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The library was eerily silent, and that was how Cleo liked it. She enjoyed the quiet of the Greek and Latin department of the UCL Library. There were shelves after shelves of books. She loved the scent of the ancient texts, the antique parchment paper from the first editions made her fingers itch to touch and read them. She browsed through books of ancient philosophers, stopping up between two shelving systems and opened one of the books, Plato’s Ethics in the original Ancient Greek.
Cleo had barely read the book’s first few sentences when she was interrupted by a loud commotion outside the library. She sighed deeply and tried to enter her inner sanctum of peace.
Getting lost in the book, she didn’t hear the heavy running footsteps that came towards her. She heard a loud gasp, but it was too late. A mountain of a man pummeled into her, pushing her out of balance and landing on her bum.
“Are you alright, miss?” a deep gravelly voice asked her. She felt annoyance creep into her heart. All she wished for was to be undisturbed and alone, but that was hard to find in a city like London.
“I’m quite alright,” she answered irritated. She searched for the Plato text she had dropped during the fall. The man bent down to retrieve the lost book. He handed it to her, revealing his long digits, and a signet ring on his little finger. Her eyes slowly crept up from his large hand to his bulging biceps to the broad shoulders, moving on to his chiselled jaw, up to his perfectly sculpted lips, and last stop was his intense blue eyes.
“I’m so very sorry, miss. I was running from some people chasing me, and this was the only place where I knew I could hide,” he kept profusely apologising, but Cleo had stopped listening. She was drowning in the blue of his eyes, even noticing the small patch of brown at the top of his right eye.
“Heteroglaucous…” she whispered.
“Pardon?”
“It’s the Ancient Greek name for having multicoloured eyes. Only Aristotle has used the term. Today it is called heterochromia,” she started explaining but clamped up, as she thought she probably bored him about all the facts of her language.
“That’s interesting, is it proven that only Aristotle used the word?”
Cleo looked astonished at the man, more surprised by the fact that he was interested in Aristotle. She knew that Aristotle was widely known throughout the world, but knowing his name and knowing what Aristotle stood for were two different things.
“I apologise for not introducing myself. My name is Henry,” he said and extended his hand in a greeting. Cleo smiled and put her smaller hand in his. His grip was firm yet so delicate and gentle.
“Mine is Cleo. So far, there has only been found one text in Ancient Greek, in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals.”
Cleo sat on the sofa with a book in her lap, waiting for her boyfriend to cuddle with her. Henry entered the living room a few minutes later with two steaming mugs of coffee. He kissed her cheek, peeking down on the book she was reading.
“What are you reading, Cleo?” he asked. His voice was gruff and raspy, as he had just woken up from a deep slumber. He nuzzled his nose in her lengthy hair, kissing the top of her head. The sound of her name came from deep within his chest, right from his heart. It was rare for him to call her by her name; the minute he had found out her name, he started calling her his itty bitty fishy or my little fishy, and he would try to kiss her while his lips were pursed into a fishmouth.
“Aristotle’s Poetics,” she showed him the cover and then went back to the page she was reading. Henry looked down at the words written in the Greek alphabet; they all looked jumbled and didn’t make any sense to him.
Henry moved around the sofa and went to lay down. He pushed the book out of Cleo’s lap, but she had a hard grip on it and instead lifted it away from his grasp. Henry chuckled as he lay his curly-haired head in her lap. Cleo automatically pushed her fingers through his soft hair and massaged his scalp while she continued reading.
“Read something out loud for me, my little fishy,” he asked. Cleo giggled at the silly nickname. They had been together for a few months since their encounter at the library. Their conversation about Aristotle and his sectoral heterochromia had lasted for hours, and in the end, he had asked for her email so that he could write to her. It had developed into a loving friendship and a passionate relationship. Cleo had researched on why her boyfriend called her a fish. First, she had thought that maybe she reminded him of a fish, which she had been a little insulted by, but after a talk with some of her classmates at the UCL, Department of Greek and Latin, she found out that ‘Cleo’ was also the name of a cartoon fish in Pinocchio. She then started to call him by the name of the little black and white kitten from the same movie.
“Of course, Figaro,” she smiled. She took a deep breath and started reading the passage out loud in Greek:
“ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ σπουδαῖα μάλιστα ποεητὴς Ὅμηρος ἦν (μόνος γάρ οὐχ ὅτι εὖ ἀλλὰ ὅτι καὶ μιμήσεις δραματικὰς ἐποίησεν), οὕτως καὶ τὰ τῆς κωμῳδίας σχήματα πρῶτος ὑπέδειζεν, οὐ ψόγον ἀλλὰ τὸ γελοῖον δραματοποιήσας · ὁ γὰρ Μαργίτης ἀνάλουον ἔχει, ὥσπερ Ἰλιὰς καὶ ἡ Ὀδύσσεια πρὸς τὰς κωμῳδίας.”1
“And what does it mean?” Henry looked up at her, perplexed.
