House of Names

by Colm Toibin

  I feel that if I remain still, something more will come. It is hard not to wander in these spaces when there is silence. There are presences I wish to encounter, presences that are close but not close enough to touch or be seen. I cannot think of the names, their names. And I cannot see faces clearly, although there are moments when I have been quiet, when I have made no effort for some time to remember or focus, moments when a face approaches, the face of someone I have known, but it fades before it becomes anyone I can recognize.

  I know that there was feeling, and that is the difference between where I am now and the place I was once. There was a time, I know, when I felt rage and I felt sorrow. But now I have lost what leads up to rage and sorrow. Maybe the only reason I wander in these spaces has to do with some other feeling, or what is left of it. Maybe that feeling is love. There is someone whom I love still, or have loved and protected, but I cannot be sure of that. No name will come. Some words come, but not the words I want, which are the names. If I can say the names, I will know then whom I loved and I will find them, or know how to see them. I will lure them into the shadows when the time is right.

  No one in their world knows how little there is here. It is all blankness, strangeness, silence. Hardly anything moves. There are echoes like distant water flowing under rock, and then sometimes that sound comes nearer but it is still faint. If I listen too eagerly, it disappears.

  Maybe there are things that did not come to an end when I was there, and they linger now like words that need to be said, or words that have escaped me and will come or might come or must come as I wait here. It will take time. I do not know how much time I have, or how much time there is. But I know that I must fade, that I cannot persist in this state. The fading will be gradual. By the end I will not know anything. What I am hoping for is one more surge, some hours or even moments when I will go back into the world and settle into it briefly as though I were alive.

  In the meantime, there is memory, which connects and attaches and withdraws. It is almost something. A vague thought hovers but is never stable. Like a figure with wings, it edges towards what has been, or was. I live on the inside of what has substance. I can feel some large set of pressing desires brushing past.

  All I am left with though are the grey traces, the clues.

  This must be what shadow is like, or aftermath. Some lines or shapes that must have made sense at one time, or may still make sense, but seem random now. If only I could follow what their intention was, or whisper to whoever made them. That desire is the closest I have come to pure feeling, and it is not close at all. I will be left here for the hours or days or years I have been allotted. No longer than that.

  Being perplexed and bewildered replaces truth and knowledge, replaces what is real and tangible. The space I inhabit is like a sad gift that was offered but will soon be withdrawn.

  And then a word occurred to me, a word of which I was sure. It was the word ‘dream’. Once the word came, I knew what ‘dream’ was or had been, and I was certain then that I was not dreaming in this nullness, that none of what is happening is dream; it is real, it is actual.

  And then other words appeared like stars in the darkening sky. I became desperate to take possession of each one, but I could not hold on to them. They were falling or glittering or moving farther away. It was enough, however, to have seen them to get some idea of their power and know that some of them would return and, like the light from a full moon on a dark night, become part of a shadowy stability that was guiding me.

  I walked in the corridors of that palace where I had once lived. I could almost remember some things that had happened. There was an image of someone in a garden, or on steps that led to a garden, staring hard, breathing hard, but then nothing, just stillness in the garden and then there was not even a garden, there was merely a space.

  But I was still awake. I was waiting, knowing that there would be change, that it would not always be like this. I was aware how easy it would be, once I was in those corridors again, for one of the guards to notice me if I made a sound or if I moved quickly so that there would be some disturbance in the air. And then, slowly, I began to understand why I was here and who I was looking for. His name did not come to me, and I was not able to picture his face, but I felt that he was close.

  I could imagine the guard who had seen me, or who had noticed my presence, consulting one of the other guards, and then both of them approaching him, the one I am searching for, or his friend who looks after him.

  My husband is dead and my daughter. They have become pure shade. My other daughter is here, but the one I am searching for is my son.

  I am awake; the words I knew are sleeping. Sometimes they turn in the night, or make some sound in their vast dreaming, and then they wake too. Often, if only for a second, they open their eyes and watch me. I hold their gaze so that they might remember me as they fall back into sleep. I study them then in their inert state. I am alert to any movement they make. I can hear their dark groanings in the night, intermittent against their breathing. I can see them reach their arms towards me to be lifted.

  I can tell the difference between night and day now. I know the silence that descends on the gardens and corridors at night, a silence broken only by the soft movements of the guards or of cats. This is my realm, where I am free to wander. As I come from the garden, I am aware that the guards can feel a movement in the air. It would just take one more thing to let them know that I am with them. A sound. A darting gesture.

  When the time came, I knew that I would hear his name, my son’s name, enough to whisper it, like someone imploring. It would come to me when I needed it.

  ‘Orestes,’ I whispered on one of those nights, and then I withdrew into the shadows.

  ‘Orestes,’ I repeated, letting my voice echo down the corridor.

  I saw two of the guards running back and forth and then summoning the other one, my son’s friend, who strutted up and down, checking doorways and corners.

  I waited until he had gone and then I whispered to one of the guards.

