Odysseus: The Return

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  I called Euriclea again and asked her to bring me fire and sulphur so their fumes could cleanse the hall and courtyard of the stink of death, purge the clotted blood. My house must bear no trace of the desecration.

  Euriclea called out all the surviving handmaids and the servants who had remained closed up in their rooms during the massacre. She invited them to recognize me and render homage. I was moved by their words and gestures. They surrounded me, kissing my hands and my head, they knelt at my feet and embraced me, many of them weeping with emotion at seeing me again or perhaps with relief at having escaped death themselves.

  I could not believe that I had restored the law in my home and had reconquered the throne. But the bottom of my heart was filled with profound bitterness, because I had never before had to wield arms against my own people. My own blood. The victory I had so longed for had turned into poison. My homecoming had brought nothing but great, unending grief. Not a single one of the companions who followed me to war had I brought back to their families, to the heartsick fathers and mothers who had yearned for their return, scanning the sea day after day for a sign of them. And now there was fresh grief to be borne. Yet, a goddess had chosen to fight beside me, the gasping swallow on the ceiling’s main beam: reason was on my side and legitimized everything I had done. Justice had been served, and this was a king’s most sacred duty. This I had accomplished. Now I could think of my feelings.

  Penelope.

  NIGHT HAD finally fallen. Phemius, the singer, crossed the hall like a ghost. He passed next to me without looking at me, his eyes staring at images that only he could see. He crossed the threshold and his dark figure stood out against the last faint red glow of the darkling sky. I stopped him. ‘Can you stay here for a little while?’ I asked him. Someone was lighting the lanterns in the hall and courtyard.

  ‘If you like, wanax.’

  ‘Yes, I would. We used to be friends once . . . long ago.’

  ‘Yes, we were.’

  ‘Then don’t go yet, I need you one last time. Inside. Then you can leave.’

  Phemius turned and walked back into the hall. He sat on a stool next to the wall and put his lyre on his lap. Then he bent his head and wept hot tears, and I felt a knot in my throat. I wanted to weep with him and let out the bitterness that oppressed me, but my heart was made of stone.

  I watched as Telemachus entered from the courtyard. His armour and face were covered with blood. My boy, innocent and unseasoned until just a short while ago, had wounded and killed with sword, axe and spear. He had crossed a line and he would never be able to go back again. I realized that I must look much the same as him, if not worse. We regarded each other in silence: one the mirror of the other.

  I heard the sound of a step descending the stair and my heart trembled. I turned and saw Penelope, my bride. Behind her was Euriclea, who was pointing at me and shouting: ‘It’s him, my child! It’s the husband you’ve been waiting for all this time. He was the foreign guest begging for alms in the hall. He didn’t want anyone to recognize him.’ But my queen stood still, staring at me as if I were a stranger. She sat next to the hearth and continued to regard me with a nearly indifferent look. Euriclea, confounded by the silence, insisted: ‘I recognized him from the first, as soon as I saw the scar on his leg when you ordered me to wash his feet.’

  ‘Wait, mai,’ I stopped her. ‘The queen cannot recognize me in this state. Have a bath prepared for me and have me brought clean clothes, the best remaining in the chest.’

  As if she had been waiting for that moment all day or all year, perhaps, she prepared a bath for me and had the maidservants wash me. Then she had me put on fine garments, the ceremonial robes I once wore at public hearings, when I reigned over a peaceful Ithaca.

  ‘How handsome you are, my child,’ said my old nurse, her eyes bright with tears, ‘how handsome.’

  I went back to my wife then. I sat opposite her and contemplated her in silence: beautiful and proud, cheeks blushing in the warmth of the hearth. Time had done no damage to my queen.

  There was a tension between us, like a thunderbolt that could not explode. Neither of us could ever have imagined that our meeting, after twenty years of dreams, desires, tears, would be like this: dead silence, mute, confused glances.

