Penelope's Secret

by Nicolas Ségur

  One day, he went to post himself near Crow Rock, where the warrior Medon had his modest dwelling. He wanted to surprise Ulysses. He knew that the son of Laertes, neglecting Penelope’s bed for some time, was secretly frequenting that house, attracted by the slave Amphylice. That Phoenician woman, whom Ulysses had ceded to Medon as a recompense for his fidelity and collaboration against the suitors, was coarse in her features and bronzed by the sun, but her tender youth and a sort of ardor typical of her race had awakened the senses and the curiosity of the hero.

  Chiron had to keep watch until nightfall. Finally, he saw Ulysses emerging furtively from Medon’s dwelling, and who, perceiving his master’s presence, seemed disconcerted and tried to avoid him. But the Centaur ran swiftly to meet him and barred his way.

  “Shame on you, my son,” he exclaimed. “This, then, is how you respect the bed of the charming Penelope and how you honor Medon, your faithful servant. What does she have to bewitch you in this fashion, that plump Phoenician, and how can you prefer her to the daughter of Icarius?”

  Taken by surprise and blushing with confusion, Ulysses dared not respond.

  And the Centaur went on: “What has become of your amour? Not long ago you were begging like a starveling for a smile from Penelope. Intoxicated by her charms, you wanted her to render you caress for caress. Now your wishes are finally granted, you no longer appreciate that happiness. You flee your wife and even go as far as preferring vile slaves to her.”

  And, further inflating his voice, as if a great anger were carrying him away: “Do you find Penelope less tender? Does she love another man?”

  “She loves me and cherishes me more than ever,” Ulysses finally replied. “Attentive to my words and following my footsteps, she is more faithful than Argus. Then, when she holds me in her arms, she weeps, happy and swooning, wanting to die amid my caresses.”

  “For what, then, can you reproach her?”

  “Far from having anything for which to reproach her, I judge her irreproachable and perfect. But she no longer has attractions for me, and sometimes her passion oppresses and overwhelms me. Sometimes I regret my errant life and have the desire to mount my rapid ship again.”

  And having relieved his heart at a stroke, the hero breathed in deeply.

  “And your former amour, your urgent and servile affection?” said the Centaur.

  Ulysses remained confused and silent, slowly becoming conscious of the changes that had taken place within him.

  “In fact, what has become of my affection?” he stammered, finally. “What has become of that sharp emotion, the divine and beautiful anxiety that once took possession of my entire being at the appearance of Penelope? I often go back into the past without being able to recognize myself therein. No trace of the violent transports of old subsist in me.”

  And as the Centaur said nothing, Ulysses went on: “You must agree, my master, than in spite of your recommendations, you were not able to liberate me from amour; but now, hazard and time have succeeded where your science had failed.”

  “Insensate,” cried Chiron, “do you not see that this cure is my work? Making use of you and Penelope as a potter makes use of malleable clay, I have lent you my impulsions, I have fashioned you in accordance with my intentions, and have forced you to accomplish my designs.”

  And he showed Ulysses the manner in which he had filled Penelope with illusions and had prepared and aided her to find her husband desirable. He told her how, by suffering, he had then fortified and magnified nascent amour within her.

  “I knew that in granting your wish, your desire would be cured,” he added. “That is the sovereign remedy. For passion only lasts as long as it finds no response and it burns in solitude. We love with constancy those who neglect us, but scarcely do we sense that we are loved and satisfied than the enchantment disappears. Surety leads to satiety, as if amour killed amour.”

  For a long time, Chiron continued speaking, clarifying the mind of his disciple.

  Ulysses lent his ears avidly to that speech and seemed gripped and amazed by what he heard. Finally, he collapsed on a stone near the shore and began to weep. For, instructed by his master’s revelations, he read his heart clearly, and that of Penelope—and the cruel and disappointing reality penetrated and reawakened his consciousness.

