The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  At Homer’s bidding then, Nausicaa pretended to be her own mother; Demodocus took the role of her brother Laodamas, the late Alcinous’s favorite son, who always sat at his father’s side; and Odysseus played her other two bachelor brothers, the princes Halius and Clytoneus. Where have you been? Nausicaa demanded sternly of the poet, in a voice so like Arete’s that both Homer and Demodocus gave a start. What was it between you and Lord Odysseus these past few nights, and what connection does it have, if any, to my headstrong daughter’s whereabouts?

  Don’t be alarmed, Homer said with a strum—

  Don’t be alarmed? Odysseus cried, feigning the angry young men. We were about to drag you and that lying Ithacan down from your mountains to the level seashore, where a man can see what’s what! He and Nausicaa smiled at each other. You had better sing your piece, Demodocus warned Homer gravely, and it had better be a good one.

  Homer thereupon invoked the muse Erato—not his customary muse, he noted—to sing Princess Nausicaa of the peerless arms, unharmed and safely en route home, thanks to noble Odysseus—who, like her, was guilty of no worse crime than love. Quickly he synopsized the story thus far, omitting only his own affair with Penelope, Odysseus’s revenge upon hapless Phemius, and the liaison between himself and Nausicaa. He reminded the court of Alcinous and Arete’s early offer of their daughter’s hand to Odysseus, and their later plan to cure her lovesickness with songs of that man’s fidelity; how those songs had only fed the girl’s infatuation to the point where she fled the palace—not, as everyone supposed, for Ithaca, but for Homer’s own goat-girt cabin in the dizzy-making hills, that she might hear nothing the day long but songs of Odysseus, Odysseus, Odysseus.

  Nausicaa blushed; so does Diana of the snow-white teeth. Ted squeezes her shoulder, as did Odysseus the princess’s. I took her in, gave her food and shelter, and respected her royal maidenhead, sang straight-faced Homer—but then toned the line down to her royal maidenhood. When she threatened to run off to Ithaca or over the nearest cliff, as she did every second afternoon and some mornings, I dissuaded her with songs of unrequited lovers who found new and greater happiness elsewhere. Most of these I was obliged to invent: Our myths are not rich in happy endings, especially of that sort. When the Ithacan sailed in a while back, I guessed early on he was Odysseus; I dodged him night after night because he had not yet made his intentions clear, and I wanted to spare Nausicaa’s feelings if they were not honorably directed at her. But who can get the best of that cunning fellow? The gods led him across the storm-rich seas and up the goat-fraught cliffs to his beloved. For so she is, my friends, as is he hers. His intentions are every bit as honorable as were mine. He has put Ithaca and all things Ithacan behind him; neither does he covet the throne of Phaeacia: only Nausicaa’s white hand in marriage—plus a certain wedding gift to speed them upon what bids to be the longest honeymoon in marital history. But I shall let the lovers sing that song themselves.

  Well done! the audience applauded, both then in the old bard’s cottage and a few hours later in Arete’s palace. At Demodocus’s suggestion (he was no Homer for invention and performance, but his long professional experience had made him wiser in the ways of audiences), he himself went first to the disarrayed and angry court, from which the princes’ posse was nervously making ready to set out, and declared that great Homer was safe and sound and came bearing good news of Nausicaa, which would spare them their mountain-climbing expedition. When they had assimilated this report and settled down, Homer entered and sang them an already more polished version of the trio’s story.

  Well sung! old Demodocus cheered, to cue the royal family’s reaction, and from the rear of the discombobulated hall Odysseus and Nausicaa echoed his applause. The crowd made way for them; they shed their goatherd wraps and came forward as their proper selves to kneel before Arete and the frowning princes. Nausicaa’s arms, her mother noticed at once, were white no longer, but sunburnt as any peasant woman’s; her hair, however, was clean and neatly brushed, her tunic spotless, her expression radiant. She was no longer virginal, Arete understood at once, but she had not been forced. In a clear voice, the princess declared that great Homer had sung the truth from first to last. She would regret forever the sorrow she had caused her father and mother in the name of love, as well as the trouble she had put her good brothers to—though she was pleased to hear, she added with a smile, that their new hull design had lived up to or exceeded its predicted performance values. She prayed their forgiveness, Arete’s consent to her marriage, and their blessing. Likewise, said Odysseus, and discreetly said nothing further just then about wedding gifts.