  ‘But can’t you see that he’s your husband?’ Euriclea urged. ‘Is this how you welcome him, after such a long time? After you’ve called out his name for so many days and so many nights?’ At the end of the hall, Telemachus watched in bewilderment as his parents challenged each other in an absurd skirmish of looks and unsaid words.

  Penelope shook her head and fiery tears glittered in her eyes. ‘It’s not him, mai. Do you believe for a moment that I wouldn’t recognize my husband? The sound of his voice? The way his eyes change colour when he smiles?’

  She was right. I had never smiled since I’d set foot in the house, nor sought her help. That was why she was torturing me: for not having understood her, for not having believed her. For not having gone to her first, before anyone else. For not having trusted her. ‘My name is Aithon of Crete,’ I had told her, when her soulful eyes searched my face in the darkest corner of the room. And so she had proposed the contest of the bow without saying anything to me. She wanted me to understand that she was accustomed to making decisions on her own and that she didn’t need me. I would have to be the one to adapt to her decisions, and if I failed, worse for me. I evidently was not worthy of her. I remembered how many times I’d thought of her when the moon rose on the sea, desiring her so intensely it hurt. Now I had her in front of me, and she was treating me like a foreigner come from afar to beg for a piece of bread.

  The silence between us was more deafening than any clash between warriors clad in bronze. It was breaking my heart. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I was about to walk out, to the courtyard where Eumeus and Philoetius were loading up the bodies of the suitors on a wagon. But it was she who broke the silence: ‘Euriclea, if the guest tells us that he is Odysseus, go upstairs and bring down the bed that my husband is accustomed to sleeping in, so that he may rest comfortably.’

  I turned to look at her and saw a slight glimpse of irony in her dark gaze. She was giving me a chance, a single chance, to win her back. ‘What are you saying, my queen? Your words cut me to the core! No one can move my bed. I myself built it among the branches of an age-old olive tree. I prepared a nest for you among its green leaves, my bride, my only love.’

  She rose then. I had offered up the secret that only she and I knew, the secret of the bed where she had first given herself to me, where we had conceived Telemachus, our only child, a bed redolent of old wood, lavender and wheat. She threw herself into my arms, weeping, convulsively pulled me close, and I could feel the beating of her ardent heart, her breasts pushing against my chest. I whispered confused, crazy words as I sank my face into her hair, waves of the night sea, and we cried in each other’s arms, like a boy and a girl discovering love’s longing for the first time.

  For a moment my eyes met Phemius’ dumbfounded gaze. He instantly lowered his head, waiting for me to tell him why I’d asked him to return to the hall. I left Penelope’s embrace and went to him.

  ‘Have the lanterns lit everywhere,’ I told him, ‘play and sing . . . and you, handmaids, dance and raise your voices in song. If anyone passes by this house, they must think that a wedding is being celebrated, that the queen has decided to marry one of her suitors. No one must know what has happened here.’

  They obeyed, and I remained for a while watching that macabre dance which should have been joyful and instead was pure folly. The maidservants danced as their friends swung from their nooses, the poet played his lyre and sang with tears in his eyes, oppressed by grief and dismay. He would never have thought that the house in which we had lived so serenely, dreaming of adventure, would have become the scene of a massacre. When I went back to the hearth, I saw that Penelope was no longer there. She had gone up to her rooms, accompanied by her handmaids bearing t
orches to light her way. They would be undressing her now, washing her body and spreading sweetly scented oil over her skin, laying her on the bed as if it were her wedding night.

  In the end I went up the stone stair myself, preceded by two handmaids with lit torches.

  I entered.

  22

  DRAPED IN MAJESTIC PURPLE, covered with soft linen woven by expert hands, redolent of olive, our bed waited to take us into its folds. I recognized every stroke of my axe and my plane, every surface smoothed by my pumice. My queen had preserved it like a sanctuary, without ever losing hope in my return.

  Penelope’s love . . . what was it like, after so many years? Her mouth, her fiery womb, her breasts? And her black, black, black eyes? Beyond any enchantment I could have imagined in the long nights of my exile. The intimacy we had so desired enflamed our looks, our breath. I breathed in her mouth, she in mine. The light of the lantern cast a bronze reflection on her skin. She was no more than thirty-seven now, and her beauty was dazzling.

  This was the privilege of a queen: she had never exposed her skin to the merciless sun, never ruined her hands pulling weeds in a field of wheat or barley. Food and pure water were always abundant on her ivory table and in her silver cup. Baths and scented oils had kept her skin soft. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, just as her gaze was locked on me. We were both incredulous at being together again and in each other’s arms.

  When I pulled her close to me, the sounds of the dancing and strident singing in the hall ceased and silence fell over the house, enveloped by the night. Perhaps Telemachus or Euriclea had ordered Phemius to give up the absurd pretence. After all, who would ever be passing along the path at such a late hour? Eumeus and Philoetius had their work cut out for them. They would be at it all night, but tomorrow there would be no trace of what had happened. Not a single stain nor hint of the dense, sweet stench of death.

  The frenzy of slaughter had not yet been extinguished in me; its force had not ebbed, but it flowed in a different direction. The fire was still burning, with a different energy but with the same intensity, like a river that had changed course. Only exhaustion stopped us, when the sky was just beginning to pale. We fell asleep and we forgot. The warmth of the bed and Penelope’s nude body filled me with life after the cold shadow of death had frozen my heart. Time expanded, infinitely. A wave of memories washed over me and it felt for a moment as if nothing had changed. As if I’d never left, as if our love could continue on its natural course, erasing the chasm of the years.

  I felt Athena’s veil on us, protecting us. She was not jealous of Penelope, perhaps she loved her as she loved me. But would the ire of Poseidon be appeased? Or was the blue god, from the depths of the sea, meditating on more calamity for me?

  When would I have to leave again? After a day, a month, a year? How would I ever find the courage to tell Penelope?

  Or should I ignore the prophecy as if I’d never heard it?

  How could I be certain that I’d summoned up the ghost of Tiresias from Hades, and that I’d heard those words from him? Might I have been dreaming? Might all of it have been a dream?

  In that bed, next to the bride I’d desired so fervently, the woman I’d feared would become grey, worn, lifeless, wrinkled, everything seemed possible and impossible. Her breathing, soft and regular in sleep, was a music that I’d never forgotten. That breathing, along with the merest thought from me, was enough to make me forget everything, to let me believe that none of it had really happened. A dream, like so many that had visited me in my sleep over the years. But the squeaking of wheels drifted in from the courtyard. Carts being pulled over stone. Limbs hanging over the sides, the arms and legs of young men slaughtered.

  By me, my son, the cowherd and the swineherd. It was all horribly real, there was no room for illusion. I begged my goddess to give me a few more hours of serenity. Then I would be able to face a thousand adventures, clashes, duels with men and gods, monsters, nightmares, dreams.

  I had fallen, after our lovemaking, into a torpor, neither awake nor asleep. I would open my eyes and find Penelope’s, staring deeply.

  ‘I heard you crying,’ she said.

  I didn’t know how to answer.

  ‘I understand. This is not how you imagined your return. Perhaps you thought your people would welcome you with festivities, the noblemen accompanying you to the palace where I would be waiting for you, dressed in my most beautiful gown and precious jewels. I’m sorry that didn’t happen and I’m sorry you felt you couldn’t trust me.’

  ‘I was wrong and I ask you to forgive me, my love. But my crying wasn’t for what I did, and not even for the bitterness I made you suffer . . .’

  ‘I’ve already forgotten that. I made love to you like a girl, I slept in your arms, I felt your heat after so many years. You can’t imagine how that made me feel . . . Why were you crying, then?’

  ‘Because I’ll have to leave again.’

  She looked as if she’d turned to stone.

  I couldn’t stop. I had started talking. I had to say it all.

  ‘What I’m about to tell you is unbelievable, I know, but in my ship I crossed the wall of fog that separates our world from a place where anything is possible. I reached the ends of the earth, I ventured into the waves of the river Ocean. I went beyond the jagged cliffs and the rocky towers that are the sentinels of the world of the dead. I sacrificed to the infernal gods and called up the shadows of Hades. Thousands of them came to me.

  ‘The Theban prophet Tiresias was among them. He drank of the blood of the animals I’d sacrificed and he spoke to me. It was a dreadful sight to see, but worse was to hear what he had to tell me. He predicted that I would return, here, to Ithaca, late, a broken man, on a foreign ship without a single comrade. He said that I would find my house invaded by pretenders plaguing my wife and that I would have to kill them all. He said that when I had done this, I would have to leave again, to journey in a single direction away from the sea, carrying an oar on my shoulder. I would have to continue on until I found myself among people who do not know the sea, who do not season their food with salt, who have never seen a ship. Until one day I would find a man who would ask me whether the oar on my shoulder was a fan for winnowing grain.

  ‘“This is the sign,” Tiresias told me. ‘“You can’t mistake it. You will plant the oar into the ground and offer a bull, a boar and a ram in sacrifice to Poseidon: only then will you be able to return and reign among happy peoples. Death will come to seek you only when you are exhausted by serene old age. She will come for you softly, from the sea.”’

  My wife’s tears gleamed like pearls on her cheeks. The night was never-ending, beyond any limit that I had ever known. Perhaps the spirits of the dark wanted to allow me a little more time for my night of love and sorrow.

  ‘He said nothing of me?’

  ‘You are always in my heart. But the prophecy must be fulfilled. I challenged a god and have paid dearly for it already. This is the last thing that remains to be done: to end the impossible contest of a mortal against an invincible god. Once and for all.

  ‘The first part of the prophecy has come true in every way, why shouldn’t the second as well? When Tiresias named the three animals I would have to sacrifice, I remembered something that happened when I was just a boy. The first time I ever went to the continent was to visit my grandfather, Autolykos, for a hunting party. My mother gave me a message for him, and when he’d seen it he asked me to name three animals, but to be very careful with my answer, because those three animals would mark my future.

  ‘I said without hesitation: “The bull, the boar and the ram.” The same as Tiresias. I cannot escape my destiny. It was all foretold. I know that I’ll make you suffer by leaving again, but I have no choice. If I don’t bring this conflict to an end, I’ll never have a hope of living the last part of my life in serenity, with my family, on my island.’

  Penelope held me tightly, curled into my arms. I caressed her face, her body, sought out her blac
k eyes in the darkness. I was thinking, perhaps, that her love could keep the restless shades of the murdered suitors away from me.

  ‘The gods are deceitful, they play with our lives pitilessly,’ she cried. ‘You are their toy. A little man armed only with an oar who must take on first a bull and then a boar with frightful tusks and then a curved-horned ram, in some remote, solitary place. As they sit on their shining thrones, enjoying the spectacle from the sky.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. Tiresias was telling the truth. No one tells lies in the kingdom of the dead.’

  She turned away, sobbing softly. I felt like crying as well. And yet, wretched as we were, we made love again and again, locked in a fierce embrace, weeping, each of us breathing in the other’s pain. In the heat and the bitter taste of tears, from that total intimacy of soul and body rose a challenge to the sky, more defiant and powerful than any that could be fought with a sword or spear: the call of two mortal creatures who loved each other desperately, enmeshed in a moment of extreme emotion and suffering, beyond anything they had ever experienced. A heartbroken passion whose infinite power no god, no demon, could remotely imagine.

  THE LIGHT shifted over our faces and our bodies, and my goddess, perhaps, instilled the thought in my heart of what might happen as soon as news of the suitors’ deaths spread. I jumped to my feet, washed and dried myself off, put on a tunic taken from my chest, which Penelope had kept closed all these years, and went to the armoury to don my battle gear: shield, spear and sword.