“As, in the serious style, Homer is pre-eminent among poets, for he alone combined dramatic form with excellence of imitation, so he too first laid down the main lines of Comedy, by dramatising the ludicrous instead of writing personal satire. His Margites bears the same relation to Comedy that the Iliad and Odyssey do to Tragedy.”2
“So, the book is about how to write poetry?”
“Basically yes,” Cleo put a bookmark in the book and reached for her coffee. She squashed Henry’s face with her upper body. He groaned into her jumper, sounding frustrated, but enjoying the view.
“I want to ask you something, darling,” Henry sat up and took a big gulp of his black coffee. Cleo felt her heart constrict; she didn’t like his serious tone, was he going to say he had grown tired of their relationship?
“Ehm, what is it?” she asked him nervously, her anxiety rising every second Henry was silent.
“My family wants to meet you.”
It was like a brick had fallen from her heart, but replaced by a large boulder.
“Y… yo… your family?” she stammered slightly.
“Don’t be nervous, my love. They are going to adore you and your intellectual brain.”
“That is what I am afraid of, what if I say something too academic and they look at me like I’m a weirdo?” Cleo stood from the sofa and started pacing the living room. She was overwhelmed by the situation.
Henry walked over to his panicking girlfriend and wrapped his big arms around her. She put her head on his shoulder and breathed in his scent. He smelled of something citrussy mixed with some type of wood that she couldn’t pick out, and underneath that was his own pure masculine scent that calmed her nerves.
“They know that I love you…”
Cleo whipped her head up to look into her boyfriend’s cerulean eyes. Pure determination and love oozed from him, and she knew that he meant those words.
“You… you love me?” she stammered.
“More than anything in the whole wide world,” he told her. Henry kissed the tip of her nose, making her giggle. Her shoulders relaxed, and she let Henry carry her back to the sofa.
They sat cuddled up together for a moment.
“I love you too, my Figaro,” Cleo whispered.
The journey to the isle of Jersey was fast and short. The back garden of Henry’s parents’ house was filled with people. His brothers practically attacked him the minute Henry stepped through the gate. Telling him, it was about time he brought Cleo over. Their mother scolded them for behaving like teenagers. She introduced herself and her rowdy bunch of sons, making Cleo feel less anxious. Her shoulders started to relax as she was introduced to the entire Cavill family.
There was a large table set with an abundance of food. Cleo even saw something that looked like tzatziki and pita bread, and it made her so happy, she smiled for the first time since stepping outside her apartment.
As they sat down to start the fest, Henry’s mother walked out of the kitchen with a large dish that seemed to be lasagna.
“Henry told me that your favourite dish is moussaka, and I hope mine is decent enough for your liking,” she smiled at Cleo, who was salivating at the scent wafting from the delicious-looking moussaka.
“Thank you so much, Mrs Cavill. I really appreciate the sentiment,” Cleo smiled back. Henry cut a slice of the dish and handed it to her. She nearly moaned out loud for everyone to hear as she took a bite. It reminded her of home. It didn’t taste the same as how her mother made it, but it was still filled with love and passion.
“Cleo, Henry said you are getting your PhD at UCL? What are you researching?” one of Henry’s sisters-in-law asked.
“Oh, yes. I am researching Greek philosophers, how people still use their teachings these days, and why their teachings still are relevant in the 21st century.”
When Cleo talked about her passion, her eyes lit up, the anxious aura around her would evaporate, and she would feel at ease. She was starting to feel comfortable around Henry’s family as they kept asking her questions about her research, about her heritage, and why London?
“I have to ask you this, Cleo, but what is your favourite Greek mythology story?” Henry’s younger brother asked.
“My favourite? That’s a tough one because they are so many amazing stories,” she grumbled over the question for a few seconds. “If I have to choose it would be a story told by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium.”
“What is it about?” Henry asked curiously as he ate another bite of the moussaka.
“About love. Everyone in the Symposium is giving speeches to praise the god, Eros. Aristophanes tells this story, where humans used to be creatures with four legs, four arms, and a head with two faces. Zeus decided to cut them in half and turned their faces towards the wound. After a while, the humans started missing each other and went in search of their other half.”
“Is that where the term ‘soulmate’ comes from?”
“Not exactly. The term was first used in a letter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1822, and Plato wrote his Symposium around 385 BC,” Cleo noticed that everyone was listening intensely to what she had to say. “My favourite part of the story is that Aristophanes says: ‘Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a “matchmaking half” of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.’”3
Cleo heard all the women ‘awwww’. Everyone started to tell her about how they found their other half. Which made Henry tell about their first encounter, making her realise that he was telling the story because he believed they were soulmates.
“The greatest love stories are not those in which love is only spoken, but those in which it is acted upon.” - Steve Maraboli.
1 Butcher, S.H., 1922: The Poetics of Aristotle, 4th ed., London, p. 16.
2 Butcher, S.H., 1922: The Poetics of Aristotle, 4th ed., London, p. 17.
3 Nehamas, A. & P. Woodruff, 1989: Plato. Symposium, Indianapolis & Cambridge, p. 27.