  “What! Because Penelope adores me, she has therefore ceased to please me and to appear desirable to me!” he exclaimed, in a strangled voice. “And, on the other hand, is it for having raised a homicidal hand against her that she is definitively attached to me?”

  Now following the movements of his heart, and consciously retreading the passionate road that he had traveled until then in tumult and distraction, he felt a sharp despair. And, reactions being vivid and violent in him, his first impulse was to run on to a rock in order to hurl himself into the sea.

  But Chiron held him back.

  “Why should I live?” moaned Ulysses, trying to liberate himself from the Centaur’s powerful grip. “If only, thus cured of amour, I were at least happy! But no! Since I no longer aspire to anything, life is deprived of all its brilliance, and no longer offers me beautiful temptations. Once, in the ignorance of passions, I lived from day to day, taking pleasure in increasing my wealth or acquiring new glories. But since great fevers have burned my existence and have revealed the supreme interest of passion to me, I can no longer do without it. For want of amour I feel dispossessed of everything, impoverished and miserable. Everything seems obscure to me, colorless and tasteless. Nothing spurs me, nothing attracts me. On, the sublime woes of old, the atrocious sufferings of jealousy, anxiety and desire—how I regret them! In squeezing my heart, those dolors proved to me that I was alive, and the brief moments of joy that I felt then were worth a thousand times more than the monotonous flow of days at present.”

  “Do you remember, unfortunate individual,” replied the Centaur, “when I told you that, baleful and redoubtable, sowing hatred and disarray, summoning tears and blood, amour is still the sole celestial light that transfigures life and renders it desirable? Good and evil, sweetness and bitterness, honey and absinthe, everything is contained in it, everything is in accord, in admirable, terrible, mysterious Amour.”

  VII

  He work complete, the Centaur was getting ready to depart, without Ulysses trying to retain him. For nothing henceforth appeared to interest the hero, who, liberated from all anxiety, as he had wished to be, did not feel any happier.

  One day, Chiron said to him: “Why are you sad, in sum? For what can you reproach Destiny? Your island is favorably situated, and the winds visit it without overwhelming it. One breathes a persistent perfume here that comes to vivify everything and which does not seem to emanate from flowers but to exist as a natural element in the air. As for the inhabitants, they all have smiling faces, since the generous earth furnishes them abundantly with everything that it necessary to them. And I’m forgetting the most powerful and the most likeable attraction of your kingdom, which resides in the ever-new aspect with which these beautiful shores dress themselves in the sunlight. What marvels in perpetual creation and what a wealth of pleasures there are in the rocks, the curved inlets filled with sand, and in the meandering streams! It seems to me that even if you no longer had a vehement interest in living, you could still tolerate existence with the sole objective of gazing at what this beautiful nature offers you untiringly.”

  But Ulysses did not appear to be sensible to that language. Nature was for him merely a favorable or hostile environment, aiding him in his enterprises or placing obstacles in his path.

  And the Centaur, recognizing that such consolations were inappropriate to the hero’s mind, fell silent, anxiously

  On the eve of his departure, having discovered a new remedy for his disciple’s woes, he came to find him at dawn.

  Ulysses was sitting on a stone beaten by the waves, with a distracted gaze, empty of all thought.

  “How despicable humans are, and how cruel the gods are in their ir
ony!” he exclaimed, on seeing Chiron approach. “I desired ardently to inspire amour in Penelope, but scarcely was my wish granted than the success no longer provoked anything in me but indifference. That which, in spring, appeared to me to be a happiness for which I could scarcely hope, already gives me no joy in autumn. Have I changed my heart? Am I no longer the same man? How can it be that the realization of Ulysses’ dearest wish does not give Ulysses the slightest pleasure? Is life nothing but a dream, then, nothing but a mobile shadow, a bitter derision?”

  The Centaur replied: “Don’t be completely discouraged, my son. Know that in their clemency, the gods have accorded to humans the faculty of attenuating their despair by embellishing it. They have granted them Art, which is capable of lending divine attractions even to suffering. You’re unaware of the consolations and the appeasement that illusion gives. There is a final resource in that, which I have come in order to reveal to you.”