  ‘Tell Orestes that I am his mother. He must come alone into the corridor. He must be alone.’

  The guard made as though to run, but then stopped himself.

  ‘Speak again,’ he said quietly, his head bowed.

  ‘Tell Orestes to come alone,’ I said.

  ‘Now?’ he asked.

  ‘Soon. Orestes must come soon.’

  ‘Do you mean to cause him harm?’

  ‘No, I do not mean to cause him harm.’

  Orestes

  By the time news came that Dinos had been killed and Aegisthus captured and their troops had been routed and that Leander, with an army, was coming back towards the palace, Electra had taken up residence in her mother’s room, having placed a bed in the corner for Ianthe. Some days as he ate with them, it struck Orestes that his sister was dealing with the servants precisely as his mother had. Electra’s very voice, like her mother’s, had a way of emphasizing that she controlled things even when it was clear that she was deeply preoccupied by something else. At times, it hardly mattered what she said.

  Orestes found this almost comforting since he himself had little to say. Ianthe did not speak at all; she looked into the middle distance as if the idea of speech were foreign to her, an unnecessary distraction.

  Electra had not come to Orestes’ room after the murder of their mother. Once he returned to his room that day, he had heard her shouting in the corridor. He presumed at some stage that his sister would come to talk to him, sit by his bed, comfort him, praise him, ask him to share with her every detail of what occurred. But she had been too busy making sure that her mother’s guards were surprised and strangled or hacked to death, and then that the guards whose loyalty was in doubt were put into the dungeon.

  That evening, Orestes ate alone in his room. After supper, he slept for a while. When he woke and went into the corridor, he saw that his own guard was absent. As he walked up and down, noting the guard
s who stood at intervals, he felt an overwhelming desire to be visited in his room by one of them. He puzzled over what signals Aegisthus had given so that a guard might follow him to a room at night. By flickering light from braziers in the walls, Orestes looked carefully at each one as he passed, but they behaved as they usually did, they pretended that they did not see him.

  In bed, he thought about how Leander would soon return. He thought about Leander’s losing all his family except his sister. Although news of what had happened to Dinos and Aegisthus and their army had reached the palace, he did not think that any messages had gone in the other direction. He wondered then if Leander knew he had no family any more except Ianthe, just as he, Orestes, had no one except Electra.

  He would tell Leander when they were alone how he had found the bodies and how he had killed his mother, who had ordered these killings. What he had done, he thought, would make them closer to each other, as Electra and Ianthe were close. The two women had, indeed, become inseparable, just as he and Leander in their last months after the death of Mitros had never left each other’s side. He pictured his mother’s room at night and imagined Ianthe in all her strange beauty moving to be with his sister as Leander used to move in the darkness to be with him. Once he thought about this, his longing to see Leander again and to be with him in the night became intense and lasted into the morning and began to fill his days as he waited for his friend to return.

  *

  One morning, as he arrived in his sister’s room, he found her in a state of agitation. As Ianthe watched calmly, Electra said that a message from Leander had come to their mother in the form of a military command. Leander had said that he wanted space created where he could keep prisoners and he wanted twelve of the elders to be gathered and nothing to be done without their agreement until he and his army arrived. He also said that he wanted his family to be notified that he would soon be coming home.

  ‘It’s hard to know what to say,’ Electra declared. ‘I cannot send a message to him to let him know what has happened to his family because he forbade the messenger who came to disclose his whereabouts. And of course I cannot convey the news of my mother’s death to him. His message suggests that he has some authority, but here in the palace the authority is ours.’

  Orestes wanted to say to her that neither she nor anyone else in the palace had authority. They were protected by some guards, but he was not even sure, since news of the army’s defeat had spread, that these guards were fully loyal any more.

  ‘Can I take it,’ Electra said impatiently, ‘that you agree with me?’

  ‘What size is Leander’s army?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  ‘What size is our army?’

  ‘We have no army. The last of the army went with Dinos. But we have the palace guarded and guarded well by men who are loyal to me.’

  ‘Loyal to you?’

  ‘To us. To both of us.’

  ‘Are you sure that Leander is actually leading an army?’

  ‘It’s what I have been told. He led the army that was victorious, or he is the survivor among those who led that army. I have also been told that he holds Aegisthus prisoner. And I will ensure that if Aegisthus comes here, he will be dealt with instantly.’

  Orestes glanced at Ianthe, who pushed back her hair from her brow and looked at both him and his sister, suggesting that she had concerns more pressing than those of her two companions. He realized that she would have to tell her brother what had happened to the rest of the family.

  *

  The army came in the night. Leander’s first act was to have the palace surrounded. He then demanded a meeting with Clytemnestra and the elders. Once Electra received the request, she summoned Orestes to her room.

  ‘I have not replied to his message,’ she said.

  Ianthe, in a corner of the room, covered her body with a blanket.

  ‘I suggest we admit Leander to the palace immediately,’ Orestes said.

  ‘On what terms?’ Electra asked.

  ‘He is my friend and Ianthe’s brother.’

