Odysseus: The Return

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  So I went forward, thinking about nothing but reaching the place I was seeking, at a great distance from the sea. In that place I’d find a man and he would ask me a question: what is that object you carry on your shoulder? A winnowing blade, perhaps? To toss grain into the air, to remove the chaff?

  There I would stop, and my goddess would send me a bull, a boar and a ram. There I would make sacrifice to the blue god and I would be rewarded with serenity. My suffering would be over forever.

  But the infinite expanse I faced frightened me. I wondered where I would get food, how I would defend myself against the piercing cold . . .

  I walked for days and days, gasping for breath, gritting my teeth, imprecating, imploring, cursing, weeping . . . but with every step I took in that endless void, that ferocious wind, I felt courage swelling in my heart, I felt a strength that I’d never experienced before and fear slowly melted away from me.

  And when, suddenly, total silence would fall upon me and over the white expanse, the absence of any sound or echo or puff of air made me feel strangely inebriated, not very different from how I remembered feeling on the island at the ends of the earth. It felt like I could expand my being, like water or air or dust or smoke, until I covered the entire space as far as my eyes could see. It was then, in that silence that took my breath away, that I learned to talk with myself, so as not to go mad.

  In the end, it would always be the voice of the wind that broke the silence, either with a violent gust or with a plaintive sound that I could barely hear, soft . . . or mocking, like the chirping of a blackbird.

  More than two months into my exhausting journey, the wind learned to speak and even to sing.

  With the voice of my Penelope, so far away . . .

  Epilogue

  It took me many more months to cover the last stretch of cruel winter. Every moment of every day was filled with remembering. It barely seems possible that I could relive every instant of my life so intensely, so vividly. It was as though my mind had diffused and expanded my experience to fill that void, so that nothing could exist outside my body. Nothing but myself occupied the limitless space that surrounded me.

  I navigated alone, without a single comrade, with only an oar to remind me that I had once crossed the sea, that I had fought impossible monsters and creatures. Nothing on this journey had reawakened the forces that in the past had enabled me to carry out my endeavours; there had been neither glory nor meaning in the only combat I’d been forced to engage in.

  I felt like I’d become another person, in another place and in another world, and this pained and alarmed me. I felt my roots being yanked from the earth I knew by a force that I could not defend myself against. Every yank wounded me, spilling blood, not shining sap. My past life seemed alien to me; something that had evaporated with my passing. Changeable creatures, unfamiliar divinities confined to remote, unreachable places . . . places of magical beauty, blissful islands ruled by divine sovereigns, storms of wind and lightning, raging mountains of water: all this faded away in those twilights when the sun never set, in those delusive, tremulous lights that fluttered in the night sky. I was the only thinking animal that could live in that desert of white.

  Then this morning, when I opened my eyes and stretched my numb, aching limbs, I found myself immersed in fog. I was lost in a milky fluid that barely let me discern a globe above me that looked much more like a pale moon than the sun that brings light to mortal men. I couldn’t even distinguish the features of the ground that surrounded me, nor remember what it looked like before I fell asleep. But then the sun rose high over the horizon, and soon the fog began to dissolve, revealing a tall sparkling rampart beaded with pearls of pure light, and I thought: can this be the wall of ice that Calchas spoke of?

  Is what I face truly the last obstacle? Will I overcome this one too? Can I manage to break through this barrier? Suddenly, I’m not sure why, I know that I can.

  The wall is in front of me now: blinding glare that stings my eyes. I have to defend them with strips of cloth, ripping the merest slits in them so I can still see. I’ve had to tie the oar to my belt with shreds of leather and drag it after me. The climb is ever more arduous. The sharp ice lacerates my hands, the trail I leave is of scarlet stains on the immaculate white. How and when will I find the victims to sacrifice to the god of the abyss? When and how will I meet the man who will ask the question that will finally free me of my curse? I look behind me every now and then. My breath is ragged, the prayers I murmur to my goddess a cry of pain and hope. I gaze back at the horizon I crossed so long ago and then move forward again, towards the icy crest.

