do not go! —

Alpheus burst out helplessly, lest she recoil from the trembling embrace of those innocent waters into which, in grace and gentleness, she had entered of her own accord.

Whose fault was it, and yet whose could it be, if the manifest absence within her cocoon of mud had held him distracted?

Now and here, recognised and struck by her, frightened she burned to flee.

Alpheus wept, from pain, from rage and from fate, while she tore herself away from him.

He called after her, biting down to the very last word: he the master, she the stranger.

And still more, distorted flatteries hurled across the swiftly growing distance.

Alpheus pleaded against his own mute insubstantiality.

Alpheus prayed, he who had never known desire.

Alpheus loved, to deviate towards another form.

He stormed the banks of mud that held him and made himself flesh.

Without so much as contemplating his new shape, he hurled all of himself towards her. Soon he overtook her.

Arethusa trembled within her recovered garments, now made of portentous clouds.

— Oh, Arethusa. —

He spoke to her, breathless and poor.

Quietly he encircled her from afar. Slowly Arethusa grew still.

He seemed able to feel her beneath that mantle of cloud, drawing closer little by little, only enough to reach her.

He tasted her breath, caressed her limbs as they emptied and swelled again, yet the tighter his arms closed around her, the more she contracted within herself.

He stood aghast when, while the echo of her breathing still remained, his limbs closed upon themselves inside the cloud.

There was no time to ask himself anything, pervaded and struck by the same fluid stirring that had once led him to her.

His body mortified without pain, he wound himself into a vortex and surrendered to becoming.

A wonder beyond the places that had belonged to him, Alpheus rose again as water in Ortygia, where Arethusa already received him as a spring.

Together not in form, but in element. Twins, primordial and distinct.

They never became one, so that they might still exist as two, symmetrical and complementary.

Forever catching sight of one another in that infinite instant, vanished and perpetual, which beholds them mingling in the glitter of the sea and with all else, now matter and oblivion.