  ‘He is the leader of an army,’ Electra said.

  ‘Electra,’ he said, ‘he will come in whether we agree to his arrival or not. Resisting him makes no sense.’

  ‘Are you deserting me?’ she asked.

  Orestes did not reply.

  ‘His messenger is waiting at the door,’ Electra said. Her voice was quiet with suppressed rage. ‘It is on your head if we invite him in here.’

  Orestes and his sister went to the palace doors and ordered them to be opened. Leander, outside, was surrounded by his followers. Since there was shouting and cheering all around, no one heard Orestes when he said that he was inviting Leander into the palace.

  ‘You must come alone,’ he said.

  As Leander stopped and touched him gently on the shoulder, Orestes saw a freshly healed wound down one whole side of Leander’s face. The flesh had been sliced open with a sword.

  ‘You must come alone,’ he repeated in a louder voice.

  ‘I will come with my guards,’ Leander said. ‘No one who comes alone to this house is safe.’

  He brushed past Orestes, accompanied by five guards. As Leander marched through the corridor, Orestes tried to keep pace with him, with Electra following. A number of times Orestes made an effort to catch Leander’s attention but, in his determination to go to Clytemnestra’s room without being detained, Leander did not heed him.

  When Leander and his guards broke into the room, Ianthe was standing in the shadows so that at first he did not see her.

  ‘Where is your mother?’ Leander asked Electra, as she and Orestes arrived behind him.

  When she did not reply, he turned to Orestes.

  ‘I demand to see your mother.’

  ‘She is dead,’ Electra said.

  ‘No one told me of this,’ Leander said.

  ‘No one could find you,’ Electra replied.

  At that moment, it seemed to Orestes that the light in the room changed, as if the burning lamps on the wall had developed the power of sheer sunlight. Ianthe moved towards her brother. Her feet were bare, her hair hung loose; she appeared to be immensely frail, almost ghostly.

  ‘Why is my sister here?’ Leander asked.

  He looked at Electra, who did not answer him. Then he turned to Orestes, lowered his voice and appealed directly to him.

  ‘Why is my sister here?’

  ‘The house was attacked,’ Orestes said.

  ‘My house?’ he asked. ‘Our house?’

  ‘Yes,’ Orestes said quietly, holding Leander’s gaze. ‘Your father . . .’

  ‘Where is my father?’ he asked.

  ‘He is dead,’ Orestes said and sighed. ‘All of them are dead.’

  ‘My mother?’

  ‘Yes. All of them.’

  ‘Your sister –’ Electra began.

  ‘My sister what?’ Leander interrupted. ‘What is my sister to you?’

  ‘We found her,’ Electra said. ‘She has been in our care.’

  ‘Who found her?’ Leander asked. The scar on his face was livid with purples and reds.

  ‘I did,’ Orestes said.

  Leander’s hands moved to his face, and then his arms began reaching outwards away from him, as though beyond his control.

  ‘The house was attacked?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Orestes said.

  ‘All of them were killed, you said?’ he asked softly. ‘All of them are dead now?’

  He went towards Orestes and faced him, and then faced Electra, before walking to the window.

  ‘Allow me one minute when I do not have to believe this,’ he said. ‘And then tell me again if it is true.’

  The silence lasted only for a few seconds before he spoke again.

  ‘Is it true?’ he asked.

  When no one answered him, he repeated what he had asked, a cold fury in his voice.

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘It is true
,’ Electra whispered.

  ‘And your mother?’ he asked. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘I killed her,’ Orestes said.

  ‘You killed your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who said that you could?’ Leander asked. He did not wait for a reply but began to shout the question, repeating it several times until Electra defiantly replied: ‘I said that he could. The gods said that he could.’

  ‘The gods have nothing to do with us,’ Leander shouted. ‘Nothing! We will get nothing more from them. Their time is over.’

  ‘My mother ordered the killings,’ Orestes said. ‘She –’

  ‘I do not want to hear what she did,’ Leander said. ‘She is dead now. Is that not enough?’

  Leander walked over to Ianthe and held his sister close to him and did not speak. Orestes was aware of Electra, sure that she understood, as he did, that she had one moment when she could try to assert her authority, but that if she did so, then Leander would have her and him taken away. Leander was breathing heavily, his eyes darting from one object in the room to another as Electra seemed to be intoning a prayer.

  ‘I need the kitchens opened,’ Leander said finally. ‘The troops have not eaten for days. I need the twelve elders I asked for to assemble here. I need space in the dungeon now. Are the cells in the dungeon empty?’

  He looked from Electra to Orestes.

  ‘Will one of you answer me?’

  ‘No, they are not empty,’ Electra said calmly. ‘The guards who were loyal to my mother are there.’

  ‘Make sure that they are unarmed and put them in one of the rooms,’ Leander said. ‘And I need the kitchens opened now, and the elders sent for. I need to see them now.’

  Orestes watched as Electra, scowling and imperious in her movements, crossed the room and spoke to one of the guards.