  Arete regarded for some moments this man halfway between her daughter’s age and her own, and so marked and weathered by experience that his face and hands alone were a living logbook of his odyssey. Frankly, she told Nausicaa, I had hoped you’d marry someone more your age, whose children by you would be his first and only heirs. As it is, every chorus you sing with this man, new to you, will be a repeat for him, only in a different key. But so be it: You’ve made your choice, and it may well be that an impetuous young woman like you will be happier with a seasoned, older husband than with a young one as headstrong as yourself.

  She then embraced her daughter, saluted Odysseus, gave her consent and blessing to their match, and welcomed him to serve her and the princes as their chief state counsellor, whether officially or without portfolio.

  Odysseus saw Laodamas and his brothers exchange uneasy glances. He thanked Arete for her offer and her blessing, the three brothers for their fraternal concern for Nausicaa; he also congratulated them enviously, as one sailor to another, upon the reported success of their new design. But he disclaimed any interest in Phaeacian state offices. He had seen enough of Arete’s statecraft and general wisdom, he said, to know that the young princes could have no better advisor in the administrative arts than their mother, against the day one or more of them succeeded to the reins of government. As for himself and his bride-to-be—he looked to Nausicaa, who nodded—they had in mind by way of honeymoon a long voyage of exploration: a voyage in one respect brief, in another perhaps endless. But it had better be proposed and discussed among the royal family only—plus Homer, whom they should regard as court historian and keep no secrets from.

  The queen agreed; the posse, to its great relief, was demobilized; an engagement luncheon was ordered for the immediate family and the two bards, in the course of which Odysseus set forth his plan. He described the land Circe had told him of and the peculiar difficulty of reaching it, without mentioning that whoever overcame that difficulty would age no further, but could never return. It was his ambition, he said, to end his long nautical career with a honeymoon cruise to that country in the brothers’ new boat, the only vessel remotely capable of getting there. Should he and Nausicaa make a successful landfall, the fame of the Phaeacians—their hospitality and their nautical prowess—would be sung forever in the new principality he hoped to establish there. And who could say what rich commerce would then ensue between the two nations, which no competitor would have the technological know-how to share in? If, on the other hand, his attempt should fail—well, those were the fortunes of the sea, which his fiancée had declared her readiness to hazard at his side.

  Nausicaa affirmed that readiness and implored her brothers to lend them their boat as a wedding present, even though the loan might turn out to be a gift. Otherwise, she supposed, she and Odysseus would have no choice but to accept the appointment Arete had offered him, as her prime minister.

  The household then divided to confer and consider. Arete withdrew to question her daughter a bit more on the period of her disappearance and on Odysseus’s obligations to his first wife and his son, as well as to elaborate on the pros and cons of the difference in their ages and to review with her some intimate facts of married life. Nausicaa, who much loved her mother, answered her questions as fully as she could without saying more than she wanted to say and made it plain that she meant
to go with the man from that day forward wherever he went.

  I can see that you do, Arete said, not displeased. I hope profoundly that your friend feels likewise about you.

  As for Odysseus, he questioned Nausicaa’s brothers in technical detail about their boat, in order to gain their confidence, flatter their abilities, and forestall their questioning him more closely about his intended destination. Then the lovers changed places: Odysseus did his best to reassure Arete that he loved her daughter wholeheartedly, that he had provided generously for his former household, and that in marrying the princess he would not be committing bigamy, since Ithacan law did not apply in Phaeacia, much less where he meant to go. Nausicaa for her part found her brothers’ regret at the prospect of losing her more than offset by their relief that Odysseus would not be staying on in the palace. Sorry as they were to give up a vessel they’d barely tested, she soon had them discussing excitedly the possibility of an even better version: a Phaeacian Thirty-five Mark Two, based on their sea trials of the prototype. When she promised not to sail until they’d completed their testing of the Mark One and drawn their plans for its successor, they agreed to lend her the boat for as long as she and their prospective brother-in-law should need it.