  And, encouraged by the interrogative gaze that Ulysses turned toward him, Chiron continued:

  “Do you remember the origin of your anxieties, those shameful nights during which the suitors came to weigh upon your bed and take Penelope in their arms? A child was to be the fruit of those multiple embraces. That child was born, and grew up. I met him yesterday.” And he added: “It’s necessary that we go to see him together before my departure. Pan is his name. Although he is still young, I do not hesitate to offer him to you as an example.”

  Followed by his disciple, Chiron headed toward a grotto that he knew, and where he had encountered the child of adultery.

  While walking, Ulysses though, with melancholy, that the existence of that child would once have inspired a great movement of hatred and anger within him, whereas now, it only awakened surprise and curiosity. He saw in that a new sign of his indifference toward Penelope, who appeared have been expelled and effaced from his heart.

  The master and the disciple traveled in silence through the fecund and cheerful plains of Ithaca. They finally arrived on a solitary and abrupt promontory that looked out toward the isle of Samos.

  “There is the grotto in which Penelope’s son lives,” said the Centaur.

  As he approached it, he called to Pan by name.

  A deformed young man of strange aspect, covered in a starry goatskin, emerged from the grotto. He saluted the Centaur; he seemed to be attracted to him by mysterious sympathies and natural correspondences.

  Ulysses noticed two small horns growing on the ephebe’s forehead, and a black pelt that shadowed his body from the navel downwards, and covered his cloven feet, like those of a goat, mere thickly.

  “He is, in fact, ugly, and differs from humans,” the Centaur said to him, divining his thoughts, “but don’t hate him for that and conclude that he’s inferior to them. By virtue of the horns and the pelt, he is allied more intimately than you with the nurturing earth. The healthy forces of animality, and its admirable instinct, live within him. And as he sometimes feels and acts in a human manner, without ceasing to enjoy animal plenitudes, one can say that he summarizes all creation within him. In any case, it is in order to bring humans closer to the earth that the gods decreed his birth.”

  And the Centaur told Ulysses how amour and its sufferings had led Pan to construct a lute and to draw a balm of consolation and a diversion from music.

  “It was on a spring day,” he said, “that Pan encountered the nymph Syrinx, who was bathing in the river, She was amicable and welcoming, and was able by her words, her movements and the profound science of attraction with which every woman seems to be infused, to charm and captivate the adolescent. Then, soon, obedient to her natural cruelty and fickleness, she cast him aside. Responding with mocking laughter to his language of passion, she disappeared among the reeds and left Pan prey to all the torments of ill fortune.

  “The young man cursed his own ugliness, cried, wept and thought of dying. Finally, he perceived one day that Syrinx was following another lover and passed close to him indifferently, as if she did not know him. He felt that his heart was about to burst, since, accumulated for a long time within him, his dolor demanded an issue, required a prompt outflow. It was then that, instinctively or guided by an obliging god, Pan extended his hand, cut one of the reeds that hid Syrinx from him, and raised it to his lips.

  “Sounds emerged from it. Undisciplined at first, pliant to the laws of chance, those sounds were gradually assembled, aided one another and accorded with one another; and from that resulted something superhuman and tender, which appeared to lend a consciousness and a voice to all the surrounding nature.

  “Pan experienced a sort of appeasement; for that melody, which surpassed human speech in its sweetness, in the richness of its intonations, those chords, which contained the seed of all sentiments, all joys and all sadness, liberated and lightened the soul of the musician.

  “Thus, with the reed between his lips, Pan saw himself as a creator. Gradually, he came to blow into his flute the emotions that that the rising morning, with its birdsong and its drops of dew, produced in his heart. He also celebrated the young shoots of spring, proud and straight, which come to renew and ornament nature, and then related the dying of the light at sunset, the soft palpitating silences of nights, and the vast moving expanse of the sea.