  Slowly, gritting my teeth, I climb up and up. As I near the summit, I’m certain that a revelation awaits me on the other side and I try to imagine what I will see.

  I’m just a few steps away from the peak. It’s getting harder and harder to breathe. I’m reminded of the snowy mountaintops we glimpsed in Arcadia so long ago, when as a boy I followed the hero Laertes my father towards the sanctuary of the Wolf King.

  I’m at the top! I drag the oar towards me and I plunge it into the deep snow so it casts a long shadow. The plain opens wide below, furrowed by raging torrents, blazing in the rays of the sun. I shout with all the voice I have in me, with all my strength, I shout to the men and the gods, to the wind and the peaks I see in the distance. I shout so that someone may hear me and show himself. I can no longer bear this solitude.

  But my voice is lost in the silence.

  I take up the oar with the butterfly carved into its handle, moulded to the hand of the fallen comrade who drowned long ago in a distant sea. And so I descend the wall of ice, heading towards the plain. The wind starts to blow again, impetuous.

  All of a sudden, a roar. The snow in front of me seems to melt and a towering column of water erupts from the ground, rising higher and higher. Behind the transparent column appears a figure wrapped in a vortex. A deafening laugh resounds over all the earth, his eyes inscrutable, locks blue-green like the deepest maelstrom, body liquid as the swirling sea . . .

  ‘Did you really believe that you’d arrived?’ Voice of thunder tapering off into a long gurgle, a distant roaring sea monster.

  ‘Did you really believe that you’d reached the end of your long journey? Where is the man, then, who looks at your oar and demands an answer? Where are the victims to be sacrificed to my spirit? Run! Run, glorious Odysseus, crafty and resourceful son of Laertes, run for as long as your breath and your life hold out, run, if you can!’

  The earth swallowed him instantly and I can no longer say what I am seeing or not seeing, hearing or not hearing. All that remains is darkest despair. The wind has picked up, ever keener, and a shiver raises my skin under my tattered clothing. Is it the cold that is chilling me to the bone or is it the trembling inside me that I’ve yearned for so long, the quiver that tells me that my goddess is near?

  ‘Athena!’ I shout in my heart. ‘Athena!’ I’m surrounded by an infinite white expanse. The horizon is deserted in every direction – even the wall of ice has disappeared. The sky is empty, the light unflickering. Perhaps it is morning, perhaps evening. It makes no difference. But there it is, a black speck, far away in the distance . . .

  Where have I already seen this? When?

  It advances towards me, swiftly, becoming bigger and bigger! I’m certain I’ve already seen this. Or did I dream it?

  I don’t know how much time passes before, finally, he reaches me. Him. The Wolf King, on a swift, wheel-less chariot drawn by wolves that seems to fly over the snow . . .

  My dream at the sanctuary of Arcadia: this was what I dreamed!

  ‘Oh my goddess who touches me with a shiver, I beg you, reveal the meaning of this vision: is it he who will ask me the question? A hero racing swiftly on a chariot drawn by wolves?’ It stops, all at once and a voice in my heart says to me, ‘Draw closer!’ There he is, he has stepped out of the chariot and is standing beside it. He is staring at me and my heart leaps in my chest.r />
  His hair is run through with silver threads, like mine, his beard is like the one that frames my face, on his chest hangs a ribbon of cloth with a little stone rose . . . only his clothing is different: the bracelet he wears at his wrist and the boots he wears on his feet. The mystery opens before my eyes like a black cloud rent by the wind after a storm! The cloak on his shoulders is fastened by a golden pin, shaped like a deer in the clutches of a hound. My Penelope! The desire to weep is huge, I feel the tears leaving my eyes but I see them falling down his cheeks . . .

  ‘Draw closer,’ says the voice in my heart, and I draw closer, so close that I am him and he is me and I am no longer. There’s only one man on that snowy expanse.

  Here come other chariots, drawn by more wolves. They stop next to mine, next to his. Voices shout: ‘Commander!’ They are the voices of Antiphus, Sinon, Polites, Elpenor, Eurylochus, Euribates!