  So it came to pass, not long afterward, that Odysseus and Nausicaa were married in a splendid three-day celebration, at which the bride excelled all her bridesmaids and most of the ushers in the ball-throwing events, and Odysseus left behind all the local skippers except the three princes, against whom he refused to compete, in the around-the-buoys sailing events. Demodocus and Homer went one-on-one at a series of banquets for the newlyweds, and while the younger bard won hands down, Demodocus seemed to have gotten a new lease on life from the inspiration of the projected honeymoon voyage, which everyone agreed he turned into his best song since the one about Ares and Aphrodite snared in the golden throes of love by jealous Hephaestus. Stripped of its music, betrayed into workaday English prose, and much summarized, his new song—which turned out to be accurate prophecy—went something like this:

  Ted rises to his feet and takes over Diana’s narrative as if launching into Demodocus’s song: The nuptials done, bride and groom retired joyfully to their honeymoon bed and embarked upon a different sort of exploratory voyage, about which they were in no hurry whatsoever. . . .

  Next morning, responds smiling, blushing Diana, thanks to the wisdom of Queen Arete, the bride’s maids were able to honor an ancient custom of squid-rich Phaeacia: that of displaying to the assembled court their mistress’s wedding-night bedsheet, so copiously blazoned with Nausicaa’s hymeneal blood that, as the great bard Homer himself observed, it looked like the legendary field of battle between the Cocks and the Cuttlefish. All summer then they stayed on in the palace, giving joy to Arete and working daily with the young princes on the fine tuning and inmost secrets of their craft.

  Says Ted: Odysseus was perfectly delighted with his young bride. He could not have said himself where his energy came from, but there it was, when he needed it, as if he had already achieved Circe’s promised land. And at the naval cunning embodied in the princes’ ship, he was simply astonished: Its outward resemblance to the vessels of the time was a virtual camouflage, concealing technologies so unfamiliar as to amount to magic. But with brown-limbed Nausicaa’s help and patient Laodamas’s (who was already thinking yet farther ahead to his Mark Two version), he got the hang of sailing it.

  As for Nausicaa, chimes in Diana, it turned out that her romantic fantasizing had been as accurate as it was obsessive: A girl who had always loved her father, she was exactly as pleased with her middle-aged bridegroom as she had expected to be, in exactly the ways she had imagined. It excited her that he had had a former life; that what was fresh to her was refreshment to him. It excited her that rousing him sometimes required a bit of doing on her part; she enjoyed the doing. Finally, it excited her that her youth and inexperience, combined with her imagination and un-inhibition, excited him: Did Calypso ever do this? she would ask him, and then do something she had never heard or thought of before, but which it had just occurred to her might be possible. If what she did turned out to be news to Odysseus too, that was exciting; if on the other hand he said Circe herself used to do that, except she’d put her left leg here—that could be more exciting still.

  What with so much and various excitement, says lucky Ted, it is not surprising that at summer’s end, when all was ready for their setting out, they both gladdened and broke Queen Arete’s heart by announcing that her first grandchild, whom in all likelihood she would never see, was definitely in the making: about as far along in his or her development as the brothers’ new new boat. At Homer’s suggestion they even chose a nickname for their first child, should it be a son: Mark I.

  We watch and listen raptly as our practiced hosts wind up their tale. On the cloudless equinoctial day, declares Diana, their farewell banquets done and tearful farewells made, at exactly mid-afternoon Nausicaa cast off their boat’s bow line, Odysseus the stern. Homer and Demodocus struck twin chords, and the newly weds glided from the cheering harbor, past their petrified predecessor, and away from mountain-ringed Phaeacia. Once clear of the island, they secured their safety harnesses and set a winged course straight for the declining sun.

  For the next several hours, Ted goes on, they accelerated from fast to faster to faster yet, employing every device known to canny racing skippers plus the radical new ones built into their craft. It is perfectly safe to say that never since the world began had a manmade vessel moved so swiftly through the water: well beyond anything they had managed in their practice runs. The sun continued on its downward path, but ever more slowly as their speed increased—until, just as they had planned and hoped . . . He gestures smiling to his wife, who takes his hand and holds it.

  As they’d planned and hoped, she echoes, at the moment the sun’s golden lower limb just touched the far horizon and Nausicaa called Mark!, Odysseus made the last go-fast adjustment Laodamas had taught him—a tiny final flattening-reef in the mainsail, it was—and mirabile dictu, as the Romans say, they reached what Circe had called Holding Velocity. For what seemed an eternity, the sun hung poised exactly there, neither setting further nor retreating higher.

  Says Ted, exchanging with Diana an actor’s expression of nervous dismay. Their exultation turned into nervous dismay. Another half-knot, a tenth of a knot, would do the trick; a breath more of wind; they had done everything they’d planned to do; they had far exceeded even the sound of their own speed—and yet they were not going fast enough; the sun hung still. The terrible thought crossed Odysseus’s mind: We aren’t going to make it.

  Then, Diana quietly declares, in the spectral silence of Holding Velocity—a silence that must be experienced before it can be imagined, surrounded as it is by the visible rush of unbelievable speed—Nausicaa took her husband’s hand and spoke to him in a voice no louder than mine now. When I was a young girl racing against my brothers, she said, and all else failed, I used to win sometimes by whistling into the sails. In Phaeacia we call it whistling up a breeze.

  We had better try it, Ted responds. And so they did, Odysseus whistling in the normal fashion, as if to make music, and Nausicaa letting go a shrill blast between two fingers in her mouth.

  Yay for Nausicaa, says Kathy Sherritt: I admire a girl who can whistle like that.

  Was it wishful thinking, asks Diana, or did they see the sun actually rise a millimeter above the horizon? They scarcely dared look, for fear of injuring their eyes. Again Nausicaa whistled. No doubt about it this time: The sun perceptibly lifted—but sank again at once to horizon level. Well, she couldn’t whistle continuously; she was hyperventilated already. Honey, she said, I’m out of ideas.

  But your idea gave me one, Ted says Odysseus said then. He had heard Demodocus remark of Homer (using another Phaeacian idiom): That young fellow certainly can sing up a storm. Being a prose-minded Ithacan, he had asked Homer whether that tribute was literally
correct and, if so, whether Homer could teach him the knack, to use as a last resort when becalmed. The bard had replied that it was trick to be used only as a last resort indeed; that said, however, there was nothing very tricky about it: The secret was to find the right song for the singer and the occasion, and then (in Homer’s own words) to let ‘er rip.

  For Odysseus, says Diana, Homer recommended the song he himself was in midst of composing (don’t forget that all this is in Demodocus’s song, being sung at the wedding feast): It began with the story of the unfinished corner of Penelope’s web, and it would end with Odysseus and Nausicaa’s sailing off into the rising sunset—but he hadn’t worked out the ending yet. All you have to do, Demodocus sang that Odysseus said that Homer told him, is get the first line right, and the second; the rest will follow as does the night the day.

  Nausicaa raised her lovely eyebrows at that, says Ted, among other reasons because neither of them could carry a tune, even when they knew what the tune was. Could Homer be settling some score with them? Odysseus thought not, inasmuch as the bard had taken the trouble to teach him the first two lines of that new song. In any case, they had no other expedient: As best he could—for it was a case of the blind leading the blind—he rehearsed with Nausicaa what Homer had rehearsed with him. Then he took a deep breath and sang loudly into the sail: Once upon a time . . .

  In heartfelt harmony then, Diana says, Nausicaa joined him in Line Two, which they sang together like this:

  There was a story that began, the handsome couple sing together, in very approximate unison, and Diana continues It worked, in a way they hadn’t anticipated. Not only did the boat surge forward and the sun climb visibly a few degrees above the horizon, but when it did, instead of facing the problem of Line Three (which neither of them knew), they found themselves back at Line One: Once upon a time. And when they followed it with Line Two—There was a story that began—there they were, back at Line One again, and the sun another few degrees higher.