  “Since then, scarcely have his lips touched the flute than ardent desires, pure amours and sweet regrets take flight around him. The sounds of the instrument recreate the world and organize it in accordance with Pan’s intentions.

  “And the young man was soon able to express, with the aid of his flute, his inexpressible passion for Syrinx. He revealed the intimate essence of the flame that was devouring him, the most secret of his dreams, and how beautiful the Nymph seemed to him, and the emotions that the sound of her footfalls provoked in his heart, and the tenderness that overwhelmed him with sweetness when, leaning over to pick a flower, Syrinx displayed the frail elegance of her figure.

  “He rendered above all, by means of sounds, the splendors of the ineffaceable image that the cruel individual had left in his memory. He painted with the aid of music the real charms of his beloved and the others, the incomparable ones, with which his imagination adorned her and enriched her incessantly.

  “Then, by virtue of a sort of miracle, in ornamenting his unfortunate passion and perfecting it, Pan finished up by delighting in it. His own creation, that portrait of the ideal Syrinx that he magnified without respite, caused him to forget the terrestrial one, the imperfect Syrinx. Scarcely had his hand taken possession of the flute than his heart already ceased to suffer, for music liberated him from all pain, and, bending the universe to his desire, elevated him above the real.”

  Such was the Centaur’s story. When he had concluded it, he asked Pan to take up his flute and to play before Ulysses.

  The hero was wonderstruck by it. He thought that he was transported into unknown regions. A mysterious voice, which was preexistent within him, it seemed, but which had previously been silent, awoke now in order to speak a divine revelatory language. The sounds of the flute resonated all the way to the most profound substance of the hero, putting his soul in communion with nature, and demolishing, as if by enchantment, the barriers that isolate beings.

  So, before going away, Ulysses saluted Pan, looking at him with terror and admiration.

  “Now you know how humans, aided by art, can cure their torments and escape from themselves,” the Centaur said to him, after a long silence.

  “Are we not sufficiently victims of illusion? Was it worth the trouble of the gods adding the lie of art hereto?”

  Chiron replied:

  “Unhappy man! Know that there will never be enough consolation for you, so glorious, but disastrous, are the paths into which your intelligence draws you. In growing old, humanity becomes more and more perverted. Already, it is no longer sufficient for you to explore nature and defend yourself against the ambushes of life. You start to interrogate the secrets of your heart, you fathom the universe and you claim
to be stealing its secrets. And from all your acquisitions, dolor springs forth; for the truth is bitter, and the fruit of knowledge leaves a taste of ashes on the lips.

  “It is therefore necessary to thank the gods if, alongside plaintive thought, they have granted you fiction, the consoler of human being. Penelope’s child will leave you harmony as a heritage, while on another island, a man equal to the gods, Daedalus, is communicating to inert matter the face of things, fashioning it to such an extent that it offers to wonderstruck eyes a new and tangible universe.”

  The Centaur fell silent for a few moments. Already, the scintillating doors of Ulysses’ palace were outlined in the distance. Then he resumed:

  “Henceforth, mortals can escape their cruel condition. Reconstituting, with the aid of the creative intoxication of art, an imaginary world, and grating it the beauty that is absent from the real world, they will be able to support life and persevere without dementia to scrutinize the mysteries of the future.”

  “What you say is true,” Ulysses acquiesced. “There is in the sound of Pan’s flute a marvelous philter, analogous to that of the lotus. It is necessary to forget everything. The power of music is great!”

  “There is an art even higher and more divine,” said the Centaur, “an art victorious over time, victorious over humans, and akin to eternity. Someone other than me will reveal it to you.”

  VIII

  “Why have the gods introduced so much illogic and dementia into amour? Would it not be simpler to love someone who loves us and hate someone who deceives us? Is it necessary that instability attaches us more than constancy, that vice charms us more than virtue, and that there is more attraction in suffering than in joy?”

  Thus spoke Ulysses, while he was accompanying the Centaur to the port where the hollow ship, all sails deployed, was ready to depart.