  This is what I’ve found beyond the wall of ice: another time, another place, another where, another why, and another adventure with other comrades who I know but who don’t recognize me. What does it matter? I tie the oar to the chariot as the others laugh: ‘What will you need that for, commander? There’s not a boat to be found in these parts!’

  ‘What does that matter?’ I answer. ‘Onward!’ And I set my wolves off at a gallop, shouting other words in a language that is different yet similar. Mine, regardless.

  What does it matter? I am what I am: a small king of a kingdom I no longer have . . . son of a little island, son of a bitter fate. I, who have faced monsters and invincible heroes without trembling, I, who have been overcome by fear and fled, I, who have shouted the names of my fallen comrades and I who did not hesitate to cast them into deadly danger . . . why? Curiosity, the invincible desire to push on, beyond the last limit and beyond the last horizon. I, who have wept, laughed, rejoiced, suffered, I who have loved and hated. I, who believe in my goddess, in my bride, in my land, and who flee from them all. I who am and who will be until one day, who knows where, who knows when, I’ll meet a man who asks me whether what I carry on my shining shoulder is a winnowing blade to separate the wheat from the chaff. On that day I will re-embrace my Penelope for all time, and my son, clad in blinding bronze. And I will reign over happy peoples. I, who am everyone and anyone.

  I who am No One.

  Author’s Note

  After Odysseus: The Oath, this second volume, The Return, covers Odysseus’ voyage home after the war of Troy and then his final journey, the one foretold by the prophet Tiresias from the underworld. His story is only one of many ‘nòstoi’, the poems of the epic cycle that recount the ‘returns’ of the heroes of the Trojan War. Odysseus’ tale is the only one of these poems to survive; only small fragments of the others remain, mostly as citations in the works of other classic authors. Homer himself includes one of these stories in Book XI of the Odyssey: the return of Agamemnon and his murder at the hands of Clytaemnestra, his wife, and her lover Aegisthus. Book IV of the Odyssey provides a version of Menelaus’ return. Virgil’s Aeneid indirectly mentions the return of Diomedes, who is forced to leave Argus and forge a new life for himself in Apulia, in the south of Italy.

  Today we know that the itinerary of Odysseus’ homeward journey is lost to us. Fascinating hints in ancient sources suggest that his original voyage probably took place between the Black Sea and the Aegean. In the 1900s it was believed that the route had been modelled on a Phoenician navigation manual but this hypothesis was dismantled when traces of Mycenaean presence began to turn up throughout the entire Mediterranean. The ‘traditional’ localizations on the Tyrrhenian Sea (Circe on Mount Circeo, Scylla and Charybdis in the Strait of Messina, etc.) were actually mapped out quite early on, by the first Euboean colonizers who settled on the shores of that sea.

  A number of scholars have noted that the hero of the Odyssey is a different man from the Iliad: Odysseus goes from being a warrior and fighter in the latter to an adventurer in the former, a wanderer of mysterious islands and tempestuous seas who find himself pitted against cyclopes, man-eating giants, sirens, monsters and deadly whirlpools. It is his cunning, not his physical prowess, that allows him to navigate all these obstacles. His adventures are a compendium of the more-or-less stereotypical dangers of a seafaring life that sailors would be well familiar with.

  If we take a closer look at the Odyssey, we see instead that once our wandering hero has finally made his way back to Ithaca and found his palace invaded by a wolf-pack of suitors, he resumes the role of the avenging warrior who destroyed Troy. No one escapes his wrath; even the faithless handmaids are hanged at his hands. After the suitors have been slaughtered, Odysseus reclaims his full powers as king; he even arranges for the corpses to be returned to their families and with bureaucratic precision has ships prepared for the bodies of those who come from the other islands of his kingdom. Odysseus also acts as king when, faced with the relatives of the men he has killed, who are seeking revenge and intend to exterminate the royal dynasty, he proposes peace instead, forestalling the outbreak of what today we would call a civil war.

  What is more important is that the cycle of the ‘returns’ exposes the dramatic situation of the Mycenaean kings who had taken part in the war of Troy. The fragments we have suggest that the internal equilibrium of that galaxy of small potentates rested fundamentally on two pillars: on one hand, a continuous, sophisticated diplomacy consisting in reciprocal visits, codes of hospitality, exchanges of gifts and matrimonial alliances, and on the other hand, the participation of the kings in ‘endeavours’ of different sorts. A hunting party to eliminate an exceptionally large or aggressive beast like a wild bull or a boar (like the hunt in Calydon from which Autolykos was excluded in The Oath), an expedition across the sea to conquer a treasure (the golden fleece of Colchis) or the pillaging of foreign settlements and territories. The last of these common endeavours was probably the Trojan War itself; it is only by accepting this hypothesis that we can explain the grandiose epic tradition that it generated, unique in all classic literature.

  Moreover, if we accept this hypothesis, another becomes plausible. For centuries, scholars have wondered what brought about the collapse of the Mycenaean culture; the blame was long attributed to the Dorian invasion which took place about 1100 BC (even Thucydides reports this in his ‘Return of the Heraclidae’). The only problem is that modern archaeology has failed to find any trace of these phantom invaders. A more likely explanation is that it was the Trojan War itself that imploded the Mycenaean system of rule and way of life. The long absence of the kings and aristocrats and the death toll of the war, involving the young men in their prime who could defend their homelands, led to unrest, seizure of power, civil conflict. Some of the returning sovereigns were murdered, or found their kingdoms so profoundly changed that they were forced to flee (like Diomedes) or react (like Odysseus) with ruthless determination, crushing any uprisings in blood. All of these events, and these signals of decline, are present in the epic tradition. It is not by chance that archaeologists do not generally talk about the ‘destruction’ of the Mycenaean palaces or centres of power, but of their collapse, implicitly accepting the idea that the civilization was extinguished and that its people abandoned the urban structures that they could no longer afford to maintain. Ruins of still-standing ancient structures bear signs of fire which can be attributed to isolated raids on the part of neighbouring tribes; more likely an effect than a cause of the general debilitation of the Mycenaean world.

  In the end, the winners came out losers and the ‘nòstoi’ paint the sad portrait of a dying world. Homer’s voice emerges from the collective, choral song of a great number of court and street poets, from the indistinct assemblage of thousands and thousands of imaginations, like a cathedral which rises from the labour of thousands but from the genius of a single creator.

  It has been said that there are two stars in the Homeric firmament: Achilles and Odysseus. But only one of the two survives for all eternity: Odysseus of the complex mi
nd, the wandering hero who wages an unequal war against gods, giants and the forces of nature.

  Homer, in Book XI, imagines a second Odyssey, no longer by sea but over land, a journey of mud and dust towards a remote, mysterious place where the hero would have to sacrifice three animals to the blue god, the lord of the abyss. Only thus would he finally make amends for his reckless challenge and admit his inferiority as a man in the face of a god.

  No trace has ever been found of this mysterious poem, a true unsolved mystery of universal literature.

  VMM

  Characters and Places

  ODYSSEUS AND HIS FAMILY

  Anfitea – queen of Acarnania, wife to Autolykos, mother of Anticlea, grandmother of Odysseus.

  Anticlea – queen mother of Ithaca, wife to Laertes, mother of Odysseus.

  Arcesius – father of Laertes, husband to Chalcomedusa, grandfather of Odysseus.

  Argus – Odysseus’ dog.

  Autolykos – king of Acarnania, husband to Anfitea, father of Anticlea, grandfather of Odysseus.

  Chalcomedusa – mother of Laertes, wife to Arcesius, grandmother of Odysseus.

  Laertes – king of Ithaca before Odysseus, only son of Arcesius, husband to Anticlea, father of Odysseus. Argonaut.

  Odysseus – king of Ithaca and of the Ionian islands, only son of Laertes and Anticlea, husband to Penelope, father of Telemachus. Inventor of the stratagem of the Trojan horse, he thus became known as ptoliethros, ‘destroyer of cities’. Homer’s Iliad also calls him ‘divine’, ‘very patient’ and ‘of cunning intelligence’. His adventures during his long and dramatic journey back to Ithaca give rise to the second Homeric poem, The